The Witness Read online

  Eddie Champion had no real recollection of the incident on the roof nor of the long periods of hospitalization during which orthopedic surgeons performed a total of sixteen operations on various parts of his body that had been smashed or broken upon making contact with the concrete. His memory went back as far as his later childhood years, which were spent in an upstate Catholic orphanage, to which he was sent because when his small clenched fist was pried open upon his arrival at the emergency ward of Bellevue Hospital, a miraculous medal was found impressed in the palm of his hand. Whether the medal had been placed there by his mother or had been pulled from the neck of his rescuer was not determined, but it was decided that the boy should be reared by the nuns.

  Aside from the fact that he was the only Negro boy at the upstate orphanage—in addition to three Negro girls—Eddie’s great attraction for the other children was the interesting series of stitches that seemed to outline the various joints of his body. When he reached adolescence, he had become used to, though not hardened to, the appellation “Frankenstein”—for he did seem to be some strange put-together creature.

  Eddie grew lean and hard and fairly straight and for the most part could move without any limp or other impediment. His recovery was considered something of a medical miracle. When he left St. Anne’s at seventeen, he was considered polite, soft-spoken, fairly devout and reasonably intelligent. He had a general high-school diploma, the ability to take a piece of machinery apart and put it back in working condition. He had a letter of recommendation from Father Ryan, dean of senior boys, and a room reserved in his name at a Catholic youth shelter in midtown Manhattan. He also had a brain that periodically sent unspecified waves of panic and terror racing through every part of his being.

  He had left St. Anne’s with a series of resolutions: first, that he would never again spend a night under the auspices of a church whose main communicants—to his knowledge—were pale, mean-faced, narrow-lipped Irish and Italian bastards whose main aim in life was to torment him. His next resolve was that he would never again permit anyone, black or white, to call him by the monster’s name. His third resolve, less tangible, was that he would find some way to get even with a world that had inflicted cruelty, rejection, pain and humiliation upon him.

  Eddie Champion’s collection of terrors drove him through the black streets of the Harlem ghetto, searching. He avoided the easy, obvious escapes available to him: drugs, liquor, open violence, for these things would harm him. It was not his intention to add to his own injury. His intention was quite the reverse.

  His first shock was that he was a stranger among his own: an alien in his own land. This added to his anger and hatred. His isolation was far more painful on the streets filled with black boys and girls, men and women. In the orphanage he had at least known who he was and what was expected of him. Street life terrified him, and his days were spent pushing iron clothing racks, jammed with cheap cotton dresses, from one warehouse to another, determined not to let the noise and the rush of humans and vehicles frighten him. At night he found something unanticipated and unbelievable: a youth center in the heart of the ghetto, run with hard self-confidence by tough, wise, bright, young black college students.

  Eddie Champion knew he was different from the other boys who came night after night to clown around, shoot some pool, talk dirty, and bang drums or—on occasion—each other. What he didn’t know was that his difference was carefully noted and duly reported to people he didn’t even know existed. He was approached, after a few months, by one of the most popular of the youth counselors, a senior at Brooklyn College. He had been selected as an ideal candidate for membership in the Secret Nation.

  Eddie felt safe within the stringent rules of the Secret Nation. His deep, long-suppressed anger found direction, and within two years he had become one of the best-trained, most skillful and most devoted members of the select group, the Royal Guards, whose purpose was simple and clear: the elimination and destruction of any and all enemies of the Royal Leader of the Secret Nation.

  Eddie Champion glanced around the large spotless room. The Royal Leader’s sister was a good housekeeper. He visualized those large strong hands rubbing a shine into the furniture, her hard face expressionless, every muscle of her heavy body straining at her task beneath the loose white garment that reached to the tops of her flat, shapeless shoes. Her robe was almost nunlike and her eyes were the coldest and most calculating Eddie had ever looked into. She had led him to this room after his brief meeting with the Royal Leader, provided him with a cold supper on a metal tray, appeared soundlessly to remove the tray, and had not spoken a single word to him. Yet her every gesture, her every solid, deliberate movement, had seemed threatening. Her eyes, watching him closely, seemed to advise him what everyone in the Secret Nation knew: that her brother was her life, that nothing and no one mattered but her brother, Royal Leader of the Secret Nation, and that her life and the lives of all of them counted as specks of dust in his light.

  Eddie thought about the old man. His face, old as death but not a wrinkle on him; his skin stretched over the high cheekbones as smooth as purple fruit, his eyes as bright as beetles. Only the voice seemed old: not quavery-old, but so thin that you could hardly hear him. Yet when he stood before a meeting and spoke into those powerful microphones, his voice had a whispery sound that went right through your spine. Eddie thought about the crazy words—which he had never believed, not even for a moment, but which had a strange power over the auditorium filled with tense, silent, hopeful people.

  “I am the living proof! I am the visible evidence before your naked eyes!” The old man opened each meeting with the same recitation. “You are witness to the living proof and you see before you in my living body nine thousand years of life contained within this black and fleshless form. The flesh has been burned off through all the endless incarnations, but the inner fire [one long bone of a finger, held now to his forehead] has endured and remained and lasted through the succession of bodies, and the brain remembers how it was!”

  The older people would begin now, softly, hesitantly, gradually becoming louder and surer: “Amen. Amen, brother! We have seen. We believe!”

  Then the old man would seem to withdraw from them; his body would nearly disappear in the continuous chant of his words as he evoked the story: “This brain, this mind, this inner fire, remembers. Remembers the hot and steaming jungles of the beginning. [Oh, yes, amen. Remembers, remembers!] Remembers the great nation, hidden deep in the forests and the swamp. Remembers the blood vow and the blood promise, bought with blood, paid for with blood, renewed in blood, in blood everlasting, and my voice has spoken unto you, thick with the blood of the vow [Amen: blood of the vow!]. Thick with the blood, the voice speaks to you of the new generation of my children. From the blood and by the blood, this voice of nine thousand years, this voice, raised first over my people in the generation of their triumph in their eternal kingdom, speaks and tells you this: This nation shall prevail and this generation shall prevail and this black and beautiful skin, bound by the promise and the blood, shall prevail and shall avenge the destruction of our greatness. Shall not ask, but shall demand, the splendor and the glory and the power which is ours! [Demand! Shall not ask: shall demand! Amen!]”

  By the time this weekly litany was finished, the old man had them, right in the palm of his bony hand. And when he demanded they give him their sons and their daughters, they gave him their sons and their daughters. But everyone over twenty-five was barred from the indoctrination courses that were run for the Youth Brigade and every member of the Youth Brigade took a blood oath—a small knife prick on the inner left wrist marked each of them—of silence on pain of death. The parents saw their sullen sons and restless daughters stand straighter, abandon their seemingly purposeless wanderings. They saw their sons crop their hair close and proud; they saw them abandoning wild colors in favor of dark suits and white shirts and dark ties. They saw their daughters become more modest and discreet about their bodies and
their behavior and they were grateful, for—God be praised—the Saviour was here to take things in hand.

  They never heard the first indoctrination talk the Royal Leader gave to their sons and their daughters, and no word of it was ever repeated anywhere outside the confines of the meeting place. The Royal Sister stood beside him, solid and unmoving as carved ebony, only her eyes alive and alerted, while the Royal Leader stood before them and told them their purpose in life.

  “You are now the blood of the new generation of the Secret Nation, and as your blood flowed this night, so shall other blood flow. As you have been born tonight, so shall our enemies die. They shall feel the might of the Secret Nation in small ways at first: small mysterious terrifying ways that build and build until they are overwhelmed and defeated and leave us these streets and these rat tenements and these Jew stores and shops, and we shall rule our streets ourselves after driving them out, and we shall create from their ruins our triumph, and little by little we shall move outwards. Street by street, we shall take over until our boundaries pass the boundaries they have set for us, and they shall flee from their own great modern buildings in terror of their lives and their children’s lives, and what they abandon in their fear, we shall occupy in our triumph!”

  This part of it Eddie Champion believed. This part of it excited the lust and anger and emptiness within him. He could not believe in any nine-thousand-year-old memory any more than he believed in some glowing angel stopping the innocent Mary with great tidings. But the old man knew what he was about and he had a plan and the plan was working. Eddie could not conceive of how the Secret Nation thing had got started, but it was well entrenched and its membership was growing. Yet it was a select membership and Eddie was surprised at some of the people who carried the secret scar inside their left wrists: teachers, nurses, social workers, firemen, salesmen, two writers, some guy who did television commercials, and even six cops among the nearly six hundred assorted men and women who ranged from professional to semiprofessional to unskilled labor. The emphasis was upon personal upgrading. Snotty girls with teased hair and skirts tight across their rumps, who spent their days cleaning and sweeping and fetching and carrying for the white ladies, now spent their evenings learning to type and take shorthand and to file and to operate sewing machines. The boys were measured and tested and evaluated and steered to various city agencies where skilled training was offered, where in fact the city paid them to learn a trade.

  But the real training for the boys and young men, the earnest secret training, was offered by the members of the Trained Brigade. Eddie Champion could kill a man with his hands in twenty-two ways with either one blow or a combination of blows and strategically located pressure. His training had been as precise and accurate and exacting as a medical education, and he became so proficient that he was appointed an instructor as soon as he completed his course.

  Until he had been assigned as a member of the Royal Guards whose sole duty was to follow the direct commands of the Royal Leader, Eddie Champion taught ninety-three young men the art of bloodless, weaponless murder. Toward the end of the course, twenty students were selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of their education. One after another, over a period of weeks, each ventured into the streets and proved himself. Several had had some slight difficulty, some clumsiness, some hesitation, but each had been successful.

  He felt honored by his elevation into the most elite body of the Nation, yet he felt some regret because he had truly loved his job as an instructor. Working closely around the body of the Royal Leader completely demolished any small shred of illusion, any superstitious hangovers. This was just a small dried-up old stick of a man who drank warm goat’s milk and spooned in some kind of mashed-up vegetables six times a day and rubbed his thin belly under his robe and belched and rumbled. Eddie’s assignment was to stand within the large office of the Royal Leader, his eyes fixed straight ahead, his body motionless: one of six invisible fixtures who silently opened doors as the Leader approached, fetched papers from one room to another, sharpened pencils and kept their eyes on anyone who came anywhere near the Royal Leader. Watched for a sudden motion of the Leader’s finger, alerted to the silent command to destroy an enemy.

  Though his face remained blank and vacant through the hours he was on duty, Eddie Champion’s mind had come suddenly awake. In all his life Eddie Champion had never had an opportunity for prolonged independent thought; his childhood had been spent in memorizing those things his elders and betters told him he must memorize. His early days in New York had been spent mindlessly pushing racks of clothing through the streets and gutters without getting either smashed by some truck or yelled at by some pedestrian. As a new member of the Secret Nation, he had taken part in a crash course sponsored by one of the city’s poverty programs and he had learned to operate a fairly complicated duplicating machine, which qualified him for a job that paid more money than he had ever held in his hand before.

  But now Eddie Champion was a full-time employee of the Secret Nation, and though some small money came into his pocket each week, all his expenses were taken care of, his rent paid, his food provided, in exchange for his services and special assignments; and now, for the first time, Eddie Champion began wondering about the Secret Nation. He began noticing the procession of visitors. He began listening to the snatches of words and phrases, the quiet-spoken telephone conversations, and he began to wonder about money. His experience was too limited, his knowledge too confined and narrow, but little by little he began to realize that the Royal Leader seemed to have vast sums of money at his disposal. He knew that at each weekly meeting the elderly couples placed folded-up five-dollar bills in the contribution box, after first holding up the corner of the bill to the gatekeeper to assure him that it was the right denomination. That was a pretty good take, but the hall had to be rented, and the chairs. And there was this large apartment, where the Royal Leader and his sister lived and had the office. And there were the expenses of the Royal Guards, and the travel expenses of the Leader.

  Since there was, for a long time, no action assignment to occupy his thoughts, Eddie found himself, more and more, alone in his small closet of a room, trying to calculate what sums of money came into the Royal Leader’s possession. None of the special assignments involved robbery; they were terror attacks on white merchants in the area or on rent collectors; a few quick jobs on frozen-faced white social workers. The object had been to create terror: a feeling of directionless violence. Where did all the money come from?

  And then one day it all became clear to Eddie Champion, and that was when he started his plan. The Royal Leader had a visitor Eddie had never seen before: a tall, thin, light-skinned man in a tan business suit who spoke in a high crackling voice. The man had carried a leather attaché case, like the white men downtown carried, all businesslike and professional. Eddie could not hear the Royal Leader’s voice—it did not carry to the far corner of the room that was his post—but he could hear the other man, whose voice had a nervous, frightened sound.

  “I had to come myself. There was no one else I could trust. Jed was busted and I had to come.” There was an inaudible whispering sound and then the man had said, “Yes, yes. I will. Never again. I swear to you, never again.” The man snapped open the case, and though his body hid his hands, Eddie had one quick glimpse of packets of money reaching the Leader’s hand, then disappearing into the top drawer of his desk.

  Eddie could not sleep that night for pondering the mystery of the money, and the walls of his small room in the tenement building two blocks from the Leader’s apartment offered him no solution. He had got dressed, walked aimlessly along the nighttime streets, then stopped at a bar. It was a run-down place, flyspecked, with a sticky counter and a fat woman bartender. It was a place to stop and think, and Eddie was fingering the watery drink the woman had placed before him when the man in the tan suit came in. Eddie’s first reaction was that the man had come into this place by mistake; he didn’t fit here nohow. But th
e man walked purposefully through the bar, pushed opened a door marked PRIVATE and closed the door behind him. The woman bartender, a wet dirty towel rag in her hand, stared after him, her face angry. She turned, hit the no-cash key on the register, carefully counted out some tens, slammed the drawer shut, and followed to where the man was apparently waiting for her. After a few minutes the man came out, his face damp with perspiration, his eyes set straight ahead. He had noticed neither Eddie Champion nor, apparently, the low mutterings of the woman who stood watching him leave.

  Eddie Champion took one more sip of his drink, pushed the glass away and strolled slowly out of the bar. That night he followed the man in the tan suit to six bars, and in each place the procedure he had observed was repeated. Then the man entered a tenement building. At first Eddie cautiously held back, but his curiosity got the better of him. From the outside the building was just another rotting stink hole, so that the interior hallway was a surprise. It was cleanly painted a bright light blue, it was well lit, and the doors were clearly and neatly numbered. There were no roaches scurrying along the walls, and a faint, tantalizing fragrance floated around Eddie’s head. He heard the sound of high, light voices, laughing voices: female voices. Eddie turned his face quickly to the door marked 4 as the door behind him opened and the man in the tan suit emerged. A female voice called out to Eddie, “Hey, babyboy, don’t take her. She nothin’ but an old bagga guts. What you want is something young and fierce!”