Warren Murphy - Chinese Puzzle

The numbers, however, they were pure sweet fantasy. You bought a day of dreaming of what you'd do with $5,400 for $10. And for a quarter, you got $135 worth of groceries, or rent, or a new suit, or a good taste if that was your pleasure. Or whatever your pleasure.

Nothing would ever replace the numbers in Harlem. Nothing would ever stop them, not unless someone came along with a new instant dream, payable the next day at the corner candy store.

Jackson bet the number and won. Then he phoned the other number.

"Now," came the voice, "bet 851 and 857, small. Play it with your boss, Derellio, and tell your players to play those numbers too. And phone back tomorrow night."

Eight fifty one paid off but the hit was not that big because Jackson's players did not trust him. Not that they thought he was un-trustful, Jackson knew, but that they did not really have a handle on him.

When he phoned the number again, the voice said: "The number tomorrow is 962. Tell your people you have the strongest hunch ever. And tell them you can only take so much, they'll have to go to Derellio personally. And play the number straight."

The play the next day was heavy. Big. And when 962 appeared in the day's parimutuel handle on the next to the last page of the Daily News, Derellio was broken. He had been hit for $480,000 and had not laid off any of the bets.

The next night, the voice said: "Meet me on the ferry going towards Staten Island that leaves in an hour."

It was bitter cold on the ferry, but the man who had been in the car, seemed not to mind the cold. He was well trussed in fur lined coat and boots and fur-lined field cap. He gave Jackson an attaché case.

"There's half a million in there. Pay off all Derellio's winners. And phone me again tomorrow night."

"What's your game?" asked Jackson.

"Would you believe," the man said, "that the more I learn of what I do, the less I know why I'm doing it."

"You don't talk like a brother."

"Ah, that's the problem of the black bourgeoisie, my friend. Goodbye."

"Wait a minute," said Jackson, hopping up and down on the deck of the ferry, beating his arms for warmth while trying to balance the attaché case between his legs, "what if I take a walk with this bread, man?"

"Well," said the man wearily, "I sort of figure you're pretty smart. And you're not going to walk until you know who you're walking from. And the more you know, the less you're going to want to walk."

"You don't make sense, dude."

"I haven't made sense since I took this job. Just accuracy." The black man said goodbye again and walked away. So Jackson had paid off the players and taken over the bank. If they could give him a half million to throw away, they could give him a million for himself. Besides, then he would walk.

But he did not walk. He did not walk when he received his bankroll. He did not walk, even when he was told to stand on a street corner one night, only to be told by a white man an hour later, "You can go now." Derellio and two of his henchmen were discovered with their necks broken in a nearby store a half hour later, and Sweet Shiv Jackson suddenly had a reputation for having killed three men with his bare hands which vastly increased the honesty of his numbers runners. And all it cost was just a little favour every now and then for the weary-voiced black dude.

Just little favours. Usually information, and sometimes it was putting this device here or that there, or providing an absolutely unshakeable witness for a trial or making sure another witness had money to leave town. And within a year, his main job was running an information network that stretched from the Polo Grounds to Central Park.

Even his vacation in the Bahamas was not his own. He found himself in a classroom with an old white man with a Hungarian accent discussing in terms he had not used, things Jackson thought only the street knew. There were names for things like seals, links, cells, variables of accuracy. He had liked variables of accuracy. In street terms, it was "where he coming from?" It was cool.

And then his network one fine autumn day was suddenly very interested in Orientals. Nothing specific. Just anything about Orientals that might come up.

And then the dude reappeared and informed Sweet Shiv that now he would pay back in full for his good fortune. He would kill a man whose picture was in this envelope and he would kill him at the Bong Rhee karate dojo. The man had insisted that Sweet Shiv not open the envelope until he left.

And so for the second time, Sweet Shiv saw the face, the high cheekbones, the deep brown eyes, the thin lips. The first time had been when he stood on a corner he had been told to stand on at a certain time, and the man had come out of the shop where Derellios' body was found later and had said simply: "You can go now."

He was now going to see that face again, and this tune Sweet Shiv was supposed to put a bullet in it. And Sweet Shiv knew as he turned south into Manhattan on the East River Drive that he was going to be wasted.

Somewhere a machine he had been part of was coming apart. And that machine belonged to the man. And the man had decided that one of its little black wheels was now going to be a piston. And if you lose a little black wheel trying to be a piston, well, what the hell, what's one Nigger more or less?

Sweet Shiv turned right on 14th Street, then made a U turn in the middle of the block, got back on the East Side Highway and headed north.

He had $800 in his pocket. He would not stop at his home to pick up his cash, he would not even bother to seal his car when he reached Rochester. He would leave nothing by which anyone could trace him.

Let them have the money. Let some stranger take the car. Let them have everything. He was going to live.

"Baby," he said to himself, "they really had you going."

He felt somewhat happy that he was going to live another day. He felt this way until just before the Major Deegan Highway leading to the New York Thruway and upstate. A black family was sitting by their stalled 1957 Chevrolet, a paint-worn, chipped, banged-up leftover of a car which had apparently surrendered its ghost for the last time. But Jackson figured he could make it run again.

He pulled it over, the wide soft wheels with their magnificent springs and shocks, taking the curb like a twig. He stopped on the grass which rose to a fence which separated the Bronx from the Major Deegan a few miles south of Yankee Stadium, the Black and Puerto Rican Bronx with dying buildings teeming with life.

He opened the door and got out into the stale smelling air and looked at the family. Four youngsters had been playing with a can, four youngsters in clothes so casual they looked as if they had been rejected by the Salvation Army. These four youngsters, one of whom might have been Sweet Shiv Jackson 15 years before, stopped playing to look at him.

The father sat by the front left fender, his back to the flat bald tire, his face cemented in resignation. A woman, old as flesh and weary as millstones, snored in the front seat.

"How you doin', brother?"

"Fine," said the man looking up. "You got a tire that will fit?"

"I got a whole car that will fit."

"Who I got to kill?"

"Nobody."

"Sounds fine, but...."

"But what?"

"But I wouldn't make it to your wheels, man. You got company."

Sweet Shiv, maintaining his cool, slowly scanned behind him. A simple black sedan had pulled up behind his Fleetwood. From the near window, a black face stared at him. It was the dude, the man on the ferry, the man who had given him the numbers and the methods, and the orders.

Jackson's stomach dissolved into strings. His arms hung leaden as though enervated by electricity.

The man stared directly into his eyes and shook his head. All Bernoy (Sweet Shiv) Jackson could do was nod. "Yowsah," he said, and the man in the car smiled.