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pattern.
    The first of the three events began by chance, two months after he found the lawyer’s body, in a barbershop on Amsterdam Avenue. It was an April Saturday, unusually sultry for a Manhattan spring. The women of Harlem brought out their pastels. The men carried their jackets over their shoulders but did not forgo their hats. The darker nation needed this warm relief from a difficult winter. The Southern states had announced their “rejection” of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions. All over Harlem, people shivered, whispering of a second Civil War. Then, just days ago, at the end of March, Walter White, legendary head of the NAACP, had died. The race had lost its leader. At the barbershop, everyone was lamenting. Eddie was there to have his hair cut, but others glided in and out of the door because the barber was known to supply mezzroll, Harlem slang of the day for high-quality marijuana. You slipped the barber’s assistant a couple of bills, and another assistant met you near the filthy men’s room in the back. Eddie had no interest in the shop’s sideline. He went for the history. The head barber, Mr. Pond, would fill your head with stories, some of them possibly true, of the jazz joints where he used to play piano before he cut hair—the Exclusive at 136th and Lenox, the Yeah Man on Seventh, even the world-famous Rhythm Club—and the celebrities he claimed to have barbered in the old days, from Lonnie Johnson to Willie “The Lion” Smith to Fats Waller to Jelly Roll Morton. Maybe. Maybe not. Today Eddie wore brightly colored billowing pants with a wide belt, not really to his taste, although his friends assured him they were the latest fashion. A famous writer, they said, should keep up with the times, and Eddie, although not yet famous, ruefully conceded the point. Sitting in the barber chair, characters from his next story shuffling and reshuffling through his head, Eddie heard a couple of men behind him laughing about a belt and for a terrible second burned with embarrassment. When he listened more closely, he realized that the joke was not about his clothes but about somebody whose name was Belt.
Doctor
Belt, the men said: the title emphasized and drawn out in the wonder typical of those times, especially down in the Valley, where educated Negroes were less common. Doctor Belt had come to Harlem, the men were saying, to general guffaws from the shop, and the bartenders better look out.
    Eddie was not, really, a man who hung out in bars, for he had been bred, much against his will, to a disdain of a certain kind of Negro. He did his drinking in the nicer clubs and the salons instead. But so did Doctor Belt. The name was familiar. Eddie had saved the stories about Castle. Flipping through them later, he found a list in the
Amsterdam News
of prominent Negroes the lawyer had numbered among his friends. There it was, Doctor Joseph Belt, identified as a “government official.” Eddie learned over the next few days that Belt was a physicist, a former assistant professor at Stanford, who now earned a nice living at a laboratory out west. Eddie was intrigued. He had not met many Negro scientists, although he himself had once hoped to be one. Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of them all, had died in Princeton, New Jersey, the other day, and periodicals everywhere were running stories on “the technological century.” Scientists had become heroes. Technology was everywhere. Polio had been cured. A new invention not only washed your dishes for you but dried them. There was serious talk of putting a man on the moon. It had become possible to incinerate a hundred thousand people in a heartbeat. The darker nation was caught up in the excitement. There was an editor at the
Amsterdam News
who now and then still published Eddie’s essays. It occurred to Eddie that he might track down Doctor Belt for a quick interview, a black take on the