Read A Rage in Harlem for Free Online

with a long sigh. He took off his white bonnet and gray wig.
    Seen without his disguise, he was the spitting image of Jackson. White people in the South, where they had come from, had called them the Gold Dust Twins because of their resemblance to the twins pictured on the yellow boxes of God Dust soap powder.
    “I don’t live here,” Goldy said. “This is just my office.”
    “I don’t see how nobody could,” Jackson said as he eased his weight onto one of the wobbly chairs.
    “There’s people lives in worse places,” Goldy said.
    Jackson wouldn’t argue the point. “Goldy, there’s something I want to ask you.”
    “I got to feed my monkey first.”
    Jackson looked about for the monkey.
    “He’s on my back,” Goldy explained.
    Jackson watched him with silent disgust as Goldy took an alcohol lamp, teaspoon and a hypodermic needle from the table drawer. Goldy shook two small papers of crystal cocaine and morphine into the spoon and cooked a C and M speedball over the flame. He groaned as he banged himself in the arm while the mixture was still warm.
    “It’s the same stuff as Saint John the Divine used,” Goldy said. “Did you know that, Bruzz? You’re a churchgoing man.”
    Jackson was glad none of his acquaintances knew he had such a brother as Goldy, a dope-fiend crook impersonating a Sister of Mercy. Especially Imabelle. That’d be reason enough for her to quit him.
    “I ain’t never going to own you as my brother,” he said.
    “Well, Bruzz, that goes for me too. Now what’s on your mind?”
    “What I wanted to ask is do you know a colored United States Marshal here in Harlem? He’s a tall, slim colored man, and he’s crooked too.”
    Goldy’s ears perked up. “A colored U.S. marshal? And crooked? What you mean by crooked?”
    “He’s always trying to get bribes out of people.”
    Goldy smiled evilly. “What’s the matter, Bruzz? You get shook down by some colored marshal?”
    “Well, it was like this. I was having some money raised –”
    “Raised?” Goldy’s eyes popped.
    “I was having ten-dollar bills raised into hundred-dollar bills.”
    “How much?”
    “To tell the truth, all I had in the world. Fifteen hundred dollars.”
    “And you looked to get fifteen thousand?”
    “Only twelve thousand, two hundred and fifty, after I paid off the commissions.”
    “And you got arrested?”
    Jackson nodded. “During the operation the marshal broke into the kitchen and put us all under arrest. But the others got away.”
    Goldy burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. The C and M speedball had taken hold and the pupils of his eyes had turned as black as ebony and had gotten as big as grapes. He laughed convulsively, as though he were having a fit. Tears streamed down his face. Finally he got himself under control.
    “My own brother,” he gasped. “Here us is, got the same mama and papa. Look just alike. And there you is, ain’t got hep yet that you been beat. You has been swindled, man. You has been taken by The Blow. They take you for your money and they blow. You catch on? Changing tens into hundreds. What happened to your brains? You been drinking embalming fluid?”
    Jackson looked more hurt than angry. “But I saw him do it once before,” he said. “With my own eyes. I was looking right at him all the time. A man has got to believe his own eyes, ain’t he?”
    It hadn’t been too hard for him to believe. Other people in Harlem believed that Father Divine was God.
    “Sure, you saw him do it when he was sucking you in,” Goldy said. “But what you didn’t see was when he made the switch. That was when he turned to put the money into the stove to cook. What he put into the oven were just plain dummies along with a black-powder bomb. He put your money into a special pocket in the front of his coat.”
    “Then Imabelle got fooled, too. She was watching him, just the same as me. Neither of us saw him make the switch.”
    Goldy’s eyelids dropped. “Who’s Imabelle?