The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  “Unlock your cab door,” Ryder said. His voice was flat, uninflected. The motorman’s small blue eyes were tearing, and he seemed dazed. Ryder leaned on the gun, feeling the softness of the cheek give to the pressure. “Pay attention to me. Open your cab door or I’ll kill you.”

  The motorman nodded his head but didn’t otherwise move. He looked stricken, paralyzed; his high-colored skin had turned gray.

  Ryder spoke more slowly. “I’m going to tell you this just once more, and then I’m going to shoot your face off. Open up the cab door. Don’t do anything else. Don’t make a sound. Just unlock your cab door, and do it now. Now.”

  The motorman’s left hand moved, touching the steel door, sliding along it blindly until it felt the latch. His fingers were trembling, but they turned the latch, and Ryder heard the tiny click as the lock disengaged. The door was pulled open, and Longman, who had been waiting inside the car, edged into the cab, pulling his package after him. Ryder withdrew his gun from the motorman’s face and tucked it back in his coat pocket. He carried his bags into the train. The moment he was inside, the doors shut. He felt them slide against his back.

  THREE

  BUD CARMODY

  A voice said, “Turn around, I got something to show you.”

  With the car doors open, Bud Carmody was hanging out the window, observing the Twenty-eighth Street platform. The voice came from directly behind him. An instant later something hard jarred the base of his spine.

  The voice said, “This is a gun. Come in and turn around slow.”

  Bud pulled his head in. As he turned, the gun remained in contact with his body and ended up nested weightily in his ribs. He was nose to nose with the white-haired, heavyset man with the florist’s box. He had brought the box into the cab with him.

  Bud said in a pinched voice, “What’s the matter?”

  “Do exactly like I tell you,” the man said. “If you don’t, I’m going to hurt you. Don’t make no trouble.” He twisted the gun slightly. The front sight pinched the thin skin over Bud’s ribs, and he almost cried out with the pain. “You going to do exactly what I tell you to do?”

  “Yes,” Bud said. “But I haven’t got any money. Don’t hurt me.”

  Bud tried not to look at the man, but they were so close together he couldn’t avoid it. The man’s face was large, dark-complected, with the kind of blue beard he would have to shave twice a day if he wanted to stay neat. His eyes were light in color, hazel, halfway hidden by thick lids. The eyes seemed to have no expression in them and no depth. There was no entrance in them—as he had heard eyes spoken of—no entrance to the soul. He couldn’t imagine those eyes showing any feeling, especially not pity.

  “Go back out the window,” the man said. “Check your rear section cars, and if the platform is clear, shut them up. Just the rear section. Keep the front cars open. You got that?”

  Bud nodded. His mouth had gone so dry that he wasn’t sure he could speak if he tried. So he nodded, vigorously, three or four times.

  “Then do it,” the man said.

  The gun shifted back to his spine as Bud turned and put his head out of the window.

  “Clear?” the man said. Bud nodded. “Then close them up.”

  Bud pressed the button, and the rear half doors shut and locked.

  “Stay right where you are,” the man said, and then put his head out of the window beside Bud’s.

  It was a tight squeeze, but the man didn’t seem to notice it or care. He was looking toward the front, and Bud felt the man’s breath on his cheek. Beside the first car someone was talking into the window of the motorman’s cab. It looked natural enough, but Bud knew that there was a connection with the man in his own cab. He saw the man at the front straighten up.

  “The second you see him go in the train, shut the rest of the doors,” the man beside him said. Up front, Bud watched the man enter the car. “Okay, close them up.”

  Bud’s fingers, which were already in position on the panel, pressed hard. The doors slid shut. The indication box lit up.

  “Get back inside,” the man said. They stood facing each other again. The man nudged him with the gun. “Announce the next station.”

  Bud pressed the transmitter button and spoke into the mike. “Twenty-third Street, Twenty…” His throat was tight, it pinched his voice off, and he couldn’t finish.

  “Do it again,” the man said. “Do it better this time.”

  Bud cleared his throat and wet his lips with his tongue. “Twenty-third Street next.”

  “Good enough,” the man said. “Here’s what you got to do next. Walk through the train to the first car.”

  “Walk up front to the first car?”

  “Right. Walk, and keep walking until you get to the first car. I’ll be following behind you with the gun in my pocket. If you try to pull something, I’ll shoot you in the back. In the spine.”

  The spine. Bud shivered. The steel bullet smashing into his spine, pulverizing it, taking the support away so that his whole body would collapse. And the pain: the bone of the spine fragmenting, shooting razor-sharp slivers through his flesh, his organs….

  “Get started,” the man said.

  As Bud edged out of the cab, his hip brushed against the florist’s box, and he reached out instinctively to steady it. But it was surprisingly stable and hardly moved. He turned to his right and opened the storm door, and the man followed. He hesitated for an instant on the threshold plates, then opened the second door and went into the next car. He didn’t hear any footsteps behind him as he went forward through the train, but he knew the man was behind him, his hand on the gun in his pocket, as he had promised, ready to crack his spine like a dry twig. He kept his eyes straight ahead as he walked from car to car.

  The train began to move.

  LONGMAN

  Longman felt lightheaded, almost dizzy, as he waited for the cab door to open. If it opened. He grasped at the possibility in desperation. Maybe Ryder, whom he could no longer see, would have a change of heart; maybe something unforeseen would happen and stop everything cold.

  But he knew, as certainly as he knew the depths of his own fear, that Ryder would have no change of heart, that he would be able to handle something unforeseen.

  The two boys were looking at him, smiling shyly, seeking at the same time his approval and indulgence for their game. Their innocence and trust touched him, and he found himself smiling at them, although a moment ago he would not have thought himself capable of it. For an instant, matching warmth with warmth, Longman was at ease, but then he heard a soft rubbing against the cab door, as if, inside, a hand were moving over it.

  He heard the click of the lock being sprung. He wavered for a fraction of a second, fighting down a panicky impulse to drop everything and just run. Then he picked up his package by the string, opened the door, and went into the cab. As he pulled the door shut behind him, he saw Ryder’s arm and gun disappear back through the window. Moving awkwardly, he reached for his own gun—remembering guiltily that it should have been in his hand when he entered the cab—and pressed it into the motorman’s side. The motorman was pouring sweat, and Longman thought: Between the two of us, the cab will begin to stink like a locker room.

  He said, “Get rid of your seat,” and the motorman obeyed with almost comical speed, jumping up and folding the seat back with a clatter. “Now move over to the window.”

  He heard a light tap at the door and, as he slipped the latch, noticed that the indication box was lit up. Ryder opened the door and, after placing his Valpac and valise on top of Longman’s package, squeezed inside. The cab was crowded now, with barely enough room left to move around in.

  “Go ahead,” Ryder said.

  Longman crowded against the motorman so that he could square off comfortably in front of the panel. His hands went toward the controls, then stopped. “Don’t forget what I told you,” he said to the motorman. “You try touching that mike pedal with your foot and I’ll shoot it off.”


  All the motorman was trying to do was stay alive so he could collect his pension, but Longman had spoken for Ryder’s ears. He was supposed to have warned the motorman about the foot pedal that activated the radio microphone earlier, but had forgotten it. He glanced toward Ryder for approval, but Ryder’s face was impassive.

  “Get started,” Ryder said.

  Like bike riding or swimming, Longman thought, it was one of those things you never forgot how to do. In the most natural way his left hand found the controller, his right the brake handle. But to his surprise, touching the brake handle made him feel a little guilty. A brake handle was a very personal thing. Every motorman was issued one his first day on the job, and he kept it, the same one, from then on, carrying it to work, removing it at quitting time. In a way, it was like his badge of office.

  The motorman, sounding scared, said, “You don’t know how to drive it.”

  “Don’t worry,” Longman said, “I won’t wreck you.”

  Pressing down firmly to nullify the deadman’s feature, the safety device that automatically stopped a train if the motorman were suddenly stricken, Longman nudged the controller to the left, into switching position, and the train began to edge out of the station. He entered the tunnel at a crawling five-mile-an-hour speed and immediately began to check out the signals without even having to think about it. Green, green, green, amber, red. His hand caressed the smooth metal of the controller, and with a sudden sense of exhilaration he thought of how exciting it would be to ram the controller up through series position and into multiple, right up against the post, rocketing through the tunnel at fifty, with the walls zipping by, the lights flashing like blurred stars, the signals obliging him so that he wouldn’t even have to touch the brake until he slammed into the next station….

  But they were only going for a short ride, and he kept the controller in switching. He estimated three train lengths out of the station, then knocked the controller off and eased the brake to the right. The train rocked to a halt. The motorman looked at him.

  “Smooth stop—right?” Longman said. He had stopped sweating, and he felt fine. “No jerk, no snap, no pull.”

  The motorman, responding eagerly to the tone of his voice, smiled broadly. But he was still sweating heavily, and his pinstripe overalls had stained to a darker color. Out of old habit, Longman checked out the signals: green, green, green, amber. The open window beside the motorman let in the familiar stink of grease and dampness.

  Ryder’s voice brought him down to earth. “Tell him what you want,” Ryder said.

  Longman said to the motorman, “I’m taking the brake handle and the reverse key, and I want your cutting key.” He pulled the reverse key out of its receptacle. He held his hand out. The motorman looked uneasy but without a word fished the cutting key out of the bulging pockets of his overalls. “I’m leaving the cab now,” Longman said, and was pleased at how calm he sounded. “Don’t try anything.”

  “I won’t,” the motorman said. “I really won’t.”

  “Better not,” Longman said. He felt a sense of superiority over the motorman. An Irishman, but the soft kind, not the fighting kind. He was scared enough to piss. “And remember what I said about the radio.”

  “All right,” Ryder said.

  Longman put the brake handle and the bulky keys in his raincoat pockets. He squeezed by Ryder and the stacked bags and left the cab. The two boys stared at him in awe. He gave them a smile and a wink and walked back through the car. One or two of the passengers glanced at him as he passed up the aisle, but without interest.

  RYDER

  “Turn your back,” Ryder said. “Face the window.”

  The motorman looked back at him apprehensively. “Please…”

  “Do as I say.”

  The motorman slowly faced about to the side window. Ryder removed his right glove, hooked an index finger into his mouth, and withdrew the pads of medical gauze first from beneath his upper and lower lips and then from the inside of each cheek. He bunched the sopping pads of gauze into a single ball and dropped it into the left pocket of his raincoat. From his right pocket he took out a cut-down length of nylon stocking. He removed his hat, pulled the stocking over his head, and, after adjusting the eye slits properly, put his hat on again.

  The disguises had been a concession to Longman. For his own part, Ryder had argued that, with the exception of the motorman and conductor, nobody on the train would be likely to notice them before they put on their masks. And even if they did, it was a fact—the police themselves were the first to admit it—that untrained citizens were notoriously unreliable in their descriptions of people. And even if the motorman and conductor were a little more accurate, an Identikit portrait was nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, he had not disputed the point with Longman, except to reject anything elaborate. What the disguises boiled down to eventually were Longman’s eyeglasses, Steever’s white wig, Welcome’s false moustache and sideburns, and filling up the hollows and slendernesses of his own face with gauze.

  He touched the motorman lightly on the shoulder. “You can turn around now.”

  The motorman glanced at the mask, then averted his eyes in a pointed but somewhat tardy demonstration of his lack of interest in what Ryder looked like. It was, Ryder thought dryly, a friendly gesture.

  He said, “You’ll be getting a radio call from Command Center before long. Ignore it. Don’t answer. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” the motorman said earnestly. “I promised the other man I wouldn’t touch the radio. I’m going to cooperate with you.” He paused. “I want to stay alive.”

  Ryder didn’t answer. Through the front window the tunnel ran off into the distance, dimly lit except for the sharpness of the signal lights. He noted that Longman had stopped the train less than ten paces from the light indicating an emergency power box.

  “They can call all they want to,” the motorman said. “I’m deaf.”

  “Keep quiet,” Ryder said.

  It would be another minute or two before the Grand Central Tower, becoming restive, would contact Command Center with the advice: “All signals clear in area, train laying down.” For himself, Ryder thought, it was a dead interlude with nothing for him to do but see that the motorman behaved himself. Welcome was at his post, guarding the rear storm door; Longman was on his way to the cab of the second car; it was a safe assumption that Steever and the conductor were moving forward through the train. He trusted Steever implicitly, although he had less brains than either of the others. Longman was intelligent but a coward, and Welcome was dangerously erratic. They would all be fine if everything went smoothly. If not, their weaknesses would begin to show.

  “Command Center calling Pelham One Two Three. Command Center calling Pelham One Two Three. Come in, please.”

  The motorman’s foot moved involuntarily toward the foot pedal that could be used alternatively with the button on the microphone itself, to transmit. Ryder kicked him in the ankle.

  “I’m sorry. It was automatic. My foot just moved….” The motorman’s voice petered out, his face remained screwed up in an apology so profound it was almost a form of remorse.

  “Pelham One Two Three, do you read me?” The radio voice paused. “Pelham One Two Three, come in. Speak up, Pelham One Two Three.”

  Ryder tuned the voice out of his consciousness. By now Longman would be in the cab of the second car, with the door locked, and the brake handle, the reverse key, and the cutting key emplaced. Severing the cars, even allowing for a degree of rustiness, would take less than a minute….

  “Dispatcher calling Pelham One Two Three. Do you read me? Please report, Pelham One Two Three…. Come in, Pelham One Two Three!”

  The motorman looked at Ryder with open appeal. For the moment his sense of duty, and perhaps, fear of disciplinary action, overrode his fear for his life. Ryder shook his head sternly.

  “Pelham One Two Three. Pelham One Two Three, where the fuck are you?”

  LONGMAN


  The passengers blurred into a faceless mass as Longman went to the rear of the car. He didn’t dare look at them for fear of calling attention to himself, despite Ryder’s assurance that he would have to fall flat on his face to be noticed (“And even then,” Ryder had said, “most of them would pretend nothing had happened”). Welcome was watching his approach with a crooked smile, and as usual the mere sight of Welcome made him nervous. He was a weirdo, a maniac. A man who had been fired by the Mafia because he misbehaved?

  Welcome’s smile vanished as Longman came up, and he remained squarely in front of the door. For an instant Longman was convinced that Welcome wouldn’t budge, and panic began to rise in him like the mercury column in a thermometer. But then he stepped aside and, with a mocking smile, slid the door open. Longman took a deep breath and went through.

  Between the cars he paused, visualizing, beneath the steel threshold plates, the thick electric cables that transmitted power from car to car, and the neat grasp of the couplings. The door to the second car opened, and he saw that it was being held by Steever. The conductor stood beside him, young and frightened. Steever handed over the door key, which he had taken from the conductor. Longman unlocked the cab door and went inside. He locked the door and proceeded to arm the panel. He fitted the brake handle into place, then fished the reverse key out of his pocket. About five inches long with a shiny surface, it was a wrench-type handle that fitted into a receptacle on the flat portion of the controller, which would now move the train either forward or backward, depending on the position of the reverse key. Finally, he emplaced the cutting key—similar to the reverse key in appearance, but with a slightly smaller head.

  Except in the yard, a motorman rarely had occasion to cut or reverse a train, but it was a simple enough process. Longman turned the cutting key, and the coupling between the first and second cars unlocked. He set the reverse key in reverse position. Then, pressing down on the deadman’s feature, he edged the controller into switching position. The open couples disengaged smoothly, and the nine cars of the train moved backward. He estimated a distance of about 150 feet and gently applied the brake. The train stopped. He removed the brake handle and the two keys, stuffed them into his pockets, and stepped out of the cab.