The second joke was perhaps the definitive story about this city, which had never been celebrated for its friendliness or warmth, and which in fact had a reputation for abruptness bordering on rudeness. It was a very short story, a one-liner. An immigrant stops a stranger on the street and says, “Excuse me, can you tell me where the Municipal Life Building is, or should I go fuck myself?”
Augusta laughed louder than anyone else.
Kling remembered that between the hours of twelve-thirty and one forty-five, she had been inside a building on Hopper Street, corner Matthews. When they left the restaurant at ten, Meyer offered to give them a lift, but they were only a few blocks from where they lived, and so they all said good night on the sidewalk outside.
As they moved past the restaurant, a man stepped out of a doorway across the way, and began walking parallel to them on the other side of the street.
He was a huge man with the broad, powerful shoulders of a weight lifter. His dark eyes were shadowed by the brim of a hat pulled low on his forehead and covering his black hair. He followed Kling and Augusta all the way home, and after they went inside he stood on the sidewalk across the street and watched the lighted windows on the second floor of the brownstone. He did not leave until the lights went out at a little past eleven.
Then he went uptown to look for a gun.
6
It was worse up here than it was anywhere else in the city. Even in the Marine Tiger section of Riverhead, there was sometimes a breeze coming in off the River Dix and rushing through the comparatively higher plateau of what had once been fertile farmland. But here in Diamondback, at the farthermost reaches of the city’s central island, the heat was insufferable — even at ten past midnight, when Halloran came up out of the subway.
The heat had been baking into the brick walls and the tarred roofs of the buildings all day long. The buildings themselves stretched row upon row, block after block, six and seven stories high, forming a grid that trapped the heat and held it motionless, a giant stifling canopy of heat. The windows in the apartments were open, but the air was still and the heat within was equally balanced with the heat outside, so that the people who lived here felt they were moving through a vast, viscid, impenetrable, virtually blinding force field. They sat on the fire escapes hung with clothing that refused to dry because of the humidity. They sat on the front stoops of buildings eroded by time and abuse. They lounged listlessly on the street corners. They played checkers in the light of the streetlamps. It was past midnight in Diamondback, but it could just as well have been high noon. The streets were thronged. There would be no sleeping tonight, not with this heat. Tomorrow morning, many of the residents here would travel downtown to work in air-conditioned offices, restaurants, shops, and stores. But tonight, there was only the heat, and the roaches, and the rats.
Halloran could hear the rats foraging in the empty lots as he walked along the avenue toward the address Jimmy Baker had given him. He could see their eyes gleaming in the dark. He could hear their teeth gnawing. The lots were piled with garbage. It was easier to throw your garbage out the windows in this neighborhood, into an empty lot, than to pack it neatly in plastic bags at the curb. The Sanitmen weren’t as particular about Diamondback as they were about some of the city’s better sections. The garbage would sit outside the buildings for days, waiting for collection. The rats would gnaw through the plastic. In packs, the rats would cover the sidewalks instead of the empty lots. It was safer to throw your garbage into the lots. You kept the rats off the sidewalks that way. You created little pockets of rat zoos, the rats waiting for feeding time, chewing up the scattered garbage instead of the faces of infants in cribs.
Halloran was only one of a very few white men abroad in Diamondback that night. It was an axiom of urban survival that if you were white you did not walk the streets of Diamondback after dark. The white men up there after dark were either junkies looking for a fix or out-of-towners looking for black pussy. Either was fair game to many of the people who lived here. The ones who went to work downtown each morning would sit on their fire escapes and look down into the streets where a man was getting rolled or mugged, and they would shake their heads in despair, and curse the accidental skin coloration that caused honest men and women to be equated with thieves, prostitutes, and pimps. They would sigh deeply, recognizing forlornly that this was a condition of life, however unfair, and in the morning they would dress in the clothing they had purchased in any one of the better stores downtown, and be ready at nine sharp to take dictation or to sell a negligee or to drive a passenger from the airport to his apartment in Stewart City on the River Dix, where a doorman in livery would open the door of the taxi and say, “Good morning, sir, sorry about this heat, sir.” That would be in the morning. This was the night.
Halloran was a big man who looked like he might have been a detective out of the Eight-Three up here, and this was in his favor. Moreover, there was a sense of menace about him, a certain emanation that this man was street-smart, and it would not be wise to tangle with him. There were easier marks, it wouldn’t pay to jump a honkie who might turn out to be either a cop or some cock-sucker wanted for murder in fourteen of the fifty states. Halloran walked the crowded midnight streets unmolested.
Jimmy Baker had been his cellmate up at Castleview, until last October anyway, when Jimmy was paroled after serving ten on an armed robbery rap. Together, he and Jimmy had shared some of the choicest young meat inside the prison. The way they worked it, they would pick out a baby-faced little doll riding up, and then Halloran would put the muscle on the kid, coming on like the big bad wolf about to eat him alive, and Jimmy — who was slender and slight — would stand up for the kid, facing Halloran down, telling him he’d cut off his balls if he didn’t leave the kid alone. The kid in gratitude would sidle up to Jimmy, who’d be fucking him before the week was out, threatening to throw him to the beast who was Halloran if he didn’t put out. A classic Mutt-and-Jeff situation. But by the end of the second week, both of them would be alternating with the kid, who by then had realized he’d been conned, but who figured two stir-wise operators like Halloran and Jimmy would keep all the other animals away. There were as many animals up at Castleview as there were rats foraging in the lots of Diamondback.
The pool hall Jimmy Baker owned and operated was in the middle of the block, set between a storefront Baptist church and a beauty parlor advertising hair straightening and skin lightening. There were two dozen young black guys shooting pool when Halloran walked through the front door at a quarter past midnight. Fuckin’ niggers got nothing to do but shoot pool in the middle of the night, Halloran thought. My fuckin’ daughter’s married to a nigger, he thought. Oddly, he did not think of Jimmy Baker as a nigger. Jimmy Baker was simply his cellmate, and a nicer guy you’d never want to meet in your life. The exception to the rule, Halloran thought. Enjoyed more damn two-on-ones with Jimmy up there at Castleview. Jimmy was okay. Black or white, he was okay. In his presence, Halloran never used the word “nigger.” Even if he was one.
The guys shooting pool all looked up when he came in. Their eyes caromed off each other’s like the balls on the tables. They were figuring him for a cop. Next few minutes, there’d be an “Up against the wall, motherfuckers.” A fat black guy reading the early edition of the city’s tabloid newspaper looked up from where he was sitting behind a high counter just inside the entrance door. A sign behind his head advised what the hourly rates were for a table. He was chewing on a cigar. He went back to his newspaper, deciding to ignore Halloran. If he was fuzz, he’d make his intentions known soon enough.