"Then you know him?"
"Ah say he nothing. Hey, Sugar Baby, tell mah man hyeah whuffo Joey 172."
"He nuffin'," said Sugar Baby, holding his painful right arm as vertical as possible. If he held it straight down and breathed very gently he could make the wrist pain almost bearable, if the elbow were cradled just right. When Sugar Baby said "nuffin'," he said it very softly.
"Where's he from?" Remo asked.
"Nowhere, man. He's nothing."
"Try," said Remo.
"Ah'm tryn, man. He ain' big enough to be from somewheres."
"Where's nowhere?" asked Remo.
"Lotsa places nowhere, man. You dumb or something?" said Sugar Baby.
"Name some," said Remo and gave Sugar Baby's dangling right arm a gentle touch.
Sugar Baby screamed. He suddenly remembered someone saying once that Joey was from the Stuyvesant High School.
"All right, we'll all go there," said Remo.
"Bronx High School of Science," Sugar Baby corrected quickly. "He one of them Toms. Bronx High School of Science. Ah seen a Joey 172 there. They say that where he from."
"Are you sure?" asked Remo.
And even in the next great pain, Sugar Baby allowed as how nobody could be sure, and Antwan too allowed as how it was probably Bronx High School of Science. Now, if the man wanted Chico, they could get him Chico for sure. Everybody knew Chico. For Chico they could give him the address.
"Thank you," said Remo.
As an afterthought he took the can of green glow spray paint and, ripping off their shirts, made a neat artistic "Remo" on each of their chests.
"I'm an artist myself," said Remo and went whistling off to find the Bronx High School of Science building, which as it turned out was nearby. On all the walls, there was no Joey 172. It was a big city and finding one graffiti artist in a plague of them was like singling out a locust in a swarm. And then he had an idea. He bought a can of white spray paint from a hardware store open late and convinced a cab driver to take him to Harlem. This required a fist full of twenty-dollar bills and a gentle stroking of the cab driver's neck. When Remo told the driver to let him off in front of an empty lot, the driver tried to nod but his neck hurt too much.
Remo skipped into the lot from the silent street. If night crime had thinned the street population of the rest of New York City, it had made Harlem into a desperately quiet enclave of citizens bunkered precariously for the night. Almost nothing moved except occasional packs of youngsters or convoys of grownups.
Stores were shuttered with metal shields, occasionally working streetlights illuminated empty littered sidewalks, a rat scurried soundlessly along a wall. And it was the wall Remo wanted.
Even in the dim half-light, he could make out the strong lines of powerful colors blending into a mosaic of fine black faces, set like a monument of a new generation against the decaying brick of a preceding one. It was a "wall of respect," and it hurt Remo a bit to deface it.
With the white paint, he sprayed a neat and glaring "Joey 172" across the wall and then faded back across the street to wait. The first person to spot the desecration of the wall that was, by custom and mutual consent, not to be touched was a youngster with a key around his neck. He stopped as if hit in the stomach with a pail of water. Remo lounged on a stoop. The gray dawn was succumbing to light. The youngster ran off. Remo smelled the ripe aroma of day-old greasy ribs, combined with week-old oranges and rotting chicken bones.
The street lights went off. The youngster came back with three others. By the time the sun was high, Remo had what he wanted. A large crowd formed in front of the wall spilling out into the street. Young men in gang jackets, older ones in rainbows of reds and yellows and platform shoes, a few winos careening precariously in place, a fat woman with layers of clothes like tenting over haystacks.
And down the street, his arms pinned by two burly men with raging Afroes, was a young man, his eyeglasses askew, his eyes wide with terror, his sneakers kicking helplessly in the air.
"That him," yelled a woman. "That Joey 172."
"Burn the mother," yelled a man.
"Cut him," shrieked a kid. "Cut him. Cut him good."
Remo eased himself from the stoop and cut into the mob, some of whom had been loudly discussing what to do about the white man across the street.
He wedged himself toward the opening where the two burly men were slapping the youngster into place. Remo cleared a small area in front of him quickly. To the crowd it looked like hands floating and bodies falling. The front of the crowd, after making some useless swings with knives and knuckles, tried to retreat from Remo. The back pushed forward and the front pushed back. Swinging started in the center of the crowd. Remo yelled for quiet. He wasn't heard.
"I don't suppose," he said, in a voice smothered to insignificance, like a pebble rolling uphill against an avalanche, "that you would consider this graffiti an expression of culture and ethnic pride?"
Not getting a response, he dropped the young man's handlers with two backhands flat to the side of the skull, just compressing the blood flow momentarily. Each dropped like a ripe plum. Remo grabbed the boy and cut his way through a wing of the crowd. Two blocks away, he avoided a police column that was waiting for the mob to fight out its energy before moving in.
"Hey, man, thanks," said the youngster.
"You're not going anywhere, kid," said Remo, stopping the lad by cementing the tool's wrist to his palm. They were in a deserted alley now with crumbled bricks rising toward the end like refuse from a bombing raid.
"Are you the painter of the Joey 172's?" Remo asked.
"No, man, I swear it," said the boy. He was about twelve years old, a foot shorter than Remo. His Captain Kangaroo tee shirt was torn off his left side revealing a skinny chest and bony shoulders.
"All right," said Remo. "I'll take you back to the mob, then."
"I did it," said the boy.
"Now we're talking."
"But I didn't mess up no wall of respect, man."
"I know," said Remo. "I did it for you."
"You mother," said the boy. "What'd you do that for?"
"So that I could enlist the aid and resources of the community in meeting you."
"You ain't much with a spray can, man. You got a weak hand. A real weak hand."
"I never defaced anything before," said Remo.
"Why should I help you?" asked the boy logically.
"Because on one hand I'm going to give you two hundred dollars cash if you do, and on the other, I'm going to puncture your ear drums if you don't," said Remo, just as logically.
"You make a sweet offer. Where's the money?"
Remo took a wad of bills from his pocket and counted out exactly two hundred dollars.
"I'll be back in a minute," said the boy. "I just want to see if this money's real. Can't be too careful nowadays."