New York - The Novel

sure. And he wasn’t sure what he should do about it.

    Charlie Master often went to Harlem. He went there for the jazz. Sometimes he met Edmund Keller up on 142nd Street, at the Cotton Club. The audience at the club was strictly “Whites Only”—though a few black celebrities and their friends might be found in there sometimes.
    But then Harlem itself, in the mixing of races, was still a frontier area.
    Until the terrible attacks on them back in the Draft Riots of 1863, most of the city’s Southern blacks had lived downtown. After that, there was a move to the Tenderloin area on Midtown’s West Side. Soon, their cabarets and theaters were so successful that the area became known as “Black Bohemia.” By late in the century, immigrants from Virginia and the Carolinas, fleeing the Jim Crow laws, had swelled the population, and once again, tension with the Irish community was rising. But it was only during Charlie’s own childhood that the big move of African Americans into the mainly Jewish and Italian streets of Harlem had begun. They weren’t made very welcome—they were usually charged higher rent—but they came all the same. Now they were making the area their own.
    The Cotton Club was quite a scene. From the street, with its big corner site on Lenox Avenue, and brightly lit entrance, one would have thought it was a movie theater. Only the patrons in evening dress getting out of their expensive cars gave a clue as to what it was really like inside.
    The club was big and elegant. The clientele sat at small round tables, each with a single candle in the center of a spotless white linen tablecloth. There was room for dancing, but the key to the place was the show. The proscenium stage was large and lit with footlights on each side. This evening, the front of the stage had a mirrored floor, so that the reflection of the chorus girls exploded into the space above. The back of the stage was filled by the Fletcher Henderson Band.
    Charlie had been planning to bring Peaches here tonight, but Peaches wasn’t coming. Peaches was out with another man. Charlie was pretty upset about that. But it was no good getting upset, he reminded himself, when it came to Peaches. He’d known that when it started. He knew it now it was finished.
    He’d called Edmund Keller and asked him if he’d like to meet at theclub, and fortunately Keller had been free. They’d ordered their meal and listened to the music. “God, Henderson is good,” said Keller. Charlie nodded.
    They finished their food and ordered another drink. Charlie glanced around the room.
    “See anyone?” asked Keller.
    One never knew who would be at the Cotton Club. The mayor, of course—it was his kind of place. Music people like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, singers like Al Jolson and Jimmy Durante. Anyone from the fashionable New York crowd. Charlie had recently started to write a novel. He liked taking note of any scenes he might be able to use some day, and he always made a point of talking to people—both because they interested him, and because they might give him useful dialogue.
    “I wondered if Madden was here,” Charlie said.
    Did it worry any of these good people that the place was owned by Owney Madden, the bootlegger, who had bought the club while he was still in Sing Sing, doing time for murder? It never seemed to. Madden might kill people who crossed him, but why worry about a few murders when he ran the best jazz club in town? Madden had friends, too. The police hadn’t raided the club in a long time now.
    Charlie had talked to Madden once or twice. Despite his Irish name, Madden was born and raised in northern England, and proud of it. The bootlegger and jazz club owner’s accent was broad Yorkshire.
    Charlie was just finishing his survey of the room when he noticed the table just behind them. Three men had been sitting there, talking quietly, but he hadn’t paid particular attention to them. Now two of them were leaving. The third man remained, with his back to him, but then he turned to look at the stage.
    The face was familiar, but it took Charlie a few moments to place it. Then, seeing an opportunity to talk, he glanced at the man again, gave him a brief nod, and smiled. The man stared blankly.
    “You won’t remember,” said Charlie easily, “but I saw you in the Fronton one time. You were nice to my mother. Told her not to worry about the police.”
    The man frowned, then slowly remembered. “Right. There was a girl,