The 1st Deadly Sin (86 page)

Squad cars were driven in as close as possible; their headlights and searchlights were used to illuminate the scene. Portable battery lanterns were set out to open up the shadows. Captain Delaney had called Special Operations and requisitioned a generator truck and a flatbed of heavy searchlights with cables long enough so the lights could be set up completely around Devil’s Needle.

Captain Bertram Sneed was bringing in a field radio receiver-transmitter; the local power company was running in a temporary line. The local telephone company was bringing in extra lines and setting up pay phones for the press.

Major Samuel Barnes had not yet put in an appearance, but Delaney spoke to him on the phone. Barnes was snappish and all business. He promised to reshuffle his patrol schedules and send another twenty troopers over by bus as soon as possible. He was also working on the road blocks, and expected to have the Chilton area sealed off by dawn.

He and Delaney agreed on some ground rules. Delaney would be the on-the-spot commander with Sneed acting as his deputy. But Major Barnes would be nominal commander when the first report to the press was made, calling the siege of Devil’s Needle a “joint operation” of New York State and New York City police. All press releases were to be okayed by both sides; no press conferences were to be held or interviews granted without representatives of both sides present.

Before agreeing. Captain Delaney called Deputy Inspector Thorsen to explain the situation and outline the terms of the oral agreement with the State. Thorsen said he'd call back; Delaney suspected he was checking with Deputy Mayor Alinski. In any event, Thorsen called back shortly and gave him the okay.

Little of what they accomplished would have been possible without the aid of Chief Evelyn Forrest. Laconic, unflappable, never rushing, the man was a miracle of efficiency, joshing the executives of the local power and telephone companies to get their men cracking.

It was Forrest who brought out a highway crew to open up the shut-off water fountains in the Park and set up two portable chemical toilets. The Chief also got the Chilton High School, closed for the Christmas holiday, to open up the gymnasium, to be used as a dormitory for the officers assigned to Devil’s Needle. Cots, mattresses, pillows and blankets were brought in from the county National Guard armory. Forrest even remembered to alert the Chilton disaster unit; they provided a van with sides that folded down to form counters. They served hot coffee and doughnuts in the Park around the clock, the van staffed by lady volunteers.

Chief Forrest had offered Captain Delaney the hospitality of his home, but the Captain opted for a National Guard cot set up in the gate-keeper’s cottage. But, the night being unexpectedly chill, he did accept the Chief’s loan of a coat. What a garment it was! Made of grey herringbone tweed, it was lined with raccoon fur with a wide collar of beaver. It came to Delaney’s ankles, the cuffs to his knuckles. The weight of it bowed his shoulders, but it was undeniably warm.

“My daddy’s coat,” Chief Forrest said proudly. “Made in Philadelphia in Nineteen-and-one. Can’t buy a coat like that these days.”

So they all worked hard, and Delaney had one moment of laughing fear when he thought of what fools they’d all look if it turned out that somehow Daniel G. Blank had already climbed down off his perch and escaped into the night. But he put that thought away from him.

Shortly after dark they started bullhorn appeals to the fugitive, to be repeated every hour on the hour:

“Daniel Blank, this is the police. You are surrounded and have no chance of escape. Come down and you will not be hurt. You will be given a fair trial, represented by legal counsel. Come down now and save yourself a lot of trouble. Daniel Blank, you will not be injured in any way if you come down now. You have no chance of escape.”

“Do any good, you think?” Forrest asked Delaney.

“No.”

“Well,” the Chief sighed, “at least it’ll make it harder for him to get some sleep.”

By 11:30 p.m., Delaney felt bone-weary and cruddy, wanted nothing more than a hot bath and eight hours of sleep. Yet when he lay down on his cold cot without undressing, just to rest for a few moments, he could not close his eyes, but lay stiffly awake, brain churning, nerves jangling. He rose, pulled on that marvelous coat, walked out onto the porch.

There were a lot of men still about—detectives and troopers, power and telephone repairmen, highway crews, reporters, television technicians. Delaney leaned against the railing, observed that all of them, sooner or later, went wandering off, affecting nonchalance, but looking back in guilt, anxious to see if anyone had noted their departure, half-ashamed of what they were doing. He knew what they were doing; they were going to Devil’s Needle to stand, stare up and wonder.

He did the same thing himself, drawn against his will. He went as far as the rock outcrops, then stepped back into the shadow of a huge, leafless sugar maple. From there he could see the slowly circling sentries, the sniper sitting patiently on his blanket, rifle cradled on one arm. And there were all the men who had come to watch, standing with heads thrown back, mouths open, eyes turned upward.

Then there was the palely illumined bulk of Devil’s Needle itself, looming like a veined apparition in the night. Captain Delaney, too, lifted his head, opened his mouth, turned his eyes upward. Above the stone, dimly, he could see stars whirling their courses in a black vault that went on forever.

He felt a vertigo, not so much of the body as of the spirit. He had never been so unsure of himself. His life seemed giddy and without purpose. Everything was toppling. His wife was dying and Devil’s Needle was falling. Monica Gilbert hated him and that man up there, that man…he knew it all. Yes,

Captain Edward X. Delaney decided, that man now knew it all, or was moving toward it with purpose and delight.

He became conscious of someone standing near him. Then he heard the words.

“…soon as I could,” Thomas Handry was saying. “Thanks for the tip. I filed a background story and then drove up. I’m staying at a motel just north of Chilton.”

Delaney nodded.

“You all right, Captain?”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

Handry turned to look at Devil’s Needle. Like the others, his head went back, mouth opened, eyes rolled up.

Suddenly they heard the bullhorn boom. It was midnight.

The bullhorn clicked off. The watching men strained their eyes upward. There was no movement atop Devil’s Needle.

“He’s not coming down, is he, Captain?” Handry asked softly.

“No,” Captain Delaney said wonderingly. “He’s not coming down.”

6

H
E AWOKE THE
first morning on Devil’s Needle, and it seemed to him he had been dreaming. He remembered a voice calling, “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” That could have been his mother because she always used his full name. “Daniel Blank, have you done your homework? Daniel Blank, I want you to go to the store for me. Daniel Blank, did you wash your hands?” That was strange, he realized for the first time—she never called him Daniel or Dan or son.

He looked at his watch; it showed 11:43. But that was absurd, he knew; the sun was just rising. He peered closer and saw the sweep second hand had stopped; he had forgotten to wind it. Well, he could wind it now, set it approximately, but time really didn’t matter. He slipped the gold expansion band off his wrist, tossed the watch over the side.

He rummaged through his rucksack. When he found he had neglected to pack sandwiches and a thermos, he was not perturbed. It was not important.

He had slept fully clothed, crampons wedged under his ribs, spikes up, so he wouldn’t roll off Devil’s Needle in his sleep. Now he climbed shakily to his feet, feeling stiffness in shoulders and hips, and stood in the center of the little rock plateau where he could not be seen from the ground. He did stretching exercises, bending sideways at the waist, hands on hips; then bending down, knees locked, to place his palms flat on the chill stone; then jogging in place while he counted off five minutes.

He was gasping for breath when he finished, and his knees were trembling; he really wasn’t in very good condition, he acknowledged, and resolved to spend at least an hour a day in stretching and deep-breathing exercises. But then he heard his name being called again. Lying on his stomach, he inched cautiously to the edge of Devil’s Needle.

Yes, they were calling his name, asking him to come down, promising he wouldn’t be hurt. He wasn’t interested in that, but he was surprised by the number of men and vehicles down there. The packed dirt compound around the gate-keeper’s cottage was crowded; everyone seemed very busy with some job they were all doing. When he looked directly downward, he could see armed men circling the base of Devil’s Needle, but whether they were protecting the others from him or him from the others, he could not say and didn’t care.

He felt a need to urinate, and did so, lying on his side, peeing so the stream went over the edge of the rock. There wasn’t very much, and it seemed to him of a milky whiteness, not golden at all. There was a clogged heaviness in his bowels, but the difficulties of defecating up there, what he would do with the excrement, how he would wipe himself clean, were such that he resisted the urge, rolled back to the center of the stone, lay on his back, stared at the new sun.

At no time had he debated with himself and come to a conscious decision to stay up there, to die up there. It was just something his mind grasped instinctively and accepted. He was not driven to it; even now he could descend if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was content where he was, in a condition of almost drowsy ease. And he was safe; that was important. He had his ice ax and could easily smash the skull of any climber who came after him. But what if one should come in the dark, wiggling his way silently upward to kill Daniel G. Blank as he slept?

He didn’t think it likely that anyone would attempt a night climb, but just to make it more difficult, he took his ice ax and using it as a hammer, knocked loose the two pitons that aided the final crawl from the chimney to the top of Devil’s Needle. The task took a long time; he had to rest awhile after the pitons were free. Then he slid them skittering across the stone, watched them disappear over the side.

Then they were calling his name again, a great mechanical booming: “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” He wished they wouldn’t do that. For a moment he thought of shouting down and telling them to stop. But they probably wouldn’t. The thing was, it was disturbing his reverie, intruding on his isolation. He was enjoying his solitude, but it should have been a silent separateness.

He rolled over on his face, warming now as the watery sun rose higher. Beneath his eyes, close, close, he saw the rock itself, its texture. In all his years of mountain climbing and rock collecting, he had never looked at stone in that manner, seeing beneath the worn surface gloss, penetrating to the deep heart. He saw then what the stone was, and his own body, and the winter trees and glazed sun: infinite millions of bits, multicolored, in chance motion, a wild dance that went on and on ’to some silent tune.

He thought, for awhile, that these bits might be similar to the “bits” stored by a computer, recalled when needed to form a pattern, solve a problem, produce a meaningful answer. But this seemed to him too easy a solution, for if a cosmic computer did exist, who had programmed it, who would pose the questions and demand the answers? What answers? What questions?

He dozed off for awhile, awoke with that steel voice echoing, “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” and was forced to remember who he was.

Celia had found her certitude—whatever it was—and he supposed everyone in the world was searching for his own, and perhaps finding it, or settling, disappointed, for something less. But what was important what was important was…What was important? It had been right there, he had been thinking of it, and then it went away.

There was a sudden griping in his bowels a sharp pain that brought him sitting upright, gasping and frightened. He massaged his abdomen gently. Eventually the pain went away, leaving a leaden stuffiness. There was something in there, something in him…He fell asleep finally, dimly hearing the ghost voice calling, “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” It might be his imagination, he admitted, but it seemed to him the voice was higher in pitch now, almost feminine in timbre, dawdling lovingly over the syllables of his name. Someone who loved him was calling.

Was it the second day or the third? Well…no matter. Anyway, a helicopter came over, dipped, circled his castle, tilted. He had been sitting with his knees drawn up, head down on folded arms, and he raised his head to stare at it. He thought they might shoot him or drop a bomb on him. He waited patiently, dreaming. But they just circled him, low, three or four times; he could see pale faces at the windows, peering down at him. He lowered his head again.

They came back, every day, and he tried to pay no attention to them, but the heavy throbbing of the rotor was annoying. It was slow enough to have a discernible rhythm, a heartbeat in the sky. Once they came so low over him that the downdraft blew his knitted watch cap off the stone. It went sailing out into space, then fell into the reaching spines of winter trees. He watched it go.

One morning—when was it?—he knew he was going to defecate and could not control himself. He fumbled at his belt with weak fingers, got it unbuckled and his pants down, but was too late to pull down his flowered bikini panties, and had to void. It was painful. Later he got his pants off his feet—he had to take his boots off first—then pulled down the panties and shook them out.

He looked at his feces curiously. They were small black balls, hard and round as marbles. He flicked them, one by one, with his forefinger; they rolled across the stone, over the edge. He knew he no longer had the strength to dress, but he could tug off socks, jacket, and shirt. Then he was naked, baring his shrunken body to pale sun.

He was no longer thirsty, no longer hungry. Most amazing, he was not cold, but suffused with a sleepy warmth that tingled his limbs. He was, he knew, sleeping more and more until on the fourth day—or perhaps it was the fifth—he was not conscious of sleep as a separate state. Sleep and wakefulness became so thin that they were no longer oil and water, but one fluid, grey and without flavor, that ebbed and flowed.