The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  “Could you give us some idea of how long we’ll be detained?” the girl in the Anzac hat said. “I’d hate to miss this audition.”

  “That’s enough,” Ryder said. “No more answers. And no more questions.” If the girl’s effort to hustle him and the old man’s aplomb were equally transparent, he was satisfied; neither of them was likely to turn panicky.

  Longman came in through the storm door. His gun was tucked under one arm, and he was brushing his hands against each other to rid them of dust and grime. It was probably months, or even years, since the emergency power box had last been used. Ryder gestured, and Longman trained his gun on the passengers. Ryder went back to the rear of the car. The conductor was assuring the passengers that there was no danger from the third rail.

  “The power is off, ma’am. One of those gentlemen was kind enough to cut the power.”

  Welcome guffawed, and there was even a timid ripple of laughter from the passengers. The conductor blushed, then went through the door and jumped down to the roadbed. The passengers began to follow, more awkwardly. Those who hesitated, intimidated by the drop, were sped along by Welcome, using his gun as a prod.

  Steever came back to Ryder and said in a whisper, “Five of them up front are spades. Who’s going to shell out for spades?”

  “They’ve got the same value as anybody else. Maybe more.”

  “Politics, right?” Steever shrugged.

  When all but three or four passengers had disappeared through the rear door, Ryder walked back to the front of the car and went into the cab. It stank of sweat. Ahead, through the front window, the tunnel lights, on DC, had gone off. But the signals and emergency lights, which were on AC, remained on. Close by, there was a single blue light indicating an emergency telephone and, ahead, an unbroken procession of green signal lights.

  Ryder lifted the microphone from its peg near the front window and felt for the black button which would activate the transmitter. But before he could press it, a voice filled the cab.

  “Command Center to Pelham One Two Three. What the fuck is on? You cut the power? Without phoning Power Central to explain? Are you reading me? Are you reading me? This is the desk trainmaster. Come in, goddamn it, come in, Pelham One Two Three, you crazy sonofabitch!”

  Ryder flicked the button. “Pelham One Two Three to Command Center. Do you read me?”

  “Where the hell have you been? What’s with you? What are you trying to do to the railroad? Why didn’t you answer your radio? Come in. Come in, Pelham One Two Three, and start talking.”

  “Pelham One Two Three to Command Center,” Ryder said. “Command Center, your train has been taken. Do you read me? Your train has been taken. Come in, Command Center.”

  FIVE

  TOM BERRY

  Tom Berry told himself—had been telling himself—that there was absolutely no point when he could have taken suitable action. Maybe if he hadn’t been daydreaming, thinking of Deedee instead of duty, maybe if he had been reasonably alert, he might have sensed that something suspicious was going on. But by the time he opened his eyes he could count four submachine guns, any one of which would have turned him into a side of bloody meat before his hand even touched his gun.

  Not that there weren’t plenty of cops who would have made a move anyway, committed willful suicide, responding by reflex to the hard indoctrination that started on their first day at the Police Academy: a compound consisting of a sense of mission, machismo, and contempt for the criminal. Brainwashing, Deedee would have called it. Yes, he knew cops like that, and not all of them were stupid, and not all of them were decent people. Brainwashed, or just men who took their mandate seriously? Himself, with a .38 in his belt, he had simply sat on his reflexes. If it was any consolation, he was alive and well, and probably at the end of his career as a cop.

  He had been trained and sworn to uphold the law, to enforce order, not just stand by like the public he was pledged to protect. Cops were not expected to snooze through the commission of a crime or reckon the odds against them too finely. Not even cops in plain clothes or cops off duty. They were expected to meet force with force, and if they got killed for their pains, it was in the highest tradition of police work. Line of duty.

  Well, if he had drawn his gun, he would certainly have upheld the highest tradition of the force, for both bravery and dying. As a reward, he would have been given an inspector’s funeral, with the commissioner and the mayor present and the rest of the brass turned out in pressed uniforms and white gloves and, when it appeared on the eleven o’clock television news, not a dry eye among the watchers. A high-class way to go, even if you were in no position to appreciate its grandeur and solemnity. Who would have mourned for him—mourned him truly, not institutionally? Deedee? Would Deedee mourn him or remember him beyond tomorrow except in terms of a missing person between her legs? Or would she wake up to the realization of what “off the pig” meant in terms of spouting lifeblood and shattered bone and ruptured organs?

  He opened his eyes a slit and saw that the scene had changed somewhat. The one who had climbed out of the car, presumably to cut the power, had returned, and the tall one, the leader, was just entering the motorman’s cab. The heavy one was in the center of the car, facing front, and the fourth man was overseeing the herding of the rear-section passengers out of the car. So, Berry thought, the odds were no longer a prohibitive four to one, but a mere prohibitive two to one. It was a golden opportunity. To get slaughtered. “You see, sir”—he was explaining himself to a grim captain—“I didn’t care about myself, I just didn’t want any passengers to get hurt, so I refrained from drawing my gun and instead continued to plan how the public interest could be served to the best advantage of all and in the highest tradition of the department.”

  He grinned slackly and shut his eyes. Decision confirmed. Sorry, Mr. Mayor and Mr. Commissioner, don’t feel bad; somebody will blow a cop’s head off before the month is out, so you won’t really be deprived of your solemn processional. Sorry, Deedee. Deedee, would you have worn a black love bead to celebrate your dead pig lover?

  The heavy presence of the .38 against his stomach gave him no comfort. He would have made it disappear if he could; it kept reminding him that he had neglected to become a brave corpse. Deedee. Deedee would understand. She would congratulate him on having raised his consciousness, at his liberation from being a witless instrument of the repressive society. But his superiors would take a different view. There would be an investigation, a departmental trial, dismissal from the force. All cops would despise him, even those who were blatantly on the take. No matter how corrupt they were, they were not so corrupt that they would fail to get themselves killed uselessly.

  One ray of sunshine: You could always get a new job. Getting a new life was tougher.

  CAZ DOLOWICZ

  As Dolowicz began to walk back through the old tunnel, his indigestion, which had vanished, or at least been submerged by his anger at the inexplicable behavior of Pelham One Two Three, came out of hiding. He hurried past the stink and sizzle of the orange juice stand, and puffed his way up the steps to the terminal. He went through the concourse to the street, and waved down a cab.

  “Park Avenue South and Twenty-eighth.”

  “You’re from out of town,” the driver said. “How I know, the natives still call it Fourth Avenue. Like Sixth Avenue. Only the shitkickers call it Avenue of the Americas. Where you from?”

  “The South Bronx.”

  His belly bounced on the fulcrum of his low-slung belt as he ran down the steps at the Twenty-eighth Street station. He flashed his identification card at the change booth clerk and charged through the gate. A train was standing in the station with its doors open. If Pelham One Two Three was still lying dead in the tunnel, the signal blocks would hold up this train, Pelham One Two Eight. As he started toward the south end of the platform he realized that the train was lit only by the dim battery-operated emergency lights. He hurried on to the front car. The motorman was leaning out
of the window.

  “When did the power go?”

  The motorman was an old-timer, and he needed a shave. “Who wants to know?”

  “Caz Dolowicz, the Grand Central Tower trainmaster, wants to know.”

  “Oh.” The motorman straightened up. “It went out a couple of minutes ago.”

  “You radio Command Center?”

  The motorman nodded. “Dispatcher said to sit here and wait. What’s up—man under?”

  “I’m going to goddamn well find out what’s up,” Dolowicz said.

  He went on to the end of the platform and descended to the roadbed. As he started through the darkened tunnel, it occurred to him that he could have used the motorman’s radio to find out about the power, but it was just as well. He was always in favor of seeing things for himself.

  Spurred by anger and anxiety, he began to trot along the roadbed. But his gas pains forced him to slow down again. He kept trying vainly to belch, massaging his chest in an attempt to dislodge the gassy pocket. Pain or no pain, he trudged on steadily, until he heard voices in the tunnel. He stopped and, with narrowed eyes, peered through the dimness at a bulky wavering shape coming down the track. It looked, ferchrisesake, like a crowd of people.

  LONGMAN

  Longman had been cool enough in the tunnel, pulling the emergency switch to knock out the power, as he had been earlier—and even enjoyed himself, in a way—cutting the cars and driving the train. He felt fine when he was doing the technical things. Actually, he was still okay when he came back to the car, but the moment Ryder went into the cab he had begun to sweat again. It brought home to him how secure he felt with Ryder, even though the man’s attitude scared him stiff half the time. He had never really established any kind of relationship with the other two. Steever was efficient but inaccessible, a closed system, and Welcome was not only cruel and kinky, but probably a certifiable maniac.

  The submachine gun seemed to be vibrating in his hands, as though it were picking up the agitated beat of his own blood. He braced the butt more firmly under his elbow and eased up the tightness of his grip, and the gun became steadier. He shifted his eyes anxiously to the cab door, but jerked them to the front again at the sound of a low warning whistle from Steever. He focused on the passengers in the row of seats to his right. They were his responsibility, and the left row was Steever’s. Ryder had arranged it that way so that they wouldn’t be in each other’s line of fire. The passengers were silent, hardly stirring.

  All the passengers were now out of the rear section of the car. It looked empty and abandoned. Welcome was profiled toward the storm door, his feet braced wide apart, his machine gun pointed down the track. He looked to be spoiling for action, and Longman was convinced that he was praying for something to go wrong so that he could kill somebody.

  His face was so sweaty now that he worried about the nylon clinging to it and giving its conformations away. He started to glance at the cab door again, but a sudden sound to his right brought his head around sharply. It was the hippie, his eyes shut, stretching his leg out into the aisle. Steever was calm, watchful, motionless. Welcome was peering out at the tracks through the rear window.

  Longman strained for some sound from behind the cab door but could hear nothing. So far the operation had gone without a hitch. But it would all go down the drain if they balked at paying. Ryder had assured him that they had no reasonable alternative. But suppose they decided not to be reasonable? You couldn’t predict the behavior of people that certainly. What if the cops made the decision, and got hard-nosed about it? Well, in that case a lot of people would die. Including themselves.

  Ryder’s credo: You live or you die. It was an abhorrent thought to Longman, whose own credo, if he had ever verbalized it, would have been survive at any cost. Yet, of his own free will, he had signed on at Ryder’s terms. Free will? No. He had drifted into it helplessly, in a sort of dream state. He had been fascinated by Ryder, but that didn’t explain everything. Wasn’t it he himself who was responsible for their getting to know each other at all? Wasn’t it his own idea? Hadn’t he brought it out into the open himself and then refined it from a game, a playfully vengeful fantasy, into something criminal and profitable?

  He had long ago stopped thinking of their first meeting as accidental. The more accurate, more awesome word was “fate.” From time to time he had mentioned the idea of fate, but Ryder had been indifferent to it. Not that he didn’t see the point, just that he didn’t care, it didn’t signify. Something happened, it led to something else—beyond that Ryder didn’t look into causes, didn’t get excited by coincidences. Something happened, it led to something else.

  They had met at the state unemployment office on Sixth Avenue and Twentieth Street, on one of the straggling, dispiritedly patient lines of unemployed inching forward to where a civil servant made a cabalistic entry in their blue-covered “books” and gave them a voucher to sign for their weekly checks. He had first noticed Ryder on an adjoining line—a tall, slender man with black hair and fine, intense features. Not what you would call a man’s man, yet somehow suggesting depths of hidden strength and a quality of controlled confidence. Actually, that assessment had come later. What caught Longman’s eye at first was a good deal simpler: The man stuck out in that crowd of spades and spies, long-haired boys and girls, and nondescript beaten-down middle-aged people (the last of which, Longman reluctantly admitted, was his own category). Actually, Ryder wasn’t extraordinary, and in any other place he wouldn’t have stood out.

  Sometimes people struck up conversations on the lines to help pass the time. Others brought along something to read. Longman usually picked up a Post on his way to the unemployment office and never talked to anybody. But when, a few weeks after he had first seen him, he found himself directly behind Ryder on a line, he had begun a conversation with him. He had been hesitant at first, because Ryder was obviously someone who kept his own counsel and might freeze a man out if he didn’t want to talk. But finally, half turning, he had shown him the headline on his Post.

  ANOTHER 747

  OFF TO CUBA

  “It must be catching, like a disease,” Longman said.

  Ryder nodded politely but said nothing.

  “I don’t understand what they get out of it,” Longman said. “Once they get to Cuba they’re either thrown in the clink or they have to go out in the sun and cut sugarcane for ten hours a day.”

  “I couldn’t say,” Ryder’s voice was unexpectedly deep and authoritative. A boss’ voice, Longman had thought uneasily, and yet not quite, something else to it he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “To take all that risk for a coolie’s job, it don’t make sense,” Longman said.

  Ryder didn’t exactly shrug, but Longman realized that he had lost interest in the subject, if in fact he had ever had any. Ordinarily, Longman would have pulled back at that point; he didn’t usually force himself on people. But Ryder had piqued his interest, and in some way he didn’t quite understand, he wanted to win his approval. And so he went on and uttered the words which, in the long run, were to prove prophetic.

  “When there’s something in it for them—a lot of money, say—then I can understand it. But to take all that risk for nothing…”

  Ryder smiled. “Everything is risk. Taking the next breath is a risk; you might inhale something poisonous. If you won’t take a risk, you have to give up breathing, too.”

  “You can’t,” Longman said. “I read someplace that it’s impossible to stop breathing voluntarily, even if you try.”

  Ryder smiled again. “Oh, I think you can manage it if you go about it the right way.”

  After that, there didn’t seem anything more to say, and the conversation lapsed. Longman went back to his Post, feeling that he had somehow made a fool of himself. When Ryder finally had his book stamped and had signed his voucher, he nodded pleasantly to Longman before leaving. Longman, at the counter, turned to watch Ryder go out through the glass doors.

  A week
or two later Longman was as much surprised as flattered when Ryder came over to join him at the counter of a coffee shop, where he had stopped for a sandwich. Ryder seemed easier to talk to this time—not exactly friendly, but a little more responsive in his reserved way. The conversation was casual and impersonal, and afterward they walked to the unemployment office together and joined the same line.

  Longman felt more at ease with Ryder now, less like an intruder. He said, “I noticed there was still another one of those plane hijacks this week. Read about it?”

  Ryder shook his head. “I’m not much of a newspaper reader.”

  “This one wasn’t so lucky,” Longman said. “He never made Cuba. When they came down for refueling, he showed himself, and an FBI sharpshooter shot him dead.”

  “It beats chopping sugarcane.”

  “Being dead?”

  “Being dead is an improvement on a lot of things I can think of. Trying to sell mutual funds, for example.”

  “Is that your line of work?”

  “I tried to make it my line of work for a few months.” He shrugged. “I turned out to be a lousy salesman. I guess I don’t like asking people for things.” He was silent for a moment. “I prefer telling them what to do.”

  “You mean being a boss?”

  “In a way.”

  “Salesman wasn’t your regular line of work?”

  “No.”

  He offered no further explanation, and even though his curiosity was aroused, Longman didn’t pursue it. Instead he talked about himself.

  “I was working on a construction project, small houses out on the Island. But the builder ran out of money, and I was laid off.”

  Ryder’s nod was noncommittal.

  “I’m not a construction worker by trade,” Longman said. “I was a subway motorman.”

  “Retired?”

  “I’m only forty-one.”

  Ryder said politely, “That’s just about what I figured your age to be. That’s why I was surprised at the idea that you might be retired.”