The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  With the exception of his brief service in Bolivia, Africa—one part of it or another, one side or another, one political persuasion or another—kept him gainfully employed, and he was reasonably content. He learned much about fighting on various terrains and leading troops of contrasting degrees of competence and bravery, and he was wounded three times all told, twice superficially and once seriously, a spear thrust that spitted him like a sheep and yet contrived to miss most of his vital organs. A month later he was back in combat.

  When the market for mercenaries dried up, he knocked around in Tangier for a bit, drifting. There were opportunities to do some smuggling (hashish out, cigarettes in), but he turned them down; at that time he drew a sharp distinction between fighting for money and an illegal enterprise. He met a Jordanian, who promised him service with King Hussein, but it never panned out. Eventually he returned to the States to find that his aunt and the old lawyer had sanctified their arrangement with marriage. He packed up his few belongings and moved to Manhattan.

  A few weeks after he began working as a salesman of mutual funds he drifted into an affair with a woman who declined to buy his shares but was eager to receive him into her bed. She was an avid, even rapacious, partner, but although he had learned some skills, he had no compelling sex drive. The woman professed to be in love with him, and perhaps she was, but his pleasure at poking inside a predictable variety of orifices was indifferent. The day he was fired from his job he stopped seeing the lady. Neither event stirred him.

  He could not have said why he accepted Longman’s friendship, except that it was offered, and it wasn’t worth the bother to refuse it. Nor could he explain to himself why, having rejected a criminal venture in Tangier, he was willing to embrace one in Manhattan. Perhaps it was because the strategical and tactical problems appealed to him. Perhaps because his boredom had reached a high point that it had not in Tangier. Almost certainly because the money meant the end of having to earn a living in uncongenial ways. Even more certainly because the high risk appealed to him. But, finally, motivation didn’t matter, only the action leading therefrom.

  NINE

  CLIVE PRESCOTT

  Lieutenant Prescott’s boss, Captain Durgin, called Command Center to report the news about Dolowicz. Prescott reached over Correll’s shoulder and took the phone. Correll clapped his hand over his eyes and slumped in his seat with a moan.

  “I’m going across the river to Twenty-eighth Street,” the captain said. “Not that they’ll give us much of a play. The cops, I mean. The real cops. They’ll hog the ball.”

  Correll suddenly sat upright and threw his arms out full length over his head in a gymnastic supplication to the heavens.

  “Everything is climbing up the chain of command,” the captain said. “Ours from Chief Costello to the chairman. Theirs to the commissioner, to the mayor… What’s that racket?”

  Correll was addressing the high ceiling in a hoarse, passionate voice, cursing the killers of Casimir Dolowicz, pledging God’s vengeance and his own in the same breath.

  “The trainmaster,” Prescott said. “I guess Dolowicz was his buddy.”

  “Tell him to shut up, I can’t hear anything.”

  From the farthest reaches of the Command Center, small groups of men were converging on Correll, who suddenly quieted and, collapsing in his chair again, began to sob.

  “Stay put, Clive,” the captain said. “Maintain contact with the train until we work out some other means of communication. Are they saying anything?”

  “They’ve been silent for the last few minutes.”

  “Tell them we reached the mayor. Tell them we need more time. Jesus, what a city. Any questions?”

  “Yes,” Prescott said. “I’d like to get in on the action.”

  “That’s not a question. Stay right where you are.” The captain hung up.

  The groups from the other, parts of the Command Center—trainmasters and dispatchers of the other divisions—had arrived. Rolling cigars in their mouths, they surrounded the console and looked down dispassionately at Correll. Correll, whose moods—Prescott had determined—were intense but short-lived, abandoned tears in favor of pounding his desk in anger.

  “Gentlemen,” Prescott said. “Gentlemen.” A dozen faces turned toward him, cigars twitching in thin-lipped mouths. “Gentlemen, this desk is now in effect a police post, and I’ll have to ask you to clear out.”

  “Caz is dead,” Correll said tragically. “Struck down in his prime.”

  “Gentlemen,” Prescott said.

  “Fat Caz has been taken away from us,” Correll said.

  Prescott stared sternly at the group around the console. The blank faces returned his gaze, cigars rotating, and then, still expressionless, they began to drift away.

  Prescott said, “See if you can raise the train, Frank.”

  Correll’s mood shifted again. His wiry body stiffened, and he shouted, “I refuse to dirty my hands speaking to those black bastards.”

  “How can you tell what color they are over the radio?”

  “Color? I mean black-hearted,” Correll said blandly.

  “All right,” Prescott said. “Now, let me sit down so I can work.”

  Correll jumped to his feet. “How do you expect me to keep the line running if you take my console away?”

  “Use the dispatchers’ consoles. I realize it’s awkward, Frank, but it can be done.” Prescott slipped into Correll’s chair. Leaning forward, he activated the boom mike. “Command Center calling Pelham One Two Three. Command Center to Pelham One Two Three.”

  Correll clapped his hand to his forehead. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when talking to murderers got priority over running a railroad that the life of the city depends on. Where is the justice of it, for God’s sake!”

  “Come in, Pelham One Two Three, come in….” Prescott deactivated the mike. “We’re concerned about saving the lives of sixteen passengers. That’s our priority, Frank.”

  “Screw the passengers! What the hell do they want for their lousy thirty-five cents—to live forever?”

  He was role playing, Prescott thought, but only partially. He was a true believer, and all true believers had tunnel vision. Beyond Correll, he saw the A Division dispatchers at their consoles, frantically trying to cope with the calls pouring in from perplexed motormen all along the line, so swamped that they had given up any pretense of logging the calls.

  “If I was handling it,” Correll said, “I’d go storming in there with guns and tear gas and manpower—”

  “You’re not handling it, thank God,” Prescott said. “Why don’t you start working out a flex and leave the police work to the police?”

  “That’s another thing. I have to wait for word from the super. He’s consulting. What the hell is there to consult about? I have to move my trains north and south of the dead sector. But that still leaves me with a mile-long gap, all four tracks out, right in the center of the city. If you just gave me power on two tracks, even one track—”

  “We can’t give you any power.”

  “You mean those murderers won’t let you give me power. Don’t it make you sick, taking your orders from a gang of frigging pirates? It’s piracy on the high frigging seas!”

  “Try relaxing,” Prescott said. “You’ll have your railroad back in an hour or so, give or take a few minutes—or lives.”

  “An hour,” Correll screamed. “You realize we’re creeping up on rush hour? Rush hour with a whole section out of use? Pandemonium!”

  “Pelham One Two Three,” Prescott said into the mike. “Calling Pelham One Two Three.”

  “How do you know those bastards aren’t bluffing? How do you know they’re not counting on our being soft on lives?”

  “Soft on lives,” Prescott said. “You’re something, Correll, you’re a bunch of something.”

  “They say they’re going to hurt the passengers, but they might be bluffing you out.”

  “Like they bluffed us out with Do
lowicz?”

  “Oh, God.” In another emotional quick change, Correll’s eyes filled with tears. “Fat Caz. A beautiful man. A white man.”

  “You’ve got a great touch with the language, Correll.”

  “Old Caz. A railroad man in the old tradition. Pat Burdick would have been proud of him.”

  “If he walked into those guns, he was stupid,” Prescott said. “Who is Pat Burdick?”

  “Pat Burdick? A legend. The greatest of the old trainmasters. The stories about him? I could tell you a dozen.”

  “Some other time, maybe.”

  “One day,” Correll said, “a train was laying dead at ten minutes to five. Ten minutes to five! Right before rush hour?”

  “I’m going to try raising them again,” Prescott said.

  “The motorman called on the telephone—this was well before the time of two-way radios—and said there was a dead man lying on the track right in front of his train. Pat says, ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ ‘Sure I’m sure he’s dead,’ the motorman says. ‘In fact, he’s stiff as a board.’ So Pat screams, ‘Then, goddamn it, prop him up against a pillar and get your train moving. We’ll pick him up after rush hour!’”

  “Command Center to Pelham One Two Three….”

  “That’s the kind of a railroad man Caz Dolowicz was. You know what Caz would be saying to me right now? He’d be saying, ‘Never mind me, Frank old buddy, just keep the railroad running.’ Caz would want it that way.”

  “Pelham One Two Three to Command Center. Pelham One Two Three to Lieutenant Prescott at Command Center.”

  Prescott’s finger shot out to the transmitter button. “This is Prescott. Come in, Pelham One Two Three.”

  “I’m looking at my watch, Lieutenant. It reads two thirty-seven. You’re down to thirty-six minutes.”

  “The bastards,” Correll said. “The murdering bastards.”

  “Shut up,” Prescott said. He spoke into the mike. “Be reasonable. We’re cooperating. You’re not giving us enough time to work with.”

  “Thirty-six minutes. Check me.”

  “I check you, but the time is too short. You’re dealing with a bureaucracy. It moves slowly.”

  “Time it learned how to move fast.”

  “It’s involved. You know, we don’t have a million dollars just lying around.”

  “You haven’t agreed yet to pay it. The money isn’t hard to raise—not if you’re serious about it.”

  “I’m a simple cop, I don’t know much about those things.”

  “Then find somebody who does. The clock is moving.”

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I have word,” Prescott said. “Be patient. Just don’t hurt anybody else.”

  “Else? What do you mean by else?”

  A blunder, Prescott thought, they didn’t know somebody on the track witnessed Dolowicz’s death. “People back on the station heard gunfire. We assumed that you might have hurt somebody. One of the passengers?”

  “We killed somebody out on the track. We’ll kill anyone else we see on the track. And a passenger. Keep that in mind. Any infraction and we’ll kill one hostage.”

  “The passengers are innocent people,” Prescott said. “Don’t hurt them.”

  “Thirty-five minutes left. Contact me when you have word on the money. Check?”

  “Check. I ask you again—don’t hurt those people.”

  “We’ll hurt as many as we have to.”

  “Back to you soon,” Prescott said. “Over and out.” He slumped back in the chair, wrung out with suppressed anger.

  “Christ!” Correll said. “To listen to you pleading with that bastard—it makes me ashamed to be an American.”

  “Go away,” Prescott said. “Go play with your trains.”

  HIS HONOR, THE MAYOR

  His Honor, the mayor, lay abed in his private living quarters on the second floor of Gracie Mansion with a running nose, a stupefying headache, aching bones, and a temperature of 103.5—plagues enough to insinuate the possibility that he was the victim of a plot by his numerous enemies in and out of the city. But he recognized that it would be paranoid to suspect the Other Side of, say, having introduced flu germs to the rim of his martini glass, since they lacked the imagination to conceive of such a trick.

  The floor beside the bed was littered with official business which he had discarded unread in a touch of petulance he felt himself entitled to. He lay uncomfortably on his back, unshaven, chilled, from time to time groaning in self-pity. He gave no thought to the work of the city going undone, because someone would do it. In fact, he was aware that since early morning, in the two large official rooms on the first floor, a group of his aides were busy with matters of state, riding the phones to City Hall, where their work was expedited (and in some cases duplicated) by still other aides. The phone by the mayor’s bedside was connected, but he had issued orders that no calls were to be put through barring a major disaster such as Manhattan Island slipping off into the bay, a circumstance he sometimes prayed might come to pass.

  It was the first morning since he had taken office—barring an occasional vacation in a warm sunny place or the odd time when a riot or a catastrophic labor dispute had kept him up all night—that he had not left the mansion at seven sharp for City Hall, and he felt both truant and disoriented. When he heard a boat whistle somewhere on the river beyond his window, it suddenly struck him that his predecessors—all good men and true—had been hearing such whistles for thirty years. It was a highly notional thought for His Honor to entertain. An intelligent and educated man (the Other Side disputed the first and denigrated the second), nevertheless he had no taste for the romance of history, nor did the house he lived in by the indulgence of the electorate exert any stranglehold on his interest. He knew, but only by rote, that the mansion had been built in 1897 as a private home by Archibald Gracie, that it was a creditable, if not magnificent, example of the Federalist style, and that its downstairs rooms contained a Trumbull, a Romney, and a Vanderlyn, none of them representative of the artists’ best work, but name paintings, nevertheless. The expert on the building and its contents was his wife, who had once majored in art or architecture, he forgot which, and who had briefed him on what little he knew.

  Presently, he dozed and dreamed apolitical sexual dreams. When the phone rang, he was in the shameful act of kissing (mouth open, tongue hotly probing) a monk in a Swiss Alpine monastery. He struggled out of the hot grasp of the monk (who was naked under his robe) and lunged for the phone. He picked it up and snarled a phlegmy and incoherent monosyllable. The voice on the phone, speaking from one of the downstairs rooms, was that of Murray Lasalle, one of his deputy mayors, the first among equals, the man referred to by the press most frequently as the “spark plug of the administration.”

  Lasalle said, “Sorry, Sam, it can’t be helped.”

  “God’s sake, Murray, I’m about to die.”

  “Postpone it. We have a bitch of a crisis on our hands.”

  “Can’t you handle it? You handled the third Brownsville riot, didn’t you? I feel genuinely awful, Murray. My head is throbbing, I can’t breathe, every bone in my body hurts—”

  “Sure I can handle it, like I handle every other nasty job in this stinking misbegotten city, but I won’t.”

  “Don’t ever let me hear you say won’t. There’s no such word in the lexicon of a deputy mayor.”

  Lasalle, who had a cold himself—of appropriately lesser grandeur than the boss’—said, “Don’t give me lessons in politics. Don’t do that, Sam, or, sick as you are, I’ll remind you—”

  “I’m kidding,” the mayor said. “Sick as I am, I have more sense of humor than you have or will ever have. Well, what’s the calamity? It better be good.”

  “Oh, it’s good, all right,” Lasalle said with relish. “It’s a blue-ribbon ballbuster.”

  The mayor shut his eyes against the coming revelation as though against a blinding sun. “Well, tell me. Don’t milk the suspense.”

 
; “Okay. A gang of men have seized a subway train.” He overrode the mayor’s voice. “Have seized a subway train. They’re holding sixteen citizens and the motorman as hostages, and they won’t release them unless the city pays a million dollars in ransom.”

  For a moment, in his fever, the mayor thought he was still dreaming, that his mind had fled the Alpine scene and landed in a more familiar native nightmare. He blinked his eyes and waited for the dream to dissolve. But Murray Lasalle’s voice was gratingly real.

  “Did you ever hear me, ferchrisesake? I said that some men had hijacked a subway train and were holding—”

  “Shit,” the mayor said. “Shit, goddammit, shit.” He had led a sheltered childhood and never learned to swear convincingly. He had long ago learned that swearing, like foreign languages, is best learned at an early age, but because he regarded it as a social grace, he never gave up trying to master it. “Shit. Fuck. Why do people think up such things to torment me? Are the police on the scene?”

  “Yes. Are you ready to discuss this thing sensibly?”

  “Can’t we let them keep the goddamn subway train? We’ve got plenty of others; we’ll never miss it.” He coughed and sneezed. “The city hasn’t got a million dollars.”

  “No? Well, you’d better find it. Somewhere. Even if you have to liquidate your Christmas Club account. I’m coming right up.”

  “Shit,” the mayor said. “Shit and damn.”

  “I want you to have your head clear by the time I get upstairs.”

  “I haven’t decided to pay it yet. A million dollars. Let’s discuss it.” Murray was too quick off the mark; he was too fondly trustful of his instinct, which was exclusively political. “Maybe there’s another way out.”

  “No way out.”

  “You know how much snow a million dollars will remove this winter? I want a fuller picture of the situation and other viewpoints—the police commissioner, that bastard who’s supposed to be running the Transit Authority, the controller—”