He remembered Jackie Robinson used to keep an apartment at the McAlpin, so he assumed it wasn’t as racist as some of the other luxury hotels. The facade was luxurious enough but inside it was a real beauty. The lobby was three stories tall, the biggest one he’d ever seen, made of marble and cream-colored limestone with gigantic columns and arches. The scale reminded him of Grand Central. They didn’t make them like this anymore. Just as well. No need to make everyone feel more insignificant than they already are. At this hour, hotel security gave him a quick once-over—he didn’t fit the profile of the purse snatchers and con men and perverts making the papers across the country, informing everyone that the Big Apple was off-limits, busted, and dangerous.
Before Pepper came downtown he checked with the “production office”—a room in Zippo’s apartment—to see if Lucinda Cole had shown up. She had not. He got the room numbers from the young man who answered the phone, who had a yokel accent and a genial phone manner that the city had not beaten out of him yet. Cole and Pope were on the same floor. Convenient if she wanted to see Pope, not so convenient if their history was bad.
“Mr. Pope?” He heard Pope snap at someone behind the door of room 1412, and a female voice complain in return. The woman asked Pepper to wait while she put something on. Pope resumed his abuse.
Pepper recognized the woman from the Sassy Crow—she was the bucktoothed white girl with long, curly red hair who’d yelled out “Preach!” a few times during the show. She was wrapped in a sheet, booze vapor issuing from her skin.
Pepper pushed past her. Pope asked who the hell it was and when he saw Pepper emerge around the corner cursed out his companion for letting him in. He was half under the covers, his skinny arms and chest suggesting an exercise regimen that consisted of hoisting a coke spoon. “Who said you could come in here?” Pope demanded, putting up his fists.
The comedian didn’t understand the situation, so Pepper slugged him. The girl gasped, like a white matron in a screwball comedy. “Get dressed,” Pepper told her.
Pope was stupefied. He didn’t speak.
The girl snatched up her clothes from the floor—scavenger hunt—and retreated to the bathroom, trailing the sheet on the dark carpet.
Pepper sat down in the burgundy leather armchair by the window. He glanced out at Broadway. Up the ave, in the middle of the street, a man swung a metal rake and menaced the trunk of a blue sedan. The honking reached the fourteenth floor in an irritated burst.
“You remember me?” Pepper said.
The comedian nodded and probed his jaw.
“I’m with the film production.” He couldn’t bring himself to say that Zippo sent him. The man was such a ridiculous character that it was degrading to admit being in his employ. Film production sounded like there were consequences, with an emanation of lawyers and money men and insurance underwriters.
“What’s your name again?”
“Pepper.”
“Why they call you Pepper?”
“Nobody calls me anything,” Pepper said. “You were the last person to see Lucinda Cole. What’d you get up to?”
“It was nothing—we go back. She was my lady for a while, so. We’re on this movie together, it’s natural we’re going to hang out.”
“I asked you what you got up to.”
Pope told him that he ran into her at the bar downstairs and they had some drinks. It was his first night in the city—he came to town early to try out some new material and see some people. “I only saw her back, but the way she was standing at the bar, I knew it was her. It’s just the way she holds herself, like royalty.”
Pepper was of two minds—indulge the man’s nostalgia and let him get comfortable, or push him and dominate. “Downstairs—then what?”
“Then nothing. It was last call and I knew she wasn’t going to be giving it up, no matter what kind of rap I was laying down.” He made a rueful chuckle. “I was trying, boy. But she was nervous and it was in her eyes—she was jonesing.”
Pepper had been on Secret Agent: Nefertiti for a week and hadn’t observed anything off. “Using? Back on it?”
“More of a pick-me-up, right? Get you through the night. She said she was heading up to 107th.” That was the home of the dealer Quincy Black, he explained. You were in the entertainment biz, Quincy was a dependable and discreet connection. “I would’ve gone up with her, but I had a, uh, health scare last month. Fucked me up. I mean, I’ll take a little refresher, but I’m on that macrobiotic shit now.” Pope cocked his head. “You listening in? Get your ass out here.”
The groupie stepped out of the bathroom. “You call me, Roscoe,” she said.
It did not seem likely to Pepper that he was going to call her. Pope told her to beat it and delivered an epithet. She slunk away, giving Pepper the finger and sticking out her tongue on the way out.
Lucinda Cole. The next step was clear. Pepper said, “Get dressed.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re taking me to Quincy.”
“It ain’t even noon. That nigger ain’t up.”
“I know how to wake people up.”
Pepper refrained from grabbing the man by the scruff and marching him all the way. Pope didn’t see the world like other people but Pepper hoped that getting slugged in the face had set him right, like how you kick a vending machine or a stuck jukebox. The comedian behaved when the elevator doors opened and the car turned out to be full of fresh-faced tourists gearing up for their New York safari, and he didn’t try anything when they hit the lobby, whose leather couches and club chairs had started to fill up. Guests meeting up before they headed out, suits from the surrounding office buildings rendezvousing with visiting clients.
The dark wood of the big reception desk resembled the hull of a ship, with the uniformed staff at their stations peering out into the sea of the lobby. The manager emerged from an office behind reception and Pope jerked a thumb at him. “His face, right?” he said.
“What?”
“He has a racist face—you see it.”
It was true. His white hair was swept back in an elegant wave, like in a museum portrait, its color bringing out the pink in his wide face, which was knobby in lobe, chin, and cheek. The blue eyes signaled cool, barely suppressed rage. There was no doubt about it—his was a racist face, more Southern Cracker racist than New England Plymouth Rock racist. Pepper couldn’t suppress his smile at the description.
They pushed through the revolving doors. The buildings on the square generated hostile eddies of wind, funneled by the concrete and glass. Pope said, “Sometimes you see someone and they just look racist, right? They can’t help it. My money manager is this white guy, Spencer Tomlinson.” An iceberg of slow-walking tourists floated toward them. Pepper and Pope separated and reunited on the other side. Pope continued: “At the end of our first meeting, right, I say how nice it was to meet him and he goes, ‘Because of this’ and he puts his finger on his nose. And I go, what do you mean? He says, ‘That’s okay, I know I was born with a racist face.’？”
Pope checked to make sure Pepper was chuckling before he rammed him, knocking him into an old white lady carrying A&S shopping bags. Pepper and the lady were on the sidewalk, and then he was up and in pursuit. Always plenty of bystanders to help an old white lady to her feet. Old black ladies, you’re on your own. The comedian was halfway across Thirty-fourth Street, heading uptown. Pepper zigzagged around the Checker cab—tourists in the jump seats gawking—and the Exeter Moving van. He didn’t see any patrolmen but it was Herald Square so they were near. He caught up with Pope at the corner of Thirty-fifth and this time gripped him by the neck with one hand and bent the man’s arm up into the small of his back. He twisted him around and headbutted him in the nose.