William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

He knew what she was trying to do to him, but he was angrily determined to frustrate her. Manolo lay perfectly still and turned his face away from her. He made no attempt to struggle against the massive black arms and hands that held him like a rack on the narrow bed. Manolo enjoyed the feel of that warm male muscle against his body, and he savored his helplessness, the bondage and restraint imposed on him, and so he made no move to struggle against those powerful hands because that would only excite him and make Samantha’s victory inevitable.

Manolo thought of his mother and the little white sugar cakes she had made for him. Sometimes she filled them with pinola nuts, sometimes with yellow raisins. He and his brother ate them watching TV after school. They watched old movies. Game shows. Fuck Samantha, he thought, his mood vicious and triumphant, surfacing to the present.

But that was a dangerous indulgence. Dick Clark’s Bandstand . His thoughts went back to his childhood, where there was safety and where his mother was alive and where his brother was sweet and weak and not as yet in trouble.

But to his shame and horror, he felt his flesh betraying him. Helplessly responding to Samantha’s sensual ministrations, his stomach muscles contracted convulsively and sent seismic currents of ecstasy into the very root of his sexual organ, and slowly the base of his spine began to dissolve in delicious agony.

“Stop it! Stop it, you shit bitch!” he screamed into her face.

Biggie and Coke chuckled at the signs of rut on Manolo’s slim, smooth body.

But Samantha was disgusted and angry with herself. She stood abruptly and walked to the door.

“Save it for somebody who’ll pay for it,” she said.

“Samantha,” he said, barely whispering her name.

But her heart wasn’t easy, and she didn’t know why. It was always that goddamn Emma and Missoura thing. Walk through the mud, you dumb niggers. But she was touched and moved by Manolo’s physical response to her. She wondered if it would be amusing to help him, to take care of him. Her own life was so full of dreck and pain, so tinted with the lavender of resignation that she was desperate for any emotional diversion.

“Take care of business,” she said to no one in particular, and walked out of the room.

On the street in front of Manolo’s building, Samantha’s chauffeur stood beside her Cadillac and scowled irritably at six or eight young Puerto Ricans who were admiring the loaded green Coupe de Ville.

When Samantha came down the steps to the sidewalk, her chauffeur, whose name was Doc Logan, opened the rear door of the car, and said to her, “Got a call while you were upstairs, Samantha. Chuck from the poolroom. Gypsy Tonnelli is looking for you.”

“Chuck say why?”

“Yeah. Something about that psycho’s been wasting them little chicks.

The Gypsy knows what he looks like, and he’s thinking maybe one of our sharks could maybe make the cat.”

“Screw the Gypsy,” Samantha said, and slid her lithe, elegant body into the interior of the luxuriously leathered and perfumed Coupe de Ville.

Seconds later Coke Roosevelt crowded in beside her and Biggie Lewis climbed into the passenger seat alongside Doc.

There was a musing smile on Samantha’s lips. “Yeah, screw the Gypsy,” she said, and crossed her long, slimly booted legs. “You know. I went to the same school with him. Right here in Spanish Harlem, when there were a lot of ginzos around. He was way ahead of me, but I kind of hung out with his sister, Adela. I used to help her with her arithmetic.” Samantha laughed, displaying splendid white teeth.

“Lordy, was she dumb.” She tapped her forehead. “Solid bone, solid. We called the Gypsy the Pope then, because he never scored as far as we knew.”

The green Coupe de Ville moved smoothly and arrogantly into an intersection on the yellow, cruised on slowly and insolently against the red.

In a squad car a young uniformed cop spotted the infraction and reached for the ignition key, but his partner, a seasoned old bull, looked at him and shook his head. “No way. That spook’s off limits to you and me.”

The Harlem night was blue with a smog reflecting brilliant neon lights in dancing patterns, and in the cruising green Cadillac, Samantha’s mood was as blue as the night itself, a mix of emotions that turned her thoughts toward her childhood and her drunken giant of a father, rotting with syphilis, his own eyes turned inward in bitter recollections of old angers, dead illusions.

Samantha’s father used to say to her, “The game ain’t worth the shame, honey. You win, you just shippin’ some tired shit. Lose, you turn it around. You the tired shit gettin’ whipped.”

It was Gypsy Tonnelli who was darkening her thoughts, she knew, because the only reason Tonnelli would call her was that he needed help, but helping Whitey was the thing that gave Samantha those migraines. .

Manolo Ramos dressed hastily in his most provocative gear, a pale-gray silk shirt open to his navel, a short white fur jacket, stacked blue leather boots, and midnight-blue suede pants that fitted his rounded buttocks like a second layer of skin. He patted a sweet cologne on his cheeks and hair, which he had already teased into a halo of brown curls. Flashing a brilliant professional smile at himself in the mirror above his hand sink, Manolo let himself from his room and ran down dirty, uncarpeted stairs to catch the crosstown bus to Central Park.

Six hundred ninety dollars, he was thinking. Shit, I’m a bargain. .

At eleven thirteen P.M. on the fourteenth of October, engine and ladder companies were dispatched to a fire in a shabby tenement west of Ninth Avenue in the middle Fifties of the borough of Manhattan. Firemen contained the blaze that was smoldering in a mattress in the first-floor bedroom and that had been started by an elderly wino who had fallen asleep smoking a twisted stogie.

The hissing of water under compression, the sound of shouted orders, the thud of firemen’s boots, had alerted and terrified a nursing alley cat nesting in the basement of the tenement with four lively kittens. The big tabby bitch, in panic, began evacuating her young, carrying them in her teeth with a soft but firm grip on the backs of their necks, running with them through an open window to the safety of an unoccupied garage in another area of the block. She made three such trips, but when she returned for her fourth and last kitten, she couldn’t find it. She circled restlessly, whining in distress and anxiety, but receiving no answer at all to her plaintive, demanding calls, she leaped a last time through the open window and ran off into the darkness.

The lobby of the Plaza Hotel at Fifty-ninth Street near Fifth Avenue was in brilliant contrast with the slum district where firemen had doused the flames in a mattress and chewed the ass out of a dumb Puerto Rican wino who had fallen asleep smoking a cheap black stogie-and where in the dim brain of a nursing tabby gleamed the distant, receding memory of some part of her forever lost.

Crescent Holloway was making a harried, distracted entrance into the lobby of the Plaza, blinking with jet-lag weariness and irritation at the exploding flashlights of a phalanx of news photographers. In Miss Holloway’s van and wake streamed protective and supportive members of her personal entourage, forces beefed up by baggage-laden bellhops, a brace of assistant managers, and several executives from National Films, whose firm had become a financial phenomenon among the majors by distributing back-to-back smash hits displaying the explosive sexual pyrotechnics of Miss Holloway, who had become known in the trade papers as the Stacked House Kid.

Directly behind Crescent Holloway, who was shielding her eyes in a pretty gesture against the exploding flashbulbs, stood her personal makeup man, Simon Sachs; her press agent, Nate Sokol; and her bulking and belligerent-looking black maid, Honey Hopper.