Death Wish

by Brian Garfield

  “‘I don’t subscribe to those old shibboleths. Personally. I tend to believe the so-called humanitarian approaches have added greatly to the suffering of society as a whole. We have laws because we need to protect ourselves. To break those laws is to injure society. I long ago gave up believing in the therapeutic approach to crime, except in those cases where you’ve got a demonstrably curable case of aberrant behavior—certain sex offenses, for example, that are known to be curable by various drug treatments or psychotherapies. But we’ve gone much too far in the baby-bathwater direction. The function of punishment is not to reform the criminal, it’s to protect society by preventing and deterring certain types of misbehavior. The original idea behind putting offenders in jail was simply to get them off the streets and thereby prevent them from committing any more crimes during the period of their punishment. Capital punishment was the same in theory, except of course that its effect was permanent. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say this is our “vigilante’s” primary objective—to prevent these people from committing any more crimes. The primary goal of protecting society seems to be what many of us have forgotten in our rush to safeguard the rights of accused persons—and perhaps that’s what this man is trying to remind us of.’

  “Dr. Perrine pushed his chair back and stood up. He spoke slowly again, choosing his words; the act of standing up was deliberate, I’m sure, intended to emphasize what he was going to say.

  “‘This man has spent his life as a liberal of good conscience. I’m convinced of it. And now he’s reacting against many things he’s been taught—principal among those things being the idea of tolerance. He’s come to realize that tolerance isn’t always a virtue—tolerance of evil can be an evil itself. He feels he is at war, and as Edmund Burke put it, ‘Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.’ To this man his private war is the ultimate necessity. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started it—he’d have been too frightened. He’s a very frightened man.’

  “‘I had the feeling he was just the opposite. You get the impression he has steel cables for nerves.’

  “‘Quite the reverse. He’s terrified. It’s only that his rage is even greater than his fear.’

  “‘Do you think his fear is real or imaginary?’

  “‘Fear is always real. The question is whether it’s justified by the actual conditions. If it isn’t you have paranoia in some form.’

  “‘Then he’s paranoid?’

  “‘Most of us are, to some degree, certainly if we live in the cities. Usually we get along, we’re protected by our neurotic defenses. But sometimes those defenses fail and the ego collapses, and the unconscious terrors burst through into the conscious centers. I’m sure to this man it’s a vital and very personal fact, not just a dry statistic, that the heroin addicts in New York outnumber the police by a factor of several thousand to one.’

  “‘Doctor, if you were asked to draw in words a composite psychological portrait of the vigilante, what would you say?’

  “‘It’s difficult. So much depends on factors we don’t know—his upbringing, his experiences. But I think you can say this much. He’s careful, methodical, quite intelligent. Probably an educated man to some degree. Certainly he’s not terribly young. I’d say he was at least in his middle thirties and more likely well over forty.’

  “‘What makes you think that?’

  “‘Well, it’s rather analogous to our emotional reactions to space flights. Those of us in my generation are rather mystified by the whole thing, we don’t pretend to comprehend it on the emotional level even though we may understand the scientific basis for it. On the other hand children take it for granted—my younger daughter, for example, has never lived in an age without space flight and television. A little while ago she asked me quite seriously, “Daddy, when you used to listen to the radio, what did you look at?” Do you know I couldn’t remember? But the point is that the young people have grown up accustomed to shifting circumstances and unstable values. They may not like the things they see happening, they may even act violently to express their idealism, but at bottom they understand and accept the fact that these things do happen. When they act, they act in groups, because that’s the dominating ethos. You don’t find solitary teenagers going off into the backwoods to start organic farms; they do it in communes. You don’t find individuals protesting the war at the Pentagon—it’s always groups, however badly organized. Our youth have become group-oriented; perhaps it’s the influence of Marxism. But the rugged individualism, if you want to call it that, which this man stands for, is something our youth have rejected vehemently. And it’s also fairly clear that this man is bewildered and hurt by all the drastic things he sees around him—he doesn’t understand them, he can’t comprehend what’s happened, let alone accept it. He’s fighting back, but he’s doing it according to the traditions of his generation—not theirs.’

  “‘Then you say you’d draw a picture of a middle-aged man, reasonably well-educated, careful, intelligent. Could you add anything to that?’

  “‘Well, I’ve already said I think he’s probably a confused liberal. If he were a right-winger he’d have access to like-minded groups and we’d be more likely to have an entire wave of assassinations—an entire gang of them out there murdering people, rather than one isolated killer. That’s the strange things about rightists, of course, they preach individualism but they’re far more adept at organizing themselves than the left. And I’d add that he’s probably a man who’s alone—really alone—and that this situation is something new and sudden in his life. That is to say, it’s quite likely his family was recently taken from him. Killed by criminals, perhaps. That’s merely speculation—everything I’ve said is. But it would explain a number of things, you see. We all know people who seem to lose all their inhibitions the day they get divorced. They do things they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before they were married.’

  “‘You seem convinced the vigilante is a man. Isn’t it possible it’s a woman?’

  “‘It’s less likely, although anything’s possible. Women don’t resort to overt violence nearly as much as men do. The gun isn’t a female weapon.’

  “‘It’s been suggested in the press a few times—the fact that the murder weapon is a .32. That’s a rather small caliber—they used to call them ladies’ pistols.’

  “‘It may also be a practical matter. A small caliber pistol makes far less noise than a .45, you know. But my own impression is that he’s a man who’s not intimately acquainted with the use of firearms. A small pistol is much easier to handle. Somewhat more accurate, certainly less recoil and noise, and easier to conceal in your pocket of course.’

  “There wasn’t much more. But if Dr. Perrine is right—and he has the reputation—then be on the lookout for a middle-aged, middle-class liberal who has just lost his family, possibly to criminal attackers.

  “It could be anyone, couldn’t it. Someone I know, someone you know. It could be you.”

  20

  He spent the weekend in the apartment except for the Sunday ride to Princeton with Jack. The psychiatrist’s pontifications made him uneasy; to what extent were the police guided by his opinions? Would it occur to them to start questioning every middle-aged male whose wife had been the fatal victim of an unsolved crime? How many like him were there?

  The gun was the only real clue they could find. It kept coming back to that. He ought to hide it. But he needed it: without it he would be easy prey for any junkie overdue for a fix. Without it he would again have to walk in fear, circumscribing his movements in time and place. It was the only city he knew of in which it was the well-off citizens, the honest people, who were herded into ghettos. Through most of the city you could not walk unarmed at night; through some of it you could not walk unarmed at any time of day.

  Take the chance. It was better than the fear.

  “I had a call from George Eng,” Henry Ives said. He watched as if he were peering into strong light: with his aged head down and
his eyes narrowed to slits.

  Paul sat forward, forearms resting on knees. He felt the muscles and nerves twitch in his face, worry pulling at his mouth: I blew it, he thought, I fucked up something.

  Ives’ smile was without menace but Paul felt a chill. A vein throbbed above Ives’ eyebrow, embossed as if by contained anger. Paul pinched his mouth closed with tight compression and breathed deep through his nose.

  After a silence that nearly cracked his nerves he heard Ives say in his cool precise voice, “You did a thorough job on the Jainchill matter, Paul. George is deeply grateful. He’s on his way to Arizona to close the deal for Amercon. He asked me to pass on to you his congratulations—we all know what a strain you’ve been under. It takes a great deal of strength to carry on as you have.”

  Paul straightened in relief; he made an effort to dispose the muscles of his face toward lines indicative of modest appreciation.

  “Quite frankly,” Ives said, and his eyebrows contracted sternly, “we’d been watching to see how you bore up under it. I can confess now that there were a few who thought it was only a matter of time before you’d be taking three martinis for lunch and letting your work go to pot. Personally I felt you were made of better stuff than that, but I allowed the partners to persuade me to wait and see. I can tell you now you’ve passed the test with flying colors.”

  Test? Paul said with uncertain hesitation, “Ye-es?”

  “We met this morning in Mr. Gregson’s office. I proposed that you be invited to join the firm as a full partner. I’m glad to say the motion was passed unanimously.”

  Paul pulled his head up in amazement.

  Ives’ voice dropped almost out of hearing with avuncular confidential smugness. “We all feel you deserve it, Paul.” With an effort he lifted himself to his feet and shuffled around the desk, hand outstretched, beaming.

  In the night he re-read the New York interview with the psychiatrist; he had bought a copy for himself at the stationery store on Seventy-second Street with the same feeling he recalled from boyhood when he’d bought forbidden pulp adventure magazines: the furtive haste, the fumbled coins.

  The psychiatrist was uncomfortably close to the truth in his summation. To what extent were the rest of his speculations valid?

  What kind of a monster am I?

  He studied himself in the mirror. His face seemed haggard; there were unhealthy pouched blisters under his eyes.

  “… about as much effect on the total crime picture as you’d get by administering two aspirin tablets to a rabid wolf.” Well, that was wrong. He’d had a staggering effect on the city. It was in all the media. It was the only topic of conversation. Cops were stating publicly that they applauded the vigilante. And in today’s Post, a story about a Puerto Rican boy—an addict with a lengthy arrest record—found stabbed to death in an alley beside a school in Bedford-Stuy-vesant. It added strength to the news item three days ago about a man found murdered by three .22-caliber bullets on East Ninety-seventh Street—a man who had served two terms for armed robbery; he’d been found with an automatic pistol in his pocket. The newspapers were speculating: Has the vigilante’s .32 become too hot to handle—has he traded it in? But these killings were not Paul’s doing; people were getting on the bandwagon.

  Have I done enough? It made him think of countless cowboys in countless Westerns who only wanted to hang up their guns.

  That was no good. It wasn’t a horse-opera with all the bad guys dead in the last reel. They were still out there.

  They would always be out there. You couldn’t stop them all. But that was no excuse for giving up. The important thing—the only thing—was knowing you weren’t going to give up. Perhaps there were no victors, perhaps there were only survivors; perhaps in the end it would gutter out like the noxious stub of a used-up candle. Perhaps it was all solipsism and none of it mattered to anyone but himself. But what difference did that make?

  He called Jack. “Did you talk to them today?”

  “Yes. No change. I think we’re going to have to learn to live with it, Pop.”

  “I guess we are.”

  After he hung up he got into his reversible jacket and picked up his gloves. Touched the gun in his pocket and checked the time—eleven-ten—and left the apartment.

  21

  From the trees of Central Park he looked across 110th Street at the shoddy stores and tenements. Addicts probably used half of them as shooting galleries.

  The cold wind drove right through him; he tucked his face toward his shoulder against it and stared into Harlem. Traffic moved in desultory spurts through the lights.

  He moved along inside the park at the edge of the timber. The lights of the taller buildings moved along with him, just beyond the treetops. He stepped out onto Fifth Avenue and crossed northward with the light and began to walk east along 111th Street, across Madison Avenue and on along the dark foul-smelling block to the barricade which the stone-butted, elevated tracks made on Park Avenue. It was like the Berlin Wall, he thought.

  He turned north into the ghetto with the solid railway wall to his right and the brooding slum tenements at his left shoulder. He had never been in this area by night; he had only been through it a few times in his life by day, and then only in cars or on the train. It had the air of a foreign city, it didn’t have the feel of New York: the buildings were squat and low, there was no bustly traffic, he saw no pedestrians. Not even drunks slept on the steps here; they probably knew it meant sure suicide. It was the antithesis of Times Square and yet the doomed sense of evil was the same. The icy wind made it seem darker; the occasional snowflake drifted on the swaying air; his heels echoed on the pavements and cobblestones and he imagined himself a last survivor searching the streets of a dead abandoned city.

  He saw them in silhouette on the rooftop of a four-story corner tenement: the shifting shadows of a group of people—three or more, he couldn’t tell how many. They kept coming over to the edge and canting themselves outward to look downtown. They reminded him of commuters in subway stations leaning out from the platform to see if the lights of the train were coming into the tunnel. That made him realize what these were looking for: the same thing—a train.

  He’d heard about this game. A vicious and dangerous one.

  He moved close to the wall into the deeper shadows and slipped toward the corner. He stopped before he reached it; stayed out of the pool of corner lamplight, kept to the shadows, fixed his attention on the rooftop beyond the T-intersection. He thought he heard the distant rumbling of the train but perhaps it was only the hum of the city.

  He watched them on the rooftop and began to single them out as individuals. Teen-age boys, at least three of them, and there was one girl who appeared at intervals. They seemed to be making trips to and from the roof parapet and he realized they were crossing the roof to pick things up, bringing the things over to the edge and stacking them there.

  Ammunition.

  Faintly he heard their nasal laughter.

  From this low angle they seemed terribly far above him but it was only a real distance of some seventy feet—the width of the street and half the height of the building if you measured it as a right triangle; Paul’s line of vision formed the hypotenuse.

  He had never shot anyone at quite such a long range; he remembered hearing it was difficult to shoot accurately at a steep upward angle. It would have to be done with care.

  At least four of them; he had to take that into account too. He felt in his jacket pocket for the spare cartridges and counted them with his fingers—ten. Add to those the five in the cylinder of the revolver. Not much to waste; three shots per target, no more.

  He eased closer to the corner and looked around. The spiderwork of a fire escape clung to the side of the opposite building. He thought about that but decided it would be too risky; they could see him if he went to cross the street.

  Then he had another idea. He faded back into the shadows and waited.

  The train approached. He saw the
three boys lift objects in their hands and brace their feet against the low parapet that ran around the edge of the roof. The racket increased and when Paul turned his head he saw the lights of the train rushing along the top of the stone wall. The ground began to shake under him. The train came parallel with him and he saw heads at windows; he swiveled his glance to the rooftop and they were starting to lift and throw their missiles: bricks and chunks of cement, some of them so heavy the boys could hardly lift them and heave. The big ones fell short but there was a thundering rattle of bricks thudding the roof and sides of the train and Paul heard the tinkle of shattered glass. Had it hit someone inside the train?

  Another window rattled. A brick bounced off the side of the train and pulverized itself in the middle of the street. The girl on the roof was throwing things too now; Paul counted them carefully and was satisfied there were only the four.

  A crash of glass; he was sure he heard an outcry from the last car; then the train had gone, its rumble hanging in its wake.

  He looked back to the rooftop and they had disappeared. He moved quickly to the near corner and put his head out just far enough to see the fire escape across the street.

  They were coming down. Running down the metal stair from landing to landing. Their laughter was a cruel abrasion.

  He let the first of them get to the bottom landing. The boy extended the jump-ladder with his weight, coming down to the sidewalk as the ladder squeaked rusty resentment. In the uncertain light Paul steadied his aim across his left wrist and as the boy turned to shout up at the others he squeezed the trigger with steady even pressure until the gun went off with a little kick and a squirt of noise and the boy’s head snapped to one side under the bullet’s impact.

  The others saw him fall but didn’t know the cause of it and they hurried coming down. Paul waited; there was time, they still didn’t know he was there.