American Quartet

by Warren Adler

  Something caught his eye and he quickly stopped the car.

  “Don’t,” she warned, grabbing his arm, but it was too late. He was out of the car, running toward a group of furtive loungers. A man with a stocking wrapped around his head looked up suddenly and saw him coming. They broke up quickly and the man in the head-stocking darted into an alley. She had set him off, she knew, and now had no alternative but to follow his lead. She sprinted after him, unbuttoning her holster, her insides lurching, afraid.

  When she caught up to him, Jefferson had the man at gunpoint in the alley, hands against the wall, his body at a thirty-degree angle. He was searching him roughly, pummeling him in the kidneys, and giving him a running angry lecture. A string of nickel bags of heroin, attached like sausages, were being pulled out of both pockets. Jefferson was just putting on the cuffs when she felt a swift sudden punch behind her knees. She went down, her gun clattering to the pavement. A heavy foot sank into her stomach and she felt cold pressure on her temples. Her own gun, she knew, squinting into the sun.

  There were three of them. Trying to squirm free of the man’s foot only increased the pressure and she could not restrain a squeal of pain. She felt the humiliation, the shame of it, and her eyes darted to Jefferson’s, who shook his head, baring his teeth in a forced smile of defeat.

  “Sheet,” he said, stepping back. A glint of sunlight bounced off the barrel of his piece, which he kept leveled at the cuffed man, who had turned and watched the fracas, the rigid mask of fear receding. Even as a patrolman Fiona had never experienced such fear and she felt the numbing effect of it. She was trapped and helpless.

  “Ease off, man,” a male voice said above her. It was the fellow who had the foot on her stomach. She felt the pressure again as she gasped for breath. Her strength was fading. The barrel of her gun was pressed harder into her temple.

  “The key,” the man said, his fingers beckoning. The pressure increased and she grunted her agony.

  “Ah don’t care. As soon squeeze her gut,” the man said, shouting now.

  She could see the forced smile fade and Jefferson turn mouse-gray as he watched her pain. With gun leveled at the men who held her, he dipped into his pocket and one-handed the key with surprising agility. One of the men unlatched the handcuffs. The stocking-capped man rubbed his wrists.

  “The piece,” he commanded. Jefferson looked at the gun and dropped it to the ground. One of the men picked it up and put it in his belt.

  “Git, man,” the man with the heavy foot ordered and the others moved swiftly. He took his foot off her belly and lifted her to her feet. He held her in a viselike grip as he backed slowly out of the alley.

  Jefferson watched them, his lips clamped in a helpless snarl. Everything was in slow motion. She could feel the man’s breath against her cheeks, surprisingly sweet, like Dentyne gum, oddly out of sync with the situation. She still felt the weight of the man’s foot and she sucked in her breath in gasps.

  Only the sound of their slow grating footsteps reached her. Blinking to clear her eyes of mist, she concentrated on Jefferson’s immobile face, sensing his frustration and hatred. As they backed out, she heard the purr of a motor behind her. Her feet hung limply, sliding against the pavement. One heel caught and her shoe came off. Her stocking ripped at the heel and the friction of the pavement bruised the skin. The bright autumn sunlight seemed incongruous and she felt suddenly giddy; it was a slow-motion dance and she was a rag doll, stuffed with straw, without will.

  Then, with an uncommon force which shook her insides, she felt the relentless pull of gravity, hitting the pavement like something tossed from a great height. It knocked the breath out of her lungs. She gagged and fought down the bile at the bottom of her throat. For a second, she lost any sense of consciousness. When it returned, she felt the breeze of Jefferson’s movement passing her, and caught the glint of sunlight on the barrel of his Magnum as he leveled it with two hands. A moment later, she heard the thump of bullets and the screech of tires.

  She felt someone rubbing her back and applying pressure to the base of her skull. Turning, her eyes met Jefferson’s.

  “Easy,” he whispered with surprising gentleness, then, “Fuck off, man,” he yelled at the gathering street crowd. The blood that had centered in her stomach surged back into her brain, revitalizing her.

  “Just lay there for a minute,” he cautioned as she tried to sit up. His solicitousness triggered her anger, and she tamped down her humiliation. Everything was in violation, the method of pursuit, the lack of precaution, the avoidance of radio contact, the Magnum. Everything. She could have the book thrown at him.

  “They were big fish,” he said, as if to justify his action. “I wasted one muvva.”

  “You sure?” she gasped.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well, you made your point, you bastard,” she said, climbing up his body as if it were a tree trunk. Standing, she felt dizzy and leaned against him until her head cleared. When she could stand on her own, he moved away and found her shoe, bending and lifting her foot into it.

  “Prince Charming,” she ridiculed. He let her sneer, his face impassive.

  “I needed backup,” he said, trying hard to mask the contempt. Finally, he could not resist. “Not fuck-up.”

  In a way, he had made it seem right.

  “First of all, it was not our beat. Second, you moved too fast. On your own. It was wrong and you know it.”

  She knew her anger was tentative. Nothing could justify her being zapped from behind. It was a raw humiliation.

  “I been lookin’ for that muvva for months. You saw them kids buyin’ nickel bags.” He turned his eyes on her, spotlights of blind rage, and she felt their power.

  “You worryin’ about a couple of honkies getting their guts shot up? This is where it is, woman. Out there is the real war.”

  His rage checkmated all argument. She could see how far apart they were. Jefferson was a man with a cause. It seemed, somehow, pallid against her own. Her sense of inadequacy galled her.

  “I nearly got killed,” she said lamely.

  He shrugged, but his meaning was clear. It was the woman thing. She was trapped in her biology, unable to provide the backup required for such a mission.

  “The street already has it down,” he said, getting into the car. Her stomach hurt as she bent and slid in beside him.

  “And headquarters?” she asked.

  “Forget it.”

  “And the eggplant? He’ll hear about it. You said you got one.”

  “I said forget it.”

  Cover-up, she thought. She could not seem to reconcile it with the other. Somehow this one seemed right.

  The car moved slowly. On every side of her, she saw the junkies, the prostitutes, the pushers. To Jefferson, they were the real enemy. He seemed to be deliberately flaunting the terrain.

  “I get the message,” she whispered. “We’re not in control here. They bury their own.”

  “No sheet,” he said. The car moved toward Sixteenth Street and a saner world. A thought forced a giggle through her anguish.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “What’s one more dead nigger?” she said, turning, unable to face him.

  14

  BRUCE’S campaign headquarters was in an abandoned supermarket. His Rosen for Congress banner hung across the width of the storefront under a sign that posed a futile possibility: “Will Remodel to Suit.”

  The location was on the dividing line between the jungle and civilization. The encroachments had moved in so fast that even the frozen food display cases in the old supermarket still seemed cold. Posters hawking junk foods clung to the walls, now defaced and covered with graffiti.

  A large map on a wall told a more scientific story of the changing demographics. The precincts with the old Jews in their now gloomy run-down apartment buildings were marked in orange. “Agent Orange” some critic, with a sense of irony, had written next to the map key. The minority precincts,
meaning blacks and Hispanics, were marked in bilious green, a crescent shape which provided still more grist for the anonymous commentator. “The fertile crescent,” it had been dubbed. The precincts in between were marked in red. Like an open wound, Fiona thought.

  The headquarters was staffed by eager young men and women, of every skin color. They seemed universally unshaven, even the women. Fiona had never seen a political campaign in full throttle before. The air crackled with energy as the young people eagerly pursued the most menial jobs. Many of them jabbered away on the telephone in English and Spanish in an unceasing litany of persuasion.

  To Fiona, the most disconcerting things about the headquarters was Bruce’s face. It was ubiquitous, posted even in the evil-smelling john.

  “I don’t like you watching me pee,” she joked. “It’s kinky.”

  “I’m going to force them to know who I am,” he said, ignoring the jest. She pictured every public bathroom in the district with his face posted in front of the toilet.

  “You’ll be the face that launched a thousand shits.” His laughter was hollow. He was preoccupied, operating on the thin edge of rage. His days were filled with “shoe leathering,” shaking hands on street corners, making speeches before those groups that still held together in the district, attending an occasional coffee klatch in the dingy apartment of some elderly Jewish woman whose cronies had come mainly to complain about crime and reiterate their fears.

  “What can I tell them?” Bruce paced their hotel room, his fingers nervously moving through his gray curls.

  She did not enjoy her role, doing odd jobs around headquarters. Sometimes she accompanied him on his endless patrols, trying to convince people that he was indeed their tenuous connection with the mechanics of democracy.

  Frequently, he would search out her eyes and smile bravely. He had said he needed her and he meant it. At night he clutched her, enveloped her in a stranglehold of an embrace which kept her up most of the night. His sleep was restless, as if his mind were unreeling some private horror show. Sometimes he woke up screaming, an anguished primitive cry that turned her flesh to goosebumps. But being absorbed in his problems kept her mind away from her own.

  After the incident on Fourteenth Street, she had applied for two weeks leave, partly to recover, partly to fulfill her promise to Bruce. To pursue the investigation on her own seemed futile. To confront the eggplant, like some lily-white avenging female angel, risked more of his wrath. It seemed better to run, to put her indignation on hold. Worse still, she had begun to doubt herself. Perhaps they were right. The “farces” were man’s work. Maybe it was time to surrender. Marry Bruce. Her courage somehow could not match her outrage.

  In an effort to gain insight into Bruce’s anguish, she sought out his opponent at a speech she was giving in a church basement. She was the only white Anglo-Saxon type in the audience, a label that, behind the obvious discomfort, offended her sense of Irishness. Yet she sat doggedly in the sea of darker faces, trying to detach herself from the crowd mind.

  The woman, Elena Garcia, was intense, driven by the perceived righteousness of her cause. Her appeal was directly to the blood, and she knew it well. The woman’s words hammered away at nebulous forces of repression because of race or origins. Garcia was youngish, attractive. When she talked, flashes of gold showed in her mouth.

  She had appeal. She was certainly articulate. Mostly it was the woman’s frantic ambition that offended Fiona. How dare she? A pushy spic. My God, she thought, Jefferson’s words echoing in her mind, I’m beginning to think like them.

  The idea horrified her and she slipped out of the meeting early, suffering their stares and embarrassed by the color of her skin.

  “They’re asking for a head-on debate,” Bruce informed her one evening. They sat in what passed for an elegant restaurant in his district, a whitewashed room decorated with pictures of old Mexico. Latin music was piped in. The food seemed nondescript Spanish and the paella was thick and lumpy. Bruce’s campaign “consultant,” Herbie Clark, picked away at a reddish concoction of chicken breasts. He was a thin, preppy-looking man in his mid-thirties with round horn-rimmed glasses that could have made him appear smarter than he was.

  “No way,” Clark said, tomato sauce dribbling down his chin. Bruce and Clark seemed to battle rather than eat their food, chomping away as if they were cannibalizing the enemy.

  “He’s right,” Bruce said. “You can’t defend the indefensible.”

  “He’s them. The enemy,” Clark said, buttressing his argument. He was, after all, supposed to be Bruce’s savior, the hired gun. “It doesn’t matter that he voted for all those grab bag money bills.”

  “It’s become their right now,” Bruce sighed.

  “Garcia is a spellbinder,” Fiona volunteered.

  “A fear monger,” Clark said. “A demagogue. Her solution is to shell out more and more dough.”

  “Look how it’s done,” Bruce said with a sweep of his hand. “We’ve pissed it down a rathole, ruined my fucking district.”

  “You talk like Republicans,” Fiona said, with grim humor. She was growing tired of their hypocrisy. “This is not exactly a silk stocking district.”

  “Nothing we say will matter anyway,” Clark said.

  “So why all the wasted energy?”

  “Show. Sop to the troops.”

  It was only in the last few days, up close, that she had observed how deep was Bruce’s cynicism. Getting elected was all that counted. Power was all.

  “Ideology is manure,” Clark said. “This election, like all of them, will be decided on how many lever pullers we get to the box. Pure and simple.”

  “That’s democracy,” she said.

  “So she’s a Girl Scout,” Clark said. He was, she decided, insufferably manipulative, and Bruce seemed to be buying it all as if it came from some oracle.

  “No,” Bruce countered. “Just a cop.”

  “Just a . . .?” Fiona said. Beneath the light response was a tug of annoyance.

  “Bruce. We got to find the shekels,” Clark said. “There’s no other way. Never was.”

  “That’s the lousy part.” Another double Scotch came and he tossed it back quickly, making a sour face.

  “You shouldn’t be doing anything else,” Clark said. “Transportation alone will cost nearly twenty-five thou. Then we have to keep the kitchen open for a full twelve hours. The whole operation will cost nearly a hundred thou. No kidding.”

  “I didn’t have to do it before. Not on this scale,” Bruce protested.

  “You wanna win, don’t you?” Clark demanded. It reminded her of a promise of a fix to a recently arrested heroin addict. The promise itself was enough to quiet things down.

  “I need fifty drivers and at least thirty-four to forty vans for starters. The logistics are a nightmare.”

  She had looked confused and Bruce felt the need to explain.

  “We’re going to drive all those old yids to the polls. In groups or one by one. Then we’re going to feed them three meals. Make a party out of it. We even have a social director.”

  “We have eleven locations,” Clark said proudly. “It’ll be like the Catskills.” She looked down at the greasy, lumpy mess on her plate. Somehow it fit the image forming in her mind.

  “He’s got it figured statistically,” Bruce said.

  “It can work,” Clark said. “It has to work.”

  The way they addressed her, she felt judgmental, as if they were submitting the plan for her inspection. She felt obliged to voice the obvious.

  “How do you know they’ll push the right lever?”

  “We don’t. All we can do is draw pictures. We don’t care who else they vote for. Rosen’s in a good spot on the ballot. We teach them properly, they’ll play the game. We’ll put the fear of God in them. Tell them the blacks and spics will do them in. Anything. We’ll tell them if they don’t pull the right one, no party, no meals. No nothing. Half of them won’t know what they’re doing anyhow.”
/>   “Is this all legal?”

  “Perfectly,” Clark said.

  “Like murder in the first degree,” Fiona taunted.

  “Yeah,” Clark said. “Only if we kill this lady, and get Bruce reelected we get off scot-free.”

  “It’s a buy-out,” she said. She watched as Clark’s eyes met Bruce’s. She wondered if it went against his grain, as well.

  “Without the dough, you’re finished, Bruce,” Clark said.

  “I know,” Bruce said glumly.

  Back in their hotel room, Bruce seemed to be drowning in despair and alcohol.

  “You’re hitting that pretty hard,” she cautioned.

  “I know.” He had undressed to his jockey shorts and was stretched along the bed, pillows propped, staring into space and sipping straight Scotch.

  “A hangover won’t help.”

  She sat down and watched him. He seemed to be bent on transforming himself. He did not look at all like the beautiful man of a few months before.

  “Bear with me,” he pleaded.

  “I’m here, loyal to the end.” The remark seemed flippant, but he was too self-absorbed to notice.

  “If that’s the way the game is played . . .” she began.

  “It’s finding the money that bothers me.”

  At first, she thought he was having a moral crisis. To her, he had always been strong and sure, a hero.

  “I’ll hit Remington. Maybe he can throw me a fundraiser. I’ve already picked over most of the lobbyists. There’s just not enough dough anymore.”

  “Isn’t he a little too far right these days?”

  “What the hell has that got to do with it? Remember, he was Kennedy’s man. Anyway, people give money for other reasons, not for ideology.” He swallowed his drink and reached for the bottle again. She grabbed it.

  “Bar’s closed,” she said.

  “That’s what I need now. A mommy.”

  “That’s what you got.”

  “Well then, comfort me. What the hell is a mommy for?”