The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  Haskins, his partner, and eight other teams of detectives had been assigned to this aspect of the case, and unless somebody got lucky, it would take days to check out the complete list. They had whacked up the list of names and set forth on their mission, after a passionate exhortation from their chief. These men are vicious killers, safety of the citizens of this city, slaughter of two innocent victims… Translation: The brass is on my tail, so I’m on yours, and you guys better slap shoe leather. And shoe leather they had slapped, for more than four hours now.

  Shoe leather, bus, subway, and, above all, climbing muscles. It was an axiom of the trade that nine out of ten people you had to track down lived in walkups. It figured. Poor people committed more crimes than rich ones. Or, more accurately, more crimes that violated the criminal code.

  Haskins, you’re a Communist.

  A half hour ago he had told Slott, his partner, who had an ulcer and whose bitching was getting on his nerves anyway, to go home. He could handle the three remaining names on their list himself before calling it a night. When Slott left, Haskins went into a small dry-cleaning store owned and operated by an ex-TA employee who had been fired six years before for spitting. On passengers. He had been a platform guard at the Times Square station who became so fed up with his job that he would spit surreptitiously on passengers’ backs as he pushed them into rush-hour trains. Eventually, after surveillance, he was caught, charged, given a hearing, and fired. As the verdict was delivered, he spat on the referee’s lapel.

  In response to Haskins’ questions he said first that he no longer had any animus against the Transit Authority, second that he hoped the whole fucking subway system would burn down to the ground one day, and third that he had spent half of the afternoon in a dentist’s chair, having his gum sliced to ribbons and a couple of roots dug out by brute force. Dr. Schwartz was the name of the butcher, and his phone number was…

  Detective Haskins made a note to call Dr. Schwartz in the morning, yawned, looked at his watch—quarter of nine—and then checked his list. He was equidistant from Fitzherbert, Paul, residing on Sixteenth Street West of Fifth Avenue, and Longman, Walter, Eighteenth Street East of Second. Which one? No difference—whichever he took first, it was an equally long walk to the other. So, which one? Such was the difficult nature of the decisions a detective had to make. Too tough to handle without coffee, but luckily there was a joint right at the corner. He would go in there, drink his coffee, maybe eat a piece of apple pie, and then, the inner man fortified, the brain stoked up, he could make the big decision a detective (second grade) was so well equipped to handle.

  LONGMAN

  Longman couldn’t bring himself to turn on the radio. He had seen criminals in the movies too often give themselves away by buying all the papers or clipping out stories. Of course, he was being silly, nobody would even hear his radio if he turned it down low, but still, irrational as it was, he wouldn’t do it. So he wandered around his apartment aimlessly, still wearing his coat, averting his head each time he passed the clock-radio near his bed. If Ryder had been killed, what was his hurry to find out?

  But at six o’clock, without thinking about it consciously, he had turned on his television set to a news program. The hijacking was the top story of the day, and the coverage was remarkable. The cameras had even got into the tunnel, and they showed shots of the derailed express train, close-ups of the scarred tunnel walls and twisted tracks. Then they showed “the sector of the tunnel where the shootout took place.” When the camera swung around to the spot where Steever had fallen, he winced, not wanting to see any bodies or, for that matter, any bloodstains. There were dark areas that could have been bloodstains, but there were no bodies. Later, though, the cameras were on hand when three bodies on stretchers, covered by canvas sheets, were brought out by cops. He felt no emotion, not even for Ryder.

  Next, there were interviews with police brass, including the commissioner. None of them said very much, except that each one referred to it as a “heinous” crime. Questioned by the reporters about the missing hijacker—Longman felt a hot flush sweep through his body—the commissioner said that they knew only that he had escaped through the emergency exit. As he spoke, the screen split to show the exit both from the street and from the foot of the ladder. The commissioner added that the department had not yet identified any of the three slain hijackers, two of whom had died instantaneously. The third, shot in the spine, had died a few minutes after the police found him. He had been questioned but had been unable to respond, his speech centers, among other things, apparently paralyzed.

  What leads did the police have to the missing hijacker? The chief of detectives took over and said that a very large number of detectives had been assigned to the case and would work long shifts until the criminal was apprehended. The TV reporter pressed: Did that mean there were no solid leads? The chief of detectives said sharply that it meant the division was following well-established lines of police procedure and that he hoped to be able to report progress before long. Longman felt the hot flush again, but relaxed a bit when the camera showed the reporter with a sardonically lifted brow.

  There was no mention of checking the files of ex-TA employees. He remembered when Ryder had brought that matter up. At the time, he had been less thankful for Ryder’s foresight in anticipating all eventualities than alarmed at the idea.

  “They don’t have to find me,” he had said to Ryder. “I can stay at your place.”

  “I want you to be at home. They’ll be immediately suspicious of anything out of the ordinary.”

  “I’ll have to work out an alibi.”

  Ryder shook his head. “They’ll check more carefully into details on the people who have alibis than on those who don’t. Most of the people they see won’t have an alibi, you’ll be lost in the crowd. Simply say you spent part of the afternoon taking a walk, part of it reading a book or taking a nap, and don’t be the least bit precise about what time you did one or another.”

  “I’ll give it some thought—what I’m going to say.”

  “No. I don’t want you to rehearse it or even think about it.”

  “I can say that I heard about it on the radio and that I’m horrified—”

  “No. It’s not necessary to make a case for your righteousness. They’re not interested in your opinions, anyway. They’ll be checking out hundreds of people as a matter of routine. Keep in mind that you’ll just be one in a very long list of names.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “It is easy,” Ryder said. “You’ll see.”

  “Still, I’d like to give it a little thought.”

  “No thought,” Ryder said firmly. “Not now, or after it’s over, either.”

  He had followed Ryder’s advice, and actually, this was the first time he had thought about it in weeks. It was strictly routine for the cops, and he was just another ex-TA employee in a long line of hundreds of others. He could handle it.

  He listened to the chief of detectives admit under questioning that descriptions of the missing man were sketchy, that there were too many conflicting versions to help in the formulation of an Identikit face, but that a number of passengers were going through the picture files at headquarters. Longman almost smiled. He had no record; there would be no pictures of him.

  Several of the passengers were interviewed: the girl in the Anzac hat, photographing a little heavier than he would have expected; the big fellow, the theater critic, who used a lot of big words to say very little; a couple of the black boys; the militant black, who refused to answer questions on the grounds that they were irrelevant to the race issue, but instead raised his clenched fist and shouted something that was blipped out. Suddenly, the passengers made Longman uncomfortable. They faced head-on to the cameras, in tight close-up, giving the appearance of looking straight at him. He switched off the set.

  He went into the kitchen and boiled water for tea. Sitting at the linoleum-covered kitchen table, still wearing his coat, he ate graham c
rackers that he dipped into the tea. He smoked a cigarette—it amazed him that he hadn’t even wanted one before this, though he was normally a heavy smoker—then went into the bedroom. He switched on the radio, but turned it off before it had warmed up. He started to lie down and felt a dull pain in his chest. It took him a long moment to realize that he wasn’t having a heart attack, that it was the weight and pressure of the money jackets. He got off the bed and went to the front door. He checked all three locks and returned to the bedroom. After pulling the dark-green window shades down as far as they would go, below the sill, he took off his topcoat and jacket and then the money jackets. He placed them carefully on the bed, side by side, in precise alignment.

  Walter Longman, he said to himself, you are worth half a million dollars. He repeated it in an audible whisper, and then another uncontrollable scream raced up his throat. He clapped his hand over his mouth to muffle it.

  ANITA LEMOYNE

  Anita Lemoyne had known some rotten days in her life, but this one was hands down the rottenest. As if being hijacked wasn’t enough of a bummer, she had had to suffer through two hours of boredom looking at mug shots, a parade of cruel or scruffy faces that were a composite reminder of every John she had ever met who felt that his few lousy dollars entitled him to feel loved or to hurt her. It was after eight when the cops finally let them all go. They straggled out of the old Police Headquarters building and stood in a daze on the sidewalk. A couple of blocks to the south a steady flow of traffic was moving on Canal Street, but Centre Street was chilly, bleak and deserted. They stood silently in a ragged group. Then the old wino lady gathered her rags around her and shuffled off unsteadily into the darkness. A moment later the militant black man settled his cape on his shoulders and walked briskly and erectly toward Canal. That one and the old wino, Anita thought, were the only ones who would not be affected by what had happened; it was unconnected to—like the title of the book the TV jerk kept talking about—the main currents of their thought.

  And what about her main currents? Well, her main currents were: Anita, move ass out of this forsaken place and find a taxi to take you home. A hot bath with a lot of those salts from Paris in it and then, maybe, she just might check in with her telephone answering service.

  “I don’t even know where we are.” A teary voice—the mother of the two boys, who stood beside her yawning, out on their feet. “Can somebody please tell me how to get to Brooklyn from here?”

  “Certainly,” the old man said. “You take the subway. It’s the quickest and the safest.”

  He whooped, but beyond a few pained smiles he had no takers for his wit. Again no one moved until, abruptly, the two young black boys, still carrying the packages they had set out to deliver half a day ago, mumbled something and moved off.

  The old man called after them. “Good-bye, boys, good luck.”

  The boys turned and waved, then went on.

  “Quite an extraordinary experience, to say the least.”

  The drama critic. She didn’t even look at him. He was going to invite her to share a cab and then ask her up for a drink. No dice. She turned from him, and the change of direction brought her into the wind. A cold gust whipped up her skirt and between her legs. She turned away. Mustn’t let it catch a cold, or I’m out of business.

  “I got an idea.” The old man—his scrubbed face no longer rosy, his borsalino hat dented. “After all we have been through together, it seems a shame we should just all say good-bye and…”

  Lonely old man, Anita thought, he’s afraid he’ll die without a cheering section at his bedside. She looked at the faces around her and thought: I won’t remember a single one of them by morning.

  “…reunion, say a year, even every six months….”

  She started walking toward Canal Street. At the corner, the drama critic caught up with her. He bent his ruddy face toward her, smiling.

  “Get lost,” Anita said. Her heels clacking in the stillness of the street, she walked on toward Canal.

  FRANK CORRELL

  Frank Correll refused to give way to his relief. Back in his own chair—he had wiped it ostentatiously after Prescott had left, to “get the nigger dust off”—he worked the console like (as Transit, the employee paper, had put it once in a feature article) “a man possessed, a dervish, body and soul dedicated to making the railroad run as smooth as ice cream.” He screamed a great deal, whirled in his chair to shout instructions to his dispatchers, swept coffee off his desk in a wide flail of his arm when somebody in misguided kindness brought him some. In constant, sometimes simultaneous, consultation with the Yard, with Operations, with Maintenance, with Tower Rooms, with motormen, he organized new flexes, discarded old ones, worked miracles of manipulation until, at 8:21 P.M., A Division was back on schedule, all trains running on time.

  “Okay,” Correll said to his relief, “I’m giving you back your railroad.”

  He stood up, put his jacket on over his sweat-soaked shirt, pushed the knot of his tie up to his bruised throat, and slipped into his topcoat.

  His relief, taking his place at the console, said, “Good job, Frank.”

  “I have only one regret,” Correll said. “That I was not able to get the road straightened out before rush hour.”

  “No human being could have done that, in the circumstances,” the relief trainmaster said.

  “In that case, I wish I wasn’t human.” Turning abruptly, his hands plunged deep into his pockets, Correll strode off.

  The relief man said, “He makes a nice exit.”

  At the Communications Desk, Correll paused and listened. “…and full service restored at eight twenty-one.”

  It would be picked up by the radio stations on the hourly news, and tomorrow, buried somewhere in a tailpiece to the story of the hijacking, it would appear in the daily newspapers. One line, he thought. Service restored at 8:21. So much for blood, sweat, and tears.

  “Beautiful job,” one of the men at the Communications Desk said.

  Correll shrugged. “All in a day’s work,” he said, and went out into the quiet corridor. Except for bringing charges against that nigger cop, tomorrow would be pretty dull. Well, you couldn’t expect to make railroad history every day.

  TOM BERRY

  The senior resident in surgery accompanied Tom Berry’s stretcher down from the recovery room and remained after a nurse and an orderly transferred him to the bed.

  “Where am I?” Berry said.

  “In a hospital. Beth Israel. You’ve just had two bullets removed.”

  He hadn’t meant to say where but how. He said it now. “I mean how am I?”

  “Okay,” the resident said. “We issued a bulletin saying that your condition was fair.”

  “I rate a bulletin? I must be dying.”

  “The media wanted to know. You’re in good shape.” The resident looked out the window. “Nice view. Looking right down into Stuyvesant Park.”

  Berry explored himself. His arm was bandaged from the shoulder to the elbow, and there was a fat dressing in the approximate center of his torso. “How come no pain?”

  “Sedation. You’ll feel some, don’t fret.” The resident said enviously, “My room—it’s about a quarter of the size of this one, and it faces a brick wall. Not even nice bricks.”

  Tenderly, Berry touched the dressing on his body. “Was I shot in the gut?”

  “You weren’t shot any place in particular. Missed the important things by a millimeter here, a hair there. Luck of a hero. I’ll drop by later on. Terrific view.”

  The resident left. Berry wondered if he was lying, if his condition was critical. They never told you, the mysterious bastards; they didn’t trust you to understand something as complicated as whether you were going to live or die. He tried to generate indignation, but he felt much too relaxed. He shut his eyes and dozed.

  Voices woke him. Three faces were looking down at him. One was the resident. The other two he recognized from pictures—His Honor, the mayor, and the PC.
He guessed at the reason for their presence and warned himself to portray surprise and modesty. He was a hero, as the resident had suggested.

  “I believe he’s awake now,” the resident said.

  The mayor smiled. He was wrapped in a huge coat, a voluminous muffler, and an Astrakhan hat with earmuffs. His nose was red, and his lips looked parched. The commissioner was smiling, too, but not very well. He just wasn’t a smiling man.

  “Congratulations, Patrolman, ah…” The mayor paused.

  “Barry,” the commissioner said.

  “Congratulations, Patrolman Barry,” the mayor said. “You performed an act of extraordinary valor. The people of the city are in your debt.”

  He put out his hand, and with some effort, Berry shook it. It was icy cold. Then he shook the commissioner’s hand.

  “Splendid work, Barry,” the commissioner said. “The department is proud of you.”

  They were both looking at him expectantly. Of course. The modesty bit. “Thank you. I was lucky. I only did what any man in the department would have done.”

  The mayor said, “Get well soon, Patrolman Barry.”

  The commissioner tried to twinkle and botched it. He wasn’t a twinkling man, either. But Berry knew what was coming. “We’re looking forward to your rapid return to duty, Detective Barry.”

  Surprise and modesty, Berry reminded himself, and lowering his eyes, said, “Thank you, sir, thank you very much. But I only did what any man in the department—”

  But the mayor and the commissioner were already leaving. As they went through the door, the mayor said, “He looks better than I do. I bet he feels better, too.”