Cover image for Title

CHESTER HIMES

A Rage in Harlem

With an introduction by Luc Sante

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

A Rage in Harlem

Chester Himes was born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri. After being expelled from university he was convicted of armed robbery at the age of nineteen and sentenced to twenty to twenty five-years’ hard labour. It was while in jail (he was eventually released on parole after seven and a half years) that Himes started to write, publishing stories in a number of magazines, including Esquire. He then took a series of manual jobs while still writing. He published his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, in 1945. A humiliating stint as a Hollywood scriptwriter ended in his being fired on racial grounds – as he wrote later, he felt he survived undamaged the earlier disasters in his life but it was ‘under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate’.

Himes moved to Paris in 1953: a city that he – like many African-American writers of his generation – found sympathetic and stimulating. He lived much of the rest of his life first in France and then in Spain, where he moved in 1969. A meeting with Marcel Duhamel, the editor of Gallimard’s crime list, ‘La Série Noire’, resulted in Himes being commissioned to write what became La Reine des pommes, published in English in 1957 as For Love of Imabelle or A Rage in Harlem, and which won the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière. This was the first of the Harlem novels that were to make Himes famous and was followed by further titles, each translated first into French and then published in English, including The Real Cool Killers, All Shot Up, The Heat’s On and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Himes was married twice. He died in Spain in 1984.

Luc Sante teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College, New York. He is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Walker Evans, Kill All Your Darlings and Folk Photography.

Introduction

Although Chester Himes meant this book to be called The Five-Cornered Square, it was first published, in France, as La Reine des pommes (‘the queen of fools’); later on an American paperback house issued it as For Love of Imabelle. But A Rage in Harlem is the name that stuck, not because it is descriptive or even especially appropriate, but because it combined two nouns guaranteed to act as flint and steel in the mind of the average 1950s American drugstore paperback browser. Harlem, for the greater part of a century the best-known African-American ghetto, was more myth than place to most white Americans of the period. They seldom if ever visited the neighbourhood, known for the occasional riot and perhaps dimly remembered for a raffish nightlife glamour last celebrated by mainstream entertainment some twenty years earlier. On those drugstore racks, prurient fascination with black life was restricted to a small subgenre of books treating of teenage gangs and mostly written by white authors. Himes’s book had no counterparts, not for years, and consequently it took years to find an American readership,

This is how originality is often repaid – it wasn’t a simple question of racism – and it was the American reading public’s loss, of course. But that public was not prepared for an African-American comedy-caper novel, or even for any two of those three components (Donald Westlake, who mastered the comedy-caper novel in a white American setting, was in 1957 three years away from publishing his first book). The French, by contrast, got the idea right away and made the book a success, propelling Himes into writing seven more volumes over the next decade in what became a series, featuring the hard-boiled detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Himes, who had never lived in Harlem and whose earlier work had been anything but comedic, had been commissioned to write the book on an inspired whim by Marcel Duhamel, a former Surrealist who after the war founded the wildly popular and influential ‘Série Noire’ imprint of crime novels. Himes was bemused and maybe a bit bewildered by his unexpected success. He had travelled a long road to get to that point.

Himes was born in 1909 to a middle-class family; his father was a professor of mechanical arts at various black colleges, primarily in the Midwest. The young Himes proved a disappointment to the family. He was expelled from Ohio State University for a prank that got out of hand, and then, as a consequence of hanging out on the stretch of Scovil Avenue in Cleveland known as the Bucket of Blood because of its gambling houses and brothels, he acquired a rap sheet. After his third infraction – he robbed the home of a rich white couple and was caught trying to fence the jewellery – he was sentenced to twenty to twenty-five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. He was only nineteen. During the seven and a half years he served, he began to write, and be published, first in black newspapers and eventually in the white media. In 1934 Esquire published ‘To What Red Hell’, his account of the 1930 Easter Monday prison fire in which some 330 inmates died. The story generated a novel, although it wasn’t published until 1952, as Cast the First Stone, and not in unexpurgated form until 1998, as Yesterday Will Make You Cry.

When he finally did publish a novel, it was 1945 and he had been working in the shipyards around Los Angeles. If He Hollers Let Him Go contrasted the promise of the West Coast untainted by slavery, and the remunerative employment for all made possible by the war, with the deadly reality of racism. The book is direct and confident, and it earned Himes recognition in literary circles, which were primarily left-wing then. His next book Lonely Crusade (1947), took on the Communist Party itself, as a treacherous and manipulative entity, and he found his book savaged in reviews all across the ideological spectrum. He had completed the circuit of rising and falling esteem in a mere two years, and was relegated to odd jobs and increasing bitterness. Finally, in 1953, at the end of his rope, he sailed to France.

Postwar Paris was a haven for African-American intellectuals, including Richard Wright and James Baldwin, as well as many musicians and visual artists. Himes, never a joiner, soon felt alienated, and began a peripatetic existence all over the European map – the French southwest, London, Majorca, Denmark, Holland – living in conditions seldom much above the poverty line, even in a time and place when the dollar was king. When Duhamel issued his invitation, Himes took it as a lifeline. He had never contemplated writing genre fiction, had never spent much time in Harlem, and for obvious reasons was rather averse to depicting policeman sympathetically, but Duhamel had given him the equivalent of a thousand dollars as an advance – the largest sum Himes had ever received. He took it as a lark.

 

I would sit in my room and become hysterical thinking about the wild, incredible story I was writing. But it was only for the French, I thought, and they would believe anything about Americans, black or white, if it was bad enough. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference. (My Life of Absurdity, 1992)

 

Himes had been a difficult writer – difficult in his bitterness, alienation, obsessiveness, and self-consciousness, as well as formally difficult at time. Now, however, the narrative conventions of the genre (‘Make pictures,’ Duhamel told him. ‘We don’t give a damn who’s thinking what – only what they’re doing’) forced Himes to channel all his preoccupations without betraying them, to proceed by stealth and indirection, to mask his rage as humour, to transfer his focus from himself to the diverse and particularized inhabitants of an entire teeming world, to trade his defensiveness for a gleeful assault on all fronts, and to treat social issues with an apparent insouciance that would penetrate the defences of his readers. Popular fiction, popularly considered narrow, broadened Himes as a writer.

A Rage in Harlem is the story of a lovestruck simpleton who is taken for a significant sum by a gang of swindlers, just arrived from Mississippi, who are practising two venerable cons: the green-goods dodge (in which money is quickly and ‘scientifically’ manufactured) and the lost-gold-mine scam (in which worthless rocks are employed as a apparent evidence to encourage investment in a non-existent enterprise). By the time of the novel those swindles were probably familiar to most citizens of New York City, but in 1956 the great internal migration of African-Americans from the South was still depositing in Harlem quite a lot of church-bred rural innocents, so that the story is not altogether implausible. The simpleton, Jackson, is employed by the undertaker H. Exodus Clay (who will recur in other novels in the series); his twin brother, Goldy, is a junkie who poses as a nun, collecting alms outside a department store. (In the 1950s and ’60s there were indeed ubiquitous black nuns sitting with baskets on their laps in bus and subway stations.) The plot revolves around the tensions caused when temporary alliances among crooks begin to fray and result in double-crosses; this will become a Himes staple.

The team of Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, introduced reluctantly by Himes, are in fact consierably less prominent in the action than they will be in later books. (In Bill Duke’s 1991 film adaptation they are given little more than a handful of walk-ons, and are even robbed of their one major scene – the fight that results in Grave Digger’s scarring, which will become a significant aspect of his character over the course of the series.) On the other hand, Himes has a great deal of fun with his settings and language and minor characters. Jackson visits a dice game where the other players include Red Horse, Four-Four, Sweet Wine, Rock Candy, Chink, Beauty and Mister Foot. Goldy’s roommates are two other female impersonators, Big Kathy and Lady Gypsy, the one a madam and the other a mitt-reader; when Goldy speaks to squares he emits streams of verbiage that may or may not come from Revelation: ‘ “And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up.” ’ Women on 125th Street wear coats ‘of such unlikely fur as horse, bear, buffalo, cow, dog, cat and even bat’. A man in a bar says, ‘That raggedy stud ain’t had two white quarters since Jesus was a child.’ And when Jackson is reunited with Imabelle, he

 

stared back, passion cocked, his whole black being on a live-wire edge. Ready! Solid ready to cut throats, crack skulls, dodge police, steal horses, drink muddy water, live in a hollow log, and take any rape-fiend chance to be once more in the arms of his high-yellow heart.

 

Jackson’s passion may have been foolish, but it is no less potent for that, and it provides the unexpected flavour that underlies the comedy and the suspense to make this a crime novel in which an unusually large heart beats under the cynicism.

Luc Sante

1

Hank counted the stack of money. It was a lot of money – a hundred and fifty brand-new ten-dollar bills. He looked at Jackson through cold yellow eyes.

‘You give me fifteen C’s – right?’

He wanted it straight. It was strictly business.

He was a small, dapper man with mottled brown skin and thin straightened hair. He looked like business.

‘That’s right,’ Jackson said. ‘Fifteen hundred bucks.’

It was strictly business with Jackson too.

Jackson was a short, black, fat man with purple-red gums and pearly white teeth made for laughing, but Jackson wasn’t laughing. It was too serious for Jackson to be laughing. Jackson was only twenty-eight years old, but it was such serious business that he looked a good ten years older.

‘You want me to make you fifteen G’s – right?’ Hank kept after him.

‘That’s right,’ Jackson said. ‘Fifteen thousand bucks.’

He tried to sound happy, but he was scared. Sweat was trickling from his short kinky hair. His round black face was glistening like an eight-ball.

‘My cut’ll be ten percent – fifteen C’s – right?’

‘That’s right. I pays you fifteen hundred bucks for the deal.’

‘I take five percent for my end,’ Jodie said. ‘That’s seven hundred and fifty. Okay?’

Jodie was a working stiff, a medium-sized, root-colored, rough-skinned, muscular boy, dressed in a leather jacket and GI pants. His long, thick hair was straightened on the ends and burnt red, and nappy at the roots where it grew out black. It hadn’t been cut since New Year’s Eve and this was already the middle of February. One look at Jodie was enough to tell that he was strictly a square.

‘Okay,’ Jackson said. ‘You gets seven hundred and fifty for your end.’

It was Jodie who had got Hank to make all this money for him.

‘I gets the rest,’ Imabelle said.

The others laughed.

Imabelle was Jackson’s woman. She was a cushion-lipped, hot-bodied, banana-skin chick with the speckled-brown eyes of a teaser and the high-arched, ball-bearing hips of a natural-born amante. Jackson was as crazy about her as moose for doe.

They were standing around the kitchen table. The window looked out on 142nd Street. Snow was falling on the ice-locked piles of garbage stretching like levees along the gutters as far as the eye could see.

Jackson and Imabelle lived in a room down the hall. Their landlady was at work and the other roomers were absent. They had the place to themselves.

Hank was going to turn Jackson’s hundred and fifty ten-dollar bills into a hundred and fifty hundred-dollar bills.

Jackson watched Hank roll each bill carefully into a sheet of chemical paper, stick the roll into a cardboard tube shaped like a firecracker, and stack the tubes in the oven of the new gas stove.

Jackson’s eyes were red with suspicion.

‘You sure you’re using the right paper?’

‘I ought to know it. I made it,’ Hank said.

Hank was the only man in the world who possessed the chemically treated paper that was capable of raising the denomination of money. He had developed it himself.

Nevertheless Jackson watched Hank’s every move. He even studied the back of Hank’s head when Hank turned to put the money into the oven.

‘Don’t you be so worried, Daddy,’ Imabelle said, putting her smooth yellow arm about his black-coated shoulder. ‘You know it can’t fail. You saw him do it before.’

Jackson had seen him do it before, true enough. Hank had given him a demonstration two days before. He had turned a ten into a hundred right before Jackson’s eyes. Jackson had taken the hundred to the bank. He had told the clerk he had won it shooting dice and had asked the clerk if it was good. The clerk had said it was as good as if it had been made in the mint. Hank had had the hundred changed and had given Jackson back his ten. Jackson knew that Hank could do it.

But this time it was for keeps.

That was all the money Jackson had in the world. All the money he’d saved in the five years he’d worked for Mr H. Exodus Clay, the undertaker. And that hadn’t come easy. He drove the limousines for the funerals, brought in the dead in the pickup hearse, cleaned the chapel, washed the bodies and swept out the embalming room, hauled away the garbage cans of clotted blood, trimmed meat and rotten guts.

All the money he could get Mr Clay to advance him on his salary. All the money he could borrow from his friends. He’d pawned his good clothes, his gold watch and his imitation diamond stickpin and the gold signet ring he’d found in a dead man’s pocket. Jackson didn’t want anything to happen.

‘I ain’t worried,’ Jackson said. ‘I’m just nervous, that’s all. I don’t want to get caught.’

‘How’re we goin’ to get caught, Daddy? Ain’t nobody got no idea what we’re doing here.’

Hank closed the oven door and lit the gas.

‘Now I make you a rich man, Jackson.’

‘Thank the Lord. Amen,’ Jackson said, crossing himself.

He wasn’t a Catholic. He was a Baptist, a member of the First Baptist Church of Harlem. But he was a very religious young man. Whenever he was troubled he crossed himself just to be on the safe side.

‘Set down, Daddy,’ Imabelle said. ‘Your knees are shakin’.’

Jackson sat down at the table and stared at the stove. Imabelle stood beside him, drew his head tight against her bosom. Hank consulted his watch. Jodie stood to one side, his mouth wide open.

‘Ain’t it done yet?’ Jackson asked.

‘Just one more minute,’ Hank said.

He moved to the sink to get a drink of water.

‘Ain’t the minute up yet?’ Jackson asked.

At that instant the stove exploded with such force it blew the door off.

‘Great balls of fire!’ Jackson yelled. He came up from his chair as if the seat of his pants had blown up.

‘Look out, Daddy!’ Imabelle screamed and hugged Jackson so hard she threw him flat on his back.

‘Hold it, in the name of the law!’ a new voice shouted.

A tall, slim colored man with a cop’s scowl rushed into the kitchen. He had a pistol in his right hand and a gold-plated badge in his left.

‘I’m a United States marshal. I’m shooting the first one who moves.’

He looked as if he meant it.

The kitchen had filled with smoke and stunk like black gunpowder. Gas was pouring from the stove. The scorched cardboard tubes that had been cooking in the oven were scattered over the floor.

‘It’s the law!’ Imabelle screamed.

‘I heard him!’ Jackson yelled.

‘Let’s beat it!’ Jodie shouted.

He tripped the marshal into the table and made for the door. Hank got there before him and Jodie went out on Hank’s back. The marshal sprawled across the table top.

‘Run, Daddy!’ Imabelle said.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ Jackson replied.

He was on his hands and knees, trying as hard as he could to get to his feet. But Imabelle was running so hard she stumbled over him and knocked him down again as she made for the door.

Before the marshal could straighten up all three of them had escaped.

‘Don’t you move!’ he shouted at Jackson.

‘I ain’t moving, Marshal.’

When the marshal finally got his feet underneath him he yanked Jackson erect and snapped a pair of handcuffs about his wrists.

‘Trying to make a fool out of me! You’ll get ten years for this.’

Jackson turned a battleship gray.

‘I ain’t done nothing, Marshal. I swear to God.’

Jackson had attended a Negro college in the South, but whenever he was excited or scared he began talking in his native dialect.

‘Sit down and shut up,’ the marshal ordered.

He shut off the gas and began picking up the cardboard tubes for evidence. He opened one, took out a brand-new hundred-dollar bill and held it up toward the light.

‘Raised from a ten. The markings are still on it.’

Jackson had started to sit down but he stopped suddenly and began to plead.

‘It wasn’t me what done that, Marshal. I swear to God. It was them two fellows who got away. All I done was come into the kitchen to get a drink of water.’

‘Don’t lie to me, Jackson. I know you. I’ve got the goods on you, man. I’ve been watching you three counterfeiters for days.’

Tears welled up in Jackson’s eyes, he was so scared.

‘Listen, Marshal, I swear to God I didn’t have nothing to do with that. I don’t even know how to do it. The little man called Hank who got away is the counterfeiter. He’s the only one who’s got the paper.’

‘Don’t worry about them, Jackson. I’ll get them too. But I’ve already got you, and I’m taking you down to the Federal Building. So I’m warning you, anything you say to me will be used against you in court.’

Jackson slid from the chair and got down on his knees.

‘Leave me go just this once, Marshal.’ The tears began streaming down his face. ‘Just this once, Marshal. I’ve never been arrested before. I’m a church man, I ain’t dishonest. I confess, I put up the money for Hank to raise, but it was him who was breaking the law, not me. I ain’t done nothing wouldn’t nobody do if they had a chance to make a pile of money.’

‘Get up, Jackson, and take your punishment like a man,’ the marshal said. ‘You’re just as guilty as the others. If you hadn’t put up the tens, Hank couldn’t have changed them into hundreds.’

Jackson saw himself serving ten years in prison. Ten years away from Imabelle. Jackson had only had Imabelle for eleven months, but he couldn’t live without her. He was going to marry her as soon as she got her divorce from that man down South she was still married to. If he went to prison for ten years, by then she’d have another man and would have forgotten all about him. He’d come out of prison an old man, thirty-eight years old, dried up. No one would give him a job. No woman would want him. He’d be a bum, hungry, skinny, begging on the streets of Harlem, sleeping in doorways, drinking canned heat to keep warm. Mama Jackson hadn’t raised a son for that, struggled to send him through the college for Negroes, just to have him become a convict. He just couldn’t let the marshal take him in.

He clutched the marshal about the legs.

‘Have mercy on a poor sinner, man. I know I did wrong, but I’m not a criminal. I just got talked into it. My woman wanted a new winter coat, we want to get a place of our own, maybe buy a car. I just yielded to temptation. You’re a colored man like me, you ought to understand that. Where are we poor colored people goin’ to get any money from?’

The marshal yanked Jackson to his feet.

‘God damn it, get yourself together, man. Go take a drink of water. You act as if you think I’m Jesus Christ.’

Jackson went to the sink and drank a glass of water. He was crying like a baby.

‘You could have a little mercy,’ he said. ‘Just a little of the milk of human mercy. I’ve done lost all my money in this deal already. Ain’t that punishment enough? Do I have to go to jail too?’

‘Jackson, you’re not the first man I’ve arrested for a crime. Suppose I’d let off everybody. Where would I be then? Out of a job. Broke and hungry. Soon I’d be on the other side of the law, a criminal myself.’

Jackson looked at the marshal’s hard brown face and mean, dirty eyes. He knew there was no mercy in the man. As soon as colored folks got on the side of the law, they lost all Christian charity, he was thinking.

‘Marshal, I’ll pay you two hundred dollars if you let me off,’ he offered.

The marshal looked at Jackson’s wet face.

‘Jackson, I shouldn’t do this. But I can see that you’re an honest man, just led astray by a woman. And being as you’re a colored man like myself, I’m going to let you off this time. You give me the two hundred bucks, and you’re a free man.’

The only way Jackson could get two hundred dollars this side of the grave was to steal it from his boss. Mr Clay always kept two or three thousand dollars in his safe. There was nothing Jackson hated worse than having to steal from Mr Clay. Jackson had never stolen any money in his life. He was an honest man. But there was no other way out of this hole.

‘I ain’t got it here. I got it at the funeral parlor where I work.’

‘Well, that being the case, I’ll drive you there in my car, Jackson. But you’ll have to give me your word of honor you won’t try to escape.’

‘I ain’t no criminal,’ Jackson protested. ‘I won’t try to escape, I swear to God. I’ll just go inside and get the money and bring it out to you.’

The marshal unlocked Jackson’s handcuffs and motioned him ahead. They went down the four flights of stairs and came out on Eighth Avenue, where the apartment house fronted.

The marshal gestured toward a battered black Ford.

‘You can see that I’m a poor man myself, Jackson.’

‘Yes, sir, but you ain’t as poor as me, because I’ve not only got nothing but I’ve got minus nothing.’

‘Too late to cry now, Jackson.’

They climbed into the car, drove south on 134th Street, east to the corner of Lenox Avenue, and parked in front of the H. Exodus Clay Funeral Parlor.

Jackson got out and went silently up the red rubber treads of the high stone steps; entered through the curtained glass doors of the old stone house, and peered into the dimly lit chapel where three bodies were on display in the open caskets.

Smitty, the other chauffeur and handyman, was silently embracing a woman on one of the red, velvet-covered benches similar to the ones on which the caskets stood. He hadn’t heard Jackson enter.

Jackson tiptoed past them silently and went down the hall to the broom closet. He got a dust mop and cloth and tiptoed back to the office at the front.

At that time of afternoon, when they didn’t have a funeral, Mr Clay took a nap on the couch in his office. Marcus, the embalmer, was left in charge. But Marcus always slipped out to Small’s bar, over on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue.

Silently Jackson opened the door of Mr Clay’s office, tiptoed inside, stood the dust mop against the wall and began dusting the small black safe that sat in the corner beside an old-fashioned roll-top desk. The door of the safe was closed but not locked.

Mr Clay lay on his side, facing the wall. He looked like a refugee from a museum, in the dim light from the floor-lamp that burned continuously in the front window.

He was a small, elderly man with skin like parchment, faded brown eyes, and long gray bushy hair. His standard dress was a tailcoat, double-breasted dove-gray vest, striped trousers, wing collar, black Ascot tie adorned with a gray pearl stickpin, and rimless nose-glasses attached to a long black ribbon pinned to his vest.

‘That you, Marcus?’ he asked suddenly without turning over.

Jackson started. ‘No sir, it’s me, Jackson.’

‘What are you doing in here, Jackson?’

‘I’m just dusting, Mr Clay,’ Jackson said, as he eased open the door of the safe.

‘I thought you took the afternoon off.’

‘Yes sir. But I recalled that Mr Williams’s family will be coming tonight to view Mr Williams’s remains, and I knew you’d want everything spic and span when they got here.’

‘Don’t overdo it, Jackson,’ Mr Clay said sleepily. ‘I ain’t intending to give you a raise.’

Jackson forced himself to laugh.

‘Aw, you’re just joking, Mr Clay. Anyway, my woman ain’t home. She’s gone visiting.’

While he was speaking, Jackson opened the inner safe door.

‘Thought that was the trouble,’ Mr Clay mumbled.

In the money drawer was a stack of twenty-dollar bills, pinned together in bundles of hundreds.

‘Ha ha, you’re just joking, Mr Clay,’ Jackson said as he took out five bundles and stuck them into his side pants-pocket.

He rattled the handle of the dust mop while closing the safe’s two doors.

‘Lord, you just have to forgive me in this emergency,’ he said silently, then spoke in a loud voice, ‘Got to clean the steps now.’

Mr Clay didn’t answer.

Jackson tiptoed back to the broom closet, put away the cloth and mop, tiptoed silently back toward the front door. Smitty and the woman were still enjoying life.

Jackson let himself out silently and went down the stairs to the marshal’s car. He palmed two of the hundred-dollar bundles and slipped them through the open window to the marshal.

The marshal held them down between his legs while he counted them. Then he nodded and stuck them into his inside coat-pocket.

‘Let this be a lesson to you, Jackson,’ he said. ‘Crime doesn’t pay.’

2

As soon as the marshal drove off, Jackson started running. He knew that Mr Clay would count his money the first thing on awakening. Not because he suspected anybody would steal it. There was always someone on duty. It was just a habit. Mr Clay counted his money when he went to sleep and when he woke up, when he unlocked his safe and when he locked it. If he wasn’t busy, he counted it fifteen to twenty times a day.

Jackson knew that Mr Clay would begin questioning the help when he missed the five hundred. He wouldn’t call in the police until he was dead certain who had stolen his money. That was because Mr Clay believed in ghosts. Mr Clay knew damn well if ever the ghosts started collecting the money he’d cheated their relatives out of, he’d be headed for the poor house.

Jackson knew that next Mr Clay would go to his room searching for him.

He was pressed but not panicked. If the Lord would just give him time enough to locate Hank and get him to raise the three hundred into three thousand, he might be able to slip the money back into the safe before Mr Clay began suspecting him.

But first he had to get the twenty-dollar bills changed into ten-dollar bills. Hank couldn’t raise twenties because there was no such thing as a two-hundred-dollar bill.

He ran down to Seventh Avenue and turned into Small’s bar. Marcus spotted him. He didn’t want Marcus to see him changing the money. He came in by one door and went out by the other; ran up the street to the Red Rooster. They only had sixteen tens in the cash register. Jackson took those and started out. A customer stopped him and changed the rest.

Jackson came out on Seventh Avenue and ran down 142nd Street toward home. It came to him, as he was slipping and sliding on the wet icy sidewalks, that he didn’t know where to look for Hank. Imabelle had met Jodie at her sister’s apartment in the Bronx.

Imabelle’s sister, Margie, had told Imabelle that Jodie knew a man who could make money. Imabelle had brought Jodie to talk to Jackson about it. When Jackson said he’d give it a trial, it had been Jodie who’d gotten in touch with Hank.

Jackson felt certain that Imabelle would know where to find Jodie if not Hank. The only thing was, he didn’t know where Imabelle was.

He stopped across the street and looked up at the kitchen window to see if the light was on. It was dark. He tried to remember if it was himself or the marshal who’d turned off the light. It didn’t make any difference anyway. If the landlady had returned from work she was sure to be in the kitchen raising fifteen million dollars’ worth of hell.

Jackson went around to the front of the apartment house and climbed the four flights of stairs. He listened at the front door of the apartment. He didn’t hear a sound from inside. He unlocked the door, slipped quietly within. He didn’t hear anyone moving about. He tiptoed down to his room and closed himself in. Imabelle hadn’t returned.

He wasn’t worried about her. Imabelle could take care of herself. But time was pressing him.

While trying to decide whether to wait there or go out and look for her, he heard the front door being unlocked. Someone entered the front hall, closed and locked the door. Footsteps approached. The first hall door was opened.

‘Claude,’ an irritable woman’s voice called.

There was no reply. The footsteps crossed the hall. The opposite door was opened.

‘Mr Canefield.’

The landlady was calling the roll.

‘As evil a woman as God ever made,’ Jackson muttered. ‘He must have made her by mistake.’

More footsteps sounded. Jackson crawled quickly underneath the bed, keeping his overcoat and hat on. He heard the door being opened.

‘Jackson.’

Jackson could feel her examining the room. He heard her try to open Imabelle’s big steamer-trunk.