The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  MABSTOA buses were commandeered to portage riders to other lines in the midtown area.

  The shifting of trains to the West Side required elaborate precautions to keep those tracks from being swamped.

  It was a messy improvisation, but at least it avoided a catastrophic standstill. “Like the mail has to move,” Frank Correll shouted, “like the show must go on, the railroad gotta keep running.”

  MURRAY LASALLE

  Murray Lasalle assaulted the handsome staircase two steps at a time and entered the mayor’s room. His Honor was lying on his face, his pajamas pulled down and his bare rump waving in the air as the doctor profiled toward it with a hypodermic syringe. It was a shapely and practically hairless butt, and Lasalle thought: If mayors were elected on the beauty of their asses, His Honor could reign forever. The doctor plunged with his needle. The mayor groaned, flipped over, and pulled up his pajama bottoms.

  Lasalle said, “Get out of bed and put your clothes on, Sam, we’re going downtown.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” the mayor said.

  “Utterly out of the question,” the doctor said. “Ridiculous.”

  “Nobody asked you,” Lasalle said. “I make the political decisions around here.”

  “His Honor is my patient, and I will not permit him out of bed.”

  “Well, I’ll get a doctor who will permit it. You’re fired. Sam, what’s the name of that spade intern at Flower Hospital? The one you used your influence to get into med school?”

  “This is a very sick man,” the doctor said. “His very life might be endangered—”

  “Didn’t I tell you to get lost?” Lasalle glared at the doctor. “Sam—that intern, Revillion, I’m going to get on the blower to him—”

  “Keep him the hell away from here. I’ve had it with doctors.”

  “He won’t have to come near the place. He can diagnose you over the phone.”

  “Murray, ferchrisesake,” the mayor said, “I’m sick as a dog. What’s the sense of it?”

  “What’s the sense of it? Seventeen citizens in jeopardy of their lives and the mayor cares so little about them that he won’t even put in an appearance?”

  “What good is putting in an appearance? So I can get booed?”

  The doctor moved around the bed and picked up the mayor’s hand by the wrist. “Let go of that,” Lasalle said sharply. “You’ve been replaced by Dr. Revillion.”

  “He isn’t even a doctor yet,” the mayor said. “I think he’s a fourth-year student.”

  “Look, Sam, all you have to do is go down there, say a few words to the hijackers on a bullhorn, and then you can come right back and get into bed again.”

  “Will they listen to me?”

  “I doubt it. But it has to be done. The Other Side will be there. You want them to get on the bullhorn and plead for the citizens’ lives?”

  “They’re not sick,” the mayor said, coughing.

  “Remember Attica,” Lasalle said. “You’ll be compared to the governor.”

  The mayor sat up abruptly, swung his feet over the edge of the bed, and pitched forward. Lasalle caught him while the doctor, after a first instinctive move, stood his ground stonily.

  The mayor, with effort, raised his head. “This is crazy, Murray. I can’t even stand up. If I go downtown, I’ll get even sicker.” His eyes widened. “I might even die.”

  “Worse things can happen to a politician than just death,” Lasalle said. “I’ll help you on with your pants.”

  TWELVE

  RYDER

  Ryder opened the cab door, and Longman, stepping back to give him room, touched his arm with trembling fingers. Ryder walked out from under his hand and went to the center of the car. At the rear, Steever sat against the steel outside wall of the car, his gun pointing at an angle toward the track. In the center, Welcome stood with his legs astride, holding his gun with one hand. A man who swaggered even when he was standing still, Ryder thought.

  He took up a position slightly in front of Welcome but off to one side to keep a clear field of fire.

  “Your attention, please.”

  He watched the faces turn toward him, slowly and reluctantly or in a sudden almost spastic reaction to his voice. Only two of the passengers met his eyes—the old man with grave but lively interest, the militant black defiantly over the pink-dyed curtain of his handkerchief. The motorman was white-faced, his lips moving silently. The hippie wore his dreamy zonked-out smile. The mother of the two boys kept touching them compulsively, as if to commit them to memory. The girl in the Anzac hat was sitting erect, a calculated pose to bring her breasts forward, to accentuate the curve of her thighs. The wino woman was drooling, her spittle discolored….

  “I have further information for you,” Ryder said. “The city has agreed to pay for your release.”

  The mother drew her children close to her and kissed them compulsively. The militant’s expression remained unchanged. The old man clapped his small, well-cared-for hands together in a soundless applause that had, or seemed to have, no trace of irony.

  “If everything proceeds according to schedule, you will be released unharmed to go about your business.”

  The old man said, “By according to schedule, you mean what?”

  “Just that the city keeps its word.”

  “Okay,” the old man said. “I would still like to know, just from curiosity, how much money?”

  “A million dollars.”

  “Each?” Ryder shook his head. The old man looked disappointed. “That figures to about sixty thousand apiece. That’s all we’re worth?”

  “Shut your mouth, old man.”

  Welcome’s voice, but it was mechanical, uninterested. Ryder saw why: He was playing games with the girl. Her glamor pose was strictly for Welcome’s benefit.

  “Sir,” The mother was leaning toward him, crushing her boys together. They squirmed with embarrassment. “Sir, the instant you get the money, you’ll let us go?”

  “No, but soon afterwards.”

  “Why not then?”

  “No more questions,” Ryder said. He took a backward step toward Welcome and said in an undertone, “Stop your fooling around with that girl.”

  Only barely lowering his voice, Welcome said, “Stop worrying. I could handle this crowd of slobs and hump that broad at the same time without missing a stroke.”

  Ryder frowned but said nothing. He went back to the cab, ignoring Longman’s anxious look, and went inside. There was nothing to do now but wait. He wasted no effort in speculation on whether or not the money would be delivered within the deadline. It was out of his hands. He didn’t even bother to look at his watch.

  TOM BERRY

  As soon as the leader returned to the motorman’s cab, Tom Berry put him out of mind and resumed thinking about Deedee—specifically about the first time he had met her, and generally about the way she had affected his head. Not that he hadn’t been entertaining some vaguely uncoplike thoughts on his own, but they weren’t pressing. What Deedee accomplished was to make him examine his assumptions seriously.

  He had been on plainclothes patrol in the East Village now for three months. It was a volunteer detail, and God knew why he had stuck his neck out, except that he had been bored witless by duty in an area car with his partner, a fat-necked unreconstructed Nazi type who hated Jews, Negroes, Poles, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and almost everyone else, and was violently in favor of war—the one in Vietnam, as well as all past and future wars. So he had let his hair grow down to his shoulders, raised a beard, put in a supply of ponchos, headbands, and beads, and gone down among the Ukrainians, the motorcycle freaks, street people, addicts, weirdos, students, radicals, acidheads, teen-age runaways, and dwindling hippie population of the East Village.

  The experience had turned out to be kooky and kinky, but not boring. He had gotten to know and like some of the hippies, some of the hustlers in hippie clothing (in a way he was one himself), and some of the sharp black men leading a joyous
and charismatic existence on the strength of a skin color that was high fashion in those purlieus, and, eventually, through Deedee, some of the highly motivated revolutionary kids who were refugees from middle-class comforts and the elite campuses of Harvard, Vassar, Yale, and Swarthmore. Not that he would want to run a revolution with them in the ranks, or that Mao would be particularly crazy about them, either.

  He had met Deedee during his first week on duty, when his instructions had been to acclimate himself and pick up the mores of the community. He had been studying the titles in the window of the bookstore on St. Marks Place—a mélange of Third World, Maoist, and American Movement pundits from Marcuse to Jerry Rubin—when she came out of the shop and stopped to look at the window display. She was dressed in denims and a T-shirt, and was standardly nonconformist: long hair streaming over her shoulders, no bra, no makeup. But the hair was lustrous and clean, the denims and T-shirt laundered (back then, he was still making such distinctions as his first judgments), the figure willowy, the features open and just missing beauty by a shade.

  She became aware of his scrutiny. “The books are in the window, baby.” It failed of toughness because her voice was not a street voice but soft, well modulated.

  He smiled. “I was digging the books pretty good until you came along. You’re prettier.”

  She frowned. “You’re pretty, too, but I didn’t try to demean you by saying so, did I?”

  He recognized the polemics of Women’s Lib. “I’m not into the male chauvinist bit. Honest.”

  “You may think you’re not, but you gave yourself away.”

  She walked off, in the direction of Second Avenue. For no particular reason he trailed after her. She frowned for the third time as he ranged alongside her.

  He said, “Buy me a cup of coffee, will you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “I’m tapped out.”

  “Go uptown and panhandle.” She looked at him sharply. “Are you hungry?”

  He said that he was. She took him to a coffee shop and bought him a sandwich. She took it for granted that he was a member of the Movement—that amorphous search-for-a-better-world flux of young people that was sometimes political, sometimes social, sometimes sexual, sometimes a form of mimicry, and often a combination of all of those—and as they chatted, she became increasingly exasperated at his ignorance of various aspects of it.

  He found her charming and irritating at the same time and didn’t want to arouse her suspicion, although she seemed to have none, only a kind of indignation that he could be so poorly informed. So he said, “Look, I only copped out recently, I’m just beginning to learn what the Movement is all about.”

  “You had a straight job?”

  “In a bank, would you believe it,” he said glibly. “I hated it, and finally I got around to chucking it, to doing my thing.”

  “Well, you don’t quite know what your thing is all about yet, do you?”

  “But I want to learn,” he said, and looked away from her in a situation that called for a long, meaningful glance into a girl’s eyes. He was, at least, learning about her pretty fast. “I really want to get into it.”

  “Well, I can help you.”

  “I appreciate it,” he said gravely. “Do you like me a little better now?”

  “Better than what?”

  “Than before.”

  “Oh,” she said in surprise, “I liked you well enough.”

  They met the next day, and she began his ideological education. The following week she took him to her pad, and they shared a stick of grass and went to bed, already half in love. He had to do some sleight of hand with his gun to keep her from seeing it. But a few days later he was careless, and she spotted him slipping it into the waistband of his pants when he was getting dressed.

  “This? Maybe it’s crazy, but I was mugged once, and hurt very badly….”

  Her eyes were huge with shock as she pointed to the short barrel of the .38 and said, “What are you doing with a pig gun?”

  He might have tried to improvise further, but he found that he didn’t have the stomach to lie to her. “I’m… well, Deedee, I happen to be a pig.”

  She surprised him by hitting him on the jaw—a closed-fist punch that staggered him, and then she sank to the floor and, with her head down in her arms, cried heart-breakingly, like any ordinary bourgeois chick. Later, after recrimination, vituperation, accusation, confession, and protestations of love, they decided not to break off, and Deedee vowed secretly—though she didn’t keep it a secret for very long—to dedicate herself to the liberation of a pig.

  LONGMAN

  Longman had never been convinced of the necessity of imposing a stringent time limit on the delivery of the ransom money, and he had argued vehemently against the forfeiture of the passengers’ lives as a penalty.

  “We have to intimidate,” Ryder had said, “and we have to be convincing. The moment they stop believing that we mean what we say we’re through. We intimidate by setting a tough deadline, and we convince by killing when we threaten to kill.”

  In the crazy framework of this undertaking, Ryder was always right. His arguments went directly to the success of the operation, and on those terms you couldn’t question their logic, bloodcurdling as it might be. Nor did he always argue on what Longman considered to be the “radical” side of an issue. On money, for example, he had taken a more conservative view than Longman himself, who had been for demanding five million dollars.

  “Too much,” Ryder had said. “They might balk at it. A million is the kind of sum people can understand, tolerate. It has a standard ring to it.”

  “That’s just guesswork. You don’t know they won’t pay five million. If you’re wrong, it’s a lot of money out of our pocket.”

  Ryder had given one of his rare smiles at Longman’s phrase. But he had been firm. “It’s not worth the risk. You stand to end up with four hundred thousand, tax free. It’s all the money you’ll ever need. It’s a big improvement on unemployment benefits.”

  The matter was settled, but the conversation left Longman wondering just how important the money was to Ryder; whether, in fact, it wasn’t secondary to the adventure itself, the excitement, the challenge of leadership. The same question might apply to Ryder’s past as a mercenary. Would anybody risk his life in battle if he wasn’t driven by some other—more compelling—impulse than just money?

  Ryder had certainly not counted pennies buying what he called “matériel.” He had financed everything himself, without even asking Longman if he could share costs or so much as mentioning reimbursement when they scored. Longman knew that the four submachine guns had come high, not to mention the ammunition, the handguns, the grenades, the money belts, the specially tailored raincoats, the metal construction that he had designed under Ryder’s prodding and that they referred to as the Gimmick….

  Longman became aware of Welcome and the girl in the Anzac hat. In spite of Ryder’s rebuke, nothing had changed. If two people, separated by ten or fifteen feet, could be said to be screwing, that was what Welcome and the girl were doing. It was queer, kinky. Not that he was a prude. He had done it all, everything in and out of the book, first with that bitchy ex-wife of his and more recently with accommodating whores when he had the money. He had done it all, simple and fancy, and enjoyed it, but, chrisesakes, not in public!

  ANITA LEMOYNE

  Anita Lemoyne gave the creep a long passionate look to keep his fires burning, before she glanced down at the tiny gold watch on her wrist. Even if she could get out of the lousy train right this minute and start running like hell, stripping as she went, she still couldn’t reach the television freak’s pad in time to become a deck in what the bastard called his whore sammawich.

  It was a rotten life and a rotten city. If she reckoned what she had to put out just to make the rent in that fancy high-rise she lived in (not to mention greasing up doormen and superintendents and renting agents and cops), it added up to a hell of a lot of tricks with no retur
n. If there was some way to do it, she would blow the city and find a little house with a yard in the suburbs or even the real deep country. Sure—and live how? Put out a shingle to catch the rube Johns? Fuck in a flowery bower with the whisper of trees mingling with the grunts of the Johns and her own calculated screams of ecstasy? Some dream. There were no Johns. In the suburbs they fucked each other’s wives, and in the deep country they fucked sheeps in the summertime and played poker all winter until the snow melted and they could start chasing sheeps again.

  The creep was still zeroed in on her, his eyeballs practically popping out through the holes in the mask. He was preening himself, God’s gift to women, shooting out sparks of—what did they call it?—maxismo. One thing for sure—it took a wacked-out character to think about pussy when he was right in the middle of ripping off a subway train. And what about herself—did it make any sense to be sitting there opening and closing her legs as if she was creaming at the very sight of him?

  Well, she was a pro, and she could no more not react in a professional way than she could grow a mickey between her legs. Besides, it was a scary situation, and it wouldn’t hurt to make a friend out of the horny creep. Even though she didn’t think they would deliberately harm her, accidents could happen with so many guns around. Sure, she was an innocent bystander, but she had seen too many pictures on the front page of the News of innocent bystanders lying around in their blood while some cop bent over them feeling sorry and scratching his dumb ass. I don’t want to be no innocent bystander, she thought, I got to get out of here! If it did me any good, I would blow the creep. Right this minute, with an audience, I would kneel down on the floor in front of him….

  Looking at him in panic, she formed a red suggestive circle with her mouth. The creep got the message. In front, right below the belt, his raincoat began to form a tent.