Thomas Cook - Streets of Fire

‘Yeah,’ Luther said. He patted his coat pockets. ‘Here it is,’ he said as he handed Ben the photograph.

Ben lifted the picture slightly in order to bring it into a better light. It was a small, square Polaroid, shot in a grainy black and white, but he could see the girl’s face quite plainly as it looked up toward him from the grayish dusty ground. It had the same look the dead always had. No matter how big or how small, how much or how little had been done to them, they always looked as if they’d never had a chance.

Black Cat 13 sat obliviously at rest in an emergency parking zone in the alleyway behind Smith’s Cafe. It was gray with black side stripes, and a large black cat, yellow-eyed and with its silver claws exposed in an outstretched paw, had been hand-painted on the hood. The number 13 had been scrawled in white across its side, and a dab of red hung like bloody drool from its snarling mouth.

Tod and Teddy Langley sat in the far left corner of the cafe, each of them finishing up what looked like the usual blueplate special: hamburger steak, mashed potatoes and a faded mixture of green peas and tiny cubes of carrot.

Teddy sat up slightly as Ben approached.

‘Well, hello, Ben,’ he said. He smiled thinly. ‘I hear they put you on King.’

Ben pulled one of the chairs from beneath the table and sat down. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘How are things in Bearmatch?’

Teddy laughed. ‘Couldn’t be better, now that we’re filling up the jails.’ He pulled a bottle of Coke over to the side of the table, opened a package of salted peanuts and poured them into the bottle. A hissing brownish fizz boiled up almost to the rim of the bottle, then settled back slowly.

‘Well, not all of them,’ Tod said quietly. He took the last crust of biscuit into his mouth and chewed it slowly. ‘Not all of them, right, Teddy?’

‘That’s right,’ Teddy said. He took a long pull on the bottle. ‘So what’s the story, Ben? What’s King’s next move?’

Ben let his eyes wander aimlessly about the diner, from the front, where the cafe’s menu was written on a chalkboard in the front window, to the rear wall where two photographs hung from either side of a Coca-Cola clock, one of Governor Wallace, and the other of Vice-President Johnson. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Breedlove and Daniels are watching King, too,’ Teddy said matter-of-factly, as if demonstrating how much he already knew. ‘And there are probably a few more in undercover.’

Tod laughed. ‘Undercover?’ he screeched. ‘How you get undercover with them – paint your face black?’

Ben smiled limply. ‘So what are you boys doing instead of Bearmatch, loading the paddy wagons like everybody else?’

‘Hell, no,’ Tod said excitedly. ‘We got a special –’

‘Shut up, Tod,’ Teddy said. His eyes shot over to Ben. ‘Never seen you in Smith’s before,’ he said.

‘I don’t come here very much.’

‘So why are you here now?’

Ben shrugged casually. ‘I saw your car outside, and I thought –’

Teddy leaned toward him. ‘Word is, they’s an informant in the department,’ he said. ‘Somebody who’s working for the other side.’

‘I thought you might help me with this case I’m working on,’ Ben continued without hesitation.

Teddy’s eyes squeezed together. ‘What case is that?’

‘Something that broke this morning,’ Ben told him. He took the photograph from his coat pocket and laid it down on the table. ‘A little girl. Somebody shot her in the head and buried her in that old ballfield off Twenty-third Street.’

Teddy leaned back slowly, his eyes casually lingering on the picture. ‘She from Bearmatch?’

‘I guess so,’ Ben told him. ‘But the front office still wants a full investigation.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘So the murder can’t be made to look like a racial thing,’ Ben said.

‘They’re worried about that, huh?’ Tod asked.

‘A little.’

Teddy shook his head resentfully. ‘Then we’ve already lost, Ben.’

‘It’s what the Chief wants,’ Ben said.

‘That’s how it looks,’ Teddy said emphatically, ‘but that’s not how it is.’ He smiled helplessly. ‘Don’t you see, Ben? Don’t you see how it really is?’

Ben said nothing.

‘Even the Chief is having to pay attention to them,’ Teddy explained. ‘We’re having to be worried about what they think.’ He looked at his brother angrily. ‘When the fuck did we ever have to do that before?’ He shifted his eyes back over to Ben. ‘You know what a mongrel is?’ he asked. ‘You ever see an old mongrel dog?’

Ben didn’t answer.

‘That’s what they want to turn us into,’ Teddy said darkly. ‘A race of mongrels.’

Tod’s eyes shot over to Ben. ‘That’s right,’ he said emphatically. ‘That’s what they want.’

Teddy paid no attention to him. He kept his eyes on Ben. ‘They don’t really give a shit about eating with us, or going to school with us, or anything else like that. They just want to ruin us, ruin our race, so they can take over everything.’ He shook his head wearily, painfully. ‘And they’re doing it, too. They’re already making us do what they want. And before long, we’ll just be like a bunch of mongrel dogs.’ He picked up the picture, held it a few inches from Ben’s face and slowly ripped it in two. ‘I am loyal to my race, Ben,’ he said darkly, ‘before everything.’ He released the photograph, and its torn parts fluttered back down onto the table.

Ben stared at him silently for a moment, then gathered up the two halves of the photograph and returned them to his coat pocket. ‘I’m just doing my job, Teddy,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, you’ll have to do it without me,’ Teddy said.

From somewhere deep within him, Ben felt a sudden, inexplicable surge. ‘I intend to,’ he said.

He drove home slowly, turning north, so that he could move along the central boulevards of the city. The streets were almost entirely deserted. The restaurants and cafeterias were tightly closed, and some had already taken the added precaution of boarding up their windows. Even the brilliant chandeliers of the Tutweiler Hotel appeared somehow dim and exhausted in the fully fallen darkness. The streetlamps swung ponderously in the heavy summer air, and the light that swept down from them seemed to fall to earth in thick blue drops. Uniformed policemen patrolled the empty sidewalks two abreast, their holsters already unsnapped, their fingers playing at the handles of their revolvers. In front of Pizitz, black sanitation men were gathering together stacks of broken placards and tossing them into the grinding steel jaws of the compactors, and a little further down, only a few blocks from the park, another crew was hosing waves of accumulated litter into the cement gutters.

The park itself was green and lush, and Ben knew that within only a few hours it would be shimmering brightly in the early morning dew. Far in the distance, he could see the outline of its empty playground. The swings were moving languidly in the air, and under the tall gray lantern, the slide took on a ghostly silver.

To the left, and barely visible through a wall of trees, he could make out the high wire fence of the softball field, and it instantly reminded him of the goalpost off Twenty-third Street. He made a hard left at the end of the park and headed out toward the distant perimeters of Bearmatch.

There were no streetlamps in the ballfield, and so, when he reached it, he could see only a spot of dry ground beneath the covering darkness. No line of benches, no mound of freshly turned earth, no goalpost. Only a wall of impenetrable black which seemed to rise at the very edge of the broken, weedy sidewalk and then extend outward forever. For a while he sat in his car and smoked a cigarette while he stared out into the dark field. From time to time, people would casually approach the car, moving steadily down the sidewalk until they were close enough to notice that the man behind the wheel was white. Then they’d suddenly freeze, as if they’d just stumbled upon a rattlesnake in the brush, eye him cautiously for an instant, then hurry away toward the other side of the street. It happened first one time, then another and another, until Ben grew tired of seeing it, hit the ignition and drove away.