by Jon Cleary
He hesitated before replying. “Baby, I don’t know anything about you - ” Again there was the stiffening in her face, and he held up a placatory hand. “Okay, I know -you’ll tell me all that in your own time. But I’m not blind -you don’t come from the same sorta neighbourhood I do. You’ve had - privileges. You belong to the sorta people I been hating all my life.”
“Do you hate me for that?”
He touched her jawline tenderly with one finger. “I’ll never hate you - for any reason. But that don’t say you’ve forgotten where you came from - all this” He waved a hand at their surroundings. “When you were a girl here, it meant something to you, didn’t it, that your mom put on a party as good as your friends threw? Am I right?”
It was her turn to hesitate, then she nodded. “Some day I’ll tell you all about it.”
They put on their dark glasses and wigs again, smiling at each other as they did so: they were still new enough to the game to be amused by parts of it. They took in soup, sandwiches and coffee to the two women in the bedroom. Sylvia, ear pressed to the door, had heard the conversation that had gone on out in the kitchen; the cottage was not large and the walls were thin. As soon as the door was opened, Sylvia said to Abel, “Did you talk to my husband?”
Abel nodded. “He didn’t say much, but it seems like he
isn’t hurrying himself. Maybe you’re not the number one priority.”
“I don’t believe that!” Sylvia turned her back, her face going white and taut. Then after a moment she said, “Put the tray over there.”
There was a rattle of cups and saucers as the tray shook in Abel’s hands, but Carole put a restraining hand on his arm. She shook her head at him, then said, “Don’t start giving orders, Mrs Forte. I’ve warned you once. You keep on this way and you’ll get no food at all. It doesn’t matter to us whether you’re fed or not.”
Sylvia still had her back turned. “That’s up to you. I am not going to kow-tow to you.”
“Kow-tow? Is that what you get when you go down to Chinatown soliciting votes for your husband, patting all the kids on the head, being Mrs Goody Two Shoes?”
Lisa, standing by her bed, watched the three Americans; this was not her war. She wanted to take the tray from Abel, usher him and the girl out of the room, placate Sylvia Forte; but she sensed that all three might turn on her. Outsiders were never welcome in a civil war.
“You’re very different from your public image, aren’t you?” Carole had taken over the baiting, aroused in her turn by Sylvia Forte’s arrogance. “All that devotion to good works, all that bit about wanting to show New Yorker^ their heritage - ‘
Sylvia turned back slowly, looked the two kidnappers up and down. Oh God, Lisa thought, don’t start fighting them, just let them go! “Do you belong to the Weathermen?”
“I belong to nobody but myself,” said Carole, suddenly stiff with her own cold dignity.
“And to me, baby,” said Abel.
Carole relaxed, smiled. “And to you.”
Lisa, watching Sylvia’s face, waited for some sarcastic remark; but Sylvia was not stupid, knew the right moment when to concede. She moved away, sat down in a chair and put a hand over her eyes, borrowing Michael’s strategy. It
was a strategic withdrawal, not a surrender. She would never kow-tow to these people, but she realized nothing was to be gained by antagonizing them. The boy might be provoked into blind anger and that might be dangerous. The girl would remain cold and nothing would alter the course she had planned for herself. The horrifying discovery was that she had glimpsed something of herself in the girl. They both knew what they wanted.
Then Lisa said quietly, “May we have the tray? We’re both very hungry.”
Carole looked at her for the first time. “You sound as if you are going to be sensible, Mrs Malone.”
“How is my husband? Does he know that I’m here?”
“He’s okay,” said Abel. “He understands what’s happening. He’s not gonna be any trouble.”
“I didn’t think he would be.” Lisa smiled with rueful irony; but the image of Scobie was in her mind and she smiled also with love. “He’s like me. All we want is to go home.”
Sylvia lowered her hand from her face and looked up. “Why don’t you let Mrs Malone go? You don’t want her.”
“No, that’s right,” said Carole. “And I’m sorry we had to bring you here, Mrs Malone.” She looked at Lisa, at the innocent stranger who would have to die tomorrow if the ransom demands were not met, and felt sick and sad. Violence had its own impetus: that had killed Roy. And as soon as she thought of him all pity for anyone else, stranger or not, disappeared. Abruptly she went out of the room, saying as she went, “Your husband had just better work on the Mayor, that’s all.”
Abel stared at the two women, his face bony and hard behind the dark glasses, then he went out, locking the door again. The wind had risen and they could hear it rattling the shutters outside the boarded-up windows, like some beast trying to get in at them.
“They’re going to kill us,” said Sylvia.
Chapter Four
Malone got out of the police car, waited for Jefferson to ease his bulk out of it. “We could’ve walked over here,” said Jefferson, “but I gotta keep in touch on the radio, just in case. Stick around, Stan. Anyone wants to give you a ticket, tell him you know a cop.”
“I’ll do that, Captain,” said the driver with the tired smile of a man who had listened too long to tired jokes.
Malone had been looking about him, at the towering block of the Manhattan House of Detention, The Tombs as it was called, above him, at the shabby bail bond shops across the narrow street. The shops surprised him. He hadn’t known what to expect, perhaps upstairs offices with small brass signs by their doors: the shops, with large signs painted across their windows, somehow reminded him of pawn-shops. But of course that was what they were, shops where men pawned their liberty.
A figure went by, long-haired and covered from neck to ankles in a huge shaggy fur coat. Jefferson looked after it and Malone said, “What do you do? Root it or shoot it?”
“I dunno, I try not to be too square, but I guess I got old-fashioned eyes or something. I have to keep telling myself to accept ‘em, that they’re today and I’m just a bit of yesterday that’s left over.” As they crossed the sidewalk he said, “I hope I did the right thing in asking you if you wanted to come over here with me.”
“It’s better than sitting on my bum back at the hotel.”
“That’s what I thought.”
After the second phone call to Forte’s office and the subsequent discussion which had been only words going in circles, Malone had wanted to escape from the ornate room and the stifling atmosphere brought in by the men who
surrounded Michael Forte. He had realized that the Mayor himself had wanted to escape, if only back into his official routine. Malone could not understand why the kidnappers’ demands could not be met at once, but he knew he would get no answer to such a question if he asked it in the company the Mayor kept. He would have to wait till he was alone with Michael Forte again. But then he would not make it a question: it would be a demand.
He had come out of the Mayor’s room escorted by Manny Pearl. “I suggested to the Mayor that it might be better - for you, for all of us - if you moved out of your hotel and went up to Gracie Mansion.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Malone.
“It would save you from being pestered by the press. And - ” He glanced at Malone, wondering how sensitive the Australian was. “And maybe you and the Mayor can be of some comfort to each other.”
“He would be more comforting if he agreed to release those blokes you are holding.”
Then John Jefferson had come down the carpeted corridor to them. “I’ll take the Inspector off your hands, Mr Pearl. I’m on my way over to The Tombs. Maybe he’d like to come.”
“What’s happening?” Pearl asked.
“We gotta work quietly - that’s
all we can do for the time being. There are two guys from the Department over at The Tombs now with an FBI man - they’re questioning Parker and the other men we’re holding. I thought you might like to listen in, Inspector.”
“Is that usually allowed?”
“No. But so long as you promise not to interfere, we’ll be glad to have you. It might help convince you we’re trying to do something to get your wife back.”
Now, as they crossed the sidewalk to the entrance of the detention house, Jefferson said, “You’re not gonna be impressed by this place. We got no excuses - except lack of money. We’re the richest country in the world, but we never
seem to have enough money to solve our worst problems. There are worse prisons in the world than this one, I guess, but that doesn’t excuse what you’re gonna see now.”
Malone had never been in a jail in which one stepped immediately in off a city street. Jefferson tapped on a door and it was opened by a uniformed guard. Malone at once recognized the sour smell that was prison stink and felt the tension; yet behind him a boy and girl were passing by, arms wrapped round each other, and across the narrow street two old women, eyes rejuvenated by malicious envy, went clucking by like ancient fowls. The guard clanged the door behind Malone and Jefferson and opened another door to allow them into the main lobby, a narrow hall crowded with guards who had the same air about them as Malone had seen on prisoners, a boredom laced with tension. The guards in this crowded building were as much prisoners as the men they guarded.
“You carry a gun?” Jefferson asked.
Malone, surprised, shook his head. “This far from home?”
“I’m never without mine. That’s what life’s like nowadays - I put it on before I put my pants on.” He checked his gun with the duty officer in the tiny cubicle in the corner of the lobby, signed a book, introduced Malone to the duty officer, then stepped up to the bars that separated the entrance lobby from a second, inner lobby. A guard opened a door in the bars and Jefferson and Malone stepped through.
“Hi, Jack. How’s it been?”
“Same old routine, Captain.” The guard, like most of the men in uniform in the cramped lobby, was black. Though he could not have been more than thirty he had the battered, slightly abstract expression that Malone had seen on the faces of old prize-fighters, men who had spent all their lives having hell knocked out of them in the preliminaries. This guard would never rise above his present job, would never get higher billing, and he knew it. “We had another two suicides last night. Maybe if enough of ‘em did that, we could solve the accommodation problem.”
“This place was designed in 1933 to hold 900 inmates,” Jefferson explained to Malone. “It was designed in the immediate post-Prohibition era, when the whole approach to crime was punitive and when practically all criminals were white. Today the average day to day population is between fourteen and fifteen hundred. It’s an overloaded pressure cooker.”
“How long do you keep men here?”
“It varies. Some guys come and go in a day, depending on their charges. Others - ” Jefferson shrugged. “If they got smart lawyers, ones who can keep getting remands, they can be here a year, maybe two. Only thing is, the lawyers prove too smart - their clients usually go crazy.”
The guard came back and led them into a side room. It was the sort of room familiar to Malone, designed to eliminate all cheer and encouragement, sterilized even of hope. Three men were there, two of them sitting on the metal chairs, the third resting his behind on the bare table. They all stood up as Jefferson and Malone entered; but Malone had the feeling they had not done it out of deference but only to relieve the tedium of whatever they had been doing for the past hour. They were introduced to him as Captain Lewton and Lieutenant Markowitz of the Police Department, and Special Agent Butlin of the FBI.
“We’re getting nowhere so far, John.” Lewton was a tall, thin man with an unhappy mouth and eyes yellowed with ague or bitterness. “The bastards won’t see us.”
“They don’t have to,” Jefferson told Malone. “Since they haven’t yet been convicted, they still have most of their rights. One of them being that they can refuse to be questioned on anything that doesn’t concern them. And they’re claiming the kidnapping has nothing to do with them.”
“But the ransom has!” Malone, suddenly affected by the atmosphere of the jail, had the feeling that doors were being slammed on him; from somewhere beyond the closed door of the interviewing room there came the loud clang of iron against iron, a sound as cold and dead on the ear as that of
doom itself, and abruptly he was as without hope as any of the prisoners in the building. Anger shook him as he thought of Lisa held prisoner somewhere, possibly already dead (the thought was there in the dark corners of his mind like a plague-carrying rat). The world was standing still and waiting with its hands in its pockets; and some anarchists somewhere in this building who did not believe in the rule of law were invoking it to wash their hands of the lives of two women they had never met. Suddenly he wanted to tear this bare, negative room to pieces. He felt like an innocent man just condemned to life imprisonment. He thumped the table with his fist. “Jesus, can’t you drag them down here? We’re trying to save the lives of two women - what rights do these bastards have against that fact?”
“I don’t know what the law is in Australia,” said Lewton quietly, “but in this country, since the Supreme Court decided in its wisdom that the guilty have as many rights as the innocent, we work with our hands tied.”
Malone, despite his emotional state, recognized the sour hyperbole and understood it. Only in police states did the police ever think the law worked for them: there had been times back home when he had thought he had been wearing the handcuffs and not the lawbreaker he had brought in. He simmered down, aware again of doors clanging outside: he had to find some way of surviving in this cage of frustration that enclosed him.
Then a door behind Lewton opened and a grey-haired white man in uniform came in. With him was a young black guard and a second black with an Afro hair-do and wearing a red-and-black dashiki over his blue jeans and his white T-shirt.
“McBean has said he’ll listen to you.” The grey-haired man was introduced to Malone as Warden Canby. “I told him, Inspector, that you might be coming here. That was when he said he’d come down.”
“Just to show you your side doesn’t have a monopoly on compassion,” said McBean.
Ganby looked over his shoulder at McBean, casually as he might have looked at a man he had known all his life. “Our side doesn’t have a monopoly on anything. Don’t get sanctimonious on us - we got enough do-gooders on our own side.”
McBean suddenly smiled; evidently there was some rapport between him and the Warden. “Stick around, Warden. We’ll find a place for you in our system when we take over.”
Ganby, dark lines gullying his grey face like the tribal marks of experience, turned back to Malone and the others. “He’s all yours. Officer Robinson will stay with you. Good luck.”
“That’s what you gonna need - luck,” said McBean, and sat down at the table, arranging his dashiki. “You like my outfit, Captain ? A marriage of two cultures - Africa and Seventh Avenue.”
The Warden shook his head and went out of the room, and Lewton said, “What do you mean, Eddie? Why are we gonna need luck?”
“Because there’s nothing I can tell you about this kidnapping - nothing.”
Malone found himself at the opposite end of the table from McBean; the two men looked at each other down its length and Malone saw nothing in the broad blue-black face that afforded him any hope. But they had to start somewhere if Lisa was to be found before it was too late. If it was not already too late (the rat gnawing away in the dark, the plague spreading through his mind).
“I don’t know what the other guys have told you,” said McBean. “I haven’t seen ‘em since I come in here - they don’t let conspirators fraternize, you know that? Afraid of conspiracy, I guess.”
“D
o you mind if we cut out the jokes?” said Lewton patiently. “I don’t think Inspector Malone is in the mood for laughing.”
McBean looked down the table again at Malone. He had not yet been convicted, but if he were he would still be defiant: he was a man whose pride lay in doing, as if he had
already conceded that victory for his cause was doomed. But, as he had said, he was not without compassion. “You’re one of the pigs, man, and internationally speaking you’re all the same. But this isn’t your scene and I guess you deserve some sympathy.”
“Thanks,” said Malone, not attempting to keep the irony out of his voice: he knew this man would not be offended by it. But McBean sounded like an echo of the kidnapper who had spoken to him on the phone less than an hour ago.
“Like I said, I dunno anything about your wife or the Mayor’s wife. I dunno, if I did know anything, that I’d be co-operative about the Mayor’s wife. She’s part of what we don’t believe in and we don’t owe him anything.” He glanced around at the other men. “But you know that, don’t you?”
“That’s why you’re here,” said Lewton.
McBean shook his head, smiled. “Let’s be specific, Gap-tain. I’m here on a bomb conspiracy charge and you have to prove I had anything to do with it.” He looked back at Malone. “Man, believe me, I know nothing about your wife and I’m sorry you got to suffer.”
“Thanks,” said Malone again, and this time there was no irony in his voice.
Then Butlin leaned forward. “Mr McBean, we are not suggesting you had any hand in this kidnapping. But you must have some idea who amongst your supporters would dream up such a bizarre scheme.”
“Not bizarre, man. It looks to me like a stroke of genius.”
“So if we agree to the demands of the kidnappers, release you and send you to Cuba, you’ll go along with it?”