The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  Artis turned carefully, putting his back against the pillar. He switched on his radio, and, holding the transmitter so close that his lips touched the metal, signaled headquarters. He had to repeat three times before headquarters came in.

  “I can barely make you. Speak up, please.”

  Whispering, Artis said, “I can’t do no better. I’m too close, and they might hear me.”

  “Speak louder.”

  “No louder, or they’ll hear me.” Artis spaced his words and spoke with exaggerated distinctness. “This is Patrolman Artis James. In the tunnel. Near the hijacked car.”

  “All right, that’s a little better. Go ahead.”

  “They just shot the motorman. They put him out on the tracks, and they shot him.”

  “Christ! When did that happen?”

  “Maybe a minute or two after the first shot.”

  “What first? Nobody was supposed to… Did somebody shoot?”

  It struck Artis all at once and left him numb. Oh, God, he thought, I never should have fired. Oh, God, if it had something to do with killing the motorman…

  “Come in, James,” the radio voice said impatiently. “Somebody shot at the train.”

  “I told you,” Artis James said. You did it, baby, he thought, oh, God, you did it. “Somebody shot at the train.”

  “Who, chrisesake, who?”

  “Don’t know. Came from behind me someplace. Maybe scored a hit. I can’t say for sure. Shot came right out of the tunnel behind me.”

  “Oh, Jesus. The motorman. Dead?”

  “Not moving. Don’t mean he’s dead, but not moving. What do I do?”

  “Nothing. For God’s sake, don’t do anything.”

  “Right,” Artis said. “Continue not to do anything.”

  RYDER

  By the time Ryder picked up the first-aid kit from his valise in the motorman’s cab Steever had almost finished stripping down. His raincoat and jacket were neatly folded on the seat, and after Ryder helped him with the money jacket, he removed his shirt, peeling the bloody right sleeve down over his heavy upper arm. Ryder looked out through the shattered storm door window. The motorman lay face up, a few paces nearer the car than the trainmaster. Dark splotches on his pinstripes showed where Steever’s shots had exited.

  Ryder sat down beside Steever, who was now stripped to the waist, his torso massive, dark-skinned, matted with whorls of thick hair. Ryder examined the entry wound, a neat round hole oozing blood. The underside of the arm, where the bullet had emerged, was somewhat mangled. Blood had trickled down Steever’s arm in a series of rivulets that played out in the hairy thickets of his forearm.

  “Looks clean,” Ryder said. “Painful?”

  Steever tucked his chin in to look at the wound. “Nah. I never feel pain too much.”

  Ryder rummaged in the metal first-aid box for the antiseptic solution. “I’ll use this and then bandage it. It’s the best we can do now.”

  Steever shrugged. “It don’t bother me.”

  Ryder doused a square gauze pad and dabbed it on the wound, then scrubbed the bloodstains. He wet two more pads and covered the wound front and rear. Steever held the pads in place while he bound them firmly with surgical tape. When he was finished, Steever started dressing.

  “It might get stiff after a while,” Ryder said.

  “No problem,” Steever said. “I can’t hardly feel it.”

  When Steever was fully dressed, Ryder picked up the first-aid kit and left. He noted the interplay between Welcome and the girl in the Anzac hat, and beneath the mask his jaw hardened. But he didn’t stop. At the front of the car Longman stepped toward him.

  “The motorman?” Longman said.

  “The motorman is dead.” He went inside the cab and shut the door. A voice on the radio was calling frantically. He stepped on the foot pedal, activating the transmitter.

  “Pelham One Two Three to Command Center. Come in.”

  “Prescott here, you bastard. Why did you kill the motorman?”

  “You shot at one of my people. I warned you what the penalty would be.”

  “Someone disobeyed orders and fired. It was a mistake. If you had checked in with me first, you wouldn’t have had to kill him.”

  “Where is the money?” Ryder said.

  “About a hundred yards down the track, you cold-blooded bastard.”

  “I’ll give you three minutes to deliver it. Same procedure as before. Acknowledge.”

  “You bastard, you shit! I’d like to meet you some time. I’d really like that.”

  “Three minutes,” Ryder said. “Over and out.”

  SERGEANT MISKOWSKY

  A voice came out of the darkness. “Hey, you two guys.”

  Miskowsky, gun in hand, said hoarsely, “What?”

  “I’m over here behind a pillar. I’m not going to show myself. I got orders for you from the borough commander. Resume delivery of the money, according to instructions.”

  “They know we’re coming? I mean, I don’t want them to start shooting again.”

  “They got the welcome mat out for you. Why not, with a million in cash?”

  The TPF cop got to his feet and picked up the canvas sack. “Here we go again, Sarge.”

  The voice from the shadows said, “The order is, move it, and move it fast.”

  Miskowsky got to his feet slowly. “I wish to hell I was someplace else.”

  “Good luck,” the voice said.

  Miskowsky turned on his flashlight and fell in beside the TPF cop, who was already moving.

  “Into the valley of death,” the TPF cop said.

  “Don’t say that,” Miskowsky said.

  “I’ll never get this shit off my uniform,” the TPF cop said. “Somebody ought to clean up this subway one of these days.”

  THE CITY: STREET SCENE

  A human torso rolled along parallel to the curb, mounted on a dolly covered with a remnant of Oriental rug. Its legs and thighs had been severed in a straight cut a few inches below the hips. It sat squarely on the dolly, broad-shouldered, with a strong lined face and long black curls, punting itself forward with its knuckles, which dipped effortlessly into the asphalt. It said nothing, but held up a large tin cup. The cops looked at it helplessly as it rowed along the curb. The crowd rained coins into the cup.

  “My God, I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes,” a tall man with a Midwest accent said to his neighbor as he dug into his pocket for a handful of coins.

  The neighbor gave him a knowing, almost pitying, smile. “It’s a phony.”

  “A phony? But it’s impossible to fake—”

  “You’re from out of town, right? If you knew this town the way I did… How he does it, I don’t exactly know, but take my word for it, it’s a fake. Save your money, Mac.”

  The crowd remained intact by some magic numerical process of slough and renewal. People departed, and others arrived to take their place, and the shape of the great animal hardly changed. As the sun lowered behind the surrounding buildings, the air grew chill and a wind sprang up. Faces became pink or pinched, people danced in place, but few were daunted.

  In some unaccountable way, the crowd learned of the killing of the motorman before most of the policemen guarding them. It became a signal for blanket condemnation of the police, the mayor, the transit system, the governor, the transit unions, a well-known minority group, and, above all, the city, that vast monolith which they hated and from which they would have divorced themselves except that, as in an old, stormy, but durable marriage, they needed each other for survival.

  The police reacted to the motorman’s death by taking out their frustrations on the crowd. Their good humor disappeared, and they became surly and stone-faced. When they acted to contain a bulge or rupture in the crowd, they snarled and pushed against the surge of bodies with hardhanded force. Individuals and groups in the crowd struck back vocally, citing irrelevant charges of police corruption, bringing to the cops’ attention exactly wh
ose taxes were paying whose swollen salaries, condemning them for living in Ozone Park and Hollis, and even, in the safe reaches of the back rows, hurled the challenging epithet “Pig!”

  But, finally, nothing changed. Greater than its individual parts, rising above provocation, never losing sight of its purpose, the crowd maintained its character inviolate.

  SIXTEEN

  TOM BERRY

  Tom Berry watched the leader wedge the rear door open and then take his place beside the heavyset man on the isolated double seat. Both of them trained their guns on the open door. Then Berry saw the fitful flash of a light on the tracks and knew what it signified. The city was paying off. A million dollars, cash on the table. He wondered idly why the hijackers had set the ransom money at a million. Were their acquisitive horizons limited to that talismanic figure? Or—he remembered the old man’s comment—had they determined, either cynically or actuarially, that the lives of their hostages were worth sixty thousand apiece?

  The light on the track was moving closer at a slow, almost liturgical pace, which, Berry thought, was the way he would walk himself if he had been advancing toward a couple of machine-gun muzzles. He made out two figures, wavering in the half-light leaking out of the car. He couldn’t see whether or not they were cops, but what else could they be? Certainly not bank tellers. He felt a sense of agonized empathy with what those two out there must be thinking, and then, for no good reason, the image of his late uncle obtruded on his thoughts.

  What would Uncle Al have said about a pair of cops meekly delivering a million bucks to a gang of hijackers (or crooks, as he would have called them; all lawbreakers were crooks in Uncle Al’s simplistic vocabulary)? Well, Uncle Al wouldn’t even have believed it, for starters. Uncle Al, if he had had his way—and he, or his superiors, certainly would have, in that era—would have barreled in shooting. Fifty, a hundred cops, attacking the car with guns blazing, and in the end the crooks would have been dead, and a half dozen or so cops, and most of the hostages. In Uncle Al’s lexicon—and in his day—people might pay kidnap ransom, but not cops. Cops were crook catchers, not crook payers.

  In Uncle Al’s time everything was different. People might not have been wild about cops, but they feared them. Try a word like “pig” and you would wind up in the basement of a precinct house getting beaten to a pulp by a succession of joyful sadists. And in Uncle Al’s father’s time, police work was even simpler; most problems were solved by a beer-belly Irish cop hauling off and kicking some harmless kid in the ass. Well, the policeman’s lot had undergone quite a change in his family’s third generation of cops. People called cops pigs and nobody laid a hand on them. A lieutenant would chew your ass if you booted a kid’s behind (and, if it happened to be a black behind, you could start a riot and maybe get stomped to death before a ten-thirteen brought help).

  His recent dopey daydream to one side, he could well imagine how horrified Deedee would have been by his Uncle Al, not to mention Al’s fat-bellied, corrupt old man. On the other hand, she would probably take satisfaction in the idea of cops serving as messenger boys to thieves, viewing it as some kind of new dispensation in which cops properly became the servants of the people. Oh, well, Deedee. There were quite a few things Deedee had ass backwards. Not that he had such a clear idea himself of exactly what ass frontwards was. But he could hope that the two of them, confused and in love, might eventually produce a viable baby, a philosophy with the requisite number of arms and legs.

  Two faces appeared at the rear door. One belonged to a blue-helmeted TPF cop, the other to a transit cop, the badge on his peaked cap a dull gold. The TA cop shone his light into the car, and the TPF man unslung a canvas sack from his shoulder and flipped it onto the floor of the car. It landed with a soft thud. Toilet paper would make no less distinguished a sound. The officers, their faces red but unemotional, turned around and walked away.

  LONGMAN

  Longman watched the money dump out onto the floor as Ryder opened the neck of the sack and held it upside down—dozens of green slabs, neatly tied up with rubber bands. A million dollars, everybody’s dream, tumbling out onto the filthy composition floor of a subway car. Steever stripped, placing his coat and jacket neatly on the seat, and Ryder checked the ties on the money belt. Four of them had cost Ryder a pretty penny to have made up. They were on the order of a life jacket, fitting over the head and tying at the sides. Each one contained forty pockets, distributed front and back in two tiers, evenly spaced. Altogether, there were a hundred and fifty packets of bills, which figured to thirty-seven and a half packets to a man. Not that they were going to split it that finely. Two of them would have thirty-seven; two would have thirty-eight.

  Steever stood like a manikin, hands at his sides, as Ryder inserted a package in each pocket of the money jacket: When he was finished, Steever dressed, and then went to the center of the car, where he changed places with Welcome. Welcome kept gassing while Ryder filled his jacket, but Ryder was silent, working methodically but swiftly. When Ryder signaled to him the length of the car, Longman’s heart began to thump, and he felt almost jubilant as he hurried to the rear. But Ryder started shucking his own coat and jacket, and Longman felt a pang of resentment. It wasn’t fair that he was to be last. After all, whose idea was it in the first place? But his feeling of pique vanished at the touch of the money. Some of these packets he was pressing down firmly into the slots of Ryder’s jacket were worth ten thousand each, and others were worth twenty thousand!

  “All this money,” he whispered. “I can hardly believe it.”

  Ryder was silent, turning so that Longman could get at the rear pockets of the jacket.

  “I just wish it was all over already,” Longman said. “All the rest of it.”

  Ryder lifted his right arm, and his voice was icy. “The rest of it will be fun.”

  “Fun!” Longman said. “It’s risky. If anything goes wrong—”

  “Get your stuff off,” Ryder said.

  When Ryder was finished with him, they all returned to their places. Walking to the front of the car, Longman felt weighted down, although he knew that his thirty-seven packages didn’t add up to more than five or six pounds. It amused him to see that some of the passengers were looking at him with envy and maybe wishing that they had had the guts and brains to pull off something like this. Nothing like money, hot naked money, to change the thinking of a lifetime. He smiled broadly, stretching the mask. But when Ryder went back inside the cab, he stopped being amused. The getaway was still to come, and it was the trickiest and hairiest part of all.

  Suddenly, he was convinced that it wouldn’t work.

  RYDER

  Ryder said into the mike, “Pelham One Two Three calling Prescott at Command Center.”

  “Come in. This is Prescott.”

  “Have you got your pencil, Prescott?”

  “Yes. How’s the money, leader? All in order? The right amount and color and all that?”

  “Before I issue instructions, I’m reminding you that they must be obeyed to the letter. The hostages’ lives remain in jeopardy. I want to impress that on you. Acknowledge.”

  “You fucking bastard!”

  “If you understand, just say yes.”

  “Yes, you bastard.”

  “I’m going to give you five items. Write each one down and acknowledge without comment. Point One: At the end of this conversation you will restore power to the entire sector. Acknowledge.”

  “I read you.”

  “Point Two: After the power is restored, you will clear the local track from here to South Ferry station. By that I mean switches properly set, all trains between here and South Ferry cleared out, and all signals green. I emphasize the signals. They will be green. We are not to be held up or tripped by a red signal. Repeat, please.”

  “Local track cleared from here to South Ferry. All signals green.”

  “If we see a red signal, we’ll kill a hostage. Any infraction and we’ll kill a hostage. Point Three: All trains�
�local and express—all trains behind us are to lay dead. And nothing is to move northbound between South Ferry and here. Check me.”

  “The trains running behind you can’t get too close. They’ll be tripped if they try to jump a block.”

  “Nevertheless, they are to lie dead. Acknowledge.”

  “Okay, I’ve got it.”

  “Point Four: You will contact me as soon as the track is clear to South Ferry and the signals are all green. Acknowledge.”

  “Contact you when track is clear, signals green.”

  “Point Five: All police personnel in the tunnel are to be removed. If this is not done, we will shoot a hostage. Absolutely no police personnel are to be on the South Ferry station. If this is not done, we will shoot a hostage.”

  “I check you. Can I ask a question?”

  “About your instructions?”

  “About you. Are you aware that you’re insane?”

  Ryder looked out at the empty track, peopled with shadows. “That isn’t relevant,” he said. “I’ll answer questions on my instructions only. Do you have any?”

  “No questions.”

  “You will have ten minutes from this moment to comply. You will then contact me again for final instructions. Confirm.”

  “You’ve got to give me more time.”

  “No,” Ryder said. “Over and out.”

  CLIVE PRESCOTT

  Prescott was relieved when the NYPD high command agreed to comply with the hijackers’ instructions. Not that they had an alternative, but he knew cops, being one himself, and he knew how the pressures of frustration could warp judgment. Cops were, after all, human beings. Of a sort.