Ed McBain - Vespers

"Start from the beginning," Carella said.

"What's the use?" Hooper said.

"What can you lose?" Seronia said, and shrugged again.

Easter this year had fallen on the fifteenth day of April, but even in its death throes winter tenaciously refused to loosen its grip and the day was howlingly windy, with what appeared to be a promise of snow on the air. A sullen rolling sky hung in angry motion over the city, giving it the look of an E1 Greco painting even in neighborhoods not entirely Hispanic. In this checkerboard precinct where black .squares became white squares in the blink of an eye, Nathan Hooper lived in an area that was ninety-percent black, eight-percent Hispanic, and two-percent Asian. Not two blocks away was entirely white neighborhood composed of Itali Irish, and a sprinkling of Jews. The melting pot this precinct has never really come to a boil. On windy Easter Sunday, it is about to overboil.

Hooper rarely goes to church, but today he into a friend of his named Harold Jones, who other guys all call Fat Harold after the Bill Cos routine. Fat Harold isn't truly fat; he is, in fact, thin and spindly-looking. He is also a crack who is on his way to church this Easter Sunday pray that he can kick his habit and become a rich famous black television star like Bill Cosby. decides to go along with him. Too fuckin' cold windy to hang out, might as well join Fat Harold.

The church they go to is on the corner c and Third, and it is called the First Baptisi Abyssinian Church of Isola. Hooper is glad warm inside the church, because as far as he' concerned the rest of it is all bullshit.

He's dropped out of school because he doesn't do good reading none of his teachers ever realized he was dyslexic but one thing he learn from all those history books he stru through was that most of the wars that ever on this planet was because one religion tried to another religion it was the only true way to God. what the preacher is laying down in the church this morning all this stuff about Jesus crucified by the Romans or the Jews or whoever fuck did it, Hooper doesn't know and doesn't give a damn is all a lot of bullshit to him. These people want to believe fairy tales about virgins getting pregnant without nobody fucking them, that was their business. All Hooper was doing here was getting warm.

They're out of church by a little past noon. Fat Harold wants to go to this crack house he knows, buy himself a nickel vial, pass the time smoking some dope. But Hooper tells him what's the sense he just went to church and prayed his ass off for salvation if the next minute he's back on the pipe, does that make sense, man? He tells Fat Harold why don't he use the five bucks they go see a movie and buy some popcorn? Fat Harold thinks he rather go smoke some dope. So they part company on Ainsley this is now maybe ten past twelve, a quarter past and Fat Harold goes his way to the crack house where he's gonna find hope in a pipe, man, and Hooper walks crosstown and a little ways uptown on The Stem to where this movie theater is playing a new picture with Eddie Murphy in it.

Uptown.

Is where this movie theater is.

Uptown.

Where Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby live.

Hooper knows he is walking into white turf, he wasn't born yesterday.

But, man, this is Easter Sunday and all he's doing is going to a fuckin' movie where there's hundreds of white people standing on line outside, waitin' to see a black man up there on the screen. Handful of blacks on the line, too, here and there, guys all silked up, sportin' for they girls, this is Easter Sunday, it'll be cool, man, no sweat.

Hooper wishes he had a girl with him, too. But he broke up with this chick last month 'cause she was mad he dropped out of school, which was for the best if she didn't understand how he wasn't getting nowhere in that fuckin' school, what was the sense wastin' his time there? Learn more on a stree corner in ten minutes than you did in school the whole fuckin' tenn. But on days like today, dudes all around him with they girls, he misses her. makes him feel like some kind of jerk, anyway going to a movie alone.

Eddie Murphy takes care of that, though.

Eddie Murphy makes him feel good.

You see a handsome black man up there, hell and not takin' any shit from Whitey, it you feel real good. Eddie Murphy probably lived a big house on a hill overlooking the ocean. Probably had blonde girls coming in to suck his cock and his feet with they hair like the preacher was about Jesus's feet this morning. You was Eddie, Murphy, you could buy anything in the world you". wanted, have anything you wanted. Didn't matter' you was black. You was Eddie Murphy, man! In movie theater, sitting there in the dark with mostly white people, Hooper likes to wet his pants laughing every time Eddie Murphy does another one of his shrewd things.

White people all around him are laughing, too. Not at any dumb nigger but at dumb Charlie who the nigger's fuckin' around. Hooper doesn't completely understand why all these white people are laughin' at they ownselves, but he knows it makes him feel damn good.

He is still feeling good when he comes out of the theater at two-thirty, around then. It isn't snowing yet, but it sure feels like it's gonna start any minute.

Still windy as can be, great big gusts blowin' in off the River Harb and cuttin' clear to the marrow. He can walk home one of two ways. He can go down on The Stem to North Fifth, and then come crosstown the three blocks to his own building on Culver, where maybe some of the guys'll be hangin' out, or he can go directly crosstown on Eleventh where the theater is, and then walk downtown on Culver, six of one, half a dozen of the other except that the Eleventh Street route will take him straight through an exclusively Italian neighborhood.

Hooper does not belong to any of the neighborhood street gangs. Neither does he do dope nor run dope for any of the myriad crack dealers who are what the newspapers call "a blight on the urban landscape." He is not a good student, but this does not make him a bad person. The color of his skin does not make him a bad person, either. He is black.

I-Ie knows he is black. But he has never done a criminal thing in his life. Never. (He repeats the Word fervently to Carella now: "Never!" ) This is no small achievement in a neighborhood where the word "bad" is often used with pride. I'm a baaaad nigger, man. If Hooper's gonna be any kind of nigger, it's gonna be a good one. Like Eddie Murphy. (He tells this to Carella, too, driving the point home by rapping a clenched fist on his T-shined chest.) The Italian-Americans on Eleventh Street are so far removed in time, space and attitude from their heritage in Naples or Palermo that they could, if they chose to, safely drop the hyphenated form. These are Americans, period, born and bred on the turf they now inhabit with somewhat confused and confusing ethnic pride. These are kids whose great-great-grandparents came here as immigrants at the turn of the century. Kids whose great-grandparents were first-generation Americans.

Kids whose grandparents fought against Italy in World War II, whose parents were teenagers in the Sixties, and who themselves are now teenagers who do not speak Italian and who do not care to learn, thank you. They are Americans. And it is American to cherish home and family, American to protect one's neighborhood from evil infiltration, American to cherish God and country and to make sure no niggers fuck your sisters.

Hooper is aware of them at once.

He has come perhaps a block and a half crosstown: from The Stem when he sees them on the front of the building. There are six of them. This is Easter Sunday and they are all silked out in their new Easter threads, hanging out and kidding around, laughing.

He tells himself that's all they're doing is hanging out and kidding around, laughing, but warning hackles go up on the back of his neck, anyway. He should not be here. He should have gone down The Stem to Fifth Street instead, he was dumb to come across Eleventh where up ahead all of a sudden the horseplay stops and the laughter stops and there is a dead silence, they have spotted him.