The New Hero Volume 2 Page 3

  Eyes still closed, he reached across the desk and plucked up the tinted glasses, planting them on what was now his face. He smiled, her teeth looking sharper, her lips redder, and behind those specs I saw him open his eyes. I tried to think about all those poor kids, how we had to do this, but when I seen the recognition blaze up in those shaded eyes I couldn’t help thinking my number might’ve finally come up.

  *

  July of ’42 was what the wisenheimers fanning themselves with reubens at Ernie’s counter called a Scorcher, and what the toughs who hung around the Carousel called One Hot Sunuvabitch. Those hoitie-toities at Elmo and the Stork probably had all kinds of other names for it, but I thought One Scorching Sunuvabitch summed it up pretty okay. Not as bad as the summer of ’40, but what was? The summer of ’39…lame punchline, but if you were living in the city those years you knew it weren’t no laughing matter.

  Kind of weather made me happy to keep the hours I did…and hoods or not, the clubs like the Carousel made a decent office when I wasn’t hanging around the Shack with the boys…except for the weekends, when the clubs get too loud to hear my police ban. But on a Tuesday night, say, I wouldn’t trade Sammy’s or the Carousel for anything on Fifth Avenue, no thanks…even with the hoods. Kids…same kind of riff-raff thought they were bad news for going up to Connie’s back in the day…not for the music, like me, but to be bigshots braving Harlem after dark…never mind blacks weren’t even allowed in, unless they were on stage…and they didn’t call them blacks then, neither.

  Anyway, I’d left Sammy’s at nine trying to get some butter to go with the bread I’d shot that evening…I hadn’t put together a PM piece in a while, but I knew the Post was paying better for Fire pics at the moment, and I could always mail them non-exclusive to Life afterward. It was only midnight-ish and I was hoping for a Murder before the presses ran, and with this weather somebody was bound to pop…and probably pop somebody else in the result. I’d got a nibble and quit Sammy’s, but after scooting all the way up the island it turned out to just be a bindlestiff croaked from the heat, and to top it all they’d already carted him…so I camped at the Carousel and waited for my luck to change or the clock dial to push me down to the Post with just the Fire pics.

  “Got a misper at 23 Mount Morris West, corner of 122nd,” the ban crackled and I froze, halfway up to get another rickey…I’ve got a radio in the car but came into an extra and fixed it up so it could go where my jalopy couldn’t, say inside a club…but anyway, the call.

  A misper wouldn’t mean nothing to me most nights…think about it, if a person’s missing what’s there to shoot? But this was the third night in a row I’d heard a misper come over the line, and it wasn’t too far to Garvey Park and so next thing I knew I was evened up and out the door, sweating like you wouldn’t believe. Something sour was in my belly, twisting all around, but I figured it must’ve just been the egg in my last rickey being a little off from the heat.

  Twenty-three Morris was a big ugly tenement, but at least it had a view of the park. More than a few bodies were laid out there in the shadows, and I thought of all the nights I spent there myself before things came together…not in Marcus Garvey, I wasn’t crazy, but down in Bryant, lucky if I had an old newspaper for a pillow. Dark days, and if I’d set up the Invisible Light ahead of time I would have nabbed a few of the park sleepers, but I don’t want to bust up nobody’s dreams with my flash bulbs…if you’re sleeping in the park, dreams is about all you’ve got.

  I beat the officers there, but that wasn’t too queer…a misper isn’t going nowhere, and it was Harlem to boot, so it’s a wonder they showed up fast as they did. I took some snaps of the mother while I waited, and she was a real mess, wailing and hair-pulling, the whole bit…got some good ones, but didn’t press my luck…a lot of neighbors out in the street with her, and I’m not some clod…I got respect for people’s feelings, and the shots I had of her crying kicked me just like they always do. The fire escapes were crowded with folks, some of them shouting at her to shut up, others shouting at the shouters for them to shut up.

  “Whattya know, Fellig,” I heard behind me, and that queasy kind of feeling in my gut got worse…I knew the voice, and Detective Harris wouldn’t be out there at one in the morning on a Tuesday for no simple missing person.

  “This might be a shocker, but word on the street says it’s One Hot Sunuvabitch,” I told Harris, turning around to get a look at him. He didn’t look good, suit not rumpled enough, eyes not red enough…I wondered if he was waiting for this, or something like it. We didn’t shake. We don’t shake, Harris and me…I don’t think he takes cream, he just rub me wrong.

  “Don’t go nowhere,” Harris said, blowing smoke in my eye as he dropped his butt. “We’re gonna have a chat, Fellig.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure thing.”

  I overheard what I could and when they moved inside I went to my car and started developing the sobbing mother pictures in my trunk. It’s a decent set-up, and since I strapped things down real good I haven’t spilled nothing. After backing it up out of the streetlight I didn’t even have to bag the film. I was finishing up when Harris came over, and screwing the last lid on I tried to close the trunk before he saw the 8x10s sitting in my dark-boot, as the boys call it. Don’t know why I got spooked about him seeing the glossies, I mean, I’m the only guy they let keep a police ban in his car so it’s not a secret what I’m doing at the scenes.

  “Whattya got here, Fellig?” said Harris, catching the trunk and flicking it back up. “The Negress in Despair?”

  See, that’s what I mean about Harris…I wouldn’t give him a glass of water in a desert. He snatched out the pictures but I didn’t say nothing until he started folding them up.

  “What gives, Harris, those—”

  “Open investigation,” said Harris, as if that changed things. “No pictures and no running that kraut mouth of yours ’til you hear from me personally, got it?”

  Austrians ain’t krauts, but try telling that to a bigot, especially with the war and all, so I oughta just take it and nod, sure, okay, officer, but instead I hear myself saying, “I ever call you schweinehund, detective? I ever run my mouth about me and my buddies at PM invading Greenpoint?”

  “I am goddamn serious, Weegee,” he says, like it’s some kind of insult or something instead of what every other badge in the city calls me. “You sell a picture like that, you gotta tell them what’s going on with it, and they run it with a caption, and next thing I know there’s a goddamn panic down here in the jungle. Stay outta this.”

  “I didn’t see you last night,” I say, putting a few chips down as he turns to head back to the station…and he folds without even looking for a tell or glancing at his hand.

  “I don’t come up here every time a pickaninny runs off,” he says with that trademark compassion of his. “And remember, it’s for their good nobody makes a scene out of this.”

  Looking past him where all the neighbors were finally going back to the mattresses they dragged out onto the fire-escapes and rooftops and, for those unlucky saps without either, their broiling little rooms, I just shook my head…the scene already happened, and as for word getting around, well, it’ll do just that fine without me. I wished I’d paid attention to where the last two nights’ mispers were, but from what I overheard Harlem’s already had a few, and recent. Kids, too, little kids, trying to cool off by sleeping outside on the roofs or escapes…I used to worry sometimes, shooting them up there, about some baby rolling off or something, but it looks like there’s something worse going on than freak accidents. Kids are going missing, and in this town that means somebody…or something…is taking them.

  *

  “Hey Weegee-man,” says Kameela when I walk into her place, and I give her a big old wink for her trouble.

  “What’s the rumpus, Ms. Simons?” I say back, knowing full well she was in nappies when that turn of phrase was anything near to hip.

  “She’s waitin’ for you,”
says Kameela, and I get the little twinge I always get when she looks at me like that. Girl is a solid bombshell, no doubt…drop her on the Hun and they’d be pledging allegiance in nothing flat. Hair like cotton candy under the pier at midnight, skin like the kind of cocoa you only find in the real deal Austrian dives, little Alm huts for us poor damned refugees stuck in Alphabet City or Yorkville. It’s not the first time I think about kissing her like a sailor home from the Pacific, and it’s not the first time she laughs like she knew what I was thinking…that girl…

  “Come on in, Arthur,” says her mother, and I’m probably blushing. “Kameela, you leave him alone.”

  “You don’t gotta leave me alone,” I stage-whisper to her but she just rolls her eyes, done with me the minute her mom opened the office door.

  I leave behind the posterboard saints and symbols, the incense and rosaries, and go into the back office. You walk in the front door of the Lenox apartment Claire Simons shares with her daughter and it’s all hocus pocus, Houdini-land, but that plain rear room is where the real weird goes down.

  Nice mahogany desk, poster behind it of Frankie like you were in a bobby-soxer’s bedroom, and her, but she makes all the difference. Mrs. Simons got the looks of her daughter, only aged real nice, and with that, I don’t know, seasoning comes something else, something intense…she’s a little big, but not as big as I’ll be when I’m her age, God willing. We kissed once, way back when, and it was one of the greats, you know? I’ve had girlfriends for years on end that didn’t make the impression that one kiss did…and even realizing after the fact she weren’t herself when it happened didn’t sour the memory…not too much, anyway.

  “Good to see you, Arthur,” she said.

  “You too,” I said, sitting my big butt down and trying not to stare at her fireplug lips. I can’t look at that woman without…jeez, I sound like some kind of pervert, but really it’s just…if you ain’t met her there’s no point…good looking as Kameela is, she’s Eleanor Roosevelt compared to her mom, and run that on the front page, it’s gold. “You too.”

  “You were there last night,” she said like it was no big deal, her knowing where I was at one o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday in all of Manhattan. “At Garvey Park, where that little boy got nabbed.”

  “Yep,” I said, wriggling a little. “You got your ghosts on the case?”

  I always feel like a twerp, saying stuff like that, but no matter how hard I try it always comes out wrong when I try to talk about her…Stuff.

  “Mr. Himes isn’t a ghost, he’s a slumlord,” said Mrs. Simons, smiling like she always does around the time I’m feeling like a capital jackass. “He come by earlier, told me all about it. Said he saw the great man himself taking pictures, but I didn’t see nothing but the arson in the Post.”

  “Goddamn Post,” I say, like it’s their fault Harris smothered my scoop. I shift a little in my seat and repeat what I eavesdropped the mother saying to Harris, what we both know she already knows: “Little boy went missing from a third storey fire escape. Sleeping ’tween his mom and sister and whammo, gone.”

  “Not the only one,” said Mrs. Simons and I just nod, wondering like I always do if I’d even be here if I hadn’t taken that shot of the weeping mother…the Negress in Despair, how Harris pegged it. The horse’s ass. But Mrs. Simons isn’t done yet. “But you wouldn’t be here if it was just one, would you, Arthur?”

  “You wanna grab a drink tonight?” I say, cutting to the chase and giving myself a cheap little kick at the same time…thinking how nice it would be if I was saying this without some kid gone missing, some gaggle of kinder snatched by who knows what creeper…and me thinking the same kind of thoughts about her daughter…I’m a dog, no doubt.

  “Sure, Arthur, sure,” she says, but she ain’t smiling. She knows way more than me but I know not to push, not yet…she needs my police ban and I need her if I’m gonna get a decent night’s sleep…I get up to boogie but she queers me by saying something else, makes me go all cold…we both know she don’t need to tell me to leave the camera at the apartment, that if I want to be in any shape to chase my bread and butter I better not mix business with…This. No, it’s the other part that puts the chill on me, something she never asked before in a friendship full of the kind of requests that’d get you fitted for a nice new jacket at Bellvue Hospital, you weren’t asking someone who knew you real well…and trusted you not to be a damn loon no matter what calls you made over the pond at midnight: “Leave that camera at home, Arthur, but see if you can’t scare up a piece. See if you can’t get iron slugs, too.”

  My apartment is above a gunshop and I got fifteen bucks in my pocket, so it ain’t nervousness about finding a piece that’s got me sweating as I step back onto Lenox, wondering how a nice Austrian boy like me got himself mixed up in all this voodoo.

  *

  I met Mrs. Simons down at Coney Island, way back. I’d just got a new lens and wanted something special, something permanent, so I went over to the row where all the sailors got their ink done, and the first parlor I poked my nose in had this beautiful colored girl getting done up…she had her shirt pulled up over her head and was lying on her stomach, staring out past the tarp the artiste had instead of a door. She stopped my heart, and when I saw the size of the piece the bearded wonder was doing on her back I knew I had to get a shot…it was big, with a crazy kind of cross in the center and some weird square-ish shapes floating over toward her ribs, and I could see the bulge of her breasts crushing down into the table…love at first sight? Forget about it.

  The thing is, I knew the girl…the guy tattooing her was talking at me but I was just staring, trying to figure out where I’d seen her…she was looking right past me, out the gap in the tarp where I’d come in, wearing a spooky kind of smile, a cigar burning down in an ashtray set on the table next to her face. She didn’t even seem to mind the needle scarring up her back, let alone the smoke coiling round her face like a wispy snake…anyway, I’m ignoring the guy inking her ’cause it comes to me where I seen her, and I’m so excited I’m about to flip.

  “Claire Simons!” I say, having heard her a week before at the Cotton Club, and a month before that at Connie’s. Most of the crowds didn’t like her but I took that to be on account of her being local, and leave it to some fool-headed Society clowns and cheap hoods to dismiss talent on principle if it happened to be from the island…everyone’s a critic. “Ma’am, I just love your voice!”

  “What?” she growled at me, and I realized I must have made a big faux pas in calling her ma’am…I thought that was how you talked to older black folks but I should have known, I thought, no lady…black, white, whatever…likes being called old by some schlub barging in on her getting tattooed.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Simons,” I said, holding my camera between me and the glare she was throwing my way…Jeez Louise, I thought, here she is with her shirt over her head and you’re calling her ma’am and just acting like your shaking her hand after a gig. I started backing out but not quick enough, the bearded tattoo man shouting now but not stopping with his work…A real class act, a consummate professional.

  “Get the fuck outta here, Usher fucking Fellig,” said Mrs. Simons, snatching up her cigar and flicking it at me. “Get now, motherfucker!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, stumbling backward into the tarp, the murder in her eye nothing I wanted no part of. “I’m so sorry, Mrs.—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” She roared, rearing up. The tattoo guy fell back but bless his dedication, held onto his needle.

  “Damn!” I said, getting caught up in the tarp. “Mrs. Simons, I’m sorr—”

  “Fuck!” came like a bus tire blowing out, and I brought the tarp down on top of me…next thing I know it’s getting pulled off and Mrs. Simons is dragging me down the boardwalk with one hand while she’s pulling her shirt back on with the other, all the time saying stuff that’d make a marine blush. Finally she remembered I was there and turned my way. “What’s your name?”
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br />   “Arthur,” I said, more than a little scared…the only thing worse than her knowing my birth name back there was how different she looked now, beat down and sweaty like a hansom horse at the tail end of tourist season, and not knowing my name any better than she should have in the first place. I got the goose-in-the-graveyard chills like never before…though I’ve had them since. “Arthur Fellig.”

  “Well, Arthur, that’s one I owe you,” she said, her voice nowhere near so deep as it had been. Touching her back with a wince, she screwed up her face and with a tone to make me feel like she’d actually walked in on me and her old lady, added, “Motherfucker.”

  I didn’t hear her curse much after that, except when she was being ridden, and even then there wasn’t so much of it. She said Saturday was the worst of all, and no way was she letting him back on her back after the stunt he pulled. Ghost or demon or whatever he is, that Baron Saturday has some serious sand to try Mrs. Simons, I tell you what.

  *

  Rolling up Lenox that night, I felt about as comfortable as sand in your socks. I didn’t have my Speed Graphic, which put me off, and I did have a .38, which put me even further off…I hadn’t got iron bullets for it because they didn’t make no iron bullets for it, and wasn’t I a cowboy for thinking they did? What put me off most of all was I’d had to leave the SG as collateral with Jovino, who runs the gunshop under my apartment. He just laughed when I told him I needed a piece and had fifteen bucks on it, and that’s me out of my baby, at least for the night…but who am I fooling, that wasn’t what put me off most of all. What done that was knowing a bunch of kids were missing and it was up to me and Mrs. Simons to sort it all out.