He called Jake Hess, the newspaper’s lawyer and a personal friend for years, and asked, “Can I come over right now, Jake? Something dangerous is going on.”
“You sound desperate.”
“I’m too confused to be desperate.”
“Come on over.”
A copy boy dropped a note on Quinn’s desk. Quinn read “Max,” and a number. He dialed it and a voice said, “Cody’s Havana Club,” and Quinn said, “Is that you, Roy?”
“That’s me.”
“It’s Quinn. This is weird. My next move is to call you but I get a message to call Max Osborne and you answer. Max — is he still there?”
“He’s Gloria’s father.”
“He certainly is.”
“I hear she’s sick.”
“She’s all right. She’s with my wife.”
“Tell her I said to get better.”
“Listen. Tremont Van Ort’s the sick one. I just dropped him at Memorial Hospital and he’s in fantastic pain, probably from booze, but he’s also in serious trouble. You talk to him lately?”
“Two weeks ago, maybe. He was juiced. What trouble?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. This is important.”
“To who?”
“You, me, Tremont, the whole town. What’s your schedule?”
“Half an hour I’m done here. Then I’m at the Brothers.”
“Will you be there long?”
“We’ll probably be on the street trying to head off trouble before it starts. I’ll be in and out.”
“You know anybody named Zuki?”
“Zuki? Why?”
“I need to find him.”
“Why?”
“You win the Twenty Questions prize. Let me talk to Max.”
“He left. A woman called and he went out. I know Zuki. He works with Baron Roland at Holy Cross, I don’t know what he does. He’s a student at the university. He showed up at the Brothers two weeks ago, wanted to talk but I didn’t have time.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Who am I to trust anybody?”
Markson came back and said he’d told the story to Wheeler, the managing editor, who turned blue-green and took him down to Craig Penn, the publisher. “They want to call the FBI. I said it wasn’t real and might never be, but they want the FBI in on it and a report from you with names.”
“You write it,” Quinn said. “You know as much as I do. Tell them I went to Troy to buy a shirt.” And Quinn picked up his notes and went out.
Quinn referred to Tremont as Tex and Zuki as Roxy when he told the story to Jake Hess. Roxy, a young black in college, writing a book on Black Power, and Tex, a penniless, powerless, malleable, dying, grieving black man at the bottom of the world, in and out of jail half a dozen times as drunk and vagrant, also a veteran, Purple Heart, full of anger that can’t be mobilized against all the white bosses who stunted him, crippled him, his wife a drunk and now dead, his child a slum creature run off forever. And solitary Tex broods on fate, his gorge rising as he listens to Claudia the matriarch, the heroine of Better Streets, as she spews venom against the politicians who ignore us and our streets and treat us like the garbage they don’t even collect, like we live in a dump, she says, yeah, yeah, yeah a dump, says Tex, and the drink makes dump-life easier, calms him enough to let him imagine how the same people who killed Martin Luther King also killed Mary, poisoned her wine and gave him wine with the’ritises in it, but Tex says I’m stronger than she was, little bird of a thing couldn’t cut it, they killed my Mary ’cause they can’t handle us, so they guttin’ us one by one. And Roxy says to him, that’s the truth and we gotta get even. And Tex says you right, we gotta do that, and he reads a mimeographed letter signed by Black John that Roxy happened to find on the bar where they had gone to share their grief, and Black John says in his letter that black men gotta get up and move, stop hanging on the apron strings of the old mammies, those sweet old gals who want to run the town, let ’em try, ain’t doin’ no harm, but nobody in power’s gonna pay ’em no mind, you gotta go out on your own, black man, do what Black John is doin’, stand up to the white man, be a damn man, black man, be a man, don’t let the fat women talk for you, talk for yourself and let ’em all know you’re livin’, show ’em what a black man can do. And Tex says to Roxy, who is this Black John? Damn if I know, Roxy says, he just writes these letters and sends ’em around. Well, says Tex, he’s right, but what we gonna do and how we gonna do it? And Roxy says, we got to think this out, and that’s just what I been doing, writing this book about it, about the black man getting power, we had power in Korea, didn’t we? You were in Korea? Tex asks, and Roxy says, you know the battle of Chipyong-ni? I know it, Tex says. Hell of a show, says Roxy, and I got me some gooks. Tex says I got me a few, and Roxy says I heard you did, I heard you were a good shot and that you got the medals to prove it. I am a hell of a shot, Tex says. You can make money bein’ a hell of a shot, Roxy says. How you do that, Tex asks, hold up banks? Take out some of these no-good motherfucks, Roxy says. Take ’em out? And Roxy says, Get somebody nobody gonna miss or mourn and they don’t even ask who did it. He’s gone, he’s all done, that’s fine, thank you kindly, mister. Like Bobby Kennedy, that no-good, just because he’s a Kennedy, fuck him, you could shoot him. Shoot Bobby Kennedy? Who could? What the hell you talkin’ about? And Roxy says I’m talkin’ money. And he takes Tex out to practice his shooting.
Jake Hess cocked his head and said, “Bobby Kennedy?”
If Jake knew that Quinn was talking about Tremont thinking about shooting Alex Fitzgibbon and not Bobby, who was already shot, he’d pick up the phone and call Alex; for Jake, though now counsel for the newspaper, had for forty years been part of the legal brain trust of the Democratic political machine that ran this town — Patsy McCall and Roscoe Conway and Elisha Fitzgibbon, and now Elisha’s son, Alex Fitzgibbon. And Jake knew where all the bodies were buried. Yet Quinn never trusted anybody in politics more than he trusted Jake Hess, a principled man who would be the first person Quinn called if he went to jail, which was why he was now talking to Jake, who would know which way to move through this conundrum. Jake’s parents were Russian Jews who had fled the pogroms, a cultured man with ashen hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, gold watch chain looped across his vest, never without his suitcoat, soft-spoken, a 24-karat smile, and a conscience that, against the odds, had survived the political wars.
“You’re saying Tex is the one who shot Bobby?” Jake asked.
“No, Tex was here in town, too drunk even to shoot himself. Bobby’s just my for-instance,” Quinn said.
“Some for-instance.”
“Roxy had somebody else in mind, but I can’t get specific yet.”