Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

  It’s worth twice the money for to be a boss ...

  “I was born and raised in this town and I’ll be here forever,” he said, speaking to everybody now. “I don’t know what you got against Tremont, best little kid on Dongan Avenue, smart, and he knows how you get where you’re going and how you make money. You work for it, you set pins, you don’t throw rocks at it. You go out like I go out, and like Tremont goes out, and you find out how it is and you ask for the money. And they give it to you. What the hell, they got no choice. They need you. You are there and you’ve got the goods. This is the next stop on the railway to heaven. Bless me father for I have sinned,” and he blessed himself.

  “Crazy old fucker,” the black youth said.

  Through the plate glass window George saw half a dozen people standing on the sidewalk, all coloreds. It was still light out, but North Pearl Street was empty, no cars moving. Two coloreds came in and joined those at the bar.

  “Somebody threw a Molotov over on Sheridan Avenue,” one said. “Hit a bus but it kept going.”

  “There’s the cocktail you were looking for,” Howie said to Vivian.

  “Who threw it?” Vivian asked the youth, who looked at her but did not reply. The youth who didn’t trust George shook his head and they both turned away from Vivian.

  “Sheridan Avenue,” George said. “They named that for General Sheridan. He was born there. Petey Hawkins had his barbershop on Sheridan Avenue.”

  “Petey Hawkins. I knew Petey Hawkins,” Tremont said. “Lived up on Third Street. I knew the whole family. Petey’s sister Seely was a good singer. She came to Albany in a musical and they hired my daddy for a part. He was seven feet two and he’d been singin’ in sideshows as the Albany Giant, and when that musical come here they saw him and hired him and he was so funny they took him on the road with the show.”

  “Petey’s brother Dick was a great friend of mine,” George said.

  “Don’t talk about him, George,” Vivian said. “Please don’t say Petey’s brother’s name. Talk about Petey but not his brother. Do you hear me, George?”

  “Don’t say his brother’s name?”

  “Don’t say it. Don’t say it for me, all right, Georgie?”

  “All right, I won’t say it for you.”

  Matt Daugherty opened the front door and held it ajar, looked in. He saw Tremont and shook his head. He came in and let the door close.

  “You ran out on me, Tremont,” he said.

  “Had to, Bish. Knew you’d find me, had to get outa there. You know why.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I saw that guy we talked about, comin’ right toward the hospital. I couldn’t stay there like a damn sittin’ duck.”

  “You’re sitting here like a sitting duck. And you’re drinking. They just treated you for the ’ritis and you’re starting all over.”

  “They fixed me up, ’ritis ain’t so bad now. I needed to settle down.”

  “They’ll write you up, Tremont. You and your ’ritises’ll go into the medical books. How are you, George?”

  “Five or six flavors of excellent, and yourself?”

  “I talked to Danny. He’s worried about you.”

  “Danny worries too much. Worrying gives you hives. I got hives when Dewey closed down gambling in Albany. You get very itchy.”

  “Danny said you were going to a concert.”

  “We are if we ever get there,” Vivian said. But she liked the newness of the Four Spot and she wouldn’t really press George to leave.

  “Danny wants to meet you at the concert,” Matt said.

  “Danny shouldn’t worry so much,” George said. “He’ll break out in hives.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Matt said.

  From his bar stool Tremont saw Zuki on the sidewalk, talking with Roy. No way you gonna lose him now, Tremont. No place to hide. But why hide? What can he do? Beat me up, I don’t think so. Got the Bish and Roy with me. Maybe blow the whistle on me? But then he’s in it as much as me. He wants to do something, I know that. All that badass talk comes outa someplace, like political. He a Panther comin’ on like Joe College? Narc? And why he come to you, Tremont? Who’d you ever lick? Hey, Tremont’s a good shot, he be the triggerman, he be the killer. Knock off the Mayor, then somebody knock off Tremont, everybody’s happy.

  James Brown was new in the smoky air of the bar, telling everybody, I Got the Feelin, and the mood of the room went into an upswing—heads going whichway, bodies revving, George nodding in time to James’s feelin.

  “Bish,” Tremont said, “I got the feelin’ myself, and you right about me bein’ a sittin’ duck in here. There’s Zuki out there talkin’ to Roy.”

  Matt looked out, saw Roy with the young blacks.

  “Which one is Zuki?”

  “Slick dude in the T-shirt and shades,” Tremont said.

  The two were standing with eight or nine youths in front of the bar. Roy was talking and the cluster was listening. Roy shakes his head, doesn’t approve. Of what?

  “What can Zuki do to me, Bish, throw me in the river?”

  “He could do that,” Matt said. “But not if you went public with your story, talk to Quinn’s friend Doc, the cop, and you’d have a head start on him.”

  “You sayin’ I should tell people Zuki wanted me to shoot a politician?”

  Matt smiled at Tremont’s volume, then saw that Howie the bartender, George, Vivian, and some blacks had all turned to look at Tremont.

  “They just shot one of the Kennedys,” George said. “I don’t know which one. I was in Atlantic City when Czolgosz shot McKinley. They fried him at Sing Sing seven weeks later.”

  “You right again, Bish,” Tremont said. “Goin’ public’s what I’m gonna do.”

  Howie came down the bar to Tremont. “What’s that about shooting a politician? That some kind of joke?”

  “No joke,” Tremont said. “Guy wanted me to shoot somebody.”

  “In Albany?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?”

  “Didn’t say who. Just had this idea.”

  “Who you talkin’ about? What guy?”

  “That guy out there on the sidewalk.”

  “Which one?”

  “Guy with the T-shirt,” and he pointed.

  Howie looked out the window, then went down the bar and spoke to a waiter and went into the back room where the party was rocking with James Brown, getting bigger, and noisier.

  “We better get you out of here,” Matt said. “You didn’t have to broadcast it.”

  “Let’s have one for the road,” Tremont said.

  “Too late. George and Vivian, you should come with us.”

  “Give my regards to Broadway,” George said.

  Matt ushered the three of them out the door and went directly to Roy who was haranguing the sidewalk gang to get inside, the Four Spot’s dangerous tonight if the town goes crazy. Cops been cruising with bullhorns telling people keep their kids indoors. Hanging out as a gang is asking them to bust your head, put you in jail. Nobody moved. Cops are all carrying shotguns tonight. You can’t cope with shotguns. Nobody moved. They won’t serve me inside, one said. We’re waitin’ for some guys, we ain’t makin’ trouble, what are you, a preacher?

  “Roy,” Matt said and pulled him aside, “Tremont just told half the bar Zuki wanted him to shoot an Albany politician. I think the bartender called the cops.”

  “Jesus, Tremont, is that true?”

  “Wanted me to shoot the Mayor,” Tremont said, not in a whisper.

  “Oh, fuck me, this can’t be real.” Roy turned to Zuki who heard what Tremont said and was already walking toward Clinton Avenue. “Hey, Zuki,” Roy said, “wait a minute.”

  Zuki kept walking and, as Roy went double-time toward him, Zuki ran, but Roy was closing the gap as they turned the corner out of sight.

  Matt turned to Tremont and said, “Let’s move on,” but then Roy came around the corner with Zuki in a hammerlock.

  ?
??Tremont,” Roy called out as he came, “is this the guy?”

  “That’s Zuki.”

  Two hefty white waiters and Howie the bartender, who was clutching a short baseball bat, came out of the bar. “Those two,” Howie said, pointing at Zuki and Roy, “and this one,” pointing at Tremont.

  The black youths on the sidewalk backstepped away from the bar window. One waiter grabbed for Tremont but Matt moved his bulk between them and put his hand on the waiter’s chest. “Don’t touch him,” he said to the waiter and Howie.

  The two waiters moved on Roy and broke his hammerlock on Zuki. Roy pushed himself away, off balance, and as one of them grappled with Zuki the other hit Roy with a roundhouse and jumped him when he staggered.

  “Hey, leave that fella alone,” George yelled to the waiter struggling with Roy.

  A black Chevy turned off Clinton Avenue onto Clinton Square, a one-block street. The driver slowed as two white men hanging out the front and back windows threw two Molotov cocktails into the crowd, the first smashing the Four Spot’s window. Zuki broke the grip of the waiter grappling with him and ran toward Clinton Avenue. The bomb ignited Howie’s apron and he dropped his bat, flailing at the flames. George picked up the bat and swung it against the skull of the waiter wrestling with Roy. The waiter fell to his knees and Roy backed into the street.

  “I owe you for that,” Roy said to George.

  “You done the same for me more than once,” George said.

  The second Molotov had exploded against the stoop of the house next to the bar, splattering flame on the feet of the black youths and onto Vivian’s yellow shawl. Matt lifted it off her shoulder and shook out the fire. The Chevy had turned onto Orange Street, sped up Pearl and was gone. The two waiters and Howie went in to fight the fire inside the bar’s broken window.

  With sirens screeching half a dozen police cars converged on the Palace Theater and Roy walked toward it, blotting his bleeding lip. He saw Ben Jones in front of the theater, hundreds of people coming out.

  “We just got a call,” Ben said to him. “White kid either fell down the balcony stairs or went over a railing, some kind of fight during the movie. Kid may be dead. They say black kids did it.”

  “Fuck,” Roy said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “That’s what I was thinkin’,” Ben said.

  Tremont had crossed the street to watch the action, in no shape to fight tonight, Molotovs flyin’, whites are crazy. Tremont wanted a drink, but can’t go back to that place. Go to Dorsey’s. Matt had George and Vivian by the arms and was crossing from the bar to where Tremont was standing.

  “We’re moving on, folks,” Matt said, and he hustled the trio across Clinton Square Park and onto Pearl.

  “Maybe we can get a drink down at Dorsey’s on Broadway,” Tremont said.

  “Lead the way,” Matt said, and they quickstepped down Orange Street toward Broadway as the wail of sirens grew louder.

  “Too much goin’ on in that bar,” Tremont said.

  “Too many loose wires in your machinery, Tremont,” Matt said.

  “Why did you hit that man with the bat, George?” Vivian asked.

  “Dick Hawkins was getting the worst of it.”

  “That wasn’t Dick Hawkins,” Tremont said. “That was Roy Mason.”

  “That was Dick Hawkins. I’ve known him all my life.”

  “Whoever it was,” Matt said, “you got him out of trouble.”

  “I thought it was exciting,” Vivian said. “I loved every minute.”

  George sang:“Just see the sweat poppin’ out of his brow,

  I’ve got him right where I want him now.

  Don’t you dare to talk back, ’bout the white ’bove the black,

  I’ve got a white man working for me.”

  A steward at the Fort Orange Club told Quinn the Mayor was expecting him and led him to a carpeted second-floor room away from the main dining room and bar traffic, and from members reading the papers and sipping whiskies in the parlors. The room was one of a dozen in the club used for intimate private dinners, oak-paneled with a small chandelier and wall sconces offering a marginally brighter light than might have been cast in this room eighty years earlier when the Club was founded. Two W. Dendy Sadler prints with scenes in the artist’s favorite nineteenth-century men’s club—men toasting a vintage wine, and men polishing golf clubs—brought back a bit of the distant elite past that both clubs had in common. The Mayor had been president of this club not long ago, and his grandfather was one of its founders and pillars. He entered the room with a brisk gait, wearing one of his gray single-breasted suits with white shirt and rep tie, his uniform.

  “Mr. Quinn,” he said, and extended his hand.

  “Mr. Mayor,” said Quinn, and he shook the hand.

  Quinn had been watching Alex Fitzgibbon behave for three decades. Supremely articulate, expensively educated, immensely charming, he epitomized the suave politician for whom no hostile question would ever pose a problem. The answer, whatever the question, was that there is no ready answer, the situation is too complex, quite ambiguous, a matter of opinion, not what we expected, in need of study, can’t comment since it’s under investigation, sorry but I don’t have that answer, try again tomorrow. In the early 1940s his equivocal style was the understandable caution of a novice mayor, but he quickly shed the novitiate and raised vaporous improvisation to an elocutionary art form—graceful verbal effusion, devoid of specificity or meaning. I will tell you what I choose to tell you and nothing beyond.

  Why, then, didn’t Quinn talk to the police chief or the district attorney about the crisis in the city? Because only the Mayor was permitted to have a public thought. The evergreen memory in the Party was of the convention delegate who was allowed to make a speech and nominated the wrong man. Quinn was determined to draw the Mayor out by logic (unlikely) or trick or outrage or shame (impossible but worth a try), provoke him into uttering one consequential sentence, which would be a triumph.

  “I hope we can keep this brief,” the Mayor said.

  “We can,” said Quinn. “The city is on edge, blah blah, racial tension blah, and on top of this comes the shooting of Bobby Kennedy, which aggravates the situation, doesn’t it? Your reaction?”

  “National tragedy blah blah, might have been president blah, grieve for his family blah.”

  “The Albany Democratic organization didn’t like Bobby. He didn’t play the game, went his own way with his own people blah.”

  “We have nothing but admiration for Bobby blah. We would have backed him one hundred percent blah in November.”

  “You put out the word to cut Bobby when he ran for the Senate.”

  “You are misinformed.”

  “Patsy McCall said publicly that Bobby was a stiff and a louse. You have never reacted publicly to that remark.”

  “Is this an interview or an attack, Mr. Quinn?”

  “How do you assess the public anger tonight blah blah, the downtown protest and vigil for Bobby, student anger over the silencing of Father Matt Daugherty, Catholics protesting blah blah, angry blacks fuming since Martin Luther King’s death, other cities rioting.”

  “Yes, that’s blah,” said the Mayor, “doing all we can, police out in force blah, guns blah, won’t abide terror on our streets, store windows broken blah, citizens hit with rocks blah.”

  “My father was one of those citizens,” Quinn said.

  “Yes, I heard, cut by flying glass,” said the Mayor. “I met him this afternoon on Eagle Street. He was very cheerful.”

  “That’s his nature. Have you been down to the scene?”

  “Which scene?”

  “North Pearl Street.”

  “You mean the Palace?”

  “The Palace?” said Quinn.

  “There was a killing there,” the Mayor said.

  Quinn waited. What was this?

  “A young white boy is dead, attacked by Negro youths—that’s our first report. You haven’t heard?”

  ??
?No. When?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “Anyone arrested?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What does this do to your plans for controlling violence?”

  “Our police force is equal to anything that happens blah.”

  “If there’s a riot will you blah blah the State Police?”

  “No. Our own police have tear blah gas, shotguns, and they won’t tolerate any blah blah.”

  “Will they shoot to kill?”

  “They will use their best blah.”

  “I talked to a black man today who was recruited to assassinate you.”

  The Mayor crinkled his eyes, leaned back in his chair.

  “Really?” he said. “Who is he?”

  “He’s a friend of mine. Another black man named Zuki cajoled him into talking about it and took him for target practice with an AR-15. Have you heard of anyone named Zuki?”

  “No. But your friend should tell our police chief about this.”

  “I’m telling you. You’re better than the police. The man believes the police will throw him in jail, and he’s probably right. Zuki is the obvious target here, a conspirator talking murder. He shouldn’t be hard to find. He goes to the State University and has a part-time job at Holy Cross Institute.”

  “Was this why you wanted this interview—to sensationalize it?”

  “I thought you should know people are talking about murdering you.”

  “I am grateful for your concern.”

  “But you don’t believe it’s real, do you?”

  “I don’t believe it? Off the record?”

  “All right.”

  “Of course I believe it. Many people out there hate me.”

  “I know you have enemies.”

  “The Black Panthers talk openly about killing white police and they have counterparts in this city—and you write about them in your newspaper. Those fellows call me a racist but I’m no racist and never have been. They are the racists. They want me dead because I’m a white man with power over their lives and they’re sending a message that white power is passé and Black Power is the new force to reckon with in this country. But their Black Power nonsense and their so-called creative conflict are just old-fashioned anarchism in new clothes, a national cancer that’s destroying the blah blah bridges so painstakingly blah between the races. They’re calling for blood and I think they’ll get it. This country has to see this blah blah danger for what it is. Intelligent blacks don’t want the cancer these barbarians are spreading. Your news is no surprise to me, Mr. Quinn. We know they have guns and will use them.”