By Reason of Insanity (45 page)

On Broadway and 73rd Street the chill drove him into a small restaurant, where he ordered ham and eggs and black coffee. His lifetime in an institution had equipped him for an early breakfast and early dinner, and though he had changed his eating habits to conform to his new-found freedom the idea of breakfast seemed reasonable to him. His table was by the window, a square slab of wood on a center stand and topped with red Formica. The four chairs were the straightback kind, one had a hole punched into its oval seat. He bypassed it for the window slot.

Sipping his hot coffee he watched the hordes of people, all of them intent on their separate journeys. With closed faces and rigid bodies, they rushed past or waited for buses or dove between cars against the light. They behaved
en masse
as though they needed desperately to go somewhere and had precious little time to get there, and after a while Bishop became uneasy watching them. He finally turned away as his mind flashed on an image of rats scurrying in a maze that he had once seen on television. They had nothing to do and nowhere to go but they kept up their frantic activity. He wondered what all the people had to do and where they needed to go. In five minutes he had seen more people than he had in five months at Willows. It was still a bit scary and he was glad he hadn’t come upon them his first day out,

His ham and eggs were brought over and he ate hungrily, staring into the plate. He saved the toast for last, to go with a second cup of coffee.

As he lifted his eyes from the empty dish he saw the girl at the next table. She was sitting alone with a cup in front of her, its handle chipped. Her hair was disheveled, her eyes vacant. She sat motionless save for a slight swaying of the head. Though she stared in his direction she gave no indication of having seen him. For a moment he thought she might be ill but then he remembered all the TV shows he had seen about drug addicts. They looked just like the girl at the table. That same kind of vacant stare, that same nodding of the head. He kept watching her, fascinated.

A man eventually came from behind the counter and told her it was time to go. She didn’t hear him. He said it again. Still no notice. He gently took her arm and raised her to a standing position, then slowly escorted her to the door. He pushed it open and led her out to the sidewalk and a metal pole by the curb. She appeared not to care.

Back in the restaurant the man rubbed his hands briskly as he returned behind the counter. He was a New Yorker, wise to the ways of many life styles and much experienced in the neighborhood. He knew better than to startle a junkie, to come upon one suddenly. Junkies might do anything. The best way was to touch them gently and lead them firmly. They were sick people who needed help they didn’t get. He felt sorry for them even though most of them were pigs. Like the girl he had just got out. He would never trust a junkie, not even for a cup of coffee. Without money they were the poorest of the poor, and that was the worst thing of all to be in New York. Or the South Pole too.

Bishop had noted the episode carefully. The man was very gentle with her, very considerate. Which meant he loved her and was sorry she was a drug addict. It was sad and Bishop giggled softly. He was already learning about New York.

He went back to his coffee and toast. People were still scurrying in all directions. Traffic was backing up, horns were blowing. Someone dashed madly across the street, causing brakes to squeal in the far lane. Others seemingly dared cars to hit them.

A female drug addict. He considered the possibilities. Here, on Broadway in New York City, a woman with dead eyes was killing herself with evil drugs. Trying to end the horror of what she was. Probably many others were doing the same. Women who couldn’t stand the awful suffering any longer and in their madness turned to drugs of death. Women too old or too ill or too crazed to destroy any more men; women ready to die, wanting to die, crying out to die.

Maybe he could help some of them.

He was still thinking about helping women when the young man came over to the table. He took the broken chair, slumped down on it. His hands reached up for his sunglasses. “You holding?”

Bishop turned to him. “Holding what?”

“Your dick,” shot back the other in exasperation. “What you think I mean? Scag. You buying or selling?”

“What’s scag?” Bishop asked. He had the feeling that the youth in pink jeans and flannel shirt had mistaken him for someone else. Someone who spoke another language.

“You a narc or something?”

“Not really.”

“You from the mob?”

“Not really.”

“Which is it?”

“Really not.”

“You just come in for a cup of coffee, is that it?”

Bishop didn’t understand what was so strange about that. It was a restaurant, wasn’t it? Why did people go into restaurants except to eat? But maybe New York was different. Maybe it had restaurants where no one went in just for coffee, maybe even where no one went in to eat anything. But then why did they go at all? He would try to learn what he could.

“I also had ham and eggs,” he said helpfully. He thought that might make him seem all right.

“No shit,” said the youth in disgust.

“No shit,” said Bishop, trying to follow the leader in order to understand what was expected of him.

The pink-jeans-and-flannel-shirt looked at the speaker for the first time. He didn’t see a cop or a hood. So what was it?

“You from here?” he asked suspiciously.

“No.”

“From where?”

“There.”

The youth nodded in sympathetic understanding. “Rough.”

“Rough enough.” Bishop began to believe the man was totally insane.

“So you holding?”

“Holding what?”

That did it for the jeans-and-shirt. He could see only a pure, dumb hick who probably didn’t know one drug from another. And he had some sugar pills on him.

“I got some dynamite shit,” he whispered hoarsely. “You want a dime?”

“I have enough money. Thanks anyway.”

The youth mumbled under his breath. “I mean heroin. Top stuff. I got it in pills. Two for ten bucks.”

Bishop looked at him reproachfully. “I don’t take drugs,” he announced with an air of injured dignity.

“So get ‘em for a friend.”

Dignity turned to the window. The girl was still by the curb, leaning up against the post. An idea came into his head. “All right,” he said, turning back. “I’ll buy two of your drug pills. But only for five dollars.” He remembered a TV show in which a narcotics officer told how drug dealers would sell to strangers for double the price. He was too smart for anything like that.

“Five dollars,” he repeated, “or nothing.”

The youth didn’t even hesitate. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he took out two transparent capsules filled with a white powder and shoved them into the waiting hand.

From his jacket Bishop pulled several bills, careful not to reveal the black money case concealed underneath. He unfolded them; the smallest was a ten. The young man said they wouldn’t change it in the restaurant, but he offered to go across the street to the cigar store and get change while his amigo finished his coffee. It would only take a minute.

Bishop thought that was very nice of him. He watched as the dealer crossed Broadway, dodging cars and buses. Somewhere on the other side of the crowded avenue he lost sight of his ten dollars.

Twenty minutes later, his second cup of coffee long gone, Bishop sadly got up and paid for his meal and left the restaurant. He reminded himself to be more careful in New York. The city might contain some thieves.

Outside he walked over to the girl. Her head was slowly bobbing up and down. Passersby would stare at her for a second and then hurry onward, never breaking their stride. She seemed oblivious to them.

“Where do you live? Can I take you home?” He put his hand on her arm in a gentle manner.

Her only response was to shake herself free.

Several minutes of talk got him nothing but moans from the girl and hostile stares from others. Even mention of the drug didn’t excite her. He decided it was too dangerous for him to be standing there. His intention had been to get her home, assuming she lived alone, and to feed her the drug and then end her misery in celebration of his arrival. Now he saw that would be impractical for him to do.

Regretfully he shoved the two caps in a pocket of the girl’s threadbare coat. She would probably take them as soon as they were found. He knew that heroin sometimes killed people. Overdose, it was called. He hoped they would kill her.

Without a backward glance he walked away, wishing he had bought even more of the pilis.

Over the next several hours he walked around Lincoln Center, which reminded him of Willows, and then the beginnings of Central Park at Columbus Circle. He sat on a bench and ate a bag of hot chestnuts. He rambled through the southwestern corner of the park as far as the bridle path. There were few people about at this time of day, and he felt an odd excitement in being virtually alone in the heart of the big city. The terrain was vastly different from Chicago’s Grant Park, where it was all landscaped and flat and open. Here it rose into hills and deepened to valleys; variety was everywhere, and the rough hand of nature was allowed a certain sway. Bishop liked what he saw of Central Park and he promised himself more at another time. Perhaps with a woman whom he could take into the deep woods …

By noontime he was again on Broadway. At 54th Street he passed an automobile showroom, where he stopped to look in the window at the foreign cars. He saw her reflection in the glass as she came up next to him.

“Need some loving, handsome?”

He turned to her, unsure of himself. “You talking to me?”

She smiled cruelly. “Don’t see nobody else here, do you?”

“You can’t be talking to me because I’m invisible,” he told the girl. He didn’t like her smile.

“And I’m a twelve-year-old virgin,” she said. “You want a quick fuck?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Blow job?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Three-hole combination?”

“I don’t think so.”

She looked exasperated. “You know anything for sure?”

“I know you’re not a twelve-year-old virgin.”

Her eyes folded over. “You not only invisible,” she whispered in an ugly tone, “you not even here.”

He watched her walk away, her long brown legs working like giant pistons. When she got to the corner she turned back. “Faggot,” she yelled.

In his mind’s eye he cut her into four pieces and then sliced each piece into more pieces. He would have liked to work on her in Central Park; nothing would’ve been left but bleached bone.

He finally found what he was looking for on Eighth Avenue between 46th and 47th Street. She was young and soft and nicely plump. She was also alone and waiting for business. He told her he meant business only if she could take him to where she lived. He wanted no hotels; instead he would give her the hotel cost plus her fee. Take it or leave it.

She needed money and he needed privacy. To her he looked respectable enough in his suit, just another crazy businessman who wanted to get his rocks off during the lunch hour. She took it.

In her nearby one-and-a-half-room apartment he quickly strangled the girl and put her body in the bathtub, where he cut the throat and drained the blood. Now he could literally feel the animal cunning seep through the pores into his senses. When he had finished he refilled the tub with lukewarm water and rinsed himself thoroughly.

He was the wolf who had washed in the blood of the lamb.

He was the traveler who had made his thanksgiving for a safe journey.

He was the demon hunter who had done the work for which he was destined.

On a vanity mirror the wolf left its paw mark in blood. Underneath, the demon hunter scrawled one bloody word.

By six o’clock that evening the traveler had found a haven. He had spent the afternoon downtown, having earlier determined that the Lower East Side and the Soho district best fulfilled his requirements of a crowded area of young people with little money. He liked the variety of the Lower East Side, its splash and color and vitality, its small shops and packed humanity. But much of it sounded foreign, which would not suit his primary requirement of anonymity. He needed to blend into sheer invisibility and could do so only among his own kind. After looking at several places between Houston and Canal streets he finally settled on a large loft in Soho.

The three-story building on Greene Street was an old converted warehouse. A loading platform on street level was used during the day for storage by several local outlets renting space by the square foot. The second and third floors had a separate entrance. He would occupy the second floor. The third was unfinished and partially boarded up at the bottom of the narrow staircase. He would thus have the only key to the front door. In effect he had almost total privacy, since he would be alone in the building for much of each day and all night and weekends. Yet he was surrounded by thousands of young people living in similar quarters.

The loft was ideal for his purposes and Bishop quickly grabbed it, though he hadn’t intended to spend quite so much. The monthly rental was $195 and he had to give an extra month’s rent as security to the owner of the building. His intention was to live on the money he now had for a long time to come, and he didn’t relish spending any more than was absolutely necessary.

Officially, the loft was only his working studio because under city zoning laws the area was not set up for living accommodations. Nor was his building licensed for living space. In practice, of course, all the thousands of tenants actually resided in their working studios, though legally they simply didn’t exist. Which bothered no one in the neighborhood, least of all Bishop, who rather liked the idea of being surrounded by people who didn’t exist. Half of whom he longed to make literally true.

His working studio/living loft had a gas-fired heater and a double sink and small toilet with a bathtub. The owner offered him the use of a refrigerator and stove, both already installed, for a one-time payment of $75. He accepted the offer, realizing a refusal would mean losing the place. A folding cot was thrown in free, as were the few pieces of furniture left by the previous tenant, who had to leave suddenly for a job elsewhere.