The singing had stopped for several minutes. Now it started again, coming from speakers and booming off the buildings on each side of Eighth, what used to be called Negro spirituals. Donaldson wanted to be closer. “My name’s Phil,” he said. “I’m going to run some more.”
Higgins frowned. The banker was both lost and intelligent, a combination that Higgins liked. It did not occur to him that he could help Donaldson. He was simply offended that Donaldson couldn’t see their similarities, didn’t see their brotherhood. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to beg. “Well, screw you,” Higgins said.
Donaldson crossed Forty-Second, glad to be away from that man. He saw that the singers were set up on the southeast corner with an awning and an organ, some chairs on the sidewalk and a crowd of about forty people. An old lady told how the doctors had given up on her twenty years ago, but she had taken Jesus Christ into her heart and now she could run up steps. Then the people with her sang some more.
Won’t that be grand, Lord?
Won’t that be grand?
Donaldson moved in close. He felt hostile toward the crowd because they were poor and rag-tag, mostly derelicts. The old lady spoke once more, saying they had come up from their church in Brooklyn. “You know we love you because here we are, every Saturday and Sunday.”
Donaldson could see that the lady and her people were sincere and that softened him. The old lady was small with stooped shoulders and a stubborn, almost unlined face. Most of the people with her were women and girls. And there were some children, all of them neatly dressed. The boys wore ties and looked polite. On some of the songs the children gathered at other microphones and sang the chorus.
The music softened him further. There wasn’t a sentiment he didn’t wish he believed in.
Amazing grace,
How sweet the sound.
Donaldson hadn’t been there twenty minutes when he thought: if there’s a heaven, these are the people who get to go to it. And this was such an odd idea to him, he asked himself why he had thought it? And the only answer that came back was: because they’re trying. While everybody else is busy sinning or hanging back, at least they’re trying. Tears came down his face and it seemed to Donaldson that the tears were a sign. He was so worked-up that he backed through the crowd toward the street, trying to hide his tears from anybody who might look at him.
He turned away from the old lady’s voice and walked out into Forty-Second Street where a crosstown bus hit Donaldson and knocked him ten feet.
People screamed and the crowd surrounded the body on the asphalt.
“Is he moving?”
“Is he dead?”
“There, he breathed, did you see him breathe?”
People with a spiritual turn of mind would say that death wouldn’t matter because Donaldson had seen so deeply into the nature of things and now it was time for him to move on to a higher plane of existence. While people with a practical turn of mind would say that he got what he deserved, for God knows he could have been spending his weeks at a desk in air-conditioned comfort pulling down forty thousand a year not doing much, instead he had been wasting his life.
59
She had achieved a sort of mellow resignation, certainly not happy but rarely depressed. People at work said that she was steady. Some of them envied her stability. When they were anxious and confused and boomeranging from one silly crisis to another, Jane Robertson was calm and she could be counted on for patient advice.
She was in her late thirties, only in her late thirties she liked to say. But people treated her as though it were the late forties. Sometimes when she sat in her backyard, she felt much older than that. She felt like Amy Lowell with patterns stacked up to the eaves. It was all wrong she knew, but she didn’t know what to do about it.
Roger Freeman called in the evening and said something about bridge and he wanted to stop over. When he arrived he was loud and smiled a lot even though he was evidently not happy. She knew he had been drinking, which was not like him. He kept looking at her and smiling. “I’ve been thinking about all the good times we had years ago,” he said.
“Oh?”
“A man changes, Jane. He grows up. I miss you.”
He came and sat down next to her. He put his arm over her shoulder. He smiled in what he took to be an exceedingly charming way, she figured.
Jane Robertson felt like a fool, because what she needed was someone to commiserate with her and now she was going to commiserate with Roger. She wouldn’t let herself laugh at him and tell him what a phony he was. Instead, she was gentle and said, “Roger, tell me what’s wrong.”
His manner changed. “I lost both of them,” he blurted. “Goddamn, can you believe the rotten luck.”
“Both of what,” she said with a straight face.
“Jane, I’d like another drink.”
“Well, of course, Roger, give me your glass.”
After a few minutes of morose silence, Roger said, “I moved, you know.”
“No, where?”
“Over in Meadowbrook. A little place. Adele wouldn’t let me back in my own house. Well, it’s hers legally. We lived there, together, half a year or something like that.”
“That’s terrible, Roger.”
“Jesus. You’d think people … people would care more.”
“Yes.”
Roger was circling around to his real torment. Adele Morris was not what he wanted but what he would have settled for.
“Did you know I was involved in business with a woman named Charlotte Jones?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I thought we were going into real estate together. We had all these great plans.”
“That would have been … wonderful.”
“Jesus. You wouldn’t believe it, Jane. Charlotte and this guy, they’re like brother and sister. It’s incest. It should be against the law.”
“You mean,” Jane said quietly, “they have a lot in common.”
“Both very weird,” Roger said. “You won’t believe what this guy did. I mean, believe me, this is an undesirable character. Runs some crappy boat out to sea. Charlotte didn’t want to talk to him. So he goes to her house in the afternoon. Talks to her sons. He says: ‘Boys, I’m in love with your mother and I need your help.’ He turned them against me. Can you believe it?”
“Well, that’s … too bad, Roger.”
“Jesus. Everything I worked for … ruined.”
“Roger. Listen. You’re very resourceful. You’ll come right back.”
“I’m not so young. I really liked her.”
“Who?”
“Charlotte.”
“You said it was business.”
“It was more than business. I … I cared about her, too.”
“The guy with the boat loved her.”
“Jesus. What a weirdo. That guy and his sailor suit.”
“Well, what’s next?”
“Jesus. All this.… It’s made me appreciate you, Jane.”
“Let’s not start that again.”
“You don’t believe me, Jane? I’m serious.”
“I know you, Roger.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we play bridge.”
“Jane, listen. I know I’ve done some dumb things. But that’s how you grow. You can see that I.… Don’t you see, Jane, I need you.”
Jane Robertson stood up and put her hands on her hips. “What about what I need?”
“Jane …”
Suddenly those wide considerate eyes were slits. “Goddamn you, Roger Freeman. You need, you need, you need.”
Roger was dismayed, and then annoyed. Jesus, everybody was so crazy these days. He stood up and started to say something, then thought, what’s the use, Jane’s just another of the lames.
“Jane, thanks for the drink, all right.”
Without another word from either of them Roger Freeman was gone.
60
Raphael Higgins had never felt
close to anybody. Oh, maybe a few of the men he had fought beside. But only in the upheaval of combat, not later. He had felt drawn to Lucy’s primordial flesh, and the spaciousness in Daphne’s eyes, and the confusion in Sonia’s mind, but these were fragments of people, not people.
When Higgins met the Reverend and Mrs. Michaels, it was more of the same. And this was the last opportunity he would get.
The newspapers were right: it was a fluke that this sheriff from a small town in Kansas came back to the hotel late, too drunk to walk a straight line, and he “just smelled something funny.” Out came the pistol and one of Higgins’ partners wounded the sheriff. A cop in the street heard the shot. Alarms sounded.
The partners traded shots with the police for a few minutes, wounding one. But more were arriving and the two men surrendered. Higgins had foreseen that much. He ran into a stairwell and went up the steps three at a time. He knew they would expect him to try an escape through the garage in the basement. Higgins climbed seven flights. He scanned the hallway, found it empty and stepped to the closest room. He rapped with his ring on the door. The wife didn’t sleep soundly. He heard her voice first. The hallway stayed empty. Then the man’s voice. A few more raps. “This is the manager,” Higgins hissed into the crack where the door touches the frame, “there’s an urgent telegram for you. This is an emergency.” More voices inside. The door opened and Higgins hit it with his shoulder, snapping the chain, and pushed inside. He held his pistol up where they could see it and said, “Don’t talk.” Then he carefully locked the door.
“From now on,” he said, “you will speak only to me and only in a whisper and only if I speak to you. Get back in your beds and under the covers. I will be here for several hours. You have nothing to worry about.”
If you had told Higgins that he really preferred that jobs go bad so he could get himself into such situations, he would have agreed. Coming in and leaving with the loot in half an hour was supposed to be the point but after he was finished, he wondered what was the point?
Now he had a much more interesting situation. The charges so far were armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest, assault of a police officer, maybe homicide. And now kidnapping. But Higgins was not worried about any of that. He was confident that his audacity would succeed. The police, he knew, were too stupid to imagine that a robber might not try to escape. They would look for him in the basement and when they didn’t find him, they would search more widely outside the hotel. And finally they would conclude that he had somehow slipped out. They would know all along that the partners would identify the third man, so they wouldn’t try very hard to begin with. And in the morning, around nine, Higgins would borrow some clothes and walk out of the hotel and visit Africa.
It was now a few minutes after three in the morning. It would be an interesting six hours. Higgins noted that the shades were drawn. He moved the television closer to the door and clicked it on and turned the volume low. This would muffle any sounds reaching the door. He arranged the chair so that he could watch both the television and his hostages and made himself comfortable. He pointed the pistol at the man, who was slender and preoccupied and wore navy blue pajamas.
“What do you do,” Higgins whispered.
“I’m a minister.”
“Good, pray for all of us. Your wife?”
“Well, of course,” the woman said, indignant.
“Quiet! Now you look like sensible people to me. I hope so. If you do anything silly, I’ll shoot you. I’m just interested in killing time, not you, so behave. I don’t want to bore you with the details. Let’s just say this is a little game of chess with some friends.”
The Reverend Michaels and his wife continually looked at each other. Neither knew what to say, even if they had not been ordered not to talk. Neither was a screamer in any event. So they were quietly terrified. Just as predictably, Higgins was not. He seemed to be basking in some kind of interior sunshine. If his mind was one notch more lucid, he thought, he would at last be able to understand why energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, which had never made the least sense to him.
“You got a newspaper? Maybe I can catch a good movie.”
The man pointed.
It was also just a fluke that a lot of people and a lot of policemen happened to be in the vicinity; otherwise the Sargeant in charge of the search could not have been so sure of himself when he reported: “The third one’s still inside. Has to be.”
It was another fluke that the Lieutenant on that night was bright for the breed. Also, he knew of Higgins. This was not a fluke but something that Higgins had earned.
When the two men who were caught named their partner, the Lieutenant said: “Ohhh, Higgins. A real lunatic. Thinks he’s a smart guy. Very full of himself. You know what a guy like that might do. He’d run up six, eight, ten floors and talk himself in the first door he sees and he’ll think we’re too stupid to figure on that.”
There were two possibilities, a dog or an electronic stethoscope. The station sent machinery. The Lieutenant ordered two cops upstairs without their shoes on, one to tell innocent bystanders not to worry and the other to listen at doors closest to the stairs. The first sweep took forty-five minutes. All they found was one very energetic couple on the fifth floor making a lot of gurgling sounds. And some people on the seventh who had left their television on. The Lieutenant sent the men back. “Just keep making the sweep,” he said. “Two minutes on each door. If you get anything hot, move away before you contact me.”
More than thirty cops were in the hotel now, one at every door and elevator and stairway. More equipment arrived and was put to work. The Lieutenant and the manager studied floor plans.
“We’re going to make up a list of likely targets,” the Lieutenant said. “Then we’ll have to get into the rooms next to them or over them. Higgins won’t come out until the morning rush. We’ve got time.”
The catalyst was Higgins’ reputation. Some of the other cops knew him, too. He was obviously armed and dangerous. It was also assumed that when the squeeze came, he was capable of anything. The Lieutenant did not like the idea of even giving him the chance. Higgins would shoot up the place. He would take hostages. He would demand a car or a plane or something else outrageous. People could get hurt. The Lieutenant didn’t believe you could talk sense into a man like Higgins.
An hour after first light the minister’s wife had to go to the bathroom. Higgins didn’t mind but said, “Leave the door open.”
“I will not,” she said.
“Then pee in the corner over there,” Higgins said.
A cop with an electronic stethoscope pressed on the door heard this. The tourists overhead were put into another room. Three and then four other cops sat on the beds with earphones on their heads. “No doubt about it now.”
“What are we going to do, clear the whole hallway? If he comes out and the hall’s empty, he’ll know.”
“So we put some of our people there. Just walking around.”
“But all the people in the rooms? There’s thirty-five rooms on a floor.”
“All right, start calling them. Two rooms at a time, starting as far away as possible. Take what they can carry. Go to the elevator. Where they’ll be met. Let’s get some plain-clothes people in on this, men and women. We’ll need some good actors.”
“Damn,” said the Lieutenant, “I’d like to see this put away before the city really wakes up.”
All the people were out before eight o’clock. Cops in every room and doorway. And sharpshooters in place across the street. The orders were: wait for orders.
It was twenty to eight o’clock when Higgins began a serious monitoring of the sounds in the hall. There weren’t many. There weren’t enough. He was surprised. “Did they actually …”
Higgins decided that he had to know. If they were waiting, the sooner the better. If they weren’t waiting, he was home free anyway.
He told the wife to dress, quickly.
&nb
sp; The husband watched Higgins, abjectly but intently.
Higgins sat in the chair by the television without expression. Something like admiration was looming up in his brain. Not a pleasant experience in the circumstances. Higgins figured that if one gene were in another spot, he would have been a great man. Even now, if he could end up with some good guys and help them win, history would say he was a great man. Higgins wanted an uprising like that in the Warsaw ghetto, good and evil clearly opposed, where he could be berserk and people would say he was a hero. Now look at this, he thought, squirreled away with two pale souls who don’t know which end of a gun says goodbye. No class.
Higgins took off some of his clothes. He put on one of the man’s shirts. And then a windbreaker. The minister was much taller.
Higgins watched the wife, she was as mechanical as a wind-up toy. He could not imagine living with her but she was perfect for the morning’s work. “You,” Higgins said to her, “and I are going out in the hall arm in arm. We are husband and wife. You are going to smile as though you love me. You,” Higgins pointed at the husband, “are going to lie in that bed and pray. Because if you do anything else, you won’t have a wife anymore.”
Higgins said that as much for the people listening, if any, as for the minister. He noticed that he was no longer so confident about his judgment: maybe the guy would scream just to get her killed. He might.
“Everybody clear?” Higgins asked.
They nodded.
And out the door Higgins and Mrs. Michaels walked. There were only two people out there, one businessman and one cleaning lady. They looked real. Higgins smiled as he eyed them both. He had to test them. Higgins figured that this lady and her husband were his chips and he did not intend to leave them behind with things ambiguous. He made a sudden move toward his belt—a cop could not resist that move. They couldn’t. The businessman was on the floor, the cleaning lady in a crouch, guns up.
Higgins hugged Mrs. Michaels in front of him with one arm. He realized that he felt very tired. Why wasn’t this more exciting, he wanted to know? Deliberately he drew his gun and aimed carefully at the businessman on the floor. The man rolled over and over and Higgins shot for the foot in the air. He got the leg.
American Dreams Page 21