Harlem Shuffle(24)
He didn’t see combat, but did his first murder nonetheless. Thirty miles from Mongyu, a new deployment of native workers arrived, hardworking Burmese to replace the ones the jungle chewed up. Mostly they stuck to their own camp at quitting time, but there was one young man with delicate features who slunk around, ever underfoot. He wanted to learn English, he said. This gang of white officers used to taunt and waggle their tongues at him. He was not the first womanish man Pepper had seen—there was a place on Warren Street that catered to johns of that bent. The Burmese man only approached the white soldiers for practice, as if the colored grunts had a different language. (They did and they didn’t.) As the weeks went on, those officers kept on his case, lobbing kissy noises and jeers. The man just smiled and did a slow, servile nod, dipping his sad eyes from view.
There was no doubt who had beaten him so. One murky evening at the end of monsoon season Pepper went out to smoke some reefer by the Yard—that’s what they called the area for the broken-down bulldozers and cranes, as if it were a proper motor pool. No one around. No one was ever around when Pepper was put to the test, and he was not one to speak about things he said or did so what happened next joined the other items in his grim scrapbook. The man’s brains were spilled out in the mud when Pepper found him. Pants around his knees. If there’d been a hospital for native workers, he might have taken the man there. If anyone would’ve been held accountable, he might have reported it. White soldier calls someone a Jap spy, he can get away with anything.
Red bubbles on the Burmese nostrils wobbled and popped as he gurgled. Pepper fixed a palm to the man’s mouth and pinched closed the nose, then put a knee to his chest when he started to buck. Pepper’s hands were callused from the road work. He didn’t feel the man’s skin at all, like he was wearing thick rubber gloves.
You hear people say, “Oh, when our boy came back from the war, he was changed.” The war didn’t change Pepper, it completed him. He’d lose himself in different, darker caves and ditches when he returned to the States and started his career in earnest.
The rain washed the Burmese’s blood off his hands. In the barracks, Armed Forces Radio announced the score of the Dodger–Giants game eight thousand miles away. Back among normal people and their diversions. The normal world kept spinning when he was up to no good and he stepped back in like nothing happened. This Houdini trick.
The Dodgers were playing Cincinnati when he heard about Arthur.
He was at Donegal’s, up on Broadway. Friday night, three days after the heist. Everyone was hunkered and listening to the game. What kind of deviant rooted for the Dodgers on Giants turf? The Dodgers splitting Brooklyn for Los Angeles was a crime, and to cheer for the lost team meant you were an accomplice, but perpetrators and accomplices made up the majority of Donegal’s clientele. A tendency toward moral irregularity made you a regular. Pepper sat on a stool at the mahogany bar with the usual swindlers, thieves, and pimps. Kept his ears open for chatter about the Theresa job.
Banjo, an elderly hustler who claimed to be the first man to steal a car on the “Isle of Manhattan,” limped inside and announced that someone had bumped Arthur. The limp was courtesy of the robbery squad, who’d been disappointed that Banjo sicced his dog on them the last time they picked him up. It had been a crowbar-shaped disappointment.
Banjo placed his plaid beret over his heart in tribute to Arthur. The thief was known, with fans of his own among these Dodgers fans. Pour one out for the Jackie Robinson of safecracking. Pepper guzzled his beer and walked down to where the dead man had flopped. Eighth inning, six to one Dodgers.
Outside Arthur’s building on 134th, two cop cars had their lights spinning, red and white on the faces of the onlookers. No reason for it—the cops were waiting for the meat wagon—but they liked the show of power. As if white people didn’t remind these people of their place all day. At work, at the white bank, at the grocery store as the clerk explained they’d reached the end of their credit. Pepper jostled to the front of the mob. Scenes like this drew a crowd, killed time, especially on hot, listless nights. One of the cops—this beefy-faced peckerwood—noticed Pepper and gave him the once-over. Pepper stared back and the pig turned his attention to his shiny black shoes.
Pepper got the low-down from the wino swaying next to him. You want to know what’s going on, you ask the block wino. They see everything and then the booze pickles it, keeps it all fresh for later. The wino told him that a man named Arthur—“looks like a schoolteacher”—had been shot in his bed. The landlady saw the open door and phoned the precinct. “His head blown up like a watermelon fell off a cart.” The wino made an evocative splat sound. The landlady was a nice woman, he added, always with a warm hello no matter how shaky he was.
“That’s a shame,” Pepper told the wino. It was too bad, on top of not knowing where his damn money was. He’d liked Arthur, the way the man rubbed his fingertips together when he got to thinking, like he was about to punch out a safe. After the crew went to meet the furniture-store owner last night, he and Arthur went for a drink. The safecracker kept going on about this farm he owned. Out in the country. “I’m going to get a horse, and some chickens.” Come Labor Day, Arthur said, when the heat died down, he wanted to return to Carney’s Furniture and talk to the man about home furnishings. “We won’t say a word about the Theresa job. Won’t even acknowledge that we’ve ever met. Just a salesman and a man in the market. Just: Is it comfortable? Will it last?” He raised his glass to toast the idea.