Death Wish (10 page)

“Of course.”

“Then you're all set. I only wanted to make sure you were feeling up to it—it will be a tough job, Paul. It's going to take all your time for several weeks. I wanted to check with you this far in advance because you have to be certain you're willing to be away from your daughter for that period of time and ready to devote your complete attention to it.”

He hadn't been allowed to see Carol anyway. The trip away from the city might clear his head; things were pressing in on him. “I'll be glad to do it, Mr. Ives. I'm grateful for the opportunity.”

“We'll go over the details with George Eng before you leave. You've got a couple of weeks to prepare yourself. I know you'll do a fine job with it, Paul—I've always had every confidence in you.”

Paul walked in relief to the door. When he glanced back across the length of the room Ives had a copy of the Revenue Code open and was scowling furiously at it.

9

“Well, you got pretty good hinges on this door,” the locksmith said. “Lucky. Some of these newer buildings, they got hinges you could bust with a toothpick.”

The first locksmith with whom Paul had made an appointment had failed to show up. It hadn't occurred to him at the time and he'd forgotten it for a while. He'd called this fellow two days ago—a squat bald man with a cauliflower ear and feral eyes. He had tools all over the foyer carpet; curlings of sawdust beneath the door where he was drilling into its edge. “Now you realize you can't just pull the door shut with this lock. You got to turn the key, otherwise it's not locked at all.”

“I understand that. What concerns me is that nobody should be able to get in when it's locked. If I leave it unlocked it's my own stupidity.”

“Sure. Well, there ain't no lock in the world that's sure proof against an experienced pickman, but there ain't many of them around and they usually don't go for buildings like this one. Where you get trouble with them's over on the East Side mostly—Fifth along the park, the East Sixties, Sutton Place, like that. I got one place I put three locks on their front door, most expensive locks you can buy, but didn't stop some pickman from getting in the day after he read in the papers about these folks sailing to Europe. Stripped the place clean.”

The locksmith scraped sawdust out of the hole he had cut and began to fit an enormous device into it. “It sure don't pay to tell the newspapers you're going away,” he said. “Listen, you wasn't planning to sell any valuables, are you?”

“Why?”

“If you do, don't put your name and address in the ad. That's an engraved invitation to thieves.”

“I hadn't thought of that.”

“Listen, there's plenty of things you can do to make it harder on these guys. Most people just leave one little light on when they go out—that's stupid. Every burglar in the world knows that leave-the-light-on routine. What I always tell my clients, when you go out for the evening or to the office for the day or whatever, leave two-three lights on and turn your radio on so a guy can hear it if he's standing outside your door. And there's another thing—the middle of the hot summer days, these dope addicts go along the street lookin' up at all the apartment house windows. They see an air conditioner sticking out a window that's not turned on and dripping, they know nobody's home. It don't cost that much electricity to leave a few lights on and run your air conditioner on low when you ain't home, and leave the radio on. Cheap insurance, I always call it.”

“I'll keep it in mind.”

He hadn't skied since 1948, and then only a few timorous times, but in his dream he was skiing down a long white slope—faster and ever faster, and then the slope grew steeper and he could not turn, the cold wind scissored his ears, the skis whispered under him with terrifying sluicing speed, and the hill kept tilting downward and he could not turn.

He awoke with chilled feet and lay in bed listening to the garbage trucks and watching shards of dim light flash through the blinds. Out there they were killing people. There was nothing to think about but that; and nothing to do but think about it in the insomniac night.

His feet were cold and yet the room was filled with a dense stale heat and the thick-tongued smell of bad sleep. He got up and switched on the air conditioner, went to the refrigerator and poured a glass of milk and brought it back to the nightstand by the bed. Now over the chill drumming whisper of the air conditioner he heard the swishing of cars in the street—it had started raining. His eyes dreamily tracked the wavering liquid light-movements on the ceiling; he heard the rain when a gust of wind blew it against the window. Unable to stand it any longer he got up again and took a pair of wool socks from the drawer, put them on and got back into bed, pulling the covers up neatly over him. The edge of the sheet dragged the glass of milk over and spilled it to the carpet. He cursed at the top of his lungs; slammed out of bed and went to get the sponge and paper towels.

It was no good trying to sleep any more. Half-past two in the morning. He reached for a book but couldn't focus his eyes on the print; put it away and switched off the light and sat up in bed in the dark, swearing, staring.

Even in the darkness—perhaps especially in the darkness—the room had snaggy edges where memories clung.
I
ought to give up the apartment, move somewhere
. Maybe move into one of those residential hotels where you got daily maid service.

The hell
, he thought,
the only sane thing to do is move out of the city
. Get an efficiency in one of those high-rises across the Hudson on the Palisades, or maybe even a cottage in Jersey or Orange County. Not Long Island, he thought; he couldn't stand Long Island. But somewhere out of the city—out of this madness.

That's wrong. That's giving in to them. I'm not running away. Stay and fight
.

Fight how?

The mind wove ridiculous fantasies in the middle of the night. Feeling like an ass he got a glass of water, washed down a sleeping pill, set the alarm and went back to bed.

“Damn it, Lieutenant, haven't you got anywhere at all?”

“We're doing everything we can, Mr. Benjamin. We've picked up several people for questioning.”

“That's not enough!”

“Look, I know how you feel, sir, but we're doing everything we know how to do. We've assigned several extra men to the case. Some of the best detectives on the force. I don't know what else I could tell you.”

“You could tell me you've nailed the bastards.”

“I could, yes sir, but it wouldn't be true.”

“The trail's getting colder all the time, Lieutenant.”

“I know that, sir.”

“Damn it, I want results!”

But the haranguing gave him no satisfaction and after he hung up the phone he sat cracking his knuckles and looking for someone to hit.

*  *  *

Lunch in Schrafft's—single tables occupied by little old ladies in prim hats.
We are all dressing for dinner in the jungle
. He remembered a year or so ago in the same restaurant—lunching with Sam Kreutzer that day—he'd sat and watched an elderly woman alone at a table suddenly hurl water tumblers and silverware at the wall mirror. He had been shocked. If it had happened today he would regard it as predictably logical behavior. Everybody lived like a character in a one-act play that nobody understood; getting by from one moment to the next was like trying to hold on to your hat in a gusty wind.

He returned to the office after lunch and spent an hour deliberating over the Amercon papers George Eng had delivered two days earlier. Steeping himself in figures and processes so he would be ready for the trip out West at the end of next week.

At half-past three he phoned Jack's office but Jack was in court. He tried again just before five and caught him in. “How is she?”

“Rotten.”

His scalp contracted. “What's happened?”

“Nothing sudden. It's hard to describe—it's like watching someone sink into quicksand and knowing there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.”

“She's just not responding?”

“The doctor's starting to talk about shock treatments. Insulin shock, not electric.”

He was tired, suddenly; his swollen eyes took longer to blink. Coming on top of the rest it was just too much to expect a man to bear.

Jack was saying, “… form of amnesiac catatonia. She looks at things and evidently she sees them, she recognizes you when you walk into the room, but it's as if there's no
emotional
reaction. As if she observes everything without any associations. You can turn her around and give her a push and she'll walk across the room as obediently as a wind-up toy. She eats by herself if you put the food in front of her, but she doesn't seem to care what it is. She ate a whole plate full of calves' liver last night and you know how she detests the stuff. She didn't even seem to notice. It's as if there's some kind of short-circuit somewhere between the taste-buds and the brain, or between the eyes and the brain. When I go in to see her she knows who I am, but she doesn't
recognize
me—not in the sense of relating me to herself.”

He listened to Jack's words and feeling almost burst his throat.

After he hung up, Dundee came into the office. Took one look at his face and said in alarm, “Paul?”

“There's nothing to talk about, Bill. Not right now.”

He left the building and walked through Grand Central to the subway steps, moving with a heavy deliberation in his tread. Walked down to the platform and waited for the crosstown Shuttle. The tunnel was hot and crowded, stinking of stale air and urine and soot. Grease-sweaty people jostled angrily along the brink of the platform. He had never actually seen anyone pushed off onto the tracks, but he knew it happened. Whole rows of people, jammed together, leaning vertiginously out over the concrete lip to peer down the tracks in search of approaching headlight beams.

The trains were running slow today; when the next one came in he had to squeeze into it and suck in his belly against the closing doors. It was impossible to breathe. He flattened his hand over his wallet pocket and kept it there for the duration of the brief ride to Times Square. A black fist clutched the steel overhead strap by his cheek. Scarred knuckles, pink cuticles. He looked over his shoulder and for a moment he could have sworn it was the same man in the cowboy hat who'd been standing on his corner a few nights ago, staring at him, smiling. After a moment he realized it wasn't the same face.
Getting paranoid for sure
, he thought.

For some indeterminate reason the Broadway Express was less crowded; usually it was packed more thickly than the Shuttle. But he found a seat and sat with his legs close together and his elbows tight against his abdomen, squeezed between two women. One of them had a sickening load of garlic on her breath; he averted his face and breathed as shallowly as he could. The train lurched and swayed on its worn-out rails. Motes of filth hung visibly in the air. Some of the ceiling lights had blown out; half the car was in gloom. He found he was looking from face to face along the rows of crowded passengers, resentfully scanning them for signs of redeeming worth: if you wanted to do something about overpopulation this was the place to start. He made a head-count and discovered that of the fifty-eight faces he could see, seven appeared to belong to people who had a right to survive. The rest were fodder.

I
should have been a Nazi
. A shrieking scrape of brake shoes; the train bucked to a halt. He dived out of the car onto the Seventy-second Street platform and followed the crowd to the narrow stairs. The funnel blocked everything and the crowd stood and milled like bees around a hive; it was an inexcusable time before he was on the stairs. They were cattle being prodded up a chute. Human cattle most of them: you could see in their faces and bodies they didn't deserve life, they had nothing to contribute except the smelly unimaginative existences of their wretched carcasses. They had never read a book, created a phrase, looked at a budding flower and really seen it. All they did was get in your way. Their lives were unending litanies of anger and frustration and complaint; they whined their way from cradle to grave. What good were they to anyone? Exterminate them.

He batted his way through to the turnstile, using his elbows with indiscriminate discourtesy; rushed outside onto the concrete island and stood there getting his breath while the light changed.

He cried at the corny sad dramas on television; he knew every commercial by heart. At half-past nine in the middle of a program an announcer said, “… will continue following station identification,” and he stormed across the room and switched the set off.

After
, he thought,
not “following.” Where the hell did those imbeciles go to school? It's after station identification
.