For love of Imabelle

8

They were having a big ball in the Savoy and people were lined up for a block down Lenox Avenue, waiting to buy tickets. The famous Harlem detective-team of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones had been assigned to keep order.

Both were tall, loose-jointed, sloppily dressed, ordinary-looking dark-brown colored men. But there was nothing ordinary about their pistols. They carried specially made long-barreled nickel-plated .38-calibre revolvers, and at the moment they had them in their hands.

Grave Digger stood on the right side of the front end of the line, at the entrance to the Savoy. Coffin Ed stood on the left side of the line, at the rear end. Grave Digger had his pistol aimed south, in a straight line down the sidewalk. On the other side, Coffin Ed had his pistol aimed north, in a straight line. There was space enough between the two imaginary lines for two persons to stand side by side. Whenever anyone moved out of line, Grave Digger would shout, “Straighten up!” and Coffin Ed would echo, “Count off!” If the offender didn’t straighten up the line immediately, one of the detectives would shoot into the air. The couples in the queue would close together as though pressed between two concrete walls. Folks in Harlem believed that Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would shoot a man stone dead for not standing straight in a line.

Grave Digger looked around and saw the black-gowned figure of Sister Gabriel trudging slowly down the street.

“What’s the word, Sister?” he greeted.

“ ‘And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, the sixth angel said,’ ” Sister Gabriel quoted.

The couples nearby in the queue laughed.

“Listen to Sistah Gabriel,” a young woman snickered.

“I hear you, Sister,” Grave Digger said. “And what makes those three frogs hop?”

The listeners laughed again.

Sister Gabriel paused. “ ‘For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles.’ ”

“Do you think she’s crazy?” a loud whisper was heard.

“Shut your mouth,” came a cautious reply.

“And these frogs?” Grave Digger kept it up. “You mean they’ve got a frog pond in Harlem?”

It was a signal for the listeners to laugh again.

“ ‘And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery,’ ” Sister Gabriel quoted and moved on.

“Everybody to their own Jesus,” Grave Digger said to the audience.

Goldy continued down Lenox Avenue to 131st Street and turned the corner toward Big Kathy’s whorehouse.

It was a six-room apartment on the second floor rear of a big crumbling five-story building. Big Kathy was giving her customers a show and the big living-room was lit brightly for the occasion. The air was tinted blue with the smoke of incense. Five girls and a dozen men sat squeezed together on shabby overstuffed chairs and sofas backed against the walls, leaving the center of the room clear.

A huge yellow woman, almost six feet tall and weighing almost two hundred and fifty pounds, was struggling furiously with a short, skinny, muscular black man about half her weight. Both were clad in skintight rubber suits that had been greased and their faces were streaming with sweat that couldn’t escape through the body pores.

They were working off a bet whether he could throw her. The stake was a hundred dollars. Side bets had been made.

The big woman was clubbing the little man with her fists. The little man was trying to get hold of the big woman’s greased limbs. It was rugged. The spectators were laughing and shouting obscene encouragement.

“Give him some more love licks, baby,” a man kept shouting.

Goldy entered by the service door and went unnoticed down the hall to Big Kathy’s private room. He entered without knocking.

The room was furnished with a bed, chiffonier, a desk for a dressing table, and two red plastic-covered chairs.

Big Kathy was standing at the foot of the bed beside a hinged panel that opened inward from the wall at the height of his face. When closed, the panel was hidden by a lithograph of Mary and her Child. On the other side was a transparent mirror giving a clear view of the living room without the peeper’s being seen.

Big Kathy turned his head and beckoned to Goldy.

“He’s here,” he whispered. “Over by the radio with Teena in his lap.”

Goldy put his face to the peephole and Big Kathy looked over his shoulder. He spotted Hank instantly. Then he noticed a rough-skinned, broad-shouldered man with half-straightened hair, dressed in working pants and a leather jacket, sitting beside Hank in a straight-backed chair.

“That’s another one,” Goldy whispered. “The one beside him with the burnt hair.”

“He calls himself Walker.”

Goldy’s gaze roved about the room but he didn’t see the slim man.

“Can you get Teena in here?” he asked Big Kathy.

Big Kathy fingered a loose nail in the joist on which the panel was hinged. The radio dial lit up. All five girls in the big room looked at it covertly.

Then Teena got up and excused herself.

“I’ve got to go wee-wee.”

“You’re getting kind of old for that, ain’t you?” Jodie said roughly.

“Quit picking at her,” Hank ordered.

Teena slipped into Big Kathy’s room without its being noticed.

“The Sister here wants you to dig your John tonight about his gold-mine pitch, and to get every angle there is,” Big Kathy said.

Teena looked at the Sister of Mercy curiously. She had discovered by accident that Big Kathy was a man, but she didn’t know anything definite about Goldy.

“What’s her story?” she asked impudently.

“You’re drinking too much,” Big Kathy said. “You’d better be sober when you get to work, and you’d better not miss.”

“I ain’t goin’ to miss,” Teena said sullenly.

As soon as she’d returned to the sitting room, Big Kathy went in and stopped the wrestling match.

“Let’s call it a draw.”

“Let ’em finish!” Jodie shouted. “I got my money up.”

“Take it down then,” Big Kathy said harshly. “I said it’s a draw.”

The wrestlers were on the point of exhaustion and glad to quit.

Jodie took down the money from the girl who was holding the bet and pushed his way toward the outside door. Big Kathy let him out.

Teena took Hank to a room.

Goldy stretched out on Big Kathy’s bed, but he was too tense to sleep. He was too worried about whether the gold ore was real. He believed Jackson, but he wanted to be sure.

Big Kathy sat in one of the plastic-covered armchairs, skirt drawn up above his big lumpy knees, reading the society page of a Negro weekly newspaper and commenting from time to time about friends of his who were mentioned.

They had a long wait. It was after midnight before Teena knocked softly.

“Come in,” Big Kathy said.

“Whew!” Teena whistled, flopping into the other chair. “He talked my ear off.”

Goldy sat up on the edge of the bed and leaned forward. “Did he want you to go in with them?”

“Hell, no! That stingy son of a bitch! He was tryin’ to sell me some shares.”

“Then you struck,” Big Kathy said.

“I got everything but where they’re making the pitch.”

Goldy looked disappointed. “That was one of the main things.”

“I did my best, but he wouldn’t give.”

“All right,” Big Kathy said. “Let’s have what you got.”

“It’s just the old lost-gold-mine pitch. The one they call Walker is supposed to be the prospector who accidentally discovered the lost gold mine in Mexico. It’s the biggest and richest gold mine he’s ever seen in all his years of prospecting, and all that bullshit.”

“Let’s hear it anyhow,” Goldy said.

Teena threw him another calculating look.

“Well, Walker’s afraid he’d be killed if he even so much as mentioned finding the mine. And naturally the only man he can trust to tell about it is Mr. Morgan, who’s a big-time financier from Los Angeles. Mr. Morgan’s known all over the West Coast for backing big business-deals and has got a reputation from coast to coast for being honest.”

She started giggling.

“Go on,” Big Kathy said roughly.

“Well, what prospector Walker needed was thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and equipment and stuff and about a hundred miners to work for him. And besides that he’s got to get a permit from the Mexican government to work the mine, which is going to cost a hundred thousand dollars just by itself.

“So the first thing Mr. Morgan does is engage the services — that’s what he said — engage the—”

“Get on with the story,” Big Kathy said.

“Engage the services of a gold assayer from the Federal Bureau of Assayers. I ain’t seen that one, but they call him Goldsmith.”

She began giggling again but a look from Big Kathy stopped her.

“Well, all three of them, Walker and Morgan and Goldsmith, was supposed to have gone to Mexico to investigate the mine. But when Mr. Morgan found out how big it was he knew he couldn’t swing the deal alone. There were billions of dollars’ worth of gold in the mine and it’d take half a million dollars to mine it right. Morgan said he could have financed it through his bank — he told me this straight to my face — but he didn’t want the white folks to get control of it and take all the profits. So he decided to organize a corporation and sell stock just to colored folks. They’re going all over the whole United States selling stock at fifty dollars a share; and to give themselves time to make a load they’re telling everybody it’ll take six months to get the mine in operation and another three or four months before it starts paying off.”

She stopped and lit a cigarette, then looked from one to the other. “Well, that’s it.”

“How’re they selling their stock if you couldn’t find out where they’re making their pitch?” Goldy asked intently.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you about that. They got a contact man called Gus Parsons, or Gus somebody-or-other. He’s working all the plush bars, attending businessmen’s conferences, even going to church festivals, Morgan said, contacting the suckers. Investors, Morgan calls them. Then he takes them to their headquarters blindfolded, in his own car.”

Big Kathy’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Teena.

Goldy kept his intent stare pinned on her.

“How come all that?” he asked.

Teena shrugged. “He said they’re afraid of being robbed.”

“Robbed?” Big Kathy echoed.

“Robbed of what?” Goldy asked.

“He say they got a trunk full of gold ore, whatever that is. He said it was taken from the lost mine, as if anybody’d believe that shit.”

“Do they keep it at their headquarters?” Goldy asked.

There was something in Goldy’s voice that made Big Kathy look at him sharply.

Teena didn’t know what was happening and she began getting scared.

“I don’t know where they keep it. He didn’t say nothing to me about that. All he said to me was they had samples at headquarters to exhibit but if anybody had enough money to invest, they’d show ’em a whole trunk full of pure gold ore.”

Goldy sighed so softly it sounded as though he were crying to himself.

Big Kathy kept staring at him with his eyes full of questions. “You through with Teena?”

Goldy nodded.

“Get out,” Big Kathy said.

As soon as Teena had closed the door, he leaned far over and stared into Goldy’s bowed face.

“Is it true?”

Goldy nodded slowly. “It’s true.”

“How much?”

“Enough for everybody.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just play dead until after I have got it.”