"I want to report that a white man is being chased down Lenox Avenue by a colored man with a gun," the voice said with the smug sanctimoniousness of a saved sister. Lieutenant Anderson pushed aside the record sheet and pulled forward a report pad. When he'd finished taking down the essential details of her incoherent account, he said, "Thank you, Mrs. Collins," hung up and reached for the closed line to central police on Centre Street. "Give me the radio dispatcher," he said.

Two colored men were driving east on 135th Street in the wake of a crosstown bus. Shapeless dark hats sat squarely on their clipped kinky hair and their big frames filled up the front seat of a small, battered black sedan. Static crackled from the shortwave radio and a metallic voice said: "Calling all cars. Riot threatens in Harlem. White man running south on Lenox Avenue at 128th Street. Chased by drunken Negro with gun. Danger of murder." "Better goose it," the one on the inside said in a grating voice. "I reckon so," the driver replied laconically. He gave a short sharp blast on the siren and gunned the small sedan in a crying U-turn in the middle of the block, cutting in front of a taxi coming fast from the direction of The Bronx. The taxi tore its brakes to keep from ramming into the sedan. Seeing the private license plates, the taxi driver thought they were two small-time hustlers trying to play big shots with the siren on their car. He was an Italian from The Bronx who had grown up with bigtime-gangsters and Harlem hoodlums didn't scare him. He leaned out of his window and yelled, "You ain't plowing cotton in Mississippi, you black son of a bitch. This is New York City, the Big Apple, where people drive-" The colored man riding with his girl friend in the back seat leaned quickly forward and yanked at his sleeve. "Man, come back in here and shut yo' mouth," he warned anxiously.