by Ben Bova
“Not yet.”
“Guess you’re pretty lucky.”
Danny grins. “Luckier than you’ll ever know.” Nodding toward the boy who shot him, “What’s his name?”
“O’Banion.”
“All right, O’Banion. You put a bullet in me; I lived through it. You were doing your job for the Bloodhounds; I was doing my job for the Champions. Nothing personal and no hard feelings on my part.”
Waslewski’s eyes narrow. “What’re you pullin’? I thought this was gonna be a war council.
“It is, but not the regular kind.” Danny leans forward, spreads his hands on the table. “Know where I’ve been the past ten months? In Washington, in a special school the government set up, just to handle jay-dees. They pump knowledge into you with a computer . . . just like opening your head and sticking a hose in it.”
The other boys, Bloodhounds and Champions alike, squirm a bit.
“You know what they taught me? They taught me we’re nuts to fight each other. That’s right . . . gangs fighting each other is strictly crazy. What’s it get us? Lumps, is all. And dead.”
Waslewski is obviously disgusted. “You gonna preach a sermon?”
“Damned right I am. You know why the gangs fight each other? Because they keep us up tight. They’ve got the money, they’ve got the power that runs this city, and they make sure we gangs stay down in the garbage. By fighting each other, we keep them sitting high and running the big show.”
“They? Who the hell’s they?”
“The people who run this city. The fat cats. The rich cats. The ones who’ve got limousines and broads with diamonds hanging from each tit. They own this city. They own the buildings and the people in the buildings. They own the cops. They own us.”
“Nobody owns me!” says the burly kid behind Waslewski.
“Shuddup.” Waslewski is frowning with thought now, trying to digest Danny’s words.
“Look,” Danny says. “This city is filled with money. It’s filled with broads and good food and everything a guy could want for the rest of his life. What do we get out of it? Shit, that’s what! And why? Because we let them run us, that’s why. We fight each other over a crummy piece of turf, a couple of blocks of lousy street, while they sit back in plush restaurants and penthouses with forty-two-inch broads bending over them.”
“So . . . whattaya expect us to do?”
“Stop fighting each other. Make the gangs work together to take over this city. We can do it! We can crack this city wide open, like a peanut. Instead of fighting each other, we can conquer this whole fucking city and run it for ourselves!”
Waslewski sags back in his seat. The other boys look at each other, amazed, unbelieving, yet obviously attracted by the idea.
“Great . . . real cool.” Waslewski’s voice and face exude sarcasm. “And what do the cops do? Sit back and let us take over? And what about the rest of the people? There’s millions of ’em.”
“Listen. We know how to fight. What we’ve got to do is get all the gangs together and fight together, like an army. It’s just a matter of using the right strategy, the right tactics. We can do it. But we’ve got to work together. Not just the Bloodhounds and the Champions, but all the gangs! All of us, together, striking all at once. We can rack up the fuzz and take this town in a single night. They’ll never know what hit them.”
Marco objects, “But Danny, we can’t . . .”
“Look, I know it’ll take a lot of work. I figure we’ll need two years, at least. We’ve got to get our guys spotted at key places all over the city: the power plants, all the radio and TV stations. We’ll need guys inside the National Guard armories, inside the precinct stations, if we can do it. It’ll mean a lot of guys will have to take jobs. Learn to work hard for a couple years. But in the end, we’ll have this city for ourselves!”
“You got it all figured out?”
“To the last inch.”
Waslewski unconsciously pushes his chair slightly back from the table, He glances at his two lieutenants; they are wide-eyed.
“I gotta think about this. I can’t say yes or no just like that.”
“Okay, you think about it. But don’t spill it to anybody except your top boys. And remember, I’m going to be talking to all the gangs around here . . . and then to the gangs in the rest of the city. They’ll go for it, I know. Don’t get yourself left out.”
Waslewski gets up slowly. “Okay. I’ll get back to you right away. I think you can count us in.” His aides nod agreement.
“Good. Now we’re rolling.” Danny gets up and sticks out his hand. Waslewski hesitates a beat, and then—acting rather stunned—shakes hands with Danny.
Montage of scenes. Background music: “The Army Caisson Song.”
Danny escorting Waslewski and two other boys into a Job Corps training-center office. CUT TO half-a-dozen boys sitting in a personnel office waiting room. CUT TO a boy signing up in a National Guard armory.
Interior, Brockhurst’s office.
Hansen is sitting on the front inch of the chair beside the desk, tense with excitement.
“It’s a brilliant idea. Romano is working out better than any of his classmates, and this idea simply proves it!”
Brockhurst looks wary, probing for the weak point. “Why’s he doing it? What’s the sense of having gang members formed into a police auxiliary?”
“Sense? It makes perfect sense. The boys can work hand-in-hand with the police, clue them in on trouble before it erupts into violence. The police can get to know the boys and the boys will get to know the police. Mutual exposure will breed mutual trust and confidence. Instead of working against each other, they’ll be working together. With violence between the gangs and the police dwindling, a major source of trouble will be eliminated.”
“It just doesn’t sound right to me. I can’t picture those young punks turning into volunteer cops.”
“But it’s worth a try, isn’t it? What do we have to lose?”
Brockhurst makes a sour face. “I suppose you’re right. It’s worth a try.”
Interior, a one-room apartment.
The room is small but neat. The bed in the corner is made up in military style. The walls are covered with street maps of the city, over which are colored markings showing the territory of each gang. Danny sits at the only table, together with five other boys. One is a black, two others are Puerto Rican. The table is heaped high with papers.
“Okay,” Danny says. “The Hellcats will handle the power station in their turf and the precinct house. And they’ve offered to put eight of their guys on our task force for the downtown area. What else?” He looks around at his aides.
The black says, “The Hawks have a beef. They claim the Jaguars have been cuttin’ into their turf pretty regular for the past month. They’ve tried talkin’ it out with ’em, but no dice. I tried talkin’ to both sides, but they’re up pretty tight about it.”
Danny frowns. “Those damned Hawks have been screwing up for months.”
“They’re gonna rumble ‘less you can stop ’em.”
Thoughtfully, “There hasn’t been a rumble all winter. Even the newspapers are starting to notice it. Maybe it’d be a good idea to let them fight it out . . . so long as nobody winds up spilling his guts about us to the squares.”
“Somebody’s gonna get hurt bad if they rumble. Lotta bad blood between them two gangs.”
“I know.” Danny thinks it over for a moment. “Look, tell them if they’ve got to rumble, do it without artillery. No guns, nothing that’ll tip the squares to what we’ve got stashed away.”
“Okay.”
Interior, a Congressman’s office.
The room is high-ceilinged, ornately decorated. The Congressman’s broad desk is covered with mementos, framed photographs, neat piles of papers. The Congressman, himself, is in his mid-forties, just starting to turn fleshy. Sitting before him are Brockhurst, Hansen and—in a neat business suit—Danny.
“And so, with the
annual appropriation coming up,” Brockhurst is saying, “I thought you should have a personal report on the program.”
The Congressman nods. “From all I’ve heard, it seems to be highly successful.”
“It is.” Brockhurst allows himself to smile. “Of course, this is only the beginning; only a half-dozen cities have been touched so far, although we have a hundred more boys in training at the moment. But I think you can judge the results for yourself.”
Hansen interrupts. “And I hope you can realize the necessity for keeping the program secret, for the time being. Premature publicity—”
“Could ruin everything. I understand.” Turning his gaze to Danny. “And this is your star pupil, eh?”
Danny smiles. “I . . . uh, Sir, I’d merely like to add my thanks for what this program has done for me and my friends. It’s just like Dr. Hansen has been saying: all we boys need is some training and opportunity.”
Interior, a firehouse.
A boy sits at a tiny desk in the deserted garage. Behind him are the powerful fire trucks. No one else is in sight. Through the window alongside the desk, snow is falling on a city street. The window has a holiday wreath on it.
The boy is thumbing through the big calendar on the desk. He flips past December and into the coming year. He stops on July, notes that the Fourth falls on a Sunday. Smiling, he puts a red circle around the date.
Interior, a Congressional hearing room.
The committee members, half of them chatting with each other, sit at a long table in the front of the room. Brockhurst is sitting at the witness’s desk, reading from a prepared text. Hansen sits beside him. The visitors’ pews are completely empty, and a uniformed guard stands impassively at the door.
“Mr. Chairman, since the inception of this program, juvenile gang violence has decreased dramatically in five of the six cities where we have placed rehabilitated subjects. In one city, gang violence has dwindled to truly miniscule proportions. The boys are being rehabilitated, using Job Corps and other OEO facilities to train themselves for useful work, and then taking on—and keeping—full-time jobs.”
Brockhurst looks up from his text. “Mr. Chairman, if I may be allowed a new twist on an old saying, we’re beating their switchblades into plowshares.”
Interior, Danny’s apartment.
Danny is pacing angrily across the room, back and forth. Three abject youths sit on the bed in the corner. At the table sit Marco and Speed.
“He nearly blew it!” Danny’s voice is not loud, but clearly close to violence. “You stupid assholes can’t keep your own people happy. He gets sore over a bitch and goes to the cops! If we didn’t have a man in the precinct station last night, the whole plan would’ve been blown sky-high!”
One of the boys on the bed says, miserably, “But we didn’t know . . .”
“That’s even worse! You’re supposed to know. You’re the Prez of the Belters, you’re supposed to know every breath your people take.”
“Well . . . whadda we do now?”
“You do nothing! You go back to your hole and sit tight. Don’t even go to the can unless you get the word from me. Understand? Let the cops tumble to us because you’ve got one half-wit who can’t keep his mouth shut, every gang in the city is going to be after your blood. And they’ll get it!”
Danny motions them to the door. They leave quickly. He turns to his lieutenants.
“Speed, you know anybody in the Belters who can do a good job as Prez?”
Speed hesitates only a beat before answering, “Yeah, kid named Molie. Sharp. He’d keep ’em in line okay.”
“All right. Good. Get him here. Tonight. If I like him, we get that asshole who just left and his half-wit fink to kill each other. Then Molie becomes their President.”
“Kill each other?”
“Right. Can’t let the fink hang around. And we can’t make the cops worry that he was killed because he knew something. And that asshole is no good for us. So we make it look like they had a fight over the bitch. And fast, before something else happens. We’ve only got a month to go.”
Speed nods. “Okay, Danny. I’m movin.’ He’s already halfway to the door.
Exterior, night.
A park in the city. Holiday crowd is milling around. City skyline is visible over the trees. A band finishes the final few bars of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” A hush. Then the small thud of a skyrocket being launched, and overhead, a red-white-and-blue firework blossoms against the night sky. The crowd gives its customary gasp of delight.
Danny stands at the edge of the crowd. In the flickering light of the fireworks, he looks at his wrist watch, then turns to Speed and Marco and nods solemnly. They hurry off into the darkness.
Exterior, tollbooth across a major bridge.
A car full of youths pulls up at one of the three open toll gates. The boys spill out, guns in hands, club down the nearest tollbooth collector. The next closest one quickly raises his hands. The third collector starts to run, but he’s shot down.
Interior, National Guard armory.
One hugely grinning boy in Army fatigues is handing out automatic weapons to a line-up of other boys, from a rack that has an unlocked padlock hanging from its open door.
Interior, subway train.
Four adults—two old ladies, a middle-aged man and a younger man—ride along sleepily. The train stops, the doors open. A combat team of twenty boys steps in through the three open doors. Their dress is ragged. but each boy carries a newly-oiled automatic weapon. The adults gasp. One boy yanks open the motorman’s cubicle door and drags out the portly motorman. Another boy steps into the cubicle and shuts the doors. The train starts up again with the boys wordlessly standing, guns ready, while the adults huddle in a corner of the car.
Interior, police precinct station.
The desk sergeant is yawning. The radio operator, in the back of the room, is thumbing through a magazine. A boy—one of the police auxiliary—sits quietly on a bench by the door. He gets up, stretches, opens the front door. In pour a dozen armed boys. The desk sergeant freezes in mid-yawn. Two boys sprint toward the radio operator. He starts to grab for his microphone, but a blast of fire cuts him down.
Interior, a city power station.
Over the rumbling, whining noise of the generators, a boy walks up to his supervisor, who’s sitting in front of a board full of dials and switches, and pokes a pistol in his face. The man, startled, gets slowly out of his chair. Two other boys appear and take the man away. The first boy sits in the chair and reaches for the phone hanging on the instrument board.
Interior, newspaper office.
There is no sign of the usual news staff. All the desks are manned by boys, with Danny sitting at one of the desks in the center of the complex. Boys are answering phones, general hubbub of many simultaneous conversations. The mood is excited, almost jubilant. A few boys stand at the windows behind Danny, with carbines and automatic rifles in their hands. But they look relaxed.
Speed comes over to Danny from another desk, carrying a bundle of papers. “Here’s the latest reports: every damned precinct station in town. We got ’em all! And the armories, the power stations, the TV studios. All the bridges and tunnels are closed down. Everything!”
Danny doesn’t smile. “What about City Hall?”
“Took some fighting, but Shockie says we’ve got it nailed down. A few diehards in the cellblock, that’s all. Our guys are usin’ their own tear gas on ’em.”
“The Mayor and the Councilmen?”
“The Mayor’s outta town for the holidays, but we got most of the Councilmen, and the Police Chief, and the local FBI guys, too!”
Danny glances at his watch. “Okay, time for Phase Two. Round up every cop in town. On duty or off. Knock their doors down if you have to, pull them out of bed. But get them all into cells before dawn.”
“Right!” Speed’s grin is enormous.
Exterior, sun rising over city skyline.
From the air, the city
appears normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. No fires, no milling crowds, not even much motor traffic on the streets. ZOOM TO the toll plaza at one of the city’s main bridges. A lone sedan is stopped at an impromptu roadblock, made up of old cars and trucks strung lengthwise across the traffic lanes. A boy with an automatic rifle in the crook of one arm is standing atop a truck cab, waving the amazed automobile driver back into the city. On the other side of the tollbooth, an oil truck and moving van are similarly stopped before another roadblock.
Interior, a TV studio.
Danny is sitting at a desk, the hot lights on him. He is now wearing an Army shirt, open at the collar. A Colt automatic rests on the desk before him. Adults are manning the cameras, mike boom, lights, control booth; but armed boys stand behind each one.
“Good morning,” Danny allows himself to smile pleasantly. “Don’t bother trying to change channels. I’m on every station in town. Your city has been taken over. It’s now our city. My name is Danny Romano; I’m your new Mayor. Also your Police Chief, Fire Chief, District Attorney, Judge, and whatever other jobs I want to take on. The kids you’ve been calling punks, jaydees . . . the kids from the Street gangs . . . we’ve taken over your city. You’ll do what we tell you from now on. If you cooperate, nobody’s going to hurt you. If you don’t, you’ll be shot. Life is going to be a lot simpler for all of us from now on. Do as you’re told and you’ll be okay.”
Interior, Brockhurt’s office.
General uproar. Brockhurst is screaming into a telephone. A couple dozen people are shouting at each other, waving their arms. Hansen is prostrate on the couch.