“Roy,” Zuki said, “I finally got you.”
“Got me?”
“You’re hard to find. Just want to talk, pick your brain. I see you’re reading Black John.”
“You know John, do you?”
“No, but he’s funny.”
“Funny like cancer of the balls. He’s out to make trouble.”
“Who do you think he is? You think he’s black?”
“He’s black, but he’s carryin’ water for people who want to see us go down shooting one another. What’s on your mind, Zuki?”
“This book I’m doing, I want to get at what’s goin’ on right this minute in Albany. History is happening here. And face it, man, the Brothers is where it’s at and you’re out front, you’re a mover and shaker. I want to see you in action, listen in for as long as you can stand it, hang out for a week, a few days.”
“A week?”
“Three days? Start with a couple of hours when something’s taking shape, like tonight.”
“You want to follow me around and take notes?”
“That’s it.”
“The Albany cops already do that,” Ben said. “Probably tappin’ this phone I’m talkin’ on. They take pictures, too.”
“I could talk myself back into jail,” Roy said.
“Nobody will see my notes and I’ll show you what I write before it’s published.”
“This is a book?”
“It’s a long term paper, but I got somebody who’ll publish it.”
“What are you looking for?”
“See how a guy like you—guy looks ordinary but isn’t—how people pay attention to you—your picket line against the Laborers Union, going to jail for poll watching, doing what you believe in, this is some new kind of gutsy behavior and young blacks look up to you. All the stuff the Brothers are doing—taking on the five-dollar vote, running for office, fighting landlords and police brutality, it’s bigger than life, and kids find it heroic.”
“Heroic my ass.”
“I’m telling you what I hear.”
“We been doing it for two years,” Roy said. “They been doing it in the South a whole lot longer. You heard about Selma?”
“I know Selma. But the Panthers come to visit you, don’t they? Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale? And didn’t Stokely come by, and Dick Gregory, and Ralph Abernathy? Not to mention Ramsey Clark and William Kunstler. Hey, Roy. You guys are a magnet.”
“You’re keeping track. I didn’t like Cleaver. He was too tough on Baldwin. We liked Bobby Seale.”
“See what I mean? You don’t give a damn, you just do it and people know it.”
“Gordon here, and Ben and Clarence, all the Brothers do it.”
“Sure, but you did time.”
“Ben did time, for nothin’. They busted fifteen Brothers in two years, a damn fortune just in bail money. They don’t let up.”
“I’ll write about all the Brothers, write about tonight even if nothing happens. But heavy stuff could happen I hear.”
“What do you hear?”
“Cops are out for blood, if there’s a riot.”
“Cops are always out for blood, our blood. That’s no news.”
“Cops are revved. Mayor told ’em don’t take no shit tonight. Keep this town quiet.”
“Who you talking to knows what the Mayor’s saying?”
“It’s all over town. Places closing, boarding up their windows.”
“The Brothers been trying all day to put a lid on any riot.”
“I wanna look over your shoulder.”
“What about Baron Roland, what’s he up to?”
“Teaching at City College, same as always, and still doing his thing at Holy Cross.”
“Where is he tonight?”
“He’ll be at the protest. He set it up.”
“Are you working with him or what?”
“Part-time for the summer. I’ll be full-time at the university in the fall. I was doing a couple of courses at Columbia till I come back up here.”
“Back?”
“I lived in Troy as a kid. House where I roomed in Harlem got torched in the King riots so I come here.”
Roy tried to figure out Zuki’s face. Some white in him. Latin, maybe, but he’s got no accent. Smart eyes, slick and savvy line. Students behave like this? Students got muscles like this? Follow you around like it’s a documentary? Hey, Roy, don’t trust anybody who parachutes in from outer space peddling hero shit. Lose this bird, take him outside. Why did Quinn ask about Zuki—a link to Tremont? Gotta see Tremont. Get outa this.
“Let’s go outside,” Roy said and he stepped up onto the sidewalk and Zuki stood with him. “I got some business, Zuki. I’ll be at the Four Spot later. I’ll think about what you said, see what it’s like out there tonight.”
“It’s five-thirty now. When’ll you get to the Four Spot?”
“Get there when I get there.”
Tremont woke up groggy, fuzzy, but with a lot less pain, and still on a stretcher after two hours of waiting to be admitted. Through the window beside him he saw Zuki and Roy coming out of the Brothers’ headquarters across the street. They stood there and talked, the front window gone, boarded up. He saw them look toward the hospital as they talked and he decided they were talking about him. He moved one leg off the stretcher, felt pain, not that much.
An intern had examined him when he arrived, taken blood and medicated him; and from this, plus being horizontal, he sank into a fadeaway. Matt asked nurses twice about admitting him and was told we need a doctor’s approval; we’ll treat him here for now. So Tremont’s a transient, a short-timer.
Matt pulled up a chair and watched Tremont sleep, he dozed a little himself. Then he went for coffee in the cafeteria and read the Knickerbocker News with the latest on riot potential in the city, and the protest against the silencing of himself by the bishop. The protest was set for seven-thirty in the basement of the First Church, Albany’s old Dutch church, and a crowd of irate Catholics, students, and inner-city protesters was expected. It would also be a candlelight vigil for Bobby Kennedy, whose condition remained dire, but no one had yet said he would die. The assassin’s weapon was an eight-shot .22 caliber revolver.
“Hey, Bish,” Tremont said after he woke up, “I saw Zuki across the street. Talkin’ to Roy.”
Matt looked out the window. “Nobody there now.”
“I think he’s comin’ in here to see me.”
“How would he know you’re here?”
“Zuki knows things.”
“We’ll have a little chat if he shows up,” Matt said. And he saw George Quinn coming into the emergency room with a woman and an Albany detective Matt knew by sight, not by name. The detective delivered George to a nurse and left. When the nurse led George to a stretcher behind the screen next to Tremont, Matt went to him. “It’s Father Matt, George, Martin Daugherty’s son. I thought we dropped you at the Elks Club this afternoon.”
George looked at Matt, he looks a little like Martin, and said he never got to the Elks. Vivian told Matt how George got his head wound and what she knew about his Elks detour. She recognized Matt from the news coverage and said that Father was courageous for speaking about the poor and politics, that she never heard a priest talk politics except Father Coughlin back in the ‘30s, a good speaker, but with a nasty tongue and I never liked him. Her brothers wouldn’t even whisper against a politician or they’d lose their city jobs. I like your perspective, Vivian, Matt said, and he offered to call Dan Quinn and let him know his father was in the hospital. Vivian said Detective Fahey already did that and Matt went back to Tremont, who was awake.
“That guy over there, his name George?” Tremont asked.
“Right, George Quinn. Somebody threw a rock at a window and he got cut, down on Pearl Street.”
“Ain’t seen George in a whole lot of years. He wrote numbers.”
“He wrote your father’s hit in 1937, eleven thousand dollars, right?”
?
??Whoa! How you know that, Bish, how you know about my father’s hit?”
“Quinn told me. George is his father.”
“Yeah? I never put ’em together. Quinn, where’d he go to?”
“He’ll be along. You’re feeling better, Tremont?”
“Had to. Couldn’t feel no worse. They got good drugs in this place.”
A nurse came up to Matt with a note. “Father Matthew?” And Matt said yes. “We don’t take messages but the caller said you’re a priest. You’re that priest in the papers.”
“Guilty,” Matt said.
Quinn’s message to Matt: he was heading for the Fort Orange Club. The message came in a few minutes ago. “I have to make a phone call, Tremont, be right back.”
Tremont propped himself up on one elbow. “Hey George,” he said, and George turned to look. “You George Quinn.”
“That’s what they tell me.” A nurse came to bandage George’s cut and said he was lucky, the glass didn’t penetrate, no stitches needed. She gave Vivian extra bandages for later.
“You remember me, George?” Tremont asked.
George took a good look. “Tremont? Big Jimmy’s boy?”
“Yeah, George. That’s me.”
“You ran errands for Jimmy, and you set pins in Jimmy Smith’s alleys on Green Street. They moved those alleys to State Street.”
“What a memory. How you doin’, George?”
“Getting something fixed up here. Had an accident. Your father owes me money.”
“How much he owe you?”
“I don’t remember. Two hundred, maybe. Jimmy’ll remember.”
“Jimmy won’t remember. Jimmy died eleven years ago.”
“Is that so? Sorry to hear that. You got old, Tremont.”
“You too, George. Whole world got old since we saw each other.”
Tremont looked out the window and saw Roy and Ben Jones come out of the Brothers, Zuki not in sight, but he could be outside waiting for me to come out. If he comes in here I’m a sittin’ damn duck.
Vivian had gone to ask the nurse to call them a cab and now she came back and told George people were breaking windows in cabs, so no cabs are running downtown.
“We’ll walk,” George said. “It’s a nice night out, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Vivian said. “It’s a very lovely night, and we haven’t even had dinner yet.”
Tremont got off his stretcher. “Where you headed?”
“The DeWitt,” said Vivian.
“Go down this hallway,” Tremont said. “It’s shorter. I’m goin’ the same direction.” He moved down the hall with them.
“What about your friend the priest,” Vivian asked.
“Makin’ a call. He’ll be along.”
Tremont lifted a towel off a small stack of laundry and put it under his arm, then led them out the hospital’s south entrance, half a block away from Zuki already. He put the towel over his head and walked a step ahead of George and Vivian, blocking the rear vision of himself if Zuki was looking. They passed the Palace with a movie called Up Against, a black man’s face on the poster. Tremont wanted a drink, needed a drink, found a few bills in his pocket, seven bucks left from the Zuki seventy-five. The Four Spot was right in the next block, ask George.
“Tell you what, George,” Tremont said, “we go to the Four Spot over there. I’ll buy a drink for you and your lady, pay off a little of what Big Jimmy owes you.”
“We should get to the DeWitt, George,” Vivian said. “They’re probably serving dinner.”
“Never stop a man from paying what he owes you,” George said.
“I don’t owe you, George. My daddy was who owed you.”
“All contributions gratefully accepted.”
George looked at the Four Spot, one of five buildings on Clinton Square. This was Johnny Palermo’s place, steaks and chops, banquet hall in back, Johnny got a new sign. He ran it as a speakeasy in Prohibition with rooms upstairs in the building next door, you could bring a girl and if they raided it you could go up to the roof and jump onto Johnny’s roof, then drop onto Chapel Street. George bowled with Johnny at the Rice Alleys on the corner, but the alleys are gone. Where did they go? Young Negroes going in. You don’t often see them in Johnny’s, once in a while maybe.
The bar in the Four Spot was half-full with twenty young black men and women, and more in the back room. All eyes went to George and Vivian as they stood at the bar.
“Double port, and what my friends want,” Tremont said to the white bartender. He took the only barstool. “I don’t sit down I’ll fall down.”
“A small lager, please,” Vivian said.
“Make that two,” George said. He looked at the hangings on the walls: Truman, Stalin, and Roosevelt on the cover of Life, World War Two victory headlines, troops marching through Fifth Avenue confetti. War, but not George’s war. He looked carefully at all the young black men in the room, trying to remember the one who threw the rock. He didn’t see anybody he recognized.
“You lookin’ for somebody?” one older youth asked.
“He’s with me,” Tremont said.
“Yeah? Who you with?”
“We gettin’ a little taste, that all right?” Tremont said. The talk stopped. Chain, chain, chain, Aretha sang.
“People come in here lookin’ us over,” the man said.
“What’s wrong with lookin’?” Tremont said. “This man just come out of the hospital, got hit with a rock. We here gettin’ away from rocks.”
“Nobody here throwin’ rocks.”
“Then maybe we’re safe,” Tremont said.
“The cops were just in here lookin’ around for somebody,” the barman said. “They had a witness, somebody threw a rock through a liquor store window and looted it.”
“They threw rocks in the trolley strike,” George said to the young black who didn’t like to be looked at. “The National Guard shot people throwing rocks and then they shot people who weren’t throwing them. Nineteen-oh-one. They killed twenty-seven people. Frankie Pringle was standing next to me, got hit by a rock and then somebody shot him.” George pointed at the door. “Down on Broadway, near the station, fella threw a rock and killed an old widow woman. He had to leave town. Thirty-seven people got killed, some with rocks, some shot.”
George sipped his lager. “Beer is very good. Jimmy draws a good glass of beer. Thirty-seven people killed by rocks.” Chain, chain, chain, Aretha sang and George asked the barman, “Johnny around tonight?”
“No Johnnys here, my friend.”
The bartender, a burly man with slick black hair and wary eyes, doesn’t seem to trust people. George asked, “You don’t know Johnny?”
“No.”
“You been here long?”
“About a year.”
“What do they call you?”
“Howie. They call me Howie.”
“I’m talking about Johnny Palermo,” George said. “He owns this place. He used to make cigars. Had billboards all over town. Get behind a Palermo Cigar. He’d bring Jimmy Durante to town and raise thousands for St. Anthony’s church. Johnny and I bowled together.”
“The Marcello brothers own this place for ten years,” Howie said. “Maybe they bought it from Johnny.”
“Did you hear about anybody throwing Molotov cocktails?” Vivian asked.
“No Molotovs,” Howie said, “but I make a great Manhattan. Have a few of those your head explodes, just like a Molotov.”
“I don’t think I want my head to explode tonight,” Vivian said.
George turned back to the hostile youth, raising his finger as he spoke, as if the earlier conversation were still in progress. “I was born three blocks from here, on Columbia Street. You ever hear of my father? Daniel Quinn? Famous man in Albany. Did everything, went everywhere, saw everybody, shook hands with Lincoln, saw Lafayette when he came to Albany to be buried, wasn’t anything he didn’t know about this town and he was colored.”
“Old honky’s crazy,” the
youth said.
“What are you saying, George?” Vivian asked.
“You look at me and I’m white, right? I’m a white fella goes in and out of colored people’s houses just like I was colored. When I was growing up they called me and my father paddyniggers. My father was a great man. He was all over the Civil War. I met Lincoln at the bar in the Delavan House, homeliest man I ever saw and I shook his hand before I was born. And he was Jewish. My father knew Grant and Sheridan. He was there when Sheridan took his twenty-mile ride and he wrote so much about it he made Sheridan famous. Sheridan was a little bit of a fella. Little Phil they called him. George Payne, he rode with Sheridan and he was a colored fella. Came home from the war and raised a family on Main Street up in the North End, first coloreds up there, only ones for years. My father wrote so much about George Payne that he made him famous. George Payne knew Sheridan better than the people down at West Point. My father didn’t live long enough to meet Jimmy Walker. He died in a train wreck with my mother. She was a Cuban Creole.”
“Your mother was a Creole?” Vivian said.
“That’s right.”
“Creoles in New Orleans,” Tremont said. “I know Creoles.”
“Creoles got mixed blood,” Howie said.
“Paddyniggers and Creoles,” Tremont said. “You’re makin’ this up, George. Why you tryna change your skin?”
“What Creole means is she didn’t want slavery,” George said. “She was a woman who knew the top people and she raised a ton of money for the Cuban war. My father always had to go to war. He was in the Civil War and when it ended he invaded Canada with the Fenians. Then he went to the Cuban war and came back and married my mother, who was a Cuban Creole.”
“How was she a Creole?” Vivian asked.
“She was as white as those women ever get and my father knew the guys who started that damn war. They were all Cubans. But it was John Brown, that floo-doo—he was the one who got the slaves out. Quite a fella, John Brown.” Then George sang:“I got a white man workin’ for me,
I’m going to keep him busy you see,
Don’t care what it costs, I’ll stand all the loss,