Page 25 of The Deadly Candies

"A Debt Paid in Blood"

Clara Johnson knew blood better than she knew hope—how it pooled, how it clotted, how it kept her siblings alive one grim wooden nickel at a time.

The basement of theLafayette Sanitariumstank of iodine and desperation. A flickering bulb swung overhead, casting shadows on the cracked plaster walls asClara Johnsontightened the tourniquet around a Negro dockworker’s bullet-torn thigh. Her hands were steady, honey-brown, and flecked with old burns from ironing white folks’ shirts in the day and then mending and tending to her patients through the night. They moved with the precision of someone who’d learned triage not in nursing school, but in the cotton fields of Alabama, stitching up her loved ones after hard labor and punishments. At only twenty-nine, she was doctor, nurse, healer, pharmacist all in one. And she did it with joy. New York had become the promised land. Though blacks had their troubles, there were liberties here for her that she could have never imagined back in Rollings.

“Hold still, Mr. Creek,” she said, her voice low and syrup-thick with her southern accent. “This gon’ pinch.”

He bit down on the leather strap she offered just as she put in the work. He grunted through the pain but endured. Black men had been born with a bone of resistance to endure. She’d seen it enough times to know it was the truth. Weren’t no men stronger than her own men.

The clinic’s door above the narrow staircase was tossed open, and the sounds of running feet could be heard. Three then two more men stumbled in, their Italian curses clashing with the distant wail of police sirens. Clara didn’t flinch, she finished Mr. Creek with care. Harlem’s underground clinic saw two kinds of patients after midnight: Black folks too poor for proper hospitals, and white gangsters too wanted by the law to risk it.

The leader, a brute in a bloodied pinstripe suit, barked, “Fix him!Now!”

They dumped their cargo onto Clara’s operating table—a young Sicilian with a face like a saint and a chest soaked crimson.He had appeared too young for the men with him.

Emilio Cattaneo, 20 years old, had already been marked for death by the Irish Hell’s Kitchen crew. His breath gurgled; a .38 slug lodged near his lung, she guessed.

Clara’s eyes narrowed. “Y’all shot too?”

“No,” the brute lied, clutching his own bleeding shoulder.

“Bullshit,” she snapped, yanking his jacket open to reveal a shrapnel wound. “Sit. I’ll get to you when I’m done.”

Outside,Harlempulsed with life. Jukeboxes in corner parlors belted out Bessie Smith’s soulful blues while Yiddish pushcart vendors hawked pickles and knishes above the clinic’s basement. The distant rumble of Irish-Italian gang wars echoed like fireworks from Brooklyn all the way to the streets of Harlem. A grim reminder of the bloodshed that kept Clara’s clinic busy. She was so exhausted that most nights her ironing got started late in the day, and customers were complaining.

Nine years ago,Dr. Abe Goldstein—a chain-smoking Jewish medic with a heart as worn as his leather medical bag—had given Clara a job and a purpose out of desperation. No one wanted to apprentice at the bottom. He needed the help. Together, they’d turned the basement into a sanctuary for the desperate. Cops looked the other way for $20 and a bottle of bathtub gin, leaving Clara to stitch up Harlem’s wounded in peace. However, to keep the money flowing, they accepted back-door clients. Mostly, Irish and Italian gangsters were caught up in the never-ending war between them. The Jewish mobsters could stay with their own kind upstairs.

Clara turned toEmilio, her latest patient. His olive skin had gone ghostly, but his dark eyes burned with defiance. “Non morirò qui,” he rasped.I won’t die here.

“Not if I can help it,” Clara muttered. She glanced atMissy, her assistant, who was finishing up with another patient. “Take over for Creek, Missy. Once he’s done, get my boys in here. I’m gonna need all hands.”

“Yes, Ms. Clara,” Missy said, rushing to the forgotten patient.

One of Emilio’s men—a hulking brute with a bloodied shoulder—trained his pistol on Clara. “You let him die, and you next,” he said with hate.

Clara had guns pointed at her before. God was in control, not some trigger-happy idiot.

She cut away Emilio’s blood-soaked shirt, her hands steady despite the chaos. The cast-iron stove hissed, boiling water and sterilizing instruments. She pulled the basket of tools up from the pot, letting them drain before turning to her siblings—her makeshift medical team had been sent down by Goldestien without a summons.

Little Eddie, the youngest at thirteen, approached first, followed byBig Cee, seventeen and already as tall as their father had been. Clara had raised them since she was sixteen after their parents died in the great flood that had destroyed the negro town of Rollings. To them, she wasn’t just a sister; she was Mama.

“We here, Mama,” Little Eddie said, his voice cracking with adolescence.

“Good. Get him strapped down and ready, baby,” Clara ordered, her tone sharp but not unkind.

“Che sta succedendo?” Emilio yelled in Sicilian, thrashing against the restraints. His wounded comrade tried to explain, but Emilio’s panic only grew.

Clara grabbed a syringe of morphine, her movements precise. “If you want to live, this is the only way,” she said, plunging the needle into his arm.

The room erupted into chaos. Emilio fought the drug’s pull, his curses a torrent of Sicilian. Clara’s boys struggled to hold him down as she dug for the bullet with her surgical tweezers. He was a bleeder, so she had to work fast. And his defiance and resistance made it even harder to do.

“Help my boys or your boss dies!” Clara barked at the other gangsters. They hesitated, then sprang into action, pinning Emilio’s limbs as Little Eddie shoved a leather bit between Emilio’s snapping jaws.

Above, the clinic echoed with the sounds of a police raid. Dr. Goldstein tended to the poor whites above with his nurses while Clara worked below, shielded by the cops’ indifference.Colored folks ain’t worth the trouble,she thought bitterly. Still, if she wanted, she could give up the Sicilians, and they knew it. Those cops hated Sicilians as much as they hated Negroes. This one on the table must have been important to have them running into the clinic while escaping the cops.

She did not. She would not. She lived by a code of her own. Always protect the ones you serve.

The gangsters around her grew jumpy, their eyes darted to the stairs. Their guns drawn. Clara ignored the tension mounting, focusing on the bullet lodged near Emilio’s lung. With a final twist, she pulled it free and dropped it into a copper bowl.

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