The Jungle Kids

by Ed McBain

  The street lights came on, and after about a half-hour a few more cops went into the building.

  “Django!” I yelled from the window.

  There was no answer.

  “Django!”

  Then we heard the shots in the hallway, and then quiet again, and then the sounds of a door being busted, and then that goddamn telephone someplace in the building began ringing again.

  About ten minutes later, they carried Django out on a stretcher.

  Dead.

  We hung around the streets late that night. There’d been a big fuss when they carried Django out, everybody yelling and shouting from the rooftops, like as if this was the Roman arena or something. They didn’t realize what a guy Django was, and what a tough fight he’d put up.

  “They got him, all right,” Ferdy said, “but it wasn’t easy.”

  “He took two of them with him,” I said.

  “A guy like Django, it pains you to see him go,” Ferdy said.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  We were all quiet for a little while.

  “Where’s A?” Beef asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “Screw that little jerk anyway.”

  “He got an inside wire, all right,” Ferdy said. “He the first cat to tumble to this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was thinking about the look on Donlevy’s face when those slugs ripped him up.

  “How’d he tip to it, anyway?”

  “He spotted Django in the hall. Goin’ up to Louise.”

  “Oh.” Ferdy was quiet for a while. “Django see him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He shoulda been more careful.”

  “A guy like Django, he got lots of things on his mind. You think he’s gonna worry about a snotnose like A?”

  “No, but what I mean … somebody blew the whistle on him.”

  “Sure, but that don’t …” I cut myself dead. “Hey!” I said.

  “What?”

  “Aiello.”

  “Aiello what?”

  “I’ll bet he done it! Why, I’ll bet that little sonofabitch done it!”

  “Tipped the cops to Django, you mean?”

  “Sure! Who else? Why, that little …”

  “Now, hold it, Danny. Now don’t jump to …”

  “Who else knew it?”

  “Anybody coulda spotted Django.”

  “Sure, except nobody did.” I waited a minute, thinking, and then I said, “Come on.”

  We began combing the neighborhood.

  We went down the poolroom, and we combed the bowling alley, and then we hit the rooftops, but Aiello was no place around. We checked the dance in the church basement, and we checked the Y, but there was still no sign of him.

  “Maybe he’s home,” Ferdy said.

  “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We went to the building where Aiello lived. In the hallway, Beef said, “Somebody pee here.”

  “Shut up,” Ferdy said.

  We went up to Aiello’s apartment and knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” he answered.

  “Me,” I said. “Danny.”

  “What do you want, Danny?”

  “I wanna come in. Open up.”

  “I’m in bed.”

  “Then get out of bed.”

  “I’m not feeling so hot, Danny.”

  “Come on, we brung some pot.”

  “I don’t feel like none.”

  “This is good stuff.”

  “I ain’t interested, Danny.”

  “Open up, you jerk,” I told him. “You want the Law to know we’re holding?”

  “Danny, I …”

  “Open up!”

  I began pounding on the door, and I knew that’d get him out of bed, if that’s where he was, because his folks are a quiet type who don’t like trouble with the neighbors.

  In a few seconds, Aiello opened the door.

  I smiled at him. “Hello, A,” I said. “Getting a little shut-eye?”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to smile back. “I got a cold. I think maybe it’s one of them viruses.”

  “Well now, that’s too bad,” I said. We all went inside. “Your people home?”

  “They went …” Aiello stopped.

  “What’s the matter, A?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’d your people go?”

  “Ac—across the street. They—they got friends there.”

  “Oh, visiting, huh? Very nice. It’s nice to visit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like you was doing with Louise this afternoon, huh?”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Aiello said.

  “When you spotted Django.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then what’d you do?”

  “I told you.”

  “You went into Louise’s apartment, that right?”

  “Yes, I …” Aiello paused, as if he was trying to remember what he’d told me before. “No, I didn’t go in. I went down in the street to look for you.”

  “You like this gang, A?”

  “Yeah, it’s good,” Aiello said.

  “Then why you lying to me?”

  “I ain’t lying.”

  “You know you wasn’t looking for me.”

  “I was.”

  “Look, tell me the truth. I’m a fair guy. What do I care if you done something you shouldn’t have. I come here to share some weed with you, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t do nothing I shouldn’t have,” Aiello said.

  “Well, you did do something then, huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, A, what’d you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I mean, after you left Louise’s place?”

  “I went to look for you.”

  “And before you found me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you blow the whistle on Django?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “You did, didn’t you? Look, he’s dead, what do I care what you done or didn’t do? I ain’t the Law.”

  “I didn’t turn him in.”

  “Come on, A.”

  “He deserved what he got. But I didn’t turn him in.”

  “He deserved it, huh?”

  “Yeah. He was rotten. Anybody rotten like Django …”

  “Shut up!”

  “… should have the whistle …”

  “Shut up, I said!” I slapped him across the mouth. “Did you?”

  He dummied up.

  “Answer me!”

  “No.”

  I slapped him again. “Answer me!”

  “No.”

  “You did, you bastard! You called the cops on Django, and now he’s dead, and you ain’t fit to lick his boots!”

  “He was a killer!” Aiello yelled. “That’s why I called them. He was no good. No damn good. He was a stink in the neigh …”

  But I wasn’t listening no more.

  We fixed Mister Aiello, all right.

  Just the way Django would have liked it.

  THE JUNGLE KIDS

  It was the beginning of the third period.

  He had to get through the third period, and then there would be five other periods, and then Dave could leave Bernard Vocational High School and go home. Until the next morning. There was always the next morning, but he had learned to face the gray dawn with resignation.

  He had been teaching for three years now. He was a mild-mannered man, not too tall, given to wearing rumpled tweeds and neckties that were sometimes stained. His last name was Kemp, and he knew the kids called him Unkempt Kemp behind his back, but that didn’t bother him any more. Nothing seemed to bother him any more, and he often wondered if many men of thirty felt the way he did. He knew he should feel differently about teaching, knew he should expect a special reward from his chosen profession, but he had long ago ceased to expect anything but what he got. The teaching w
as just a job, nothing more or less.

  He had kept it from being a difficult job because he had studiously avoided trouble from the day he had entered the vocational-school system. That was the best way, and the only way. He was not the kind of rugged athlete who could smack a kid around, and he had no desire to be slapped around in return. He went through the motions. He stood at the front of the room, and he told himself he was teaching, and maybe he believed it.

  “Let’s have a little quiet,” he said softly, knowing he would have to repeat the sentence at least three times before the boys shut up. He felt no disturbance over this knowledge. That was just the way it was, and you had to accept life on its own terms, especially in a trade school. “Let’s have a little quiet,” he said over the boys’ raised voices, and then he said it again, and then he said it once more, and finally the boys turned their reluctant attention to the front of the room.

  “Today we’re going to write business letters,” Dave said.

  He looked out over the students, knowing the protest would come, but resigned to it.

  “What for, teach?” Carlton asked.

  “Because I say so,” Dave said wearily.

  “Because he says so,” Carlton mimicked. He was a big boy with a pug nose and flaming red hair, and Dave had felt a twinge of uneasiness the first time he’d stood alongside him. There was a bluff, hearty exterior to Carlton, and it clashed resoundingly against the mildness of Dave’s make-up.

  “Come on, Carlton,” he said, “don’t start anything.”

  “Who me?” Carlton asked, a broad grin covering his face. “Why, teach, I’m surprised at you. I wouldn’t start nothing.”

  Dave nodded, the weary sadness inside him again. He was not afraid of Carlton, or of boys like Carlton. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was just … just the bigness of everything, the bigness of the job, and the bigness of the problem. Yes, that was it. He was just a small man, a mild man, surrounded by a big school with a big problem. And maybe a bigger man could stick a heated scalpel into the festering chancre that was the school, drawing out the pus, wiping away the stink and the corruption. Dave was not that big. Dave was content to sit in the gallery and watch the surgeons. Dave was content to play it safe. It was a hell of a lot easier that way.

  “How do you start a business letter, Oringo?” he asked.

  Oringo looked up at him with blank eyes. “A business letter?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. “How do you start one?”

  “Ah, lemmee see.” Oringo rubbed the bridge of his nose. “A business letter, huh, teach? Ah, the date, ain’t that how? You start with the date?”

  “No,” Dave said softly. “You—”

  He heard the commotion out in the hallway, and he immediately figured it for another fist fight. He’d carefully stayed away from fist fights ever since he’d begun teaching at Bernard. He knew he was not a specimen of physical strength, and he did not relish the idea of having his own skull bashed in while trying to separate two angry kids. He hoped this was not a fist fight now, because he certainly couldn’t ignore a fight right outside his room. He sighed with relief when the door opened and Artie Rourke poked his head into the room.

  Rourke smiled and said, “Good morning, Mr. Kemp,” using the official title teachers always used in the presence of students.

  Dave opened his mouth, ready to answer, but Rourke’s head vanished from the doorjamb, and he heard Rourke say to the corridor, “All right, boys, come on in.”

  A frown crossed Dave’s forehead. He didn’t like disruptions in his classroom. It was hard enough without disruptions. Nor did he particularly like Rourke. Rourke taught Science, and there was something alien about test tubes, and Rourke was a big man, six-two at least, who constantly boasted that “none of these little bastards” could ever pull the wool over his eyes. Dave watched now as Rourke stepped into the room again, grinning.

  “Come on, come on,” Rourke said to the corridor, and then the doorway was filled with bodies and faces, and the frown on Dave’s forehead deepened. The boys in the doorway were all grinning foolishly. They continued to grin as they milled into the classroom, filing around past the side blackboard, moving toward the coat closets at the rear of the room.

  “What is this?” Dave asked, puzzled.

  “My Science class,” Rourke answered. He turned to his boys and said, “Double up with Mr. Kemp’s boys. Come on, let’s get on with this.”

  “Let’s get on with what?” Dave asked. He blinked his eyes and looked up at Rourke, and Rourke winked at him. The boys were sitting now, sharing seats with the boys in Dave’s class. The room was suddenly very full, looking ready to burst out at the windows. Dave didn’t like this at all. He thought of the careful lesson plan he’d made, and his annoyance began to show in the slight tremor of his hands.

  “What’s this all about, Artie?” he asked Rourke quietly.

  “This is a showdown, Dave,” Rourke answered, still grinning. “One of your little bastards is going to get hung.”

  He did not bother to remind Rourke that the “little bastards!” were all sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and not so little at that.

  “Hung? What are you talk—”

  “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye,” Rourke bellowed, “the court is now in session, the Honorable Arthur J. Rourke presiding.”

  The kids in Rourke’s Science class had apparently been briefed on all this. They sat with knowing smiles on their faces while Dave’s kids looked around in puzzlement. They looked first at Rourke, and then at the kids sharing their seats, and then they turned to Dave for enlightenment. Dave’s face was as puzzled as their own faces.

  Rourke cleared his throat and then solemnly intoned, “The case of the people versus”—he paused dramatically, eying the kids—“the case of the people versus The Mugger.”

  “Look, Artie,” Dave whispered urgently, “what the hell are you trying to do? If Hampton should walk in—”

  “Hampton’s not going to walk in,” Rourke said confidently. “He’s entertaining some jerk from the Board. Our principal is very good at that sort of thing.”

  “Still …”

  The kids had begun to buzz it up out there. They knew all about the muggings and rollings that had been going on in the corridors of their beloved Bernard Vocational. They knew all about them, and they also knew such muggings and rollings, and sometimes knifings, and once in a blue moon zip-gunnings, were all part of the game. They knew that Happy Hampton was a principal who sort of looked the other way when a bleeding kid was carted down to his office. They knew that, and so they’d learned to keep on their toes, and to walk in pairs whenever they went to the toilet, and to avoid dark stairwells during changes of class. Muggings and rollings were okay, so long as it didn’t happen to them. As a matter of fact, there was something pretty exciting about seeing another guy bleeding. Blood’s got a pretty color when it’s not flowing from your own arm.

  So they didn’t know what Rourke was planning to do, but they were interested anyway. “The court is in session,” he had said, and now he was standing up there with a big crud-eating grin on his face.

  “We’re going to try and convict a mugger today,” Rourke announced to the assembled kids. “We’re going to convict him because we’ve finally got enough students who’ll identify him.” He paused and then swiveled his head around the classroom, looking. His eyes stopped on Carlton where he sat up front. Rourke stared at him levelly and then asked, “What do you think of that, Carlton?”

  “Sounds like a good idea, teach,” Carlton answered, smiling. “If you can do it.”

  “I can do it, Carlton,” Rourke answered. “You can damn well bet on that.”

  “Sure,” Carlton said. He smiled and turned his head to look at the other boys. “Let’s get on with the trial, okay?”

  “Artie,” Dave said, “can’t we let this go? I had a lesson all planned out.”

  “You can use it tomorrow,” Rourke said. “The people call on their first witness: Pe
ter Donato.”

  A lanky boy whom Dave had seen around the school rose from his seat, grinning awkwardly. He shoved a lock of black hair off his forehead, and then began walking toward the front of the room, glancing once at Carlton and then turning his head away. Rourke pulled the chair from behind Dave’s desk and offered it to Donato. Donato nodded and then sat nervously, apparently unsure of what to do with his hands.

  “Just relax, Donato,” Rourke said. “Just take it easy.”

  Donato nodded, looking out at the other boys, his eyes straying back to Carlton again. Carlton was sitting forward in his seat, the smile still on his face.

  “Your name is Peter Donato?” Rourke asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Donato said.

  “Your official class?”

  Donato paused. “Uh, sixty-one, Mr. Rourke.”

  “Do you want to tell us what happened last week, Donato? Do you want to tell the court about it, just the way you told it to me?”

  “Sure,” Donato said uneasily. He wet his lips and looked at Carlton again.

  “Go on,” Rourke said.

  Dave watched the boy, and when he saw his eyes on Carlton, he shifted his own gaze there. Carlton seemed to be enjoying all this. But Carlton had been a troublemaker from go, and so he’d naturally enjoy anything that interrupted a normal lesson. Dave sighed heavily.

  “I was going to the john,” Donato said. “This was last Monday. I had Electrical Wiring that period, you know? Mr. Abrahms. He give me the room pass, and so I was going to the john.”

  The kids were listening intently. Dave looked out at their faces, and for a moment, he wished he had the same attention when he was teaching.

  “Go on,” Rourke prompted.

  “Well, like the john is at the end of the hall, you know? So I was coming down the hall, just going to the john, like I said, when this guy comes out the staircase and grabs me by the collar.”

  “Yes, and what happened then?”

  “So he rams me up against the wall, with his hand all twisted in my collar, and then he says, ‘You got any money, kid?’”

  “What did you answer?”

  “I said I didn’t have no money. Hell, I had a quarter for my milk and carfare, but I didn’t feel like giving it to no shakedown artist.” Donato nodded his head in righteous indignation.

  “What happened then?” Rourke asked.