by John Godey
“How come?” Welcome said. “What are you changing the plan for?”
“The passengers know you shot somebody. They’ll be easier to handle because they’ll be intimidated by you.”
Welcome’s nylon stretched to a hidden smile. “You better know it.”
“Don’t go off the handle,” Ryder said as Welcome started to move off. “Just play it cool; they’ll behave themselves.”
Ryder went back to his observation of the tunnel. Steever came up behind him and waited silently for him to speak.
“Take over back here,” Ryder said. “I want Welcome up closer to me so I can keep an eye on him.”
Steever nodded, and peered over his shoulder at the track. “Dead?”
“Maybe it was necessary. I didn’t see it. But he’s trigger-happy.” Ryder jerked his head toward the front of the car. “The bleeding man. You hit him?”
“Had to,” Steever said. “Won’t he make the people nervous? Welcome?”
“I’m going to talk to them.”
“It going okay?” Steever said.
“On schedule. I predicted it would be slow at the start. They’re still stunned on the other side. But they’ll get hold of themselves, and then they’ll go our way.”
Steever nodded, content. He was a simple man, Ryder thought, a good soldier. It was going okay or it wasn’t, and he would do his job either way. He asked for no guarantees. He took a chance and would accept any outcome, not because he was a gambler but because his uncomplicated mind understood perfectly the terms of his employment. You lived or you died.
Ryder went forward. Against the center post Steever had vacated, Welcome had taken up a widespread stance, and the passengers were scrupulously looking in another direction. Longman, wedged in the angle formed by the storm door and the front edge of the cab door, seemed to have shrunk. The shooting had left him terrified. In fact, he must have been close to panic when he had been pounding the cab door during the shooting. Ryder had heard the shots himself, muffled by the isolation of the cab, but he had ignored them, as he had ignored Longman’s pounding, until he was finished speaking to the Command Center. Coming out of the cab face to face with Longman, he had read his state of mind at once. It was astonishing how much expression you could intuit through the nylon mask.
He took up a position to the left of Welcome and spoke at once, without preamble. “Before, some of you asked for information.” He paused and watched the passengers turn toward him, some alertly, some in surprise or apprehension. “The information most important to you is this—you are hostages.”
There were one or two groans and a suppressed scream from the mother of the two boys, but for the most part the passengers accepted the news with composure, although a number of them exchanged questioning glances, as if, uncertain of how to react, they sought guidance. Only the black militant and the hippie seemed unaffected. The black’s right eye, showing around the edge of his bloody handkerchief, was a hard, disciplined blank. The hippie was smiling beatifically down at his wriggling toes.
“A hostage,” Ryder said, “is a form of temporary insurance. If we get what we want, you’ll be released unharmed. Until then, you will do exactly what you’re told.”
The elegantly dressed old man said in a calm voice, “And if you don’t get what you want?”
The other passengers avoided looking at the old man, as though to disavow complicity; he had asked the question none of them wanted answered. Ryder said, “We expect to get it.”
“What do you want?” the old man said. “Money?”
Welcome said, “That’s enough out of you, Grandpa. Button up.”
“What else is there?” Ryder said to the old man, and gave a twitch of a smile under his mask.
“So. Money.” The old man nodded, as if in confirmation of a judgment. “And if you don’t get the money?”
Welcome said, “I can stop you, old man, I can put a bullet right through your talker.”
The old man took notice of him. “My friend, I’m only asking a few sensible questions. We’re all reasonable people, right?” He returned to Ryder. “If you don’t get the money, you’ll kill us?”
“We’ll get the money,” Ryder said. “What should concern you, all of you, is that we won’t hesitate to kill you if you get out of line. Keep that in mind.”
“Okay,” the old man said. “Listen—off the record, just a little curiosity—what’s your asking price? Can’t you give us a little sneak preview?” The old man looked around the car but found no takers; he laughed alone.
Ryder went down the aisle to the front of the car. Longman stepped out in front of him.
“Move back,” Ryder said. “You’re in the line of fire.”
Longman edged to the side, then brought his head forward and whispered, “I think we got a cop sitting there.”
“What makes you think so? Which one?”
“Take a look. You ever see anybody looked more like a cop?”
Ryder picked him out. He was sitting beside the hippie, a huge, bulky man with a heavy stolid face and that quality of beefiness that wasn’t softness but power. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and loafers, a rumpled shirt, and a slightly soiled rep tie. Not exactly spit-and-polish, but that didn’t mean anything; nobody cared how a detective dressed.
“Let’s frisk him,” Longman whispered. “If he’s a cop, and carrying a gun…” His whisper got away from him, turned into a harsh, audible croak.
When the question of frisking the passengers had risen, weeks ago, they had decided against it. The chances that anybody would be carrying a gun were small, and only a fool would attempt to use one against such enormous odds. As for knives, a more likely weapon, they didn’t constitute a threat.
The man unquestionably had the look of a veteran detective. “Okay,” Ryder said to Longman. “Cover me.”
The passengers drew their feet back overzealously, shrinking away from him as he walked through the aisle.
He stopped in front of the man. “On your feet.”
Slowly, keeping his upturned eyes fixed watchfully on Ryder’s face, the man stood up. Next to him, the hippie was industriously scratching himself under his poncho.
TOM BERRY
Tom Berry caught the whispered word “frisk,” a professional word that registered where a more ordinary one might not have. The tall man, the leader, seemed to be studying him, briefly weighing some proposition advanced by the whisperer. A wave of heat swept over him. Somehow, they had made him. The heavy Smith and Wesson .38, with its graceless two-inch barrel, was snugged firmly in his belt, weighty against his bare skin beneath the concealing poncho. And what was he going to do about it?
The question was urgent, the alternatives easy to understand. By the terms of your training and conditioning and oath, your gun was a sacred object, and no man could be permitted to take it from you. You defended it as you would defend your life; it was your life, your transubstantial life. So you didn’t give it up unless you were the kind of poltroon who wanted to live at any cost. Well, that was exactly the kind of poltroon he was. He would suffer them to discover his gun and his tin, and take them both away, without so much as flexing a muscle to protect his, ah, honor. They might belt him around some, but they weren’t likely to go any further. There was no purpose to killing him once he was disarmed. A cop without a gun was no threat, just somebody to laugh at.
Let them laugh. Like the contempt of his colleagues, it would hurt some, but not fatally. Scorn and laughter were wounds that healed with time.
And so, once again, steadfast in principle, he had chosen dishonor over death. Not that Deedee would see it in that light. In fact, she might be pleased by it for a complexity of reasons, among which, he hoped, might be the apolitical one that she cared for him deeply. There would certainly be no complexities about the attitude of the department in general and his precinct captain in particular. Unequivocally, they would rather see him dead than disgraced.
But then the leader of the
hijackers started toward him, and his synapses—training, conditioning, brainwashing, whatever you wanted to call it—spat squarely in the eye of his intellect, and he became a cop who believed all the shibboleths. He slid his hand under his poncho and began to scratch himself, moving his hand steadily across his stomach until the fingers brought up against the hard wooden butt of the .38.
The leader loomed above him, his voice at the same time impersonal and threatening. “On your feet.”
Berry’s fingers had already closed on the butt when the man at his left stood up. And so, easing his hold on the gun, Berry didn’t really know, and was relieved of the burden of having to know, whether or not he would have drawn. His coppishness, he thought, blinked on and off like a sign on a Chinese restaurant.
For the first time, Berry saw how much like a cop the standing man looked. The leader, with the muzzle of the Thompson squarely on his belt buckle, was frisking him efficiently with one hand, pulling and tugging at his clothing, patting him thoroughly. When he was satisfied there was no weapon, he took the man’s wallet, and after ordering him to sit down, went through it quickly. He threw it into the man’s lap, and the flip of his wrist made him seem, for the first time, almost playful.
“Newspaperman,” he said, “ever been told you look like a policeman?”
The man’s face was red, and he was sweating, but his voice was steady. “Frequently.”
“You’re a reporter?”
The man shook his head, and said in an aggrieved tone, “When I walk through a slum neighborhood, they throw rocks at me. No. I’m a drama critic.”
The leader appeared bemused. “Well, I hope you like our little show.”
Berry suppressed a laugh. The leader walked away and went back inside the motorman’s cab. Berry began to scratch himself again, his fingers retreating from the revolver, crawling like a crab across his damp skin until they emerged from beneath the poncho. He folded his hands across his chest, lowered his chin, and grinned vacuously at his toes.
RYDER
In the cab, Ryder was remembering a bright, sunny day that accented rather than softened the tawdriness of the city streets. He had been walking with Longman, who suddenly stopped short and, almost in a spasm of desperation, blurted out the question that must have been plaguing him for weeks.
“Why is a person like you doing this? I mean, you’re smart, and a lot younger than me, you could make a living, have a life….” Longman paused, to give his words emphasis, and said, “You’re not really a criminal.”
“I’m planning a criminal act. That makes me a criminal.”
“Well, okay.” Longman waved the point away. “But what I want to know is why.”
There were several answers, each of which would have been partially true, which was to say, partially untrue as well. He might have said that he was doing it for money, or for excitement, or because of the way his parents had died, or because he didn’t feel things quite the way other people did…. And perhaps any of those would have been enough for Longman. Not that Longman was stupid, simply that he would accept any reasonable solution to the mystery over none at all.
But instead he said, “If I knew why, I probably wouldn’t be doing it.”
The evasion seemed to satisfy Longman. They continued their walk, and the question never came up again. But Ryder was aware that he had plucked it out of the air because it had a solemn psychiatric ring to it, not because he believed it or, for that matter, had any interest in either the question or the answer—his own or anybody’s answer. As he reminded himself now, standing in the motorman’s cab (a sequestered place, like a confessional, figuratively halfway between the outer crust of the earth and hell), he was neither a psychiatrist nor a patient. He knew the facts of his life, and that was enough for him. He felt no need to interpret them, to fathom the meaning of his life. Life—anybody’s life—struck him as a rather heavy-handed joke that death played on people, and it was as well that you understood it. “We owe God a death.” He recalled reading that in Shakespeare. Well, he was a man who paid his bills when they came due and didn’t have to be dunned.
A girl had once told him, in pity and anger, that something had been left out of him. He didn’t doubt it and thought that she had actually understated the case. Some things would have been more accurate. He had tried to explore himself, probing for the missing ingredients, but in an hour had lost interest in the whole idea and dropped it. It occurred to him now that lack of exigent interest in himself was probably another one of those missing ingredients.
He knew the facts of his life, and he realized that they might have acted to incline him this way or that. But he had allowed them to. Whether you drifted with the current or tried to fight it, you reached the same destination—death. It was a matter of indifference to him what route he took, except that he preferred something scenic over something expedient. That made him a fatalist? Okay, he was a fatalist.
He had learned much about the value of life from the example of his parents, who had died of accidents within a year of each other. His father’s accident consisted of a heavy glass ashtray that had come sailing out of a window, thrown by an irate woman at her husband, who had ducked. The ashtray whirled downward, struck his father in the head and smashed his skull. His mother’s accident was cancer, a cluster of cells suddenly running rampant in the body of a robust woman and killing her after eight months of agony and appalling destructiveness.
If his parents’ deaths—which he did not see as different or even discrete events—did not alone give birth to his philosophy, they certainly planted the seed. He was fourteen that year, and he had acknowledged the loss without actually mourning it, perhaps because he had already cultivated an unusual detachment derived from the sensed absence of love in his parents’ marriage, which more or less included their feelings toward their only child. He recognized that some of the things that were “left out” were a heritage from his parents, but he had never held it against them. It wasn’t only the love things that were missing, but the hate things as well.
He went to live with an aunt in New Jersey, a younger sister of his dead mother. The aunt taught school and was physically austere, an angular woman in her late thirties. She turned out to be a secret drinker and masturbator, but beyond those two humanizing flaws she remained formal and distant. According to some whimsical last wish of his mother he was enrolled at a military academy near Bordentown and rarely saw his aunt, except for the holidays and an occasional weekend. In the summers she placed him in a boys’ camp in the Adirondacks while she went off on an annual European vacation. On the whole, since he had never known an affectionate family life anyway, it was an arrangement that suited him well enough.
He regarded his school as inane and its headmaster, a retired general, as an ass. He made few friends, and no close ones. He was neither big enough to be a bully nor small enough to be a victim. He was drawn into two fights in his first week and demolished his opponents with such cold and offhand viciousness that he never had to fight again for the remainder of his stay at the school. Although he had quick reflexes and was quite strong for his weight, sports bored him, and he participated only when they were compulsory. Academically he was in the top 10 percent of the class. Socially, by choice, he was a loner. He never joined group excursions to a local whorehouse or took part in the occasional gangbang of a willing town girl. Once he went off to a whorehouse on his own and failed to get an erection. Another time he was picked up by a girl who drove her car to a lakeside parking place and seduced him successfully—for her, that is. He erected satisfactorily, but was unable to ejaculate, which pleased the girl well enough. He had a single homosexual encounter, which he enjoyed no more than he had the heterosexual, and after that, he eliminated sex from his schoolboy curriculum.
Nothing in his military subjects at school or in two years of ROTC at college—or, for that matter, when he was drafted, in basic training or officers’ training school—prepared him for his discovery of a métier on
ce he went into combat. It was in Vietnam, in the halcyon days when Americans were “advisers,” and a buildup to more than half a million men would have seemed an unlikely prospect. Holding the rank of second lieutenant, he had been assigned as adviser to an ARVN major leading a hundred men on some ill-defined mission to a hamlet a few miles northwest of Saigon. They were ambushed on a dusty, foliage-cramped road, and would have been wiped out to a man if the enemy—they were Vietcong, tiny men in sweaty jerseys and khaki shorts—had been better disciplined. But when the ARVN unit retreated (actually, turned their backs and ran in a panic), the ambushers broke their cover and chased them in the open.
The major and another officer had died in the first volley, and the remaining two officers were dazed and helpless. With the help of a sergeant who spoke some English, Ryder rallied his troops and organized a resistance. Eventually, and discovering in the process that he was fearless—or, more accurately, that the thought of death did not terrify him or in any way affect his competence—Ryder mounted a counterattack. The enemy was routed, which is to say melted away, but left behind a sufficient number of dead and wounded so that the episode was construed as a victory of sorts for the ARVN.
He fought frequently after that, leading small detachments on limited raids. If he didn’t precisely take pleasure in killing, certainly he found a measure of satisfaction in discovering his competence. At the end of his tour he was returned to the States and reassigned as an instructor at an infantry camp in Georgia, where he remained until he was mustered out.
He returned to his aunt’s house, where some changes had taken place—his aunt was drinking less and had given up masturbation in favor of a lover of sorts, an elderly lawyer of goatish disposition and, apparently, prowess. For lack of anything he really cared to do more, rather than genuine interest or curiosity, Ryder used his accumulated pay to make a tour of Europe. In Belgium, at an out-of-the-way bar in Antwerp, he met a loud, cheerful, hard-faced German who recruited him as a mercenary for the fighting in the Congo.