by John Godey
Here and there in the car a passenger was squirming with impatience at the delay, which had now stretched into several minutes, but no one seemed alarmed. Nor did it seem to bother them that their car had moved backward. But it would bother the Tower, all right. He could just imagine what must be going on in the Tower.
Steever held the storm door for him. He stepped out onto the flange of the threshold plate, crouched low to ease the impact, and jumped down to the concrete roadbed. The conductor followed, and then Steever. They walked quickly through the tunnel to the first car. Welcome opened the door, stepped out on the threshold plate, and, crouching, extended a hand to help them up.
Longman was relieved that he didn’t try to fool around.
FOUR
CAZ DOLOWICZ
Fleshy, edematous, his belly straining the buttons of his jacket, Caz Dolowicz moved with deliberate speed through the crowds entering and leaving the Grand Central terminus of the shuttle. He belched in a series of light, purse-lipped expulsions at almost every step, bringing a measure of relief from the painful accumulation of gas that pressed upward against his heart. As usual, he had eaten too much lunch and, as usual, had admonished himself that he would live to regret his appetite, by which he meant that he would one day die of it. Death as a phenomenon held no particular terrors for him, other than that it would screw him out of collecting his pension. But that was a big exception.
A few steps past the Nedick’s stand—whose effluvium of roasting frankfurters, enticing an hour ago, now made him gag—he pushed through the inconspicuous gate with its sign reading TO SUPER’S OFFICE and hurried past the ramp with the nine-foot Dempster cans holding refuse from the Grand Central concessions. Eventually, the garbage train would come and the Dempsters would be rolled on, but meanwhile they stank and encouraged the rats. Dolowicz was amazed, as always, that the unlocked gate didn’t tempt the curiosity of passersby, except for the occasional drunk who stumbled through it in search of the John or God knew what. Just as well—they could live without civilians wandering into the Tower and asking stupid questions.
As he entered the tunnel, he wondered how many people—even employees—knew that it was the old right-of-way; although the tracks had been removed, the original roadbed remained. As he walked on at his heavy, steady pace, Dolowicz caught here and there the glint of an eye. Not a rat, but one of the army of cats that lived in the tunnel, never seeing the light of day and preying on the rats, which infested the passage by the thousands. “The rats are big enough to pick you up and carry you away,” they had told him solemnly on his first day as a towerman. But not as big, although he had never seen them, as the rats which were supposed to inhabit the heating section of the Penn-Central. According to the famous story, a man trying to duck the cops had found his way into the heating system and, bewildered by the maze of passages, had got lost and, eventually, had been completely devoured by the rats, down to the marrow of his bones.
Directly ahead of him, a train charged down at him head-on. Smiling, he walked straight toward it. It was the northbound express, and in another moment it turned away. On that first day, twelve years ago, nobody had bothered to warn him about the northbound, and when it came thundering toward him, he had flung himself into the trough in terror. It was still one of the simple pleasures of his life to escort a new man down the tunnel and watch what happened when the northbound came hurtling down the track.
The week before, he had escorted some subway brass from Tokyo through the tunnel, and it was a great opportunity to check out the Oriental so-called impassivity. Some impassivity—when the northbound roared down at them, they turned chicken like everybody else and screamed and scrambled. But they recovered fast and thirty seconds later were bitching about the stink. “Well,” he had told them, “it’s an underground tunnel, not a botanical garden.” They also had some complaints about the Tower itself—too drab, too shabby, too gloomy. Dolowicz thought they were silly. Okay, it was just a long, narrow, unadorned room with a few desks, a few phones, a toilet. But, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what made the Tower beautiful was the Model Board, stretched high across one wall, recording in colored slashes of light the routes and movements of every train that passed through the sector, all of it superimposed on a map showing the tracks and the stations.
He climbed the steps and entered the Tower Room, the control center he ran for eight hours a day. Tower Room. Actually, the technical name for it was Interlocking Plant, but nobody ever called it that. It was Tower Room, or simply the Tower, named after the old-time towers raised above the railroad tracks at key points, as the subway towers were located underground at key points on the system.
Dolowicz took in the scene. His towermen were all busy at their flashing consoles, watching the action on the Model Board as they spoke to desk trainmasters, dispatchers, and towermen at adjoining key points. His eye went to Jenkins. A woman. A woman towerman. And a black woman, yet. He couldn’t get used to the idea, even after a month. Well, he had better get used to it; the talk was that a lot more women were taking the towerman test! What next—motormen? Motorwomen? Not that he had any complaints about Mrs. Jenkins. She was a quiet person, clean, soft-spoken, competent. But still…
On the left side of the room, Marino was beckoning to him. Dolowicz, his eye on the Model Board, walked over to Marino’s chair and stood behind him. On the board, a southbound local was standing between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-third.
“He’s laying dead,” Marino said.
“I see that,” Dolowicz said. “How long?”
“Couple, three minutes.”
“Well, get onto the squawk box to Command Center so they can contact the motorman.”
“I did,” Marino said, aggrieved. “They’re trying to raise him. He don’t answer the radio.”
Dolowicz could think of a number of reasons why the motorman wouldn’t answer the radio, the chief being that he wasn’t in the cab, that he had climbed out to reset a tripper that had accidentally cut him dead or maybe to fix a hung door. Anything more serious, he would have radioed in for a car knocker. But whatever, he was required to report to Command Center by radio.
Still looking at the Model Board, he said to Marino, “Unless he’s a jerk, the reason he didn’t call Command Center is because his radio is probably busted. And the lazy bum won’t exert himself to pick up a telephone. They got it too good these days.”
When he had first joined the system, there was no such luxury as two-way radios. If a motorman got into trouble, he would climb down out of the cab, walk the track to one of the telephones placed at 500-foot intervals in the tunnel, and report in. The telephones were still there to be used if necessary.
“The sonofabitch is going to get written up for this,” Dolowicz said. The gas pocket stabbed his heart. He tried to force a belch and failed. “What train is it?”
“Pelham One Two Three,” Marino said. “Hey, he’s starting to move.” Then Marino’s voice rose in astonishment. “For Jesus Christ sake, he’s moving backwards!”
RYDER
When Longman rapped his knuckles against the metal of the cab door, Ryder held him up for a moment while he undid the lock of the brown valise and took out the submachine gun. The motorman gasped. Ryder unlocked the cab door, and Longman stepped in.
“Put your mask on,” Ryder said. He kicked Longman’s package. “And get your weapon out.”
He squeezed out of the door and shut it behind him, the tommy gun held vertically along his pants leg. In the center of the car, making no effort to be inconspicuous now, Steever was pulling his gun from the florist’s box, which was now neatly split down the center, where it had been prescored and joined by scotch tape. At the rear of the car, Welcome straightened up from his valise. He was grinning, and his tommy gun was trained down the length of the car.
“Attention,” Ryder said in a loud voice, and watched the passengers turn toward him, not in unison but raggedly, varying with their reaction time. He held
the gun in the crook of his arm, the barrel resting on his right hand, the fingers of his left curved around the trigger behind the magazine. “You will all remain seated. Nobody will move. Anyone who tries to get up, or even moves, will be shot. There will be no further warning. If you move, you’ll be killed.”
He braced himself as the car began to move slowly forward.
CAZ DOLOWICZ
The red slashes on the Model Board in the Grand Central Tower began to wink.
“He’s moving,” Marino said. “Forwards.”
“I can see that with my own eyes,” Dolowicz said. He was bent forward, his hands braced on Marino’s seatback, looking up at the board.
“Now he stopped,” Marino said in a hushed voice. “He stopped again. About halfway between the stations.”
“A pure mental case,” Dolowicz said. “I’m going to have that motorman’s ass.”
“Still stopped,” Marino said.
“I’m going down there and see what the hell’s going on,” Dolowicz said. “And I don’t care what his excuse is, I’m going to have his ass.”
He remembered Mrs. Jenkins. Her face was impassive. Christ, Dolowicz thought, if I have to watch my language, I’m going to pack it in. Did they think of that when they opened up towerman classification to women? How the hell could you run a railroad without swearing?
As he opened the door, a raging voice blasted through the speaker: “What the fuck is going on with that crazy train? Will you for Christ sake get some goddamn supervision down there?”
It was the desk trainmaster’s voice, screaming into his microphone from Command Center. Dolowicz grinned at Mrs. Jenkins’ stiff back.
“Tell his nibs supervision is on the way,” he said to Marino, and hurried out of the Tower and down the steps into the tunnel.
RYDER
The submachine guns represented a substantial outlay of money—sawed-off shotguns, which were terrible weapons in their own right, were much cheaper—but Ryder considered them a sound investment. He didn’t particularly care for them as weapons (granted, they were murderous at short range, but they were inaccurate, with a tendency to pull high and to the right, and at a distance of 100 yards they were almost useless) but valued them for their psychological effect. Joe Welcome called the tommy gun the weapon of respect, and, his nostalgia for the traditional weapon of the gangster era to one side, he was right. Even the police, who were aware of its limitations, would show some deference for a weapon that could spew out 450 lethal .45 caliber rounds per minute. Most of all, it would impress the passengers, with their standard movie-inspired image of tommy guns cutting people down in rows.
The car was hushed, except for the squealing wheels and the creak of metallic joints, as Longman eased the train slowly through the tunnel. Steever, in the exact middle of the car, faced Welcome at the far end. Both were masked. For the first time, Ryder took account of the passengers in the front half of the car. Sixteen of them. A dozen and a third, the way you reckoned a commodity. But, however dispassionately he viewed them, individuals forced their way into focus:
The two small boys, saucer-eyed, probably more fascinated than frightened to find themselves actors in a real-life TV drama. Their plump mother, hung up between two conventions: fainting or protecting her cubs. A hippie type with shoulder-length blond Jesus Christ hair and beard to match, wearing a Navajo-patterned woolen poncho, a headband, and leather-thonged sandals. Comatose. Either bombed out or sleeping off a high. A flashy dark-haired girl in an Anzac hat. A high-class hustler? Five blacks: two almost identical boys carrying packages—long, bony, sad faces, with huge eyes showing disproportionate amounts of white; the dashing militant type of the platform, with his Che beret and Haile Selassie cape; a middle-aged man, smooth-skinned, handsome, well turned-out, holding an attaché case on his lap; a stout placid woman, probably a domestic, wearing a coat with a patchy silver fox collar, legacy from some beneficent Mrs. An old white man, tiny and alert, rosy-cheeked, duded up in a cashmere coat, a pearly Borsalino hat, a foulard silk tie. A female derelict, color indeterminate, a wino, layered in coats and sweaters, unimaginably scabbed and grimy, snuffling in a semiconscious daze…
And others. Figures in a city landscape. Except for the black militant, who was staring at him in direct challenge, the other passengers were doing their best to be inoffensive, self-effacing. Good enough, Ryder thought, they were simply cargo. Cargo with a fixed value.
The car dragged under his feet, bucked, and came to a stop. Steever turned inquiringly. Ryder nodded, and Steever cleared his throat and spoke. His voice was heavy, monotone, muffled, the voice of a man who spoke little.
“Everybody in the back half of the car,” Steever said. “Up on your feet. Everybody. Be quick about it.”
Ryder, anticipating the stirring in his half of the car, said, “Not you people. Stay where you are. Sit fast. Don’t even move. Anybody who moves will be shot.”
The black militant moved in his seat. Deliberately, with carefully measured defiance. Ryder trained the muzzle of the gun on his chest. He moved again, wriggling his hips, and then subsided, content with his demonstration of intransigence. Ryder, too, was content; the challenge was ceremonial, it could be ignored.
“Everybody up. Move ass. You understand English? On your frigging feet!”
Welcome, from the rear of the car, ad libbing, getting into the act. It was wrong. The passengers were docile enough; it was pointless to risk scaring them into a stampede. Well, he had anticipated that Welcome would improvise, and it was too late for regrets.
The cab door opened, and Longman came out, prodding the motorman ahead of him with the tip of his gun. Longman spoke softly to the motorman, who nodded and looked for a seat. He wavered before an empty place beside the hippie, then moved on and fell heavily into a seat alongside the stout black woman. She accepted his presence tranquilly and without surprise.
Ryder nodded to Longman. Longman, with the motorman’s door key in his hand, bent to the keyhole above the handle on the front storm door. The two boys, backed against the door, were in his way. Longman put his hand between them, not roughly, and separated them.
The plump woman cried out. “Brandon. Robert. Please don’t hurt them.” She jumped to her feet and took a step toward the boys.
“Sit down,” Ryder said. The woman stopped and turned to him, her mouth shaping a protest. “Don’t argue. Sit down.” Ryder waited until she returned to her seat, then motioned to the boys. “Get away from the door. Sit down.”
The woman reached out for the boys and drew them to her convulsively, planting them between her spread legs, their original and ultimate safe harbor.
Longman opened the door, stepped out onto the threshold plate and, as the door slid shut, dropped to the tracks. Ryder checked off his passengers, shifting the muzzle of his gun from one to the other, its movement deliberate, intimidating. The girl in the Anzac hat tapped her foot restlessly on the filthy white and black squares of the floor. The hippie was nodding, smiling, his eyes still closed. The militant black, with his arms folded across his chest was staring with accusatory stoniness at the Uncle Tom across the aisle, the well-dressed black with the attaché case. The boys were squirming with embarrassment in their mother’s scissors hold…. At the rear of the car the passengers were now facing the door three abreast, with Welcome worrying at them like a sheep dog.
Without warning, the lights in the car went out, and the emergency lights blinked on. The passengers looked alarmed, their faces hollower in the diminished light cast by the incandescent bulbs, less numerous and intense than the fluorescent tubes that ran the length of the car on each sidewall and along the center of the ceiling. The power was now out in the sector between Fourteenth and Thirty-third streets on all four tracks, local and express, northbound and southbound.
Ryder said, “Conductor. Come here.” The conductor came to the center of the car and stopped. He was very pale. Ryder said, “I want you to walk all of those passengers back down the tr
ack.”
The conductor said, “Yes sir.”
“Collect all the passengers in the other nine cars of the train, too, and lead them all back to the Twenty-eighth Street station.”
The conductor looked worried. “They might not want to leave the train.”
Ryder shrugged. “Tell them their train isn’t going anyplace.”
“I will, but—” The conductor’s voice became confidential. “Passengers hate to get off a train, even when they know it’s not going to move. It’s funny—”
“Just do as you’re told,” Ryder said.
“Can I go, please?” The girl in the Anzac hat, making a production of crossing her legs, then leaning forward earnestly. “I’ve got this terribly important appointment.”
“No,” Ryder said. “No one in this half of the car will leave.”
“A very important audition. I’m in the theater—”
“Sir?” The young mother, craning over the heads of her boys. “Please, sir. Please? My two children are very high-strung—”
“Nobody leaves,” Ryder said.
The old man in the cashmere coat said, “I’m not asking to leave, but. But shouldn’t we at least be fully informed what’s going on, at least?”
“Yes,” Ryder said. “What’s going on is that you’re being held by four desperate men with machine guns.”
The old man smiled. “I guess if you ask a foolish question…”