I knew he’d only asked the question so he could answer it himself, so I sat quiet and let him blow off steam.
“Black hands,” he said. “Black hands do all that lifting. Memphis earns its bread from moving things, and black folks do all the moving. Fifteen million tons, ship to shore, and shore to ship. We carry it. Those men marching outside the offices of Kluge Shipping bear this city on their backs seven days a week for a dollar seventy-five an hour. We’re trying to organize and ask for the square deal every hardworking American deserves. And you come up here and you treat us like criminals. You come into my office, where I do the Lord’s work, and you treat me like a low-life thug. Sir, I will not have it.”
Paul Schulman had given me two leads on Elijah: that the target was somehow related to striking freight workers, and that Ari Plotkin had a piece of the job. Plotkin was simpler to get at; I could just pick him up and kick the shit out of him until he spilled whatever he knew. But if I did, Elijah would know about it immediately, and my best lead would be burned. So I’d decided to sniff around the strike first. And since I didn’t really know who else to talk to, I decided to pay a visit to the angry black man I’d seen on the TV. Not exactly brilliant deductive work on my part, I’ll admit, but I never said I was Sherlock Holmes.
Molloy described himself an “activist” or an “organizer,” but he was more of an instigator. He’d come to Memphis a few months earlier and rented a small office across the street from the downtown skyscraper that housed the headquarters of Kluge Shipping and Freight. Kluge was one of dozens of companies that handled river cargo, and it was a medium-sized outfit at best, but it was notable for paying poorly, and its laborers were almost all black, so it was an ideal target for a civil rights rabble-rouser. The forklift operators and longshoremen were receptive to his talk about wage inequalities and dignity, and he was starting to cause pain in many rich, white asses.
Over the course of the last couple of months, Molloy had gotten more than half the company’s colored workers organized. Six weeks previous, 120 men had walked out of the company’s facility on Governor’s Island. Since then, they’d been marching around in front of Kluge’s downtown office, waving signs, hassling businessmen, and frightening secretaries.
“A group of black workers try to affiliate themselves with a white labor union, and they are rebuffed, even though all who work with their hands ought to be brothers,” Molloy said. “And when those workers try to organize and peacefully demonstrate for a decent wage, they get themselves surrounded by fifty cops armed with clubs and guns and fire hoses and vicious dogs.”
“There ain’t no dogs over there.”
“Maybe there ain’t no dogs yet, but sooner or later, they always bring the dogs.”
We sat there looking at each other, while I thought about the time some drunk SS guards threw a Jewish kid from Detroit named Marc Grossman into a toilet shed, and then shoved a couple of German shepherds that they’d starved for a few days in behind him. The Krauts watched the proceedings with their noses pressed against a greasy window, and the next day, they made us clean up the mess.
“Fifty cops, Detective,” Molloy said. “No more than half the strikers are picketing on any given day, and we gotta keep a few protesters out on Governor’s Island so the scabs have to cross a picket line to get onto the job site. The rest of the men have to take on day labor a couple times a week to keep their roofs, or they have to see to their children when they send their wives out to clean white folks’ houses. Fifty cops to subdue sixty freight workers, plus a few dozen concerned citizens who show up to support our cause. And then they send you up here to hassle me. You don’t scare me, Detective. I think it’s you people who are scared. You and your cronies see what’s going on outside, and you know that ain’t just a few disgruntled longshoremen protesting a freight company. You know it’s the start of something. Things cannot keep being the way they’ve been.”
There was a little philosophical question I always liked to think about when schmucks were yammering at me: Did the man’s character shape his worldview, or did his worldview shape his character?
I wasn’t smart enough to figure whether the chicken came before the egg, but either way it worked out, a man’s view of society revealed something about his own tendencies. I, for example, believed the world was hard and dangerous, so I was hard and dangerous myself. Similarly, conspiracy theorists and paranoids, the folks who suspected everyone of plotting against them, were often treacherous.
“I don’t need to listen to this,” I said to him.
“And I don’t need police coming up into my office. But I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. If you’re going to arrest me, let’s spare the foreplay.” He presented his wrists to me.
“I just want to ask some questions. If you want me out of here, you need to settle down and give me some answers.”
He paused for a second and really looked at me. “Maybe I should call my lawyer.”
Guilty men—the pro-level scumbags—liked to lawyer up real fast, but the self-righteous types did as well. Sanctimonious pricks were very concerned about their rights. I wasn’t sure yet which kind of asshole I was dealing with. I decided not to make any assumptions; I didn’t really care what Longfellow Molloy was up to. If he was scamming his people, it wasn’t my job to stop him. I was after a slippery Jewish bank robber.
The problem was that I knew approximately bubkes about what Elijah was planning; my only real clue was that it had something to do with the strike. So Molloy was going to have to tell me something.
“I’ve got a tip that there’s a robbery going down that has something to do with the strike,” I said. “I ain’t accusing you of anything. Your people may be the victims. Your office may be the target. If I am going to stop this thing, I will need you to cooperate.”
Molloy had clean fingernails, and he kept his hair neat; slicked down close to his skull. He had a way of letting his gaze drift down to the floor as he spoke, and then he would notice himself doing that, and look up deliberately to stare daggers at me.
In a white man, I’d have seen this as a sign of dishonesty or, at least, of a fundamentally strange nature. But maybe a Negro looked at the floor because he’d been born into a world that expected him to keep his eyes down, and Molloy looked up when he did because he wanted to live in a world that was different.
He was also wearing a three-piece suit. A lot of cops I knew didn’t like to see a colored boy in a business suit; and they’d have taken one look at this one and bet that he was up to no good. But I suspected that if I put Molloy up against a wall and turned his pockets out, I’d find no label in his jacket, and only a cheap kind of lining.
There were colored ladies working out of their homes; out of tenements and row houses, sewing clothes to make ends meet, and some of them did very fine work. A white man with similar skills could take home five or six times what any of those ladies earned. Molloy had probably paid only a small fraction of what a comparable garment would cost me at Oak Hall or Goldsmith’s. I’d have had half a mind to try to buy such a suit myself, but the blacks tended not to be forthcoming with referrals for some reason.
“And yet, somehow, with these supposed criminals out there, you’re interrogating me. Ain’t that the way it goes?”
“It’s nothing personal. You just might be able to tell me some things I need to know.”
He sat down behind his desk and held out his hands, palms up. “Well, then ask.”
“Have you collected any kind of union dues from the strikers?”
“Ain’t you read the newspaper? The union won’t take us. Can’t make any headway with the leaders of the Local; they’re bigots. The whole lot of them. Been to Washington to visit the national organization. There’s resistance, they tell me, which is a diplomatic way of saying they don’t want our kind.”
“You didn’t collect money from those men, anyway?”
“Those men don’t have any money. These men are poor; much poo
rer than they ought to be, hard as they work. That’s why they’re out there marching.”
“Have you got a large sum of cash on the premises? Is there a safe here?”
“What do you think I am? Do you think I am fleecing these people? Are you accusing me of running some kind of scam?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I know there’s a gang out there planning a robbery that is somehow related to the striking workers.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me. I have nothing here worth stealing. I’ve got this one-room office, and I’m about to fall behind on the rent. I sleep on the floor, most nights, unless one of the strikers or a member of the clergy offers me a hot meal and a bed someplace.”
Sitting on a filing cabinet behind Molloy’s desk was a dirty glass with a toothbrush in it. Maybe a better detective would have spotted that sooner, and drawn appropriate conclusions.
“If that’s the truth, maybe I came to the wrong place, and I suppose I’m sorry if I caused you distress,” I said. I wondered what my son and his rabbi would think of this conversation, and I felt, right then, the way I’d felt after Brian saw me beat down Paul Schulman.
“If you looking for someplace with a lot of money, maybe you should go to a bank.”
I had to admit, that wasn’t a bad idea.
SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:
On television, the man my grandson wanted to elect president was trying to talk himself out of a tight corner:
“The remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.”
“He’ll have to work a lot harder than that, if he wants to convince any Jews that he’s a supporter of Israel,” I said. “How many years did he go to Jeremiah Wright’s church? It’s practically the same as following Farrakhan.”
I was in a bad mood, because I didn’t realize how much worse things were going to get for me. It was March 2008, and I was still nearly a year away from getting shot in the back and losing my house, my independence, and my dignity.
I stuck my cigarette in my mouth so I could write part of what Obama had said in my notebook, and then I wrote “Jeremiah Wright = Anti-Semite” underneath it, so I’d remember the context.
“Are you copying down what he’s saying?” Rose asked.
“I want to remember it, for when Brian calls later, to talk about this.”
“William,” Rose said.
“What?”
“Our grandson’s name is William.”
“Wasn’t that what I said?”
“He says we’ve got to vote for this guy,” Rose said.
“Who says?”
“William. Our grandson, William.”
“Oh. What does he know?”
“He knows a lot. He reads the New York Times. I’m still hoping Hillary gets the nomination.”
“Never going to happen,” I said. “It’s this guy, or else it’s John McCain.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It was probably William.”
“Yeah, it probably was.”
“I wanted to live to see a woman president. Now I guess I won’t get to.”
“The efforts of women throughout thousands of years of human history, all building up to the coronation of Hillary Clinton, and then this guy has to spoil it,” I said.
“You can be really obnoxious sometimes.”
On television, Obama said: “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely—just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
“You have to give him that one,” Rose said.
“Wright baptized Obama’s children.”
“Abramsky davened with Brian at his bar mitzvah, and you hated Abramsky.”
“Not the same thing.”
“It’s almost exactly the same thing.”
“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
“You’d probably like his white grandmother,” Rose said.
“John McCain is a war hero.”
“William says McCain isn’t up to the task of fixing the economy.”
“The country never would have got into this mess in the first place, if only somebody had consulted William.”
“William says McCain would make Phil Gramm Secretary of the Treasury.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“William seems to think it would be.”
“I liked things better when Brian was still with us, and William never remembered to call.”
“I also liked things better when Brian was still with us.”
“Yeah.”
On television, my grandson’s president was starting to get more emphatic, punctuating his sentences with aggressive gestures: “Legalized discrimination—where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments—meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.”
Rose was sobbing now, softly into her sleeve.
“Is this bothering you? We don’t have to watch it. We can see what’s on the animal channel.”
“No, it’s not this. It’s just…”
“For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it,” Obama said. “Those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations—those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race and racism continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.”
“I understand,” I said. I stubbed the cigarette into the ashtray and set the notebook down so I could light another. “We don’t need to talk about it.”
“It’s good to talk about it,” Rose said. “I mean, it hurts, but I think it’s good.”
“Wounds don’t heal over if you pick at them all the time.”
Obama was reaching a crescendo: “In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”
“I think I like him,” Rose said.
“I don’t trust him. He doesn’t look like a president to me.”
“Neither does Hillary, I bet.”
“What kind of name is that, anyway? Barack?”
“Baruch.”
“What?”
“Y
ou said ‘Barack’ and I said ‘Baruch.’”
“Yeah, I heard you. What do you want?”
“Never mind.”
I tapped my cigarette against the side of the ashtray. “Oh, I get it now.”
“Barack. Baruch. Barack. Baruch.” She laughed.
“Just because you’re right doesn’t mean that you’re right,” I said. “Let’s see what kind of animal program is on. I bet there’s one of the ones you like, with the penguins.”
“In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand—that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another.”
I reached for the clicker.
12
1965
There were many banks in Memphis, but the one closest to the Kluge offices seemed like the one most likely to have some connection to the strike. So, that’s where I went.
Sherlock Holmes said that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. In my experience, it’s better to just start with the obvious, and hope you don’t have to take things any further.
The downtown branch of the Cotton Planters Union Bank was a block and a half away from Longfellow Molloy’s window, and maybe two hundred yards from the picketers outside the Kluge offices. It was also one of the biggest and wealthiest banks in the city; with a retail bank occupying the ground floor of the skyscraper, and its offices for administrative staff and management occupying five stories above that.
The bank manager, a genial fellow named Charles Greenfield, was a member of my synagogue. He congratulated me on my son’s upcoming bar mitzvah, but politely refused to tell me anything about the bank’s business.
Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Page 7
