Manhattan 62 (29 page)

PART FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

October 24, '62

“
A
RE YOU READY FOR
Star Time?” yelled out the MC,

Lucas “Fats” Gonder, from the stage of the Apollo. “Thank you and thank you very kindly. It's indeed a great pleasure to present to you at this particular time, nationally and internationally known as the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business …”

The crowd, about 1200, maybe 1500, I couldn't count exactly, they yelled out yes, yes yes in agreement, yes, they were saying, we are ready, and I figure they've been waiting for James Brown, they've already seen the other acts, and they're worked up, and I'm backstage with Ostalsky, but it was Clay Briscoe, the detective I knew from the academy, who had fixed it up at the Apollo.

By the time we had found our way to Harlem, and the Hotel Theresa, it was dark, and on 125th Street I was feeling like a fish out of water; with Max, we were two white men in a Negro neighborhood. Inside the hotel, packed with people heading for the bar and the ballroom, mingling in the lobby, the clerk was wary; who the hell were we, his expression said. I had no badge. Max no ID he could show without them making him for a Russian. Finally, after a few bucks changed hands, the clerk turned over a large brown envelope addressed simply to MAX.

“We can't stay here,” I said, but when I looked at the street, I saw a uniformed doorman watching everyone, and on the street two cars—the black Plymouth; the two-toned blue and white Impala. This was not a good time for us to be out of doors, so I ducked into a hotel phone to call Briscoe. I wasn't sure he'd answer; I was out in the cold, and no cop wanted business with me. I didn't want to hurt Briscoe's career; he was a Negro, and that meant he was automatically under some kind of suspicion. I was desperate. I had nowhere else to turn.

A few minutes later Briscoe appeared; maybe he hadn't heard I was a pariah; maybe he didn't care.

Clayton Briscoe was a tall lanky fellow with a loping stride like the basketball player he had been in college, and he was medium brown, sharply dressed and had a neat mustache. He had lived his whole life in Harlem and everybody knew him. Briscoe shook hands with everyone he passed. Smiled. Inquired about families. Nobody asked him any questions about the white men he was with, and he got us out of the hotel's back door where kitchen workers were smoking and shooting the breeze.

“Bad times, Pat,” said Clay, then turned to Ostalsky, who couldn't see much with the cracked glasses and had stumbled and fallen onto his knees. Clay put out his hand. “You OK, man?” Max nodded, then climbed to his feet. “What do you need? I know the word is out not to talk to you, but what the hell, we're friends, right?”

“Thanks, Clay. Yeah, I could use a friend.” When I told him we needed to get off the street for a while, he gave me a triumphant little smile, stroked his trim mustache, pushed us into his maroon Buick Electra, and drove us around for a while, making sure nobody was on our tail. He never asked me what was going on, just did the favor. He was a decent man and a good cop; he knew the favor would be repaid but he never asked for anything. Eventually, we pulled up on 126th Street.

“This your car, or official?”

“Mine,” said Briscoe.

“Good. Less of a target,” I mumbled, and when Briscoe said, “What the hell?” I just said, “Nothing, forget it. Where are we going? You look like the cat who ate the cream, man, in spite of us probably being at war over Cuba any minute.”

“In there, that door.” It turned out to be the Apollo Theater's stage door. From the stage came the sound of the band, horns, voices; an audience in ecstasy.

“He's not on yet, you haven't missed much,” said Briscoe. “Look, I'll hang around best I can,” he added. “But there's some stuff going down, and I have a nervous partner, young cop, only in a couple years, who's sure the Reds are going to invade the city, and I best keep him from hiding under his desk, so to speak. You'll be OK here until I get done. Try not to make yourselves too obvious, especially you, Max.” He lowered his voice. “If anybody asks, Pat does the talking. Say you're with a record label; you came by to check out the show. They're recording an album tonight, it will be chaos, so nobody will pay attention, just watch out for Mr Brown's bodyguard.”

“I'll watch for him.”

“It's a her,” said Briscoe. “Only James Brown would get himself a lady bodyguard. Stay this side of the stage, near the door. There's dressing rooms upstairs, you can always take your pal into one of them that's empty. Right? I won't be long.” He shook hands with both of us. “Enjoy the show, man. Didn't I tell you I'd fix for you to get in?” Grinning to himself at the idea, Briscoe opened the heavy stage door and left, and I could hear his car as he drove away.

Already, I can hear an instrumental of ‘Mashed Potatoes USA'. I'm holding my breath, in the moment, and somehow the thought of nuclear war and the whole damn case is falling off my back, and Max Ostalsky, clutching his brown envelope and in that heavy old gray suit, looks like he's entered an unknown planet.

For the first few minutes, I don't care. This is a crazy thought, but it's true. I'm living in this theater, cream paint, gold decoration, red seats, murals of the old burlesque house the Apollo once was, and hundreds of faces, expectant, urgent, ready for it all, music, entertainment, redemption, and all of them colored, all the way up to the second balcony. And Fats Gonder going for broke with his intro.

“The man who sings ‘I'll Go Crazy'! ‘Try Me'! ‘You've Got the Power'! ‘Think'! ‘If You Want Me'! ‘I Don't Mind'! ‘Bewildered'! Million-dollar seller, ‘Lost Someone'! The very latest release, ‘Night Train'! Let's everybody shout and shimmy! Mr Dynamite, the amazing Mr Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames!”

The horns are beginning the fanfare. The band is on a riser at the back of the stage in two tiers. Horn section, trumpeters, trombonist; I knew about Dicky Wells from Count Basie's band. Of all the jazz musicians I had always loved Basie. The Flames are singing tight.

Then he appears. James Brown's big black hair shining, perfectly coiffed, tight three-piece suit, his feet have a life of their own as if they have wheels implanted. He slithers across the floor, no sound, no friction at all, the feet carrying the body as it dips and bends, and the voice, and the audience is hollering in ecstasy.

You've got the power of love in your hands …

The microphone is like a woman for him, pulling it, caressing it, purring into it, screaming out like a man possessed; James Brown is twenty-nine, same age as Ostalsky.

You've got the power of love

To make me understand …

This, all of it, Brown himself, the band on the two-tier riser at the back of the stage, the musicians themselves, and the singers, this is all happening while Max Ostalsky is trying to open the envelope from Valdes and read the letter inside, and I'm trying to find a better place to watch, and worried about some of the people backstage staring at us.

If you leave me, I'll go crazy,

cause I love you, if you quit me, if you forget me …

Afterwards I can't remember what order the songs came in. For those minutes, I didn't care if the nukes fell on us. The noises Brown makes, the apocalyptic feel, the abandon— frenzied, feverish—as he implores the audience, he's a preacher, they're his congregation, he works the stage with those crazy small inhumanly fast steps. I never again saw anything like it, not even the last time I had been here. People in the audience get out of their seats, they shriek, and he sings, body twisting, hair dripping with sweat now, the music, James Brown and his music is what makes it worth being alive.

Through his one-eyed glasses, Ostalsky, on a chair and half hidden behind a pile of stuff—recording equipment, trunks, props, girls in feathered bikinis coming and going— is frowning at the letter from Rica Valdes.

Brown moves, he implores, “Don't leave me …”

I'm practically on the stage, practically standing by the Flames. Ostalsky reaches over and pulls me back, but all I hear is the music coming at my face, from under my feet, the whole place shaking.

“Pat, please, you must hear this.” On Ostalsky's face was a look of panic, of desperation. I pointed at the stairs and pushed him up a flight to an empty dressing room and locked the door. A metal rack of suits stood to one side, and on a dressing table was make-up, a pile of rhinestone earrings and a pink feather boa. I could still hear the music. The dressing room stank of heavy perfume and hair oil.

“What?”

“I've read Rica's letter,” said Max. “It's in Russian.”

“Then read it to me.”

“My Dear friend, Maxim, I am writing to you just before we are to meet at the pier near the Hudson River. I feel that I may not have time to tell you everything or if you will believe me, because I know you are loyal to your country, and to the Cuban revolution, which now depends on the Soviet Union. I no longer feel this way. Our revolution has betrayed the people.”

“Just tell me, Max. Come on, man, just tell me the important stuff. I don't care how he feels about some revolution.” From below, the horn section was shaking the building.

“He writes that on October 7, Osvaldo Dorticós, the President of Cuba—Rica came in the delegation, spoke at the United Nations—and he said, let me read this, ‘If…we are attacked, we will defend ourselves, I repeat, we have sufficient means with which to defend ourselves; we have indeed our inevitable weapons, the weapons which we would have preferred not to acquire, and which we do not wish to employ.'”

“Jesus. It obviously means nukes. Where the hell were our people?”

“Nowhere, according to Rica, not paying attention, thinking of most Cubans as just people who brag a lot, but have no brains, and then Rica says, after they got to New York, some Russian at the UN asks him to deliver family photographs to me.”

“The Rishkova woman? The what you call, Letter Carrier?”

“Yes.”

“Let me finish,” said Ostalsky, who read out loud in Russian. “Hold on, please, Pat. I'm just translating,” he added.

“What about the nukes?”

“He talks about Moscow, and how he learned Russian and was asked to help with translations for delegations from Cuba and other errands. They trust him, they promote him, send him home to work as a pretty high-level translator, mostly at the main newspaper in Havana because he also knows English. But he's been away for two years. He sees things have changed, he says. He fell for Susana Reyes, an upper-class girl who returned from America, and found, he says, ‘her beloved brother disappeared because he was a homosexual'. Old friends who disagreed with the government were executed.

“‘The worm began to burrow inside my brain. I played the game, and I waited. They saw me as possible bait, as
carnada,
a “dangle” they call it, to offer me to the CIA who would hire me, and I would be a double agent, burrowing deep into the United States. Many CIA in Cuba are so stupid. They do not see what's in front of their eyes, including Soviet troops arriving. They cannot believe that Cuba has a brilliant intelligence service; they assume we are a silly little people, lazy, macho and useless. But people, even including Che Guevara, a man I idolized, had become possessed. When I heard my hero say he would gladly destroy America with nuclear weapons, even if it meant destroying his own country it changed me.'”

And James Brown sang “Hold me hold me, and your love we won't hide.”

“Rica and Susana, and her cousin, somebody named Jorge, joined a small group. They decided, ‘If Castro called dissenters worms, then we were glad to be worms.' ”

The cigarette had burned my fingers, and I tossed it in an ashtray. “What else?”

“Let me finish the letter. He says he's enclosing snapshots, here, look at them,” said Max and passed me four small black and white photographs. “Rica says shipments have been arriving from the Soviet Union for quite a while, and that on October 4, when the
Indigirka
docked at Mariel, which is Rica's hometown, it was easy for him to visit home, and find out what was going on. Forbidden to most, but Rica had become a Party member and was trusted. Listen to this, Pat.

“He says there are thousands of troops, Soviets, even some others, who have been arriving since August. Cuba is a Soviet military camp, he reports. ‘Missiles are taken by truck across country, through little towns, and because I have worked as a journalist, many people know me, and I go where I like.' It is hard to hide trucks with huge metal tubes. Also, the Soviet soldiers are miserable, it's hot, they're sick, they would like to drink, and though the officers are quite correct, some of the men, so homesick and unwell, will tell you anything for a glass of rum, or an introduction to a nice lady, you can take a look at anything. You can give a Russian soldier a cigarette, and he says, ‘Take a photograph, if you want. So I took these pictures.'”

“These pictures don't look like anything to me,” I said.

Max got up from where he had been sitting and smoking, and looked over my shoulder. “The one you're holding is interior of some sort of bunker, with a stack of what look like rockets. This next one, look, you see, this trailer-truck has a missile launcher, with the missile, the warhead in place. It looks like a MIG, a fighter plane, you see, attached to a little hump-backed car?”

When he pointed out the details, I could see it clearly. The missile was set in a clearing, with scrubby tropical foliage around the edges. In it was a man in a checkered shirt, his right arm cut off by a photographer who was either incompetent or in a big hurry.

“Cuba?” I said.