Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  For all the opulence and elegance, for all the worship of consumption that the place enshrined, Michael could not forget that Lucky Strikes had killed his father. His thoughts were full of death.

  The walkways were as crowded as Fifth Avenue at Christmas. Lines of people moved sluggishly toward bright umbrellas offering free food and drink. Michael saw no uniformed police, only a couple of men in SECURITY sweatshirts and baseball caps. Canned soft rock whispered from hidden speakers at the same time that a live band in the distance eased into Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.”

  Harriman cleared a path for them like an icebreaker, taking them along the east side and into a small, glass-fronted office near the water tower.

  The interior was clearly transitory. A multi-line corporate style phone sat on a cheap steel-and-laminate desk next to a fluorescent desk lamp. The woman behind the desk was in her forties, with looks out of Equatorial Africa: close cut peppercorn hair, wiry figure, lustrous black skin. Someone had taped a poster with a map of the complex to the bare bricks next to her desk, and next to that, a copy of the sketch of Greg Vaughan. A few folding chairs were scattered around the refurbished hardwood floor; otherwise the long, narrow room was empty.

  “What is this place?” Michael asked.

  “This, gentlemen,” Harriman said, “is our nerve center.” To Michael he said, “We have friends in Black Star. You’ve got your cell phone? You might want to put this number in memory.” He read out the number of the office phone and Michael obligingly punched it into his phone.

  “Is there a plan?” Michael asked.

  “We have fifty members stationed around the complex,” Harriman said. “They’ve each got a specific area they’re responsible for.”

  “Zone defense,” Charles said.

  “They overlap, in case anyone should have to take a break. If they sight someone that could be Vaughan, they call me here and I call you. You and Charles try and catch up to them to confirm.”

  “We’re the free safeties,” Charles said.

  “I don’t do sports,” Michael said. “You’re wasting your metaphors. What about the demonstration?”

  “We’re coordinating that from here, too. That’s Anika’s job. Anika, Michael.”

  “Charmed,” she said, “I’m sure.” Her accent was African as well.

  “This isn’t good enough,” Michael said. “You’ve got fifty men looking for a needle in…a stack of ten thousand other needles.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Harriman said.

  “What about your vodou? Can’t you use that?”

  “It’s a religion. It doesn’t include crystal balls.”

  Michael slumped in one of the folding chairs. “Okay, first things first. I haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon. I’m about to pass out.”

  “Come on,” Charles said. “We’ll find you something.”

  *

  The band was a mixed-race outfit, the lead singer a youngish black man with long dreads who also played sax and flute. They were working sixties soul classics like “Midnight Hour” and “Knock on Wood.” The snare hits sounded like gunshots, the horns like EMS sirens. Michael wished, for the sake of his nerves, that they would stop.

  “Lines for the free barbeque are around the block,” Charles said. “There’s a pizza place down by the entrance.”

  “Fine,” Michael said.

  They got an outside table, and he ate a Greek salad while he waited for the pizza, scanning the crowd, the feta and vinegar and pepperoncini making him tear up so badly he had to keep lifting his glasses to wipe his eyes with his sleeve.

  “You all right?” Charles asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  Later, as he put what he could of the pizza into his shrunken, nervous stomach, Michael said, “Tell me something. That story you gave me about your sister and the Bloods. Was that for real?”

  “Yeah, that was straight up. Tip of the iceberg, in fact.” While Michael ate, Charles talked about growing up in the shadow of gang warfare in Durham—constantly checking right shoes for red shoelaces, left for blue, watching hands for signaled letters, reading graffiti like newspapers. It was completely alien to Michael's experience, the sort of life he imagined people living in Beirut or Baghdad.

  When Michael finished it was twelve-thirty. “Show me where the Duke players are going to sign,” he said.

  “Washington Building, far end,” Charles said. That turned out to be the west side of the complex, north of the water tower. It took them ten minutes to get there through the crowds, long enough to hear Nnenna Freelon, the jazz vocalist, sing “God Bless the Child” and “Superstition.”

  The space was two stories high, with exposed support columns and a broad staircase leading to a balcony across the north wall, all of it empty except for a few chairs folded against one wall.

  An old white guy in a different security uniform of white shirt and flat police cap stopped them at the entrance. “Doors open at two,” he said.

  “Do you know what part of the room they’re going to be signing in?” Michael asked.

  “Upstairs, is what I heard. Going to run the line down the stairs and all the way around the inside if they got to.”

  They moved off a few yards and looked in through plate glass windows. “Pretty exposed in there,” Charles said.

  “It won’t be a direct assault. Let’s see what’s next door.”

  There was only one more office to the north. It was locked up tight, and a sign in the window promised an investment broker coming soon.

  Michael called Bishop’s cell phone. When Bishop answered, Michael heard crowd noise in the background. “It’s Michael. Are you at American Tobacco?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  “I’m standing at the north end of the Washington building.”

  “Michael, goddamn it—”

  “Listen. There’s an empty storefront next to the place where the Duke basketball players are going to be signing in a couple of hours. If you were smart, you’d get in there and make sure Greg hasn’t set up a surprise for them. And then I’d have a couple of officers watching everybody who comes near those players.”

  “Message received. Now will you please get out of there, before you hurt yourself?”

  Michael hung up and called Denise. She answered before the end of the first ring. “Michael?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “So far, so good. Are you still in the room?”

  “Yes. Watching TV with the sound off, waiting for a new bulletin to come on and tell me about the disaster in downtown Durham. I’d forgotten how bad Saturday morning TV is.”

  “No disaster yet. No sign of Vaughan. I just wanted to check in.”

  “Thank you. I don’t suppose you’re coming home to me?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Got to go. I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  He was putting the phone in his pocket when Charles’ cell went off. Charles flipped it open and said, “Yeah?”

  He looked to his right. “Yeah. When?” He beckoned to Michael to follow and started toward the water tower at something between a fast walk and a jog, drawing some annoyed looks. “We’re on it,” he said into the phone.

  Michael bumped into a fat man, who turned angrily and said, “Watch it!”

  “Police!” Charles yelled over his shoulder. “Be cool.” The lie changed the man’s attitude instantly. He nodded and backed away.

  “Vaughan?” Michael asked Charles as they ran.

  “Maybe,” Charles said, and white noise filled Michael’s brain. Oh man, he thought, over and over. Oh man.

  Charles was still on the phone, taking directions. Smaller buildings cluttered the north end of the complex, earmarked for hotels and condos, including the one that supported the Lucky Strike smokestack. Once past that the grass opened up again, and there was more of a feeling of being in a hidden valley, protected by commercial spaces rather than hills.
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  A black man in a red sweatshirt, cell phone in hand, stepped off the walkway 50 yards ahead and pointed toward a set of doors that led into the long building on the southeast side.

  “Tan baseball cap,” Charles called out to him. “Gray windbreaker. You see him?”

  Michael saw him, disappearing through the doors. It might have been Vaughan. “I don’t know,” he yelled back.

  Charles upped the pace, nearly knocking down a middle-aged woman. “Sorry,” Michael called as he dashed past. They dodged the metal legs of the water tower and ran up a short flight of stairs into the building.

  Two dozen people filled the inside corridor. The walls were hung with huge, sepia-toned photos of Hayti. As Michael watched, the man in the tan cap climbed another set of steps to take him up to the level of Blackwell Street, exited the doors there, and turned left.

  Once on Blackwell Street, the crowds eased enough for Charles to break into a run. Though Michael tried to keep up, his ribs screamed with pain. With his last breath he yelled, “Hey!” and then slumped to a stop, cool air wheezing into his lungs.

  The man in the tan cap turned around.

  Michael’s legs had turned to concrete. He pictured a gun in Vaughan’s hand, pictured him turning, raising it, opening fire—

  It wasn’t Vaughan.

  Charles, who had stopped short of tackling the man, looked at Michael, and Michael shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Charles said to the man in the tan cap. The man was about Vaughan’s size, except older and puffier in the face. “Thought you were somebody else.”

  “You boys need to calm yourselves down,” the man said. “Before y’all hurt somebody.”

  Michael staggered into the building and leaned against one wall, staring up at a photo of Pettigrew Street in its heyday. He’d seen it before; the few surviving Hayti photos had been endlessly recycled. This one showed the Biltmore Hotel, Regal Theater, and the Donut Shop, with a pair of 1930s cars parked in the foreground by the railroad tracks. It seemed a bad omen, a harbinger of doom and destruction.

  Charles came through the doors and stopped in front of Michael. He was breathing heavily too.

  “This is no good,” Michael said. “I can’t chase after every skinny white man in a cap.”

  “You got a better idea, I’m listening.”

  “We have to outthink him. How hard can that be?”

  *

  Michael paced back and forth in front of the poster sized map. It was ten minutes before 2.

  “The Duke space goes all the way through the building, right?” Michael said. “What’s on the other side? Any kind of schoolbook depository where somebody could shoot through the windows?”

  “Trees and a parking lot,” Harriman said. “And sniping is not his MO.”

  “Could he drive a truck up to the rear of the building, like in Oklahoma City?”

  “Doubtful,” Harriman said. “We can put a couple of people on it.”

  “Or phone an anonymous tip to the cops about it,” Michael suggested. “Let them do the work.”

  “Good idea,” Harriman said. “Anika, can you take care of that?”

  “This is not getting us anywhere,” Charles said. “The Night Riders are coming. I’m going to go watch.”

  The doors would open to the Duke space at two as well, Michael thought. Watching those doors was something the cops could do. He had to find a better use for his time.

  He tried to fight down feelings of panic and helplessness. “I’ll come with you,” he said to Charles.

  “My man,” Charles said.

  By the time they got out onto Blackwell Street, the police had set up barricades at both ends and roped off the sidewalk on both sides. There were squad cars every hundred feet and two paddy wagons to cart away troublemakers. As well as 20 regular patrol officers, Michael counted a dozen men with Kevlar body armor and pump shotguns, members of Sgt. Bishop’s former unit, the Selective Enforcement Team. Their uniforms were flat black, and their helmets completely hid their faces. They were the stuff of third-world military dictatorships or science fiction movies, and Michael hated the thought of them on the streets of the US. He tried to tell himself the cops were the good guys in this one, here to protect him from the bad guys in white. It was a tough sell.

  A radio crackled from somewhere nearby. “Here they come,” it said.

  *

  Charles led the way around the south end barricades to stand on the ballpark side of the street. The noise from inside American Tobacco seemed weirdly loud as the police went rigid with anticipation and the silent crowd looked north.

  “There,” a voice said, and then Michael saw it too, a moving wall of white like the glaciers Michael had seen in nature films, sliding unstoppably out of the valley of downtown Durham and crumbling into individual robed figures. Like glaciers, the Klan and its spinoff groups were something he’d only seen in movies and TV. Between the cops in their Darth Vader suits and the Night Riders in their sheets, Michael felt like he was trapped in a Halloween nightmare.

  “God Almighty,” Charles said.

  The robed figures kept coming and coming. As the police moved the barricades aside at the north end of the complex and the first Night Riders entered the cordoned-off street, more appeared from downtown. They were widely spaced, Michael saw, to maximize the effect, and the effect was chilling, unforgettable. They carried no signs or visible weapons, they were not marching in rhythm, they made no sound beyond the impact of boots on pavement, multiplied hundreds of times.

  Harriman was right, Michael thought. This cannot be tolerated. The demonstration stood for everything that was killing America in the twenty-first century, everything that was wrong with the human race: greed, intolerance, fanaticism, terrorism.

  Someone jostled Michael, and in a matter of seconds the counter-demonstrators took the field. They streamed out of American Tobacco and from the ballpark side as well, ducking under the ropes and moving out into the street. Instead of hidden faces and perfect white uniforms, these were women, men, and children in jeans, sweats, and coveralls, with skin colors from purplish black to dark brown to golden tan and everything in between.

  A crew on the sidelines unfurled a huge banner that read: 400 YEARS—WHEN WILL IT END? In the margins, in smaller letters, were the words, “Slavery,” “Jim Crow,” “Urban Renewal,” “Racial Profiling,” “Night Riders of the Confederacy,” “KKK,” “White Flight,” and “Homeland Security.”

  The police moved in on the first black demonstrators that got into the street and tried to push them back onto the sidelines. The demonstrators were well trained, going limp as soon as they were touched. Apparently the police were under orders not to arrest them. Instead two cops carried each of the protesters to the sidewalk, where they would get up and duck under the ropes again. In less than a minute the police were overwhelmed.

  It was flawlessly staged, and now Michael saw ringleaders in the crowd, talking on cell phones, making hand signals, and waving more and more people into the arena. The police must have seen them too, and Michael felt their mounting frustration. He wondered if the man in the suit at Harriman’s house had been the one to give the cops their orders, knowing the chaos they would cause.

  At the same time the Night Riders continued to march inexorably forward. Michael felt his own nerves jumping, unable to imagine a happy outcome.

  The SET cops linked arms and tried to herd the black protesters to the southern end of the street. Again the protesters went limp and sprawled across the pavement. A regular uniformed cop, caught in front of the wall of Kevlar, surrounded by passive protesters, frustrated beyond endurance, kicked a prone woman in the ribs. Suddenly there were cameras out and clicking, and one of the SET stormtroopers pulled the cop aside and sent him to the sidelines.

  As the line of police moved forward, more protesters moved in behind them, standing empty-handed and blank-faced, like prisoners waiting to be executed.

  Then, like a slow
-motion car wreck, the first of the Night Riders collided with the first of the black protesters, a teenaged boy with ebony skin and short natural hair. He looked enough like Rachid to make Michael look twice, blinded for an instant by panic. As soon as the hooded man made contact, the boy went down. He wasn’t pushed, Michael saw, but dove gently under his own power and did a judo roll, cushioned by a heavy sweatshirt.

  The Riders that he blocked stayed where they were, and the others flowed around, careful not to step on the boy. As they in turn met resistance, they stopped, until the Riders filled most of the street, with gaps where black bodies lay at their feet.

  “Well, that didn’t work out so great,” Charles muttered.

  The Riders, Michael saw now, were not endless after all. They didn’t come close to filling the roped-off area. Michael guessed there were between 200 and 300 of them, more than Harriman had predicted, an imposing, terrifying number, but not infinite.

  They stood in silent menace for an endless time and then, startlingly, they began to sing:

  Joshua fit the battle of Jericho

  Jericho, Jericho

  Joshua fit the battle of Jericho

  And the walls came tumbling down.

  The combined power of their voices was like a jet engine in the narrow, high-walled corridor of the street. Michael imagined glass rattling in the windows.

  He looked at Charles to say something and stopped himself. Charles was apoplectic. “Those motherfuckers,” he said, or at least that’s what Michael thought he said. The singing was too loud to be sure.

  Good morning sister Mary

  Good morning brother John

  Well I want to stop and talk with you

  Want to tell you I come along.

  They started into the chorus again and Charles went berserk. He jumped up onto the hood of the nearest squad car and began to scream. “You motherfuckers!” he shouted, shaking his fist. “That’s our song, you sons of bitches!”

  I know you’ve heard about Joshua