"Right, Marvin. No illusions." He poured himself another drink and listened to the bagpipers, their strange sounds rising upward ten stories.
"The reporters and TV people wanted to come up. I told them no. And I asked that stupid ass of a desk clerk to disconnect our phone. The man is scared to death, white as a sheet. Oh, yes, we saw that man again. Marbury."
"Worried about the damned hotel?"
"Yeah. He's standing in the shadows watching things, like an owl. Hell, he hasn't had it so good in years. The place will be well known again after tonight." Perlmutter went to the sideboard and poured himself some scotch. Lifting his glass, he tipped it toward Sully and drank, grimacing. His face reddened. "Who said Jews don't drink?"
Fitz looked at his watch. "Almost time to open the doors."
"I'll come up and bring you down," Perlmutter said. "You'll know it's
about time when the drum and bugle corps downstairs begin to boom out. The whole barn should shake." Fitz and Perlmutter left the room.
April poured herself a drink and sat down next to him. They listened for a while to the sounds of the bagpipers and watched the eerie movement of the floodlights dancing in the sky. Sully reached out and took April's hand. He kissed her fingers.
"Sweet September," he said. She shifted toward him and looked at his face, her eyes searching his. Her mouth curved up in a deep smile. He noticed that her little dimple, a tiny indentation, had deepened. Perhaps it was the light. He remembered her face in another time, another context. She was looking at him then, as now, urging him on, invoking the blind power of natural forces.
"My man," she said quietly, patting his cheek tenderly.
He felt tears begin to well again in his eyes. Blinking, he felt their heat, then their cold as they evaporated on his cheeks.
"I'll miss the damned place," he said hoarsely.
"So will I"
"Hell, April, you can stay on if you want. Christ, you'll get a job in a minute."
"I go where you go, buddy boy."
"I don't know where I'm going."
"Then neither do I."
He bent over and kissed her on the lips, lingering, deeply feeling the old wonder. She reached up and pressed him closer.
"I'm going to marry you, April," he said.
"I know, Sully."
"We should have years ago."
"What did it matter?"
He thought about that for a moment.
"It would have been a helluva lot more convenient."
"More interesting than a secret love affair?"
"Nothing is more interesting than that."
"All those years we thought we were keeping it a deep dark secret. Today, finally, I made the papers and they didn't even give my name. I was referred to as a member of your staff."
"The press distorts as usual."
"You didn't see that story, Sully. It was a real low blow. They even said that Timmy was a homosexual and you liked your booze."
"ll, they were right about that. Don't worry about Timmy. He doesn't give a damn. As for me" — he raised the drink to his lips — "they're totally accurate for a change."
He got up and walked to the sideboard, feeling her eyes on him. Almost as a reflex, he tucked in his belly, straightened himself to full height. He felt his strength surge, the power of his manhood.
Suddenly they heard the distant sounds of a drumroll and the boom of a bass drum. The rush of sound vibrated in the room, tinkling the glasses. Beyond the sound of the drums and bugles, they could hear a cry of human voices, a crowd sound in a crescendo. Sully got up and went to the window. Opening it, he stuck his head out and looked down the ten floors to the street below. The three floodlights continued their dance in the sky, but the crowd below seemed to have emerged into a single amorphous mass barely distinguishable in the semidarkness. The edge of the crowd, vaguely distinguished in the light of some lonely storefronts, appeared to reach two blocks beyond the hotel. He could see dark forms attach themselves to the crowd edges as if drawn by a magnet.
"My God. What a crowd."
He closed the window and looked at his watch.
"Marvin should have been here," April said calmly.
Rumbling sounds could be heard outside the door to their suite. Sully opened the door and saw a group of young black boys in sneakers rush past them, banging against the walls, then kick open a door marked EXIT.
He could hear the thump of their feet against the metal stairs as it echoed through the shaft.
Then from the same exit door, Sully saw Perlmutter moving toward them. He was puffing and sweat glistened on his forehead. The knees of his pants were covered with dust, as if he had stumbled on his way up.
"I couldn't get near the elevator," he puffed. "And those little bastards just then, nearly pushed me down ten floors." In the corridor, the crowd sounds seemed magnified, soaring up at them. The drumbeat seemed a faint echo.
"We'll have to walk." Perlmutter said. "I told the Pinkertons to meet us at the exit door on the ballroom floor."
Sully lifted his drink and finished it. He returned to the suite and put the empty glass on the sideboard. Then he picked up an unopened fifth and stuffed it into April's large bag.
"Never can tell when a feller needs a friend," he said, pecking her on the cheek and taking her hand.
They started toward the exit. The noise was deafening, increasing as they descended. Halfway down, they met groups of people coming up. They were an odd assortment, blacks in dress ranging from dark suits to tattered overalls, huge-busted women with children in their arms, teenagers in sneakers and short jackets open at the front — all of them smelling of sweat and carrying plastic beer containers in their hands. There were also Puerto Ricans of all shapes and sizes, talking animatedly in Spanish.
"Why are they going upstairs?" Perlmutter asked an old black man who was struggling with great concentration to make each step. Not getting an answer, Perlmutter bent close to the old man and shouted the question.
"Where are you going?"
"To the meetin'."
"The meeting is downstairs," Perlmutter shouted, but the old man only shrugged and pushed up.
As Perlmutter, April and Sully continued down the stairs, the crowd moving upward thickened. They carried beer and fried chicken. The stairwell was now littered with chicken bones, discarded rolls, and paper napkins. They threaded their way downward through the crowd, Sully gripping April's hand and keeping his eye on Perlmutter as he descended in front of them. People continued to surge past them. Sully could see Perlmutter below, now separated from him and April and looking back helplessly, his glasses slipping down his nose as he pushed against the upward movement of the crowd, which quickly closed around him.
On the ballroom level, they caught up with Perlmutter. He was flattened againsthe wall waiting for them. "I can't understand it. Where are the Pinkertons?"
Sully gripped April's hand tighter and led the way through the crowds, pushing toward the exit doors. The vestibule was packed, and people surged in all directions. At the entrance to the ballroom, they could see a group of Pinkertons fighting their way toward them. The drum and bugle corps, a group from a local black high school, played valiantly in a corner of the ballroom while their gray-haired bandmaster tried to push people away from them. Many had simply stopped playing, their arms clamped to their side by the press of the crowd. A fat young boy, his high uniform hat pushed over his eyes, banged away at his drum.
Coming toward them through the mass of dark faces and now leading the Pinkertons was the sweating florid face of Fitz, his fists and elbows flying as he carved his way toward them. Reaching them, he took a firm hold of Sully's arm and began the pushing and shoving battle back into the ballroom.
"I don't get paid for this shit," one of the Pinkerton men suddenly shouted. "I gotta get out of here." He began to grope his way toward the stairs that led to the lobby.
The lines of tables that had held the food were now empty and shoved haphazar
dly back against the walls. Kegs of beer were being fought over by grinning people, all of them trying to get plastic cups under the spigot.
The crowd finally thinned somewhat as they groped toward the ballroom. All the tables were filled. People ate their chicken determinedly, ignoring the din. The remaining Pinkertons formed a wedge in front of Sully and his party and moved slowly toward the stage, the drum and bugle corps following in disarray. Camera flashes popped and television lights blinded them. Photographers with hand-held cameras tried to follow their procession only to fall, cursing, beyond range as the crowd spilled past them. A reporter jabbed a pencil in the air and shouted at Sully.
"What you gonna tell them?"
"Wait and see."
"I think you're crazy, Sullivan, crazy." The voice drowned out as the man was jostled against the wall, unable to move.
A second group of Pinkertons managed to clear the stage as Sully and the others filed up the stairs to the platform. The drum and bugle corps followed quickly, set themselves up again in full military order, and began to play as the bandmaster urged them on. The sounds they made were discordant, lost somehow in the human insulation.
Sully turned and looked up at the huge blowup of himself that hung at the back of the stage. It was an old picture, taken maybe twenty years ago. The face was only vaguely familiar, distorted further by the enlargement and his angle of viewing it. _You big, dumb Irish bastard,_ he chuckled to the picture.
Turning back, Sully saw Marbury making his way toward the stage from the relatively safe niche in which he had huddled.
"They're wrecking the hotel," Marbury was yelling.
"If it has to go, what's wrong with this way?" Sully laughed. "Like me," he said, jabbing a thumb into his chest.
But Sully's words were lost in the increasing wave of sound that was sweeping over them. More people were shoving into the room, caught up in the excitement of the crowd, and moving as though of a single will.
April and Fitz sat on either side of Sully on folding chairs trimmed with red, white, and blue bunting. Behind them Perlmutter fiddled with the sound system. He shouted into Sully's ear, "I'm going to spin this record and turn it up as loud as I can. If it doesn't quiet the crowd, get up anyway."
"No introduction?"
"I'm sorry, Congressman. I thought I could get the mayor. He declined. Sorry."
Sully saw the distress in Perlmutter's eyes and reached across to pat him on the shoulder.
"Fuck the mayor," Sully said. "Play the music." He looked back at the moving, shoving crowd and saw the Pinkertons giving way in a kind of orderly retreat toward the stage. "I'm gonna get the fuckut of here if this gets any worse," Sully heard one of them say.
Sully tried to distinguish familiar faces in the crowd, but it was mostly black and Spanish, and the sprinkling of white faces, pale and frightened, bobbed in the crush like floating tennis balls on a dark sea.
"You better make your speech and get the hell out of here, Congressman," a red-faced, sweating Pinkerton said. "We're not going to be able to hold them much longer."
"They're just people," Sully said, smiling calmly. He reached for April's bag and pulled out the scotch bottle, opened it, and turning his face from the crowd, downed a deep slug.
"Not frightened, are you, darlin'?" he said to April.
"I'd feel better if we were out of it, Sully."
Then, above the roar of moving people, drums, bugles, shouts, laughs. howls, a new sound intruded — train whistles and the nerve-rending screech of metal resisting metal. In the sound system, the record Perlmutter had put on rumbled into the brain as a giant train roaring down at them from all four sides, a shattering noise almost beyond comprehension. The crowd froze into silence, suspending itself in time and space as though waiting for the crash of the onrushing trains.
Even Sully felt its awesome power, was hypnotized by its threat of Armageddon. He stepped to the podium and lifted his arms in a politician's V salute, knowing its effect, as if he were imparting divine power to the assembled masses. As he lifted his arms, Perlmutter clicked off the sound, an abrupt ending as though the trains had been stopped by the sheer power of John J. Sullivan who, in the act of raising his arms, had saved them from the pit.
"Fellow people." Sully's voice boomed out over the silent crowd in an electronic onslaught. "I come before you to ask your forgiveness." Sully wanted to pause here but feared that any gap would break the spell. "I have failed you as your Congressman. I do not know who you are. I do not represent you. It is as if I am in a foreign land. Who are you?" he shouted suddenly.
"Who are you?" he repeated, louder than before.
"You are strangers," he shouted then. "And I have betrayed you; I have screwed you. I come before you as a penitent, but also with a warning. _You have been fucked by the democratic process._"
Perhaps it was the word "fuck," the familiar all-encompassing expletive, hurled out at them like raw meat to starving dogs, that revived the crowd.
"Fuck you too, man," a voice jeered back.
"Up your white mothafuckin' ass," another voice screeched. The crowd laughed, howled, roared, started to move again.
"You will lose," Sully cried, ignoring the resurgence of the din. "You will betray yourselves. You will be betrayed by others as I have betrayed you."
He noticed the face of an old man near the stage looking up at him, concentrating, his fading eyes searching Sully's face as though wanting to hear. Sully thrust a finger in his direction.
"We are both guilty of stupidity," he shouted. "We let it happen. You and I. Our generations. We gave them this jungle while we promised them salvation — the moon, the sky, the heavens. We lied to them."
The old man strained, but it was obvious he could not hear a word. Sully plunged doggedly on. He was strangely calm. He felt, for the first time, part of them, sharing their agony.
"I'm not fit to represent you," he said calmly, almost to himself. "I am yesterday's dishwater. You're quite right. But the alternative to me is equally bad. Worse! You're in for more rape. More bullshit. More fucking. More of the same."
He turned and looked at April. Her marble skin seemed drained, white, paper-thin. He walked back, reached into her bag again, and removed the bottle. He passed it to Fitz, who rose from his chair and glowered at the crowd as he pugnaciously lifted the bottle to his lips.
"To all you black, spic mothafuckers," he shouted, upending the bottle in a deep drink. He handed the bottle back to Sully, o put it to his lips and swallowed deeply. The crowd began to surge again in all directions, thrashing hopelessly.
The Pinkerton men pulled back against the stage. "This ain't for me," one of them yelled. "Me neither, let's go." And suddenly they were on the stage and running toward the rear exit, which led to an alley beside the hotel. Sully moved back to the podium.
"I'm saying what I've got to say, and it doesn't really matter if you listen or not. It's important for me to say it. I leave you Brooklyn's Eighth Congressional District. I bequeath it to you for better or for
worse. It's yours now."
Someone threw some chicken bones at him, missing by a wide mark. Then came an avalanche of empty beer cups, rolls, more chicken legs. Paper plates sailed through the air like an invasion of ships from outer space.
Fitz jumped up suddenly and moved into the crowd, his bulky figure wading into the mass, elbowing, kicking, flaying his fists.
"Fitz," Sully yelled. "Come back."
"My God," Perlmutter shouted.
"Fitz," April screamed.
They could see Fitz disappearing, a man drowning, rising, and disappearing, bloodied now, floating on the crest of the crowd.
Perlmutter rushed to the sound system, tried to start the train record again, but the wires had been pulled. The crowd was moving wildly now, and Fitz's body appeared again for a moment, a reddened figure bobbing on the waves, and then he disappeared. Sully watched, his throat no longer able to utter sounds, as the crowd washed around him, moving up ont
o the stage with faces shining with sweat. Good-natured jostling had given way to anger. Sully's eyes frantically searched the crowd for another glimpse of Fitz.
"My God, they'll trample us," April shouted, panicked now, getting up from her chair and seeking refuge behind Sully.
"I give you back the Eighth District," Sully shouted, finding his voice again, making a megaphone with his hands. "Take it. I've ruined it for you. Now make it whole again."
Perlmutter came up behind him.
"We've got to get out of here," he shouted.
Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Page 25