William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

When Kate ran into the study wearing a quilted red robe and matching slippers, his resentment ebbed at the sight of her rosy, pretty features and her long blond hair which, released from its ponytail, fell smoothly down to her shoulders. While she came over and sat on his knee, he smiled appraisingly at her, judging her points, the soft line of her developing bosom, the good, square shoulders and coltishly slim legs, as he might assess the qualities of a thoroughbred filly. “Well, Miss Katherine Jackson Boyd, let’s see you hollow out your back,” he said.

She smiled at him and sucked in her stomach, squared her shoulders, and put her hands together on the pommel of an imaginary horse.

“How’s this, Daddy?”

“Blue ribbon,” he said, and she relaxed and snuggled herself into his arms.

“Could we talk about Buddy now?” she asked him.

“Do you remember your grandfather, Kate?”

“Just that he was tall and had white hair. And he told me to lean forward and grab my pony’s mane to help him when we were going up a hill.”

Boyd smiled faintly. “Anything else?”

“Well, he always smelled of Pears soap and tobacco.”

“I admired him because, above all, he was fair,” Boyd said. “And I’ve tried to be like him. So I believe we should talk about Buddy sometime when your mother is here. That’s the fairest way to make you understand.”

She sighed and snuggled into his arms.

“But I don’t think she’s being fair,” she said.

“Hush now,” he said and patted her shoulder gently.

And Katherine Jackson Boyd rested in her father’s arms, physically safe and secure and privileged in their electronically guarded apartment building high above the mean streets and alleys where Gus Soltik was looking for a kitten.

Samantha Spade stood looking out a tenement window in Spanish Harlem, while a pair of her enforcers-black professional muscle, Biggie Lewis and Coke Roosevelt-were systematically and unemotionally smothering a young Puerto Rican boy, Manolo Ramos, who was delinquent by six hundred and ninety dollars in his payments to Samantha, a statuesque black Shylock, whose turf embraced much of Harlem from river to river and south of 125th Street. Samantha was tall, five eleven in white leather boots, with classically chiseled features and wide, luminous eyes, which she enlarged in a startling and almost comic fashion with heavy black liner and silver-white eye shadow. She wore a high-crowned dome-shaped red velvet hat and a flared leather coat over a black denim pants suit, which glittered with sequins forming clusters of patriotic designs, stars and eagles and shoulder patches from the old glory outfits, the 182nd Airborne Division, and the Fourth Infantry, the Ivy Division.

The room was small and filthy and smelled of drains.

Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis were large, powerful young men who amused themselves by dressing with piratical flourishes; they wore silver earrings, Aussie digger hats, tight leather suits with brilliant scarlet kerchiefs wound around their powerfully muscled throats.

With effortless ease, they held young Manolo’s writhing figure on a narrow bed, twisting his slim brown arms high up between his shoulder blades and pressing his curly head and pretty brown face deeply into a soiled and matted pillow.

“All right! That’s enough!” Samantha Spade said abruptly, and Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis immediately released the boy, reacting like well-trained guard dogs to the thread of irritation in Samantha’s voice.

“Mother, Mother, don’t let them hurt me!” Manolo screamed at Samantha.

All this Samantha found degrading. You started with something clean, and while the interest was ball-breaking, they couldn’t go to banks, so they came to her. When they got behind and started hiding, you had to use muscle, or your work and reputation went down the drain.

“We didn’t advertise for you, Manolo.”

“It’s my brother,” Manolo said, barely whispering the words, while watching Samantha’s cold black face as if it were hostile terrain he must try to cross to find sanctuary.

She knew about his brother, a junkie with a big habit, whose whining and desperate appeals for help lay across Manolo’s spirit like a draining poultice. Manolo, at twenty, was two years older than his sick brother and had been told countless thousands of times by their dead mother to take good care of his little brother and hold his hand crossing the streets. All the streets of life. .

“But you and me made a nice business deal, and it didn’t have anything to do with your brother,” she said.

“He makes me cry, and I can’t stand it.”

Oh, Jesus, Samantha thought. Coke and Biggie flipped Manolo over onto his back, locking his arms behind his head with their huge black hands. Manolo was naked except for a pair of clean white sweat socks, and the overhead lights coated his slim body and small but shapely private parts with shimmering silver reflections.

He’s really something, Samantha thought, staring with frank interest at his vulnerable body. What a super trip she could make with him, toying with him like an elegant little doll. Manolo had curly brown hair, the dimpled face of a cherub, and skin as soft and finely textured as pure silk. But none of this sweet stuff was for the ladies. Manolo was strictly for cockbirds.

Samantha-who had been christened Maybelle Cooper in Mobile, Alabama, and educated in New York-sat down on the bed beside Manolo and let her fingertips stray across the velvetlike skin of his stomach.

Manolo shivered unpleasantly; the touch of her flesh against his revolted him; it was a perverse, unclean feeling, like flowers acrid with rot.

Coke Roosevelt lighted a big cigar and blew smoke into Manolo’s face.

“Staff of life, faggykins,” Coke said in a soft but rumbling voice.

“He means, like bread,” Biggie Lewis said. Manolo was not afraid of Biggie. He knew Biggie wanted him, but if Biggie hurt him, he’d lose any chance of getting him to go down on him. But Coke Roosevelt didn’t want him and might enjoy hurting him to prove it. Samantha wanted him, too, but there was no leverage for Manolo.

“What’s the most you tricked in one night, Manolo?”

“Eight, maybe ten times.”

Samantha looked at him thoughtfully. “This may set Women’s Lib back a ton, but I’m giving you a break. You got two nights to get that six hundred and ninety dollars. Don’t make us look for you.”

“Thanks for shit nothing,” Manolo said sullenly.

“You talk nice to Samantha,” Coke Roosevelt said to him. “If you don’t, I’ll twist off that little spic cock of yours. But knowing where you like to put it, I’d do the job with a pliers.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Manolo shouted, and spat in Coke Roosevelt’s face.

“Stop it!” Samantha said.

Manolo spat at Coke Roosevelt again, and then he screamed in pain; Samantha had tugged sharply at his pubic hair, a gesture more reflexive than sadistic, expressing the casual tyranny of all ghettos, pain and violence employed as impersonal proof of power.

“When I tell you to stop it, you stop it,” Samanatha said to Manolo.

Samantha, her manner absent and distracted, drew her fingernails across Manolo’s stomach; his reaction was spasmodic and helpless, a shuddering contraction of the muscles in his loins.

“Manolo, there’s a convention of florists at the Plaza this week, and a lot of them cats are only a couple of degrees from flaming fags. Pick yourself some pansies. Maybe work Central Park the next couple of nights, find yourself some passion fruits.”

Her fingertips continued to stray across the velvet surface of his stomach. She was amused but irritated at his deliberate refusal to respond to her efforts to arouse him.