A Matter of Conviction

“There’s only one thing I’m going to do, Danny. I’m going to send you and your friends to the electric chair for the murder of an innocent boy.”

The note was waiting for him back at the office. It was addressed to MISTER DISTRICT ATTORNEY HENRY BELL. The letters were scrawled across the face of the envelope in ink. He tore open the flap and pulled out the single sheet of notepaper. In the same hand were written the words:

IF THE THUNDERBIRDS DIE,

YOU DIE NEXT

Four

He went back to the street the next morning and realized in an instant that the image of Harlem as he knew it was no longer valid.

Standing on the corner of 120th Street and First Avenue, he looked westward and tried to visualize himself as a boy and found that geography had passed the dagger of befuddlement to time, and that both had conspired to stab memory.

On the north side of the street, spreading from Second Avenue where the grocery store used to be, where he’d flipped picture cards on hot summer days, spreading from there almost halfway down the block was an open lot, leveled by the bulldozers for a new housing project. The house in which he’d been born and raised — his Aunt Serrie had served as midwife during the delivery — still stood in the center of the block on the south side of the street, but the candy store that had been alongside it was boarded up and demolition had already begun on the houses across the way from it.

“This isn’t where the kids come from,” Detective First Grade Michael Larsen said. “It’s a few blocks over, sir.”

“I know,” Hank answered.

He looked up the street again, feeling change as a sentient thing, wondering if change were truly synonymous with progress. For if the geography of Harlem had changed, if the architecture of the city had imposed upon the gridwork of streets a new pattern of sterile red brick, the model caves of the Miltown Men, the people of Harlem had changed, too. His earlier concept of the three Harlems was one of clear territorial division: Italian, Spanish and Negro. In his mind, he had almost erected the border inspection posts. He recognized now that there was no true border separating the three. Harlem was Harlem. The streets of Italian Harlem were dotted with the tan and white faces of Puerto Ricans, the deeper brown of Negroes. In Harlem could be read the entire immigration pattern of New York City: the Irish and the Italians being the first to succumb to the slow steadiness of integration; the Negroes — later arrivals — melting imperceptibly into the pot of white Protestant respectability; the Puerto Ricans entering last, reaching desperately across a cultural and lingual barrier for the extended hand of acceptance. The hand, they discovered, held an open switch blade.

He wondered what the city had learned, if anything. He knew there were studies, countless studies of housing conditions and traffic problems and schools and recreation centers and occupational opportunities, scores of studies compiled by learned men who knew all about immigration. And yet, projecting the city into the not too distant future, twenty years, twenty-five years, he could visualize it as a giant wheel. The hub of that wheel would be the midtown area where the Idea Men worked, grinding out communications for the entire nation, Eat Crunchies, Wash With Wadley’s, Smoke Saharas, shaping the taste and the thought of the country with their words. And surrounding the camp of the Idea Men would be the nomadic tribes, fighting among themselves for the unproductive earth of the city streets, roaming, shifting, still searching for that welcoming hand of acceptance. A huge loudspeaker would be set atop the Empire State Building in the heart of the hub owned by the Idea Men. And every hour on the hour, the loud-speaker would bleat out a single word which would ring loud and clear on the air of the city, crossing into the territories ruled by the barbarian tribes roaming the fringes of the hub.

And that word would be “Tolerance!”

And Rafael Morrez, swimming in a sea of words, drowned because words don’t float.

“Are you familiar at all with Harlem, sir?” Larsen said.

“I was born here,” Hank answered. “On this street.”

“Oh? Yeah?” Larsen looked at him curiously. “Well, it’s changed a lot since then, I guess.”

“Yes. It has.”

“You know,” Larsen said, “we could’ve brought this girl to your office. You didn’t have to come to Harlem.”

“I wanted to come.”

Walking with the detective who’d caught the initial squeal, he wondered now why he’d wanted to come. Perhaps it was the note, he thought. Perhaps the note challenged my bravery and my manhood. Or perhaps I wanted to see what it was about Harlem that could alternately produce a district attorney and three young killers.

“This is the block,” Larsen said. “The three of them lived right here. And the Puerto Rican kid lived on this same street, only farther west. Great, huh?”