“So long, Tree honey,” she said.
Tremont writhed as the car moved, and with every jolt came a yelp, a moan. “Where we goin’?”
“Memorial Hospital,” Quinn said. “Do somethin’ for your pain.”
“I can’t stay there.”
“Yes you can.”
“You don’t know,” Tremont said. “I got a guy after me.”
“What guy?”
“Bad mother.”
“Are you talking drugs?”
“No, man. We go to the hospital you gotta stay with me. He finds out I’m there he’ll be comin’ for me.”
“Who will?”
“Zuki. He was talkin’ guns, shootin’ people.”
“What people?”
“Took me out shootin’. Wanted to see how I do. He heard the army give me those sharpshooter badges. Wanted me to shoot somebody.”
“Shoot who?”
Tremont didn’t answer.
“Who is this Zuki? He have another name?”
“No.”
“Is he black?”
“Brown.”
“Who’d he want you to shoot?”
“Talked about a landlord owns bad houses.”
“Shoot a landlord for his bad houses?”
“That’s what he say. Then he say the landlord’s gonna kill Claudia’cause she makes trouble for everybody.”
“He name this landlord?”
“Never said no names. But killin’ Claudia, that wasn’t real.”
“Who was real?”
“Can’t say.”
“You gotta say, Tremont.”
“He’ll come after me. He say this is important, and if I goof out he’ll find me, and I won’t like what happens.”
“We’ll get you protection.”
“From who, the cops? Cops’ll put me in jail forever. All Zuki’s gotta say is I was gonna shoot a politician.”
“You were?”
“That’s what he was talkin’. I told him I needed money to eat and he give me a few and said he’d see me in the mornin’. But I drank two days on that money and I ain’t seen Zuki since. When I got the pain I went to the house to lay down but I couldn’t get inside.”
“Who was the politician?”
“Can’t say.”
“This is crazy, Tremont. You can’t keep this secret if you want protection. Who was it?”
Tremont said nothing.
“Was it Bobby Kennedy? He was coming to Albany next week but they shot him last night in Los Angeles.”
“They shot Bobby? Who did?”
“Some guy nobody knows.”
“I wouldn’t shoot Bobby Kennedy.”
“Who would you shoot?”
“Wouldn’t shoot nobody.”
“Tremont, who was it?”
Tremont said nothing.
“Tremont.”
“Zuki talkin’ about the Mayor.”
“The Mayor? Alex Fitzgibbon?”
“Yeah.” Tremont was moaning.
“Where did you meet this Zuki?”
“He came into the Brothers and talked to Roy. I was there. He say ‘Let’s go have a drink,’ and I said why not and we went down to Dorsey’s.”
“Who is he? What does he do?”
“He say he’s in college.”
“Which college?”
“Didn’t say.”
“Does Roy know about shooting the Mayor?”
“Roy don’t know none of it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Zuki said nobody knows. Nobody. Him and me the only ones know. And now you-all.”
“Zuki say why he wanted to shoot the Mayor?”
“Called him a fascist fuckhead dictator. Said he’s no good.”
“You think the Mayor’s no good?”
“He ain’t done much for me, but that ain’t a reason to shoot him.”
“How’d you leave it when he gave you the money?”
“I said I’d eat somethin’ and meet him in the mornin’ at Chloe’s Diner. But I drank two days, maybe three, and then you come and got me.”
“How come Zuki didn’t go to the house to see you?”
“Zuki don’t know nothin’ about me and that house.”
“Who do you think Zuki’s working for?”
“I dunno, but he’s a bad ass.”
“What kind of gun was it?”
“AR-15 What they had in Vietnam. I never shot one of those.”
“Zuki say where you’d be when you shot the Mayor?”
“On a hill out in the mountains. Every day the Mayor goes out to see the old political boss, Patsy McCall. Sit up on that hill you got a clear shot when he gets outa the car.”
“Zuki would take you out there?”
“He talked about it.”
“What about the getaway?
“A car waitin’. Go down the other side of the mountain before anybody know where the shot came from.”
“Did you buy that?”
“You get down to the bottom of that mountain they be waitin’ for you with the Third Army.”
“But you didn’t say that to Zuki.”
“Just took the gun and said I’d see him tomorrow.”
“Where’s the gun now?”
“In a locker down at the bus station, in a black bag.”
“A black bag.”
“Yeah. Ain’t that how it goes?”
“That’s how it goes.”
“Where’s the key to the locker?”
“In my pocket.”
Tremont heard about Roy through Quinn’s story in 1965 of his one-man picket line. Roy had come to the Laborers Union every morning for six weeks but never got a day’s work from Carmine Fiore, who ran the shapeup. On the morning that a white stranger showed up and was hired, Roy painted his sign: CARMINE FIORE IS A RACIST, and walked with it.
Quinn interviewed Roy as he picketed and when the Times Union story came out the next day four black men joined Roy’s picket line and Tremont was the first of the four. Twenty more joined the day after that, including Baron Roland, who taught the history course Roy was taking at Albany City College. The unofficial title of Roland’s course was “Social Justice, an Oxymoron.” Roy and his fellow picketers were all so full of fire and grievance that Roland suggested they organize to face down racism. The strength to do this, he assured them, would grow out of their collective anger, and more would join them, for black power was in the air. Within two months the Brothers existed three-dozen strong, picketing unions and city hall, speaking at churches, joining peace marches, giving slum tours to the press and the clergy, and, in the spirit of Claudia Johnson, dumping cockroaches on the desks of slumlords.
The Brothers took on the aura of the Black Panthers, America’s badass militants. They disavowed Panther talk of killing white cops, but they loved Malcolm more than Martin, and when Malcolm came to town they sat with him in the gallery of the Senate chamber. When Stokely came he visited the Brothers’ storefront and said riots in Newark and Detroit were an unavoidable movement toward urban guerrilla war. Roy Mason, who spoke cogently and without rant as coordinator of the Brothers, clarified the group’s position. “No, we’re not Stokely, and we don’t advocate violence. But we don’t advocate nonviolence either.”
Tremont spent less time with the Brothers and more time going with his wife to meetings of Better Streets. As Election Day 1967 approached, the Brothers accumulated enough signatures to put one of their own, Ben Jones, on the Liberal Party ticket for alderman of the Third Ward. They announced plans to picket polling places to urge blacks not to sell their vote. Roy tried to register as a poll watcher in the Third Ward but it had already been assigned to Tremont Van Ort of Better Streets. “I’ll help him out,” said Roy.
Roy was alone on the corner of Westerlo and Green streets at 5:45 on the clear, twenty-four-degree morning of Election Day when Quinn and Matt Daugherty arrived in Quinn’s car. Cardboard signs with POLLING PLACE had been nailed to telephone poles on the block, and one was pasted onto the window of Tony Romildo’s storefront clubroom, where old-timers who couldn’t speak English gathered to drink coffee and grappa. Store lights were on and men were moving a table. One man saw the group outside and came out. He was a white-haired pudge with a facial flush and razor nicks.