by John Godey
It was a gracious apology, but Longman wasn’t fooled. He had a worn look, a grayness, and people usually overstated his age. He said, “I had about eight years in as motorman. But I quit the system. That was a few years ago.”
Whether or not he was convinced, Ryder wasn’t going to make any more of it. He merely nodded. Ninety-nine out of a hundred men would have followed up by asking why he had quit. True, Ryder simply might not give a damn, but even so, it would have been normal curiosity to ask. Annoyed, Longman asked a counterquestion which, in deference to Ryder’s reticence, he would otherwise have avoided.
“What was your line? I mean your regular line?”
“The military. I was a soldier.”
“Twenty-year man? That’s a pretty good deal, I guess, if you can stick it out. What was your rank?”
“My last grade was full colonel.”
Longman was disappointed. He knew from his own year in the service that men of thirty—which was what he reckoned Ryder’s age to be—did not become full colonels. He hadn’t figured Ryder to be a bullshitter. He nodded, and was silent.
Ryder said, “Not the American army.”
The explanation didn’t entirely allay Longman’s suspicion; it simply deepened the mystery. What army had Ryder served with? He had no trace of a foreign accent; he certainly sounded American enough. The Canadian army? But a thirty-year-old wouldn’t become a colonel in that army, either.
He stepped up to the counter to have his book processed, then waited for Ryder to complete his turn. Outside, they fell in step, and began to walk uptown on Sixth Avenue.
“Going anywhere in particular?” Longman said.
“Thought I’d take a walk.”
“Mind if I tag along? I haven’t got anything to do.”
They walked to the mid-Thirties, impersonal again—commenting occasionally on something in a shop window, on the women barging in and out of the department stores at Thirty-fourth, on the noise and smell of the traffic. But the puzzle bothered Longman, and finally, while they waited at the curb for the cross-town traffic to go by, he blurted it out.
“What army were you in?”
Ryder paused for so long a time that Longman was on the verge of apologizing. But then Ryder said, “The last one? Biafra.”
“Oh,” Longman said. “Oh, I see.”
“And before that the Congo. Also, Bolivia.”
“You’re a soldier of fortune?” Longman read a great deal, adventure novels, and so the concept was not entirely alien to him.
“That’s a fancy name for it. Mercenary is more accurate.”
“Meaning someone who fights for money?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Longman said, thinking not so much in terms of fighting for money as killing for money, and somewhat aghast at the idea, “I’m sure the money was secondary to the adventure.”
“The Biafrans were paying me twenty-five hundred a month to lead a battalion. I wouldn’t have touched it for a penny less.”
“Biafra, the Congo, Bolivia,” Longman said wonderingly. “Bolivia. Isn’t that where that Che Guevara was? You weren’t on his—”
“No. I was with the other people—the side that killed him.”
“I didn’t exactly think you were a Commie,” Longman said with a nervous laugh.
“I’m whatever I’m paid to be.”
“It sure as hell sounds like an exciting and glamorous life,” Longman said. “What made you quit it?”
“The market dried up. No job opportunities. And no unemployment insurance.”
“How does a guy get into work like that?”
“How did you get into driving a subway train?”
“That’s different. I got into it because I had to make a living.”
“That’s how I got into soldiering. Would you like a beer?”
After that, the walk and the beer became a weekly custom. At first, Longman had been puzzled that someone of Ryder’s class bothered with him, but he was shrewd enough to guess the answer. Like himself, like so many people in the city, Ryder was lonely. And so they became companions of a sort, for an hour or two a week. But, after those first revelations, they returned to an impersonal relationship.
Then, one day, it changed.
Once again it started, innocently enough, with a newspaper headline. They read it in a paper lying on the bar when they stopped for their beer.
TWO DIE IN
SUBWAY SHOOTOUT
Two men had tried to stick up a change booth at a subway station in the Bronx. A transit cop who had been on the station had drawn his gun and shot both robbers dead. A picture showed the two dead men sprawled on the station floor and, behind them, the change clerk peering out between the bars of his booth.
“Addicts,” Longman said knowledgeably. “Nobody else would go for the money in a change booth. There’s not that much involved to warrant the risk.”
Ryder nodded, without interest, and there the matter would have ended—as Longman had so often reminded himself—if he had not gone on, if he had not, bartering for Ryder’s esteem, taken his fantasy out of its hiding place.
“If I wanted to perpetrate a crime in the subway system,” he said, “I sure as hell wouldn’t hold up a change booth.”
“What would you do?”
“Something sensational, something where there would be a big payoff.”
“Like what?” Ryder’s interest was nothing more than courteous.
“Like hijack a train,” Longman said.
“A subway train? What could anyone do with a subway train?”
“Hold it for ransom.”
“If it was my subway train, I would tell you to keep it before I paid to get it back.” Ryder was amused.
“Not the train itself,” Longman said. “Ransom for the passengers. Hostages.”
“Sounds too complicated,” Ryder said. “I don’t see how it could work.”
“Oh, it might work. I’ve thought about it, from time to time. For laughs—you know?”
It was true, in a way, that he had thought it out for laughs, but the bitter kind. It was his revenge against the system. But it was only a shadow revenge, a game that he played, and it never once entered his mind to be serious about it.
Ryder set his beer glass down and turned on his stool to face Longman squarely. In a firm, level voice, the voice of command, as Longman now understood it to be, he said, “Why did you leave the subway system?”
It wasn’t the question Longman expected—if he had expected anything at all except mild interest. It took him unawares, and he found himself blurting out the truth. “I didn’t quit. I got the boot.”
Ryder kept looking at him, waiting.
“I was innocent,” Longman said. “I should have fought it, but—”
“Innocent of what?”
“Of wrongdoing, naturally.”
“What kind of wrongdoing? What were you charged with?”
“I wasn’t charged with anything. It was only insinuations, but still they forced me out. You sound like a district attorney.”
“Sorry,” Ryder said.
“Hell, I don’t mind talking about it. They framed me. The beakies had to find a victim—”
“Beakies?”
“Special inspectors. Undercover men. They go around in plain clothes, checking up on trainmen. Sometimes they even dress up like kids, you know, long hair. Spies is what they are.”
“They’re called beakies because they’re nosy?” Ryder smiled.
“That’s what everyone thinks. Actually, they got their name—like the bobbies in London—from the first chief of Security Services on the old IRT, way back. His name was H. F. Beakie.”
Ryder nodded. “What did they accuse you of doing?”
“Some gang was supposed to be passing dope,” Longman said defiantly. “You know, transporting it from downtown to uptown, giving it to a motorman, and then someone picking it up in Harlem, supposed to pick it up, uptown. The beakies tried to pin i
t on me. But they never had any evidence; they never caught me with any. How could they, if I didn’t do it?”
“They tried to frame you?”
“They did frame me, the bastards.”
“But you were innocent.”
“Sure I was innocent. Do you think I would do something like that? You know me.”
“Yes,” Ryder said. “I know you.”
KOMO MOBUTU
Up to the point where he became enraged by the two black boys, Komo Mobutu had kept his cool. The event was no place, not his business at-tall. Somebody could rip off the subway twice a day, and he wouldn’t blink an eye. If it didn’t have nothing to do with the revolutionary aspirations of the oppressed black people, it didn’t exist, it wasn’t here.
It gave him a sense of perverse pleasure to be involved—not that he was really involved, more like exvolved—because he rode the subways. He wasn’t no taxi-limousine-penthouse-attaché-case-747-first-class-ticket-free-cocktails-from-ofay-stewardesses type like that international clique of so-called Brothers on the coast and in Paris and Algeria. He was a righteous working revolutionary, and even if he had the bread, he would still ride the people’s conveyance, and, for long-distance, he would still fly Greyhound.
Ordinarily—when some big gray mothers weren’t ripping it off with armament that made his mouth water—he almost enjoyed the subway because he had a way of passing the time. A pastime, you could say, not a wastetime but a powertime. He would pick out a gray peeg, fix his righteous eye on the sumbitch and just stare him out of sight. More often than not, the sumbitch got so uptight that he changed his seat or went into another car. Some of them even got so nervous and sweaty that they got off the train before their station. All he did was stare, but they read in his eyeballs the tre-menjous anger of a people at long last raising up against 300 years of repression and genocide. There wasn’t one single whitey who didn’t dig that message in his unblinking maroon eyes and didn’t fade out of the challenge. He had never lost one yet. He hypmatize the sumbitches! If every Brother did the eye thing, they could generate enough power to paralyze the whole peeg population.
Mobutu sat with a very erect back in his seat, facing a fancy white fox in an Anzac hat, looking straight through the whore. When the old dude sitting next to him had spoken up he didn’t even turn his head. Screw it all, it wasn’t germane. But now, from the corner of his eye, he dug the two black boys sitting across the aisle. They were both very dark, good African types, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Delivery boys, serving the master, carrying the white man’s packages for him. What burned his ass most was what they were doing with their eyes. Big soft brown eyes, and they were rolling them around like marbles in the whites, making them a kind of a grin, wagging their goddamn tail so the man wouldn’t get mad and shoot a bullet up their ass.
Almost before he knew that he was doing it, he was shouting across the aisle in a fury. “Goddamn you, you two niggers, get your goddamn eyes straight, you hear?” He glared at them, and they looked back at him, startled. “You stupid niggers, you too young to be Tomming. Get your eyes straight and look the man in the fucking eye!”
Every eye in the car was on him, and as he stared at one after the other of them, he lingered on the well-dressed Nee-gro with the attaché case. His face was expressionless, detached. A white nigger, long lost to the cause, and not worth the bother. But the two boys…. It might be worth putting on a little demonstration for them.
Turning to face the man with the gun but addressing the boys, he said, “You don’t have no cause to be scared of no white motherfucker, Brothers. Someday soon we are going to take that gun away and ram it down his peeg throat!”
The man with the gun, stolid, even bored, said, “Shut up your goddamn mouth.”
“I don’t take orders from no white motherfucker peeg!”
The man made a gesture with his gun. “Come over here to me, loudmouth.”
“You think I’m afraid of you, peeg?” Mobutu got to his feet. His legs were shaky, not with fear but in anger.
“I just want you over here,” the man said. “Come on over.”
He walked to the center of the car and stood before the man, his back very straight, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“Go do it,” he said. “Go shoot me. But I warn you, there are many more like me, thousands and thousands, and we promise to cut your peeg throat—”
Effortlessly, without passion, the man brought the gun across his body, and smashed it on a diagonal across Mobutu’s left temple. Mobutu felt the impact—a stunning pain, a red rain in his eyes—and he reeled backward, thumping to the floor in a sitting position.
“Go sit down, and never open your mouth no more.”
Mobutu heard the man’s voice dimly. He touched his face and realized that blood was dripping down into his eye socket from a mashed eyebrow. He stood up, then fell back into his seat beside the old man. The old man put out a hand to steady him. He shook it off. The car was hushed.
“He asked for it,” the man who had hit him said. “Don’t nobody else ask for it.”
Mobutu took out his handkerchief and pressed it to his forehead. Through his right eye he focused on the black messenger boys. Their eyes were still bugged, their lips pendulous. Sheet, Mobutu thought, I took a blow for nothing. They will never be nothing but fucking field hands.
Everyone in the car was studiously avoiding looking at him, even those who might ordinarily be fascinated by the sight of blood.
SIX
FRANK CORRELL
The headquarters of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, commonly called the Transit Authority, is located in a large granite-faced building at 370 Jay Street in what is known as “downtown Brooklyn.” 370 Jay is a comparatively new and modern structure surrounded by many older, darker-toned, more graceful and architecturally complicated buildings that constitute the heart of Kings County’s official center: Borough Hall, courthouses, administrative bureaus. Although this area of Brooklyn is not just another Brooklyn joke, nevertheless it is classed as a province of the island across the nearby river, and suffers loss of stature thereby.
The administrative functions of the Transit Authority are spread throughout 370 Jay in offices ranging in style from styleless, to Civil-Service-utilitarian, to the dignified thirteenth-floor suite of the top executives of the authority, which is approached through a large, discreetly lighted anteroom guarded casually by a transit patrolman.
If space is at a premium in many of the offices in the building—notably, just below, on the second floor, in the cramped quarters of the TA Police Nerve Center—it is prodigally cheap in the third-floor area occupied by the Trainmasters’ Office, better known as the Command Center. Three divisional units are scattered widely, even wastefully, through an enormous, block-long, high-ceilinged area with so much space that the arrangement seems provisional. Each of the three divisions—A Division, or IRT; B Division, or BMT; and B-1 Division, or IND—occupies its own enclave at widely separated intervals. The most active and visible members of a divisional group are the desk trainmaster and his dispatchers.
IRT, the oldest but smallest division, has four dispatchers assisting the desk trainmaster. They sit at steel desks with electric consoles through which they can speak to every motorman in their section by two-way radio. Each division is split into sections along geographical lines; on the IRT, for example, into East Side, West Side, aboveground tracks in the Bronx, and so forth. The consoles on the dispatchers’ desks are similar to those in the Tower Rooms, with the major exception that the Tower consoles are unable to communicate directly with the motorman’s cab.
Each call the dispatchers receive from a train, or initiate themselves, is recorded in a log: identification number of the train, nature of the call; action taken. A typical call to Command Center might involve a motorman reporting a fire under a platform at a given station. After ascertaining the extent and seriousness of the fire, the dispatcher proceeds to advise the motorman
on whether or not to proceed, to stand by or to empty his train of passengers (“dump his load”). He then gets in touch with the appropriate department: Maintenance (known as car knockers), Tower, Power Central (cut or restore power, as the case might be), the Transit Police—whichever one or combination of these is indicated.
The dispatchers report to the desk trainmaster, who in turn is subordinate to a supervisor, who does not concern himself with the minute-to-minute operation of the division. The desk trainmaster’s console allows him to reach the motormen in all sections, which is to say, every motorman in the division. The desk trainmaster is the boss; he is responsible for keeping the trains running smoothly and on time. He earns his pay on any day, but particularly when there is an emergency that threatens the functioning of the division. Then his job is to work out a flex, an emergency schedule which will keep the trains running: switching locals to express tracks and vice versa, moving trains from the East Side line to the West, ordering motormen to dump their load or travel light—any of a variety of intricate improvisations designed to make a schedule flexible, to maintain service in the face even of major catastrophes like a derailed train or a collision. Such things have been known to happen on the best run of railroads.
An adjunct of the Command Center is the Communications Desk, which announces schedule changes and emergencies through the station PA systems, to keep passengers advised. The messages are recorded by the Communications Desk on tape and cassette and relayed to the stations. When there are major delays or emergencies, the desk gets in touch with the media—newspapers, radio, and television—and keeps them abreast of developments.
Frank Correll knew all of this, as well as he knew himself, though he couldn’t have described it, or thought it necessary to, any more than he could have described his body. If you asked him how he lifted his arm, he would scowl and say, “You just lift it,” meaning there are some things you don’t have to think about. That was precisely how he regarded the Command Center and his vital role in the operation of A Division as one of three desk trainmasters who functioned in three shifts around the clock.