The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “I don’t know! I swear to God I don’t know! I swear on my dead mother’s soul I don’t know! I can tell you Wabash. Sure I can tell you that, and maybe it’s true and maybe it ain’t. But I don’t know and if I tell you that I’d be lying, and if I ever said it under oath, I’d seal my death warrant, because you don’t fuck with Wabash, so what in hell do you want from me, Lieutenant?”

  Fran, close behind me, whispering, “Don’t—it’s enough, Harry.”

  “You know,” Toomey said, “they don’t care about one empty prowl car, because they know the cops are in here and they can take care of them, but if we call the house and pull over two more, one at each end of the block, it could be that we got Percy, and that would be a nice collar, the way things are now.”

  I didn’t ask him what he meant by the way things are now, because this was not the moment to go into such a discussion. I mentioned that I had thought of the same thing, but that my apartment was bugged. “However,” I said to Toomey, “there’s no reason why one of the uniforms here can’t go upstairs and ring a bell or two and ask to use the phone. How about it?” I said to Benny. “Just nice and polite. If they see the uniform through the peephole, they won’t panic. Tell them over at the house to bring in two cars, no sirens, one at the Third Avenue end, one at the Second Avenue end. Tell them who we’re looking for, and that a couple of detectives with shotguns should run a backup. Since there are four of us here, they shouldn’t need much more. But tell them to hurry.” Benny started up the stairs, and I turned to the others.

  “It’s started. Get away from the door.” It was almost eight o’clock. “Fran,” I snapped, “get up to the apartment!”

  “No.”

  “Get away from the door!” I yelled. They did as I said, and I pushed Fran down. “On the floor all of us!” The big black car had pulled out into motion. “Benny,” I yelled. “Forget it!”

  I didn’t see anymore of what happened, because we were all on the floor. It had never occurred to me that they might have bugged the hallway of the apartment house. When I yelled to Benny, the two wood and glass doors that led into the foyer of my apartment house exploded. There must have been two large-caliber rapid-fire guns, because they chopped the doors out of existence in a matter of seconds. The moment that was over, the other cop, Toomey, and I leapt through the opening into the street, rolling on our bellies and emptying our guns at the black car, already swinging onto the avenue. It was a futile and useless gesture of frustration. We brushed the dirt off our clothes and went back to our apartment house, where Fran and Heston were the center of an increasing crowd of people, coming from inside and from outside the apartment house. Piper Heston could have walked away, but I had a feeling that it would take a great deal to pry him loose from the protection of cops. Fred Jones was there, his face sick as he studied the two shattered doors, a shattered chandelier, and bullet holes all over the walls.

  “Will you please tell me what on earth goes on here, Lieutenant?” he begged me. “You know the way the co-op owners get up so tight if there’s a speck of dust around. Just look at this!”

  “Take him over to the house and book him,” I said to Toomey, nodding at Piper. “Maybe I’ll get there later, maybe not.”

  Joe Hammerstich, chairman of the board of the co-op that owned our building, interrupted at dinner by the machine-gun fire, drew me aside and said unhappily, “What happened, Harry? It sounded like Beirut.”

  “I’ll try to make it short but not clear, because none of this is very clear, Joe, and none of it makes sense. That little guy”—pointing to Piper, who was pushing through the crowd with Toomey—“was rifling my apartment when Fran and I got home tonight. I arrested him, and then he indicated that some people in a large black car across the street would probably kill him. When we decided what to do about it, the gentlemen in the black car were told what we had decided and they swung by and emptied their guns through our lovely old front door.”

  “What do you mean, they were told what you had decided?”

  “There’s a bug somewhere in this foyer.”

  “You’re kidding.” Joe was a round-faced, overweight, pleasant accountant. He ran the building brilliantly, and instead of gratitude, he got all our complaints. He began to tremble a bit now. “What do you mean, a bug? What’s going on, Harry?”

  His wife, June, had joined the crowd in the foyer, and she and a dozen others of the co-op family had surrounded Fran as a source of information. Benny came over to me and asked, “What about it, Lieutenant? Should I clear the lobby?”

  “Only of those who don’t live here. Both of you stick around for a while—at least until Fred”—I pointed to where Fred Jones was sweeping glass together—“until he jerrys up something to close off the lobby.” I turned back to Hammerstich. “Joe, I wish I could tell you, but I don’t know myself.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” I began to reload my gun. I always keep a few extra cartridges in my coat pocket. I had fired three times at the car. That was anger and frustration and not very good police procedure, firing into an avenue running right angles to your line of fire, but the target was large and I’m sure we hit the car several times. Toomey would put it on the wire, and we might just be lucky enough to pick up a large black Chrysler with bullet holes in it, except that such luck almost never happens.

  “Crazy,” I agreed. “I’m sorry, Joe.”

  “But look at it. Who pays for it? Do the cops pay for it?”

  “Come on, Joe. We didn’t do any of it.”

  “You provoked it!” he said shrilly.

  “No, no. Come on, Joe. Think about it. The building’s insurance will cover it.”

  “If it’s not excluded.”

  “Joe, did you ever hear of a policy that excludes machine-gun damage?”

  Finally, Fran and I were able to slip away, and we walked downtown on Second Avenue. After a few blocks in silence, Fran said, “You’re two men, Harry. I suppose all cops are, and I guess what happened tonight is what you call your work.”

  “You could call it that. This suit is ruined.”

  “No it isn’t. I’ll brush most of the dirt off tonight. I don’t want to watch you working again.”

  “No, it’s not a good thing.”

  “You begin to get the feeling that I hear crooks have.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That one side isn’t much different from another.”

  “They’re damn different!” I said angrily.

  “Don’t turn your anger on me, Harry. I’m all torn up inside. There’s that fellow in California, a cop turned writer, and he called his book The New Centurions, and do you know who the centurions were, Harry? They were the Roman officers who rolled dice and got themselves drunk under the cross, while our Lord died there in his agony—”

  “Your Lord, not mine.”

  The tears filled her eyes now. “Don’t go at me, Harry, please. I’m a failed Catholic who wants only to get down on her knees and beg God’s forgiveness.”

  “For what? For what should you be forgiven?” I stopped and turned her around and put my arms around her. “You’re the best person I ever knew. Nothing to forgive you for.”

  “Harry,” she whispered, pulling away from my kiss, “I think we’re being followed.”

  “Two men on foot. A third in the car.”

  “What shall we do?”

  “Nothing. I want to kiss you again, and then we’ll walk. It’s a beautiful night.” I kissed her, and we began to walk again.

  “Harry, we are being followed. I can’t stand this anymore. What do they want from us? What have we done to anyone?”

  “First we get rid of them.” I stopped a cab. We got in, and I was relieved that the driver appeared to be under forty. I showed him my badge and plastic and said to him, “I’m being followed. Do you think you can shake them?”

  “Goldman—you’re Jewish?” the cabby asked.

  “What the hell difference—”


  “Don’t get excited.” He had a thick accent. “I’m an Israeli.” Half the cabdrivers in New York seemed to be Israeli. “You want to lose a car, we lose a car. No sweat. What kind of car?”

  “Dark brown. It looks like a Dodge.”

  “So we’ll lose it.”

  We picked him up on 78th Street and Second Avenue. He roared down Second, increasing his speed to sixty miles an hour, leaning on his horn, weaving in and out in a manner that reduced our chances of getting through alive—and yet the Dodge hung on our tail. At 65th Street, our driver made a screaming turn. In thirteen blocks, he had overrun the stagger and had gone through four red lights. If Fran had come out of her white terror long enough to ask me, I would have answered that the cops can’t be everywhere. There was a red light at First Avenue, and our driver, after squeezing past three double-parked cars at fifty miles an hour, ran the red light, his horn screaming, made a two-wheel turn north, narrowly missing one car, and even more narrowly missing another, and plunged west on 67th Street. There was an enormous garbage truck on 67th Street, and I could have sworn that there was not enough room for a car to pass between the truck and the parked car on the other side of the street. Our driver decided otherwise, and Fran and I both closed our eyes as, once again at at least fifty miles an hour, we shot between the garbage truck and the parked car. I will swear that there was not a quarter of inch of space on either side, and the Dodge following us was simply not as good as the Israeli cabdriver. It hit either the truck or the parked car, I don’t know which, and there was the most tremendous crash. A red light had appeared at the Third Avenue end of the street, and our driver stood on his brakes and managed to stop. A police car, its siren going, passed by us into the block as the light changed, the police car going in the wrong direction on a one-way street—something that did not matter, since it would be hours before that street could be used. As we drove west, we heard the siren of an ambulance and the wild hooting of fire engines.

  “So I lost him,” the driver said.

  “You sure as hell lost him,” I said. “Go straight ahead through the transverse and drop us at Columbus.” There was a Chinese restaurant on 66th, just east of Columbus Avenue, that we both liked.

  Fran was lying back on the seat, her eyes closed. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “It’s over. I mean being tailed. That’s over.”

  “We’re alive?”

  “I think so.”

  “The men in the car—were they killed?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out on the eleven o’clock news.”

  “Harry,” she whimpered, “I’m tired and frightened, and I want to talk to my kids.”

  “It’s too early. Hang in there, baby.”

  When I paid off the cabdriver, I said to him, “Remember—we were never in your cab.”

  “Already forgotten. Even to you, I deny it.”

  “It helps to have a police lieutenant in this city who owes you one.”

  “You bet. Only I don’t even remember your name.”

  He drove off, and Fran said, “I don’t think I want to go to Israel ever again, Harry. Aren’t you going to report this?”

  “No. I left the scene of an accident. That’s a bad play for a cop. I couldn’t explain it. We’re so deep in this nightmare, I can’t explain anything, not even to myself.”

  “Amen.”

  We went into the restaurant. It was past nine now, and Chinese food, like chocolate candy, always helped to elevate Fran’s spirits. But she complained that she wasn’t hungry and that all she wanted was to call her brother Sean and find out what had happened to her poor children whom I had sent away. I explained that it was too early, that they might have had to wait hours for the plane, and then they had to go from Shannon to Dublin.

  “It’s already two in the morning in Dublin.”

  I ordered egg rolls, ribs, spicy noodles, lemon chicken, and Cantonese lobster. Fran nibbled a piece of egg roll, explaining that she wasn’t hungry, but she couldn’t just sit at the table and watch me eat. She mentioned the connection between the stomach and the mind, suggesting that people who could maintain an appetite under stress were lacking in any real kind of human sensitivity.

  “I guess if you knew this side of me you wouldn’t have married me.”

  “Probably not, and it’s even worse when those qualities exist in a Jew, who is supposed to be—”

  “You still have your illusions about Jews.”

  “Not so many after tonight. That Israeli cabdriver—are you going to take all of that?”

  I had put some lemon chicken on my plate. “It’s less than half. You’re not hungry.”

  “I might want to taste it.”

  “There’s enough there to taste. And you know, that crazy cab-driver saved our lives.”

  “He almost killed us.”

  I put the rest of the lemon chicken on her plate.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You know I’m not going to eat that. You’re just provoking me. Anyway, we should finish the egg rolls and ribs before we eat the other stuff.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Oh, you ask the dumbest questions. All right, I’ll tell you why. When you grow up in a poverty-line family of numerous Irish kids in New York, you don’t leave food on your plate.”

  “That’s reasonable.”

  “Harry, I can’t pretend anymore,” she said woefully. “I can’t pretend to be charming and bright. It’s all too horrible.”

  “I know. But we’ll work our way out of it. Believe me, please.”

  We finished eating, and then we walked for a few blocks, Fran holding tight to my arm. Then we took a cab downtown to 34th Street and Broadway, from where we walked east to the hotel. The night was cool but not really cold, and Fran wondered whether this was the first day of spring. Myself, I had lost track, but I didn’t think so. I counted from St. Patrick’s Day.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “But St. Patrick’s Day was so long ago.”

  “Day before yesterday.”

  “Months.” Fran sighed. “What time was it when you called Gavin this morning?”

  “Ten o’clock. Give or take a few minutes.”

  “Almost twelve hours ago. Give it two hours before they got a plane. Six more for the flight—”

  “Less. It’s west to east, and Shannon’s on the edge. With good winds, well, five hours, even less. We made it once in four and a half.”

  “All right. They should be in Dublin now.”

  “Just don’t count on it. They could have waited hours for seats.”

  At the Primrose Hotel, Bill Hoffman and his wife, Tillie, were both behind the check-in desk. Tillie was a fat, cheerful lady who was always on the verge of tears, or apparently so, the tears having no connection with sorrow; but when she embraced Fran the tears became real. A threat to us was a threat to the entire world as she saw it.

  I gave Bill the number in Ireland. “You know it’s about half past three in the morning in Dublin?” he said.

  “This is a saintly man. Saintly men don’t mind being awakened at three in the morning.”

  “That wasn’t necessary,” Fran said. “You don’t believe in saintly men.”

  “I’ll put the call through,” Bill said. “We could move right through or it could be an hour before we have a connection. But at this time, it should be quick. Then I’ll ring your room. I won’t listen in.”

  Upstairs in the room, Fran said, “I don’t know how you do it. Wisecracks. One-liners. Doesn’t anything touch you?”

  “Too much. Do you want someone who possibly can stand up and finish this? Or do you want a wet cloth. I can give you both.”

  Almost a minute of silence. She sat on the bed, staring at me, and then she said, “I’m sorry, Harry. I have to beat up on someone—otherwise, I’d go mad. You’re the only one here.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t go to her or kiss her or take her in my arms. I was i
n the same condition as she was. “I’ll go into the other room,” I said, “and I’ll sit by the extension. But Fran, baby, whatever we hear when the telephone rings, it’s not the end. The kids couldn’t call us—that’s the thing to remember. A hundred different things could have gone wrong, but they couldn’t call us to tell us, could they?”

  She shook her head.

  We sat in silence, she in the bedroom, myself in the tiny adjoining parlor, and we sat that way for almost twenty minutes waiting for the telephone to ring. It was the longest twenty minutes that either of us had lived through, twenty minutes during which we accepted the fact that our children were lost and gone, rejected it, grappled with it. In that scenario I put together every possibility, that they—the unknown they—had killed my children as they left their respective universities, kidnapped them, beaten them, had them shot at Shannon, etcetera, etcetera, every dreadful vision that could leap into my mind. Afterward, Fran confessed to the same fears.

  And then the telephone rang.

  Fran couldn’t find her voice. I was shouting hoarsely, “Sean, Sean, is that you? This is Harry.”

  “Yes, it is myself, Sean, and your kids are here, safe and sound—what’s that?”

  Fran had let out a squeal followed by tears.

  “Your sister, Sean. She’s had a hard time. Forgive us for waking you.”

  “You didn’t. Your kids just got here half an hour ago, and now we’re all sitting in the school kitchen, where they’re eating eggs and good Irish bacon as quick as Mary can fry it up. Do you hear me, Fran? Say something to tell me you’re alive and well.”

  “I’ll try, Shanny, I’ll try. Right now, I have to weep.”

  “I’ll let the kids talk to you in a moment, but what is this, Harry? Can you tell me something over the phone? The kids know even less than I do!”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said, “except that no one must know where they are for the next week or so. That doesn’t mean that they can’t step outside for some sunshine and fresh air.”