“What’s that?”
“There isn’t any. It doesn’t exist.”
“There isn’t any what?”
“There isn’t any Syndicate. There isn’t any Mafia. There isn’t any Cosa Nostra. You can all go home.”
“Try to eat something,” the man said. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked solicitously.
“No,” Feldman said glumly. He found a chair and sat down. They’d probably have to shut him up, now they knew he was on to them. Already the man was conferring with someone; together they were staring at him. It was all a fake. Maybe even evil was a fake. He’d better keep his ears open and his mouth shut. (The thought nauseated him.) He had to focus, concentrate. There were things to learn he could bring back to the boys. He thought fondly of the boys. Good old Bisch. That grand old man Ed Slipper. And Hover — fine, maligned Hover. Sky and Flesh and Walls were the best pals a guy ever had. He thought of his friends asleep on their cots. They might be thieves and murderers, but they were good old boys. He had a duty to the guys to sober up, to tell them what he’d learned: that they were a myth. He imagined a youthful eagerness in his voice as he told them. It was news to make a tenor of a man.
Concentrating, he was astonished at the enormous varieties of cophood there were in the room. In addition to those he had already met, the sheriffs and marshals and constables and private detectives, there were insurance investigators and high officials in the National Guard. There was a man who trained German shepherds and leased them to department stores and warehouses. Another man was in charge of an army of crowd handlers at ball parks and arenas. There was a chief of house detectives for a large hotel chain and a woman who headed up an agency of store detectives. There were polygraph experts and fingerprint men and a police artist who was introduced to Feldman as the Rembrandt of his field. There were prison chaplains and expert witnesses for the prosecution at murder trials.
He felt as if he had been caught in the guts of an enormous machine. As he had noted before, there were no windows, and he rushed instead to the door to get some air. Outside stood the deputy who had brought him to the prison. The man passed him by, smiling. “It’s ten thirty-seven,” he said, waving his wrist with Feldman’s watch on it.
When he was calm enough Feldman went to the buffet table; his new knowledge had made him hungry. He was surprised at the meager character of the food. Perhaps there was something in the make-up of good men that subdued their tastes and deadened their appetites, something surly in their hearts that made them trim their lettuce and chop their food, as though matter had first to be finely diced and its atoms exposed before they would eat it. Feldman almost gagged on the liquescent potatoes and minced loaves of meat and could not even look at the colorless gelatinous molds with their suspended chips of pimento and halved olives and thin, biopsic bits of carrot, like microbes in a culture.
He toured the room, a spy among spies. There was an element of nervousness in their talk, which surprised him. They spoke of men still at large, public enemies who were armed and dangerous, their very vocabularies reminding Feldman of news bulletins that interrupted dance music on the radio in old films. They could have been residents of some storm-threatened outpost on the mainland. But there was smugness too, a basic confidence in their cellars of guns and stacked riot helmets and cases of tear gas. What was Armageddon to these guys?
“All the borders were closed,” one said. “It was the tightest security net in the history of the state. They used three hundred squad cars, for Christ’s sake. They couldn’t have done any more.”
“I know, Chief Parker was telling me,” another said.
“Still,” someone else said, “I see Commissioner Randle’s point. They didn’t take the mountains into account. One call to Lane Field, and they could have had fifty helicopters over that area in twenty minutes. They could have dropped troopers with infrared gun sights. They could have lit up the entire state with flares. It doesn’t make any sense for a manhunt to fail when you can get that kind of cooperation.”
“I’m glad you brought that up about the mountains. We’d improve security a thousand percent if the borders were redefined. Take Wyoming and Montana, for example.”
“Flanders and Labe have a tough one there, all right. I wouldn’t want to be those two lawmen.”
“Well, sure. They’ve got it tough, but it’s not much different for True in Tennessee or Wright in South Carolina, or even Grand and Nobel in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I could give you a dozen examples. The mountainous common borders of those states offer the criminal a million places he can hole up. We’ve simply got to recognize that sooner or later the frontiers have to be moved in this country. The natural border is a thing of the past anyway, since four-wheel drive. Place your state lines far enough away from your mountain ranges — create a twenty-mile belt of flatland around the high country — and when they come down from those hills they fall right into our nets without all this crap about extradition.”
“I don’t know, Jim, it sounds pretty idealistic to me.”
“Hell, Murray, we’ve been doing it in our penitentiaries for years. What’s your yard between your outside walls and your main buildings?”
We’re surrounded, Feldman thought. We’re lost, but we’re surrounded.
He took a cup of coffee with him into an empty room. Even normally he moved around a lot at parties, but tonight he had covered miles. He was looking for a place to hole up, but what he really wanted was to go back to his cell, to be with those who knew him. I’m Feldman, he thought; my book is in the library. He longed to be with anyone who had read his book, who knew about his life. What was this party all about, anyway?
Always an invitation had meant to him something more than it was: a secret message, a signal, a declaration of love. And though he was not a public man he had gone to all parties open to the regard of others, to their attention. It was all that he would ever do for anyone — show them his moods, demonstrate himself. I should have been a late-model automobile, he thought. But these people, these cops and armored-car executives and czars of baseball and auditors of books, wanted only to be protected from him, and to have the right of protecting others from him. His blue fool suit was as heavy as armor. Ah, he thought, I’m such an amateur. He despised his clumsiness, his bad balance. He knew himself for a stumbler in the dark, a stubber of toes, a snagger of pockets. The insurance companies wouldn’t touch him.
Once — it was the year his father died — he had sent himself to Boy Scout summer camp. Joining on a whim at the last moment — he had seen a poster of some boys around a campfire, Negroes, Asians, white kids, all of them strangely Caucasoid — he’d had to go as a Tenderfoot, years older than any other boy of that rank, and as a pauper, with none of the equipment that the others had. He hadn’t understood why he’d come. He couldn’t tie the knots or make a fire or pitch a tent. He didn’t know the pressure points and was clumsy in the canoe and didn’t recognize the plants. He couldn’t find the North Star. He suffered much from the taunts of the other boys and from the commands of boys much younger than himself; yet for the two weeks he was there he had been convinced of his happiness. He remembered one clear, cool evening of a three-day portage when they had slept in the open. He had no sleeping bag and lay in his town clothes, his only protection the few rubber rain slickers the others had lent him and would take back as soon as it rained. He recalled looking at the sky, knowing none of nature’s names but smelling its woods and feeling its earth, sensing himself there in it, who knew no cloud formations nor the shapes of leaves. He was too excited to sleep, and he began to talk to a thirteen-year-old boy who lay near him, telling him about himself, speaking as someone younger might have spoken to someone older but rarely as someone older ever spoke to someone younger. And the kid listened. Then it rained and that kid was the first to ask for his slicker back. Best pal I ever had, Feldman thought.