First Deadly Sin

by Lawrence Sanders

  Then there was the palely illumined bulk of Devil’s Needle itself, looming like a veined apparition in the night. Captain Delaney, too, lifted his head, opened his mouth, turned his eyes upward. Above the stone, dimly, he could see stars whirling their courses in a black vault that went on forever.

  He felt a vertigo, not so much of the body as of the spirit. He had never been so unsure of himself. His life seemed giddy and without purpose. Everything was toppling. His wife was dying and Devil’s Needle was falling. Monica Gilbert hated him and that man up there, that man … he knew it all. Yes, Captain Edward X. Delaney decided, that man now knew it all, or was moving toward it with purpose and delight.

  He became conscious of someone standing near him. Then he heard the words.

  “… soon as I could,” Thomas Handry was saying. “Thanks for the tip. I filed a background story and then drove up. I’m staying at a motel just north of Chilton.”

  Delaney nodded.

  “You all right, Captain?”

  “Yes. I’m all right.”

  Handry turned to look at Devil’s Needle. Like the others, his head went back, mouth opened, eyes rolled up.

  Suddenly they heard the bullhorn boom. It was midnight.

  The bullhorn clicked off. The watching men strained their eyes upward. There was no movement atop Devil’s Needle.

  “He’s not coming down, is he, Captain?” Handry asked softly.

  “No,” Captain Delaney said wonderingly. “He’s not coming down.”

  6

  HE AWOKE THE FIRST morning on Devil’s Needle, and it seemed to him he had been dreaming. He remembered a voice calling, “Daniel Blank … Daniel Blank …” That could have been his mother because she always used his full name. “Daniel Blank, have you done your homework? Daniel Blank, I want you to go to the store for me. Daniel Blank, did you wash your hands?” That was strange, he realized for the first time—she never called him Daniel or Dan or son.

  He looked at his watch; it showed 11:43. But that was absurd, he knew; the sun was just rising. He peered closer and saw the sweep second hand had stopped; he had forgotten to wind it. Well, he could wind it now, set it approximately, but time really didn’t matter. He slipped the gold expansion band off his wrist, tossed the watch over the side.

  He rummaged through his rucksack. When he found he had neglected to pack sandwiches and a thermos, he was not perturbed. It was not important.

  He had slept fully clothed, crampons wedged under his ribs, spikes up, so he wouldn’t roll off Devil’s Needle in his sleep; Now he climbed shakily to his feet, feeling stiffness in shoulders and hips, and stood in the center of the little rock plateau where he could not be seen from the ground. He did stretching exercises, bending sideways at the waist, hands on hips; then bending down, knees locked, to place his palms flat on the chill stone; then jogging in place while he counted off five minutes.

  He was gasping for breath when he finished, and his knees were trembling; he really wasn’t in very good condition, he acknowledged, and resolved to spend at least an hour a day in stretching and deep-breathing exercises. But then he heard his name being called again. Lying on his stomach, he inched cautiously to the edge of Devil’s Needle.

  Yes, they were calling his name, asking him to come down, promising he wouldn’t be hurt. He wasn’t interested in that, but he was surprised by the number of men and vehicles down there. The packed dirt compound around the gate-keeper’s cottage was crowded; everyone seemed very busy with some job they were all doing. When he looked directly downward, he could see armed men circling the base of Devil’s Needle, but whether they were protecting the others from him or him from the others, he could not say and didn’t care.

  He felt a need to urinate, and did so, lying on his side, peeing so the stream went over the edge of the rock. There wasn’t very much, and it seemed to him of a milky whiteness, not golden at all. There was a clogged heaviness in his bowels, but the difficulties of defecating up there, what he would do with the excrement, how he would wipe himself clean, were such that he resisted the urge, rolled back to the center of the stone, lay on his back, stared at the new sun.

  At no time had he debated with himself and come to a conscious decision to stay up there, to die up there. It was just something his mind grasped instinctively and accepted. He was not driven to it; even now he could descend if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was content where he was, in a condition of almost drowsy ease. And he was safe; that was important. He had his ice ax and could easily smash the skull of any climber who came after him. But what if one should come in the dark, wiggling his way silently upward to kill Daniel G. Blank as he slept?

  He didn’t think it likely that anyone would attempt a night climb, but just to make it more difficult, he took his ice ax and using it as a hammer, knocked loose the two pitons that aided the final crawl from the chimney to the top of Devil’s Needle. The task took a long time; he had to rest awhile after the pitons were free. Then he slid them skittering across the stone, watched them disappear over the side.

  Then they were calling his name again, a great mechanical booming: “Daniel Blank … Daniel Blank …” He wished they wouldn’t do that. For a moment he thought of shouting down and telling them to stop. But they probably wouldn’t. The thing was, it was disturbing his reverie, intruding on his isolation. He was enjoying his solitude, but it should have been a silent separateness.

  He rolled over on his face, warming now as the watery sun rose higher. Beneath his eyes, close, close, he saw the rock itself, its texture. In all his years of mountain climbing and rock collecting, he had never looked at stone in that manner, seeing beneath the worn surface gloss, penetrating to the deep heart. He saw then what the stone was, and his own body, and the winter trees and glazed sun: infinite millions of bits, multicolored, in chance motion, a wild dance that went on and on to some silent tune.

  He thought, for awhile, that these bits might be similar to the “bits” stored by a computer, recalled when needed to form a pattern, solve a problem, produce a meaningful answer. But this seemed to him too easy a solution, for if a cosmic computer did exist, who had programmed it, who would pose the questions and demand the answers? What answers? What questions?

  He dozed off for awhile, awoke with that steel voice echoing, “Daniel Blank … Daniel Blank …” and was forced to remember who he was.

  Celia had found her certitude—whatever it was—and he supposed everyone in the world was searching for his own, and perhaps finding it, or settling, disappointed, for something less. But what was important, what was important was … What was important? It had been right there, he had been thinking of it, and then it went away.

  There was a sudden griping in his bowels, a sharp pain that brought him sitting upright, gasping and frightened. He massaged his abdomen gently. Eventually the pain went away, leaving a leaden stuffiness. There was something in there, something in him … He fell asleep finally, dimly hearing the ghost voice calling, “Daniel Blank … Daniel Blank …” It might be his imagination, he admitted, but it seemed to him the voice was higher in pitch now, almost feminine in timbre, dawdling lovingly over the syllables of his name. Someone who loved him was calling.

  Was it the second day or the third? Well … no matter. Anyway, a helicopter came over, dipped, circled his castle, tilted. He had been sitting with his knees drawn up, head down on folded arms, and he raised his head to stare at it. He thought they might shoot him or drop a bomb on him. He waited patiently, dreaming. But they just circled him, low, three or four times; he could see pale faces at the windows, peering down at him. He lowered his head again.

  They came back, every day, and he tried to pay no attention to them, but the heavy throbbing of the rotor was annoying. It was slow enough to have a discernible rhythm, a heartbeat in the sky. Once they came so low over him that the downdraft blew his knitted watch cap off the stone. It went sailing out into space, then fell into the reaching spines of winter trees. He watched it go.<
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  One morning—when was it?—he knew he was going to defecate and could not control himself. He fumbled at his belt with weak fingers, got it unbuckled and his pants down, but was too late to pull down his flowered bikini panties, and had to void. It was painful. Later he got his pants off his feet—he had to take his boots off first—then pulled down the panties and shook them out.

  He looked at his feces curiously. They were small black balls, hard and round as marbles. He flicked them, one by one, with his forefinger; they rolled across the stone, over the edge. He knew he no longer had the strength to dress, but he could tug off socks, jacket, and shirt. Then he was naked, baring his shrunken body to pale sun.

  He was no longer thirsty, no longer hungry. Most amazing, he was not cold, but suffused with a sleepy warmth that tingled his limbs. He was, he knew, sleeping more and more until on the fourth day—or perhaps it was the fifth—he was not conscious of sleep as a separate state. Sleep and wakefulness became so thin that they were no longer oil and water, but one fluid, grey and without flavor, that ebbed and flowed.

  The days passed, he supposed, and so did the nights. But where one ended and the other began, he did not know. Days and darkness, all boundaries lost, became part of that grey, flavorless tide, warm, milky at times, without odor now. It was a great placid sea, endless; he wished he had the strength to stand and see just once more that silver river that flowed to everywhere.

  But he could not stand, could not even make the effort to wipe away a thin, viscous liquid leaking from eyes, nose, mouth. When he moved his hand upon himself, he felt pulped nipples, knobbed joints, wrinkles, folds of scratchy skin. Pain had gone; will was going. But he held it tight, to think awhile longer with a slow, numbed brain.

  “Daniel Blank … Daniel Blank …,” the voice called seductively. He knew who it was who called.

  On the second day, an enterprising New York City newspaper hired a commercial helicopter; they flew over Devil’s Needle and took a series of photos of Daniel Blank sitting on the rock, knees drawn up. The photograph featured on the newspaper’s front page showed him with head raised, pale face turned to the circling ’copter.

  Delaney was chagrined that he hadn’t thought of aerial reconnaissance first and, after consultation with Major Samuel Barnes, all commercial flights over Devil’s Needle were banned. The reason given to the press was that a light plane or helicopter approach might drive Blank to a suicide plunge, or the chopper’s downdraft might blow him off the edge.

  Actually, Captain Delaney was relieved by the publication of that famous photo; Danny Boy was up there, no doubt about it. At the same time, with the cooperation of Barnes, he initiated thrice-daily flights of a New York State Police helicopter over the scene. Aerial photographs were taken, portions greatly enlarged and analyzed by Air Force technicians. No signs of food or drink were found. As the days wore away and Blank spent more and more time on his back, staring at the sky, his physical deterioration became obvious.

  Delaney went along on the first flight, taking a car north with Chief Forrest and Captain Sneed to meet Barnes at an Air Force field near Newburgh. It was his first face-to-face meeting with Sam Barnes. The Major was like his voice: hard, tight, peppery. His manner was cold, withdrawn, his gestures quick and short. He wasted little time on formalities, but hustled them aboard the waiting helicopter.

  On the short flight south, he spoke only to Delaney. The Captain learned the State officer had consulted his departmental surgeon and was aware of what Delaney already knew: without food or liquid, Blank had about ten days to live, give or take a day or two. It depended on his physical condition prior to his climb, and to the nature and extent of his exposure to the elements. The Major, like Delaney, was monitoring the long-range weather forecasts daily. Generally, fair weather was expected to continue with gradually lowering temperatures. But there was a low-pressure system building up in northwest Canada that would bear watching.

  They were all discussing their options when the ’copter came in view of Devil’s Needle, then tilted to circle lower. Their talk died away; they stared out their windows at the rock. The cabin was suddenly cold as a crewman slid open the wide cargo door, and a police photographer positioned his long-lensed camera.

  Captain Delaney’s first reaction was one of shock at the small size of Daniel Blank’s aerie. Chief Forrest had said it was “double bedsheet size,” but from the air it was difficult to understand how Blank could exist up there for an hour without rolling or stumbling off the edge.

  As the ’copter circled lower, the photographer snapping busily, Delaney felt a sense of awe and, looking at the other officers, suspected they were experiencing the same emotion. From this elevation, seeing Blank on his stone perch and the white, upturned faces of the men surrounding Devil’s Needle on the ground, the Captain knew a dreadful wonder at the man’s austere isolation and could not understand how he endured it.

  It was not only the dangerous height at which he had sought refuge, lying atop a rock pillar that thrust into the sky, it was the absolute solitude of the man, deliberately cutting himself off from life and the living. Blank seemed, not on stone, but somehow floating in the air, not anchored, but adrift.

  Only a few times before in his life had Delaney felt what he felt now. Once was when he forced his way into that concentration camp and saw the stick-men. Once was when he had taken a kitchen knife gently from the nerveless fingers of a man, soaked in blood, who had just murdered his mother, his wife, his three children, and then called the cops. The final time Delaney had helped subdue a mad woman attempting to crunch her skull against a wall. And now Blank …

  It was the madness that was frightening, the loss of anchor, the float. It was a primitive terror that struck deep, plunged to something papered over by civilization and culture. It stripped away millions of years and said, “Look.” It was the darkness.

  Later, when copies of the aerial photos were delivered to him, along with brief analyses by the Air Force technicians, he took one of the photos and thumb-tacked it to the outside wall of the gate-keeper’s cottage. He was not surprised by the attention it attracted, having guessed that the men shared his own uncertainty that their quarry was actually up there, that any man would deliberately seek and accept this kind of immolation.

  Captain Delaney also noted a few other unusual characteristics of the men on duty: They were unaccountably quiet, with none of the loud talk, boasting and bantering that usually accompanied a job of this type. And they were in no hurry, when relieved, to return to their warm dormitory in the high school gymnasium. Invariably, they hesitated, then wandered once again to the base of Devil’s Needle, to stare upward, mouths open, at the unseen man who lay alone.

  He discussed this with Thomas Handry. The reporter had gone out to the roadblocks to interview some of the people being turned back by the troopers.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Handry said, shaking his head. “Hundreds and hundreds of cars. From all over the country. I talked to a family from Ohio and asked them why they drove so far, what they expected to see.”

  “What did they say?”

  “The man said he had a week off, and it wasn’t long enough to go to Disneyworld, so they decided to bring the kids here.”

  They were organized now: regular shifts with schedules mimeographed daily. There were enough men assigned to cover all the posts around the clock, and the big searchlights and generator truck were up from New York City so Devil’s Needle was washed in light 24 hours a day.

  Captain Delaney had a propane stove in his cottage now, and a heavy radio had been installed on the gate-keeper’s counter. The radiomen had little to do and so, to occupy their time, had rigged up a loudspeaker, a timer, and a loop tape, so that every hour on the hour, the message went booming out mechanically: “Daniel Blank … Daniel Blank … come down … come down …” It did no good. By now no one expected it would.

  Every morning Chief Forrest brought out bags of mail received at the Chilton P
ost Office, and Captain Delaney spent hours reading the letters. A few of them contained money sent to Daniel Blank, for what reason he could not guess. Blank also received a surprisingly large number of proposals of marriage from women; some included nude photos of the sender. But most of the letters, from all over the world, were suggestions of how to take Daniel Blank. Get four helicopters, each supporting the corner of a heavy cargo net, and drop the net over the top of Devil’s Needle. Bring in a large group of “sincere religious people” and pray him down. Set up a giant electric fan and blow him off his rock. Most proposed a solution they had already rejected: send up a fighter plane or helicopter and kill him. One suggestion intrigued Captain Delaney: fire gas grenades onto the top of Devil’s Needle and when Daniel Blank was unconscious, send up a climber in a gas mask to bring him down.

  Captain Delaney wandered out that evening, telling himself he wanted to discuss the gas grenade proposal with one of the snipers. He walked down the worn path toward Devil’s Needle, turned aside at the sniper’s post. The three pale-faced men had improved their blind. They had dragged over a picnic table with attached benches. From somewhere, they had scrounged three burlap bags of sand—Chief Forrest had helped with that, Delaney guessed—and the bags were used as a bench rest for their rifles. The sniper could sit and be protected from the wind by canvas tarps tied to nearby trees.

  The man on duty looked up as Delaney approached.

  “Evening, Captain.”

  “Evening. How’s it going?”

  “Quiet.”

  Delaney knew that the three snipers didn’t mix much with the other men. They were pariahs, as much as hangmen or executioners, but apparently it did not affect them, if they were aware of it. All three were tall, thin men, two from Kentucky, one from North Carolina. If Delaney felt any uneasiness with them, it was their laconism rather than their chosen occupation.