Festival of Deaths(109)

“How can you tell?” John Jackman muttered under his breath.

“They certainly aren’t being quiet about it,” Gregor pointed out. “They have to be audible in Delaware. That ought to help the case down the line.”

“Here comes the paint,” John Jackman said.

Red Scarf had taken a can out of his jacket pocket. He turned it over a couple of times and then shook it in the air. Blue Gloves dropped the roach of his joint onto the street and stamped what spark there was left in it under his boot. Then he reached into his own jacket pocket and pulled out a spray can of his own.

“Do you think they believe any of the things they say?” Gregor asked idly, watching them begin to pace back and forth in front of the synagogue’s facade.

“I think they have a hard time remembering it from one day to the next,” John Jackman said. “Except that they think they’ve been screwed. They remember that.”

“Maybe they have been screwed,” Gregor said.

John Jackman snorted. “Their mothers should have screwed up the courage to give them a few good spankings. That’s the only way they’ve been screwed.”

Out on the street, Red Gloves had raised his arm in the air and aimed the spray can at the synagogue’s front face. He set it off in a blur of white and yelled, “Die, you Jew bastards, die!”

He was very loud, but to Gregor he did not sound convincing. Blue Gloves leaped in next to him and raised his spray can in the air, but with less dramatic flourish.

“We will not be destroyed!” he shouted, but he didn’t sound convincing, either.

This was as far as the two uniformed cops had ever intended to let it go; just far enough to get the conviction they wanted, and no farther. Gregor and John Jackman heard the double doors beneath them slam open. A second later, the uniformed cops were on the street and the two white boys were in custody, handcuffed and secure, swearing away in language so foul it would have got them bounced from the Marine Corps.

“Let’s go.” John Jackman leapt to his feet and heading for downstairs.

Gregor couldn’t leap. It had been twenty years since he even tried. He got up in a much more dignified manner. The foyer was now brightly lit. Either John Jackman or one of the uniformed cops had had the good sense to turn the lights on. The two young men were hopping and jumping and shaking in custody.

Gregor arrived just as the one he’d been calling Red Scarf caught sight of John Henry Newman Jackson. Red Scarf froze. His body went rigid. His eyes seemed to bug out of his head. He seemed to have stopped breathing. Then he started to wail.

“Ricky!” he shrieked. “Ricky! Look at this! It’s the Head Nigger himself come down to do us in!”

“Oh, fine,” John Jackman said. “Sidney Poitier, Virgil Tibbs, and the Head Nigger. It’s been quite a week. Let’s go eat, Gregor. I can’t stand it anymore.”

“We can’t go eat,” Gregor said.

“Why not? I’m starving. Of course we can go eat.”

“We’ve got to go back to the hospital and see Carmencita Boaz again,” Gregor said. “We’ve got to go right away.”





FIVE


1


DEANNA KROLL WAS GOOD in a crisis. In fact, she was best in a crisis, which was part of the reason she was not still living in Harlem and all of the reason she had so many nights like this one, pacing back and forth in front of blank windows and wondering what she was supposed to do next. What she was expected to do next was go home: back to the hotel, back to her room, back to the usual routine, assuming she had a usual routine. Instead, she was walking, back and forth in front of the windows in the waiting area of Five North, wanting a cigarette so desperately it made her chest ache. Five North was very quiet. It was after nine o’clock at night. Visiting hours were over. Patients were medicated and put to sleep. The nursing staff was reduced to a skeleton force, and would remain that way until the morning. DeAnna looked down on the parking lot and the street and the light and dark of Philadelphia and realized she was about to have One of Those Moods. Lotte had Those Moods, too. In fact, she’d had one just this afternoon. Maybe she was having it still. One of Those Moods was a time when you just couldn’t stand it any more, the senseless triviality of everything, the endless posturing of people who wanted to feel important without going to the trouble of doing anything of consequence. That was the trouble with television talk shows. In no time at all, they made you think your fellow human beings were no better than grapefruit with delusions of grandeur. Unless, of course, you were a grapefruit yourself. DeAnna had met a certain Very Famous Talk Show Host, one of those people with near-saintly reputations for Sensitivity and Courage, and he not only had been a grapefruit but had been from the planet Mars. Or maybe it was the planet television. Had she always been so cynical about what she did?