I recognized him, too. Not individually; I mean I recognized his type. He was a homosexual, young and slender and delicate, wearing tight pale-blue chinos and white sandals and a white fishnet shirt. He was pretty obviously what’s called a cruiser, a faggot who hangs around one of the gay areas of the city looking to get picked up. They very frequently get beat up, too, and sometimes they get killed. They also have a higher incidence of VD than any other group in the city. I won’t say it’s a kind of life I understand.
At the moment, this one was scared out of his mind, terrified, trembling all over. He was so fragile-looking, he looked as though he might break his own bones with all that shivering he was doing.
When we got close enough to hear voices, it was the boy on the ground who was talking. He could hardly speak; his voice was trembling and his throat apparently kept closing up on him. All the time he struggled to talk, his hands kept fluttering around. I hate to say they fluttered like butterflies, but that’s what they reminded me of.
He was saying, “I don’t know why he’d do it. There wasn’t any reason, there was just— There wasn’t any reason. Everything was fine, and then—” He stopped talking, and let the fluttering of his hands finish the story.
Walter, one of the plainclothesmen, preferred words to hands. Not sounding at all sympathetic, he said, “Yeah? Then what?”
The hands fluttered to his throat. “He started to choke me.” The street-light glare was in his face as he looked up at us, bleaching out whatever color was left in it, reducing his face to little more than a twisting mouth and staring eyes. With that face, and the gracefully twitching hands, he suddenly also reminded me of pantomimists I’ve seen on television. You’ve seen them; they cover their faces with white make-up, and wear dark clothing and white gloves, and they pretend to be in love, or to be an airplane, or to be mixing a martini. This one seemed to be doing a pantomime impression of terror.
Except that he was talking. Hands still at his throat, he said again, “He choked me. He was screaming awful things, terrible, and just choking me.” His hands trembled at his throat.
Walter, still not sympathetic, said, “What was he saying?”
The expressive hands came down, flattening out. “Oh, please,” he said. “Oh, just terrible things. I don’t even want to remember them.”
Walter’s partner Bert was grinning a little as he watched and listened, and now he said, “What did you say you were doing just before the attack?”
Evasiveness cut through the young man’s agitation. Suddenly nervous as much for his present situation as for what had happened to him in the past, he gestured vaguely with both hands, looked away from us all, blinked, and said, “Well—” He stopped, ducked his head, twisted his shoulders around. “We were just talking, just—” He looked up at us again, looking like the heroine of a silent movie melodrama, and said, “Everything was fine, there wasn’t any reason at all.”
“Talking,” Bert said. He jerked his head to the right and said, “Over there in the bushes at two in the morning.”
He clasped his hands together. “But there wasn’t any reason to choke me,” he said.
I wondered why he kept reminding me of silent things — pantomimists and silent movies — when he was steadily talking. Of course, as much as anybody was really listening to him, he might as well have been silent. He’d thought he’d found a friend, and he’d been betrayed, and that was most of the pain he was showing us. But we’d all seen it before, and we had other ways to describe it. All Walter and Bert were hearing — and all I’d be hearing, if I was the one who’d have to fill out the report on this — were the facts. Like that old police show on television used to say, all we want are the facts, ma’am.
Walter was saying now, “Can you give us any identification on him?”
“Well...” He thought about it, sitting there in the middle of us, and said, “He, uh, he had a tattoo.” He said it as though he were proud of having remembered, and expected a gold star.
Ed said, “A tattoo?” The incredulity in his voice was almost comic.
I looked at Ed beside me, and saw he was grinning. Looking down at that poor jerk and grinning. I thought, Ed’s a nice guy, he’s really a very nice guy, decent and straight. What the hell was he doing grinning down at some poor bastard who’s been betrayed and choked and humiliated by some other son of a bitch?
And me, too. I was in the ring around the guy, one of the five cops standing around him, brought out to do our duty to protect him from bodily harm.
I took a step backward, as though to get out of the circle. I really didn’t understand it myself, it was just a feeling I had, that I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore.
The guy on the ground was explaining about the tattoo. “On his forearm,” he said. “His, uh, his left forearm.” He pointed to his own left forearm. “It was in the shape of a torpedo,” he said.
Walter laughed, and the guy pouted at him. He was getting over his fear now, and his normal mincing mannerisms were returning to him.
That wasn’t the way God had made him. And none of us were the way God had made us, either.
I remembered again that hippie talking about what the city does to people, and that none of us had started this way.
Bert was saying, “What about a name? He give you any kind of name before you went off in the bushes with him?”
He raised his eyes again, and clasped his hands in his lap. Christ, he looked like Lillian Gish. Wistfully, remembering having liked the bastard, he told us, “He said his name was Jim.”
I took another step backward and looked up at the sky. It was one of those rare nights in New York when you can see a few stars.
Joe
I’d been in a bad mood ever since we pulled it off. Tom didn’t feel that way, he was going around happy and chipper and easy in his mind, but as for me, most of the time I felt like punching somebody in the head.
It would have been a different thing if we had the money in our hands. Even if we had the bonds, something we could sell, something we could touch and hold and know that this was the result of our labors. But what did we have? A blue plastic laundry bag full of air.
I’m not arguing. I know the case for doing it that way, and we did it that way, and I agree with it. As Tom said, the Mafia is not going to give away two million dollars if it doesn’t absolutely have to, so we can take it for granted when the time comes to make the switch they’ll try to double-cross us. And, since they already know this is a one-shot operation, we’re never going to be useful to them again, they’d be smart not only to cheat us but also to kill us.
Why not? We’re the only connection between the bond robbery and the mob, the only ones that know the whole story. Kill us, and they not only save two million dollars, they protect themselves from getting implicated just in case we should ever get picked up by the law later on.
So they’ll try to double-cross us, and they’ll try to kill us. We knew that before we went ahead and did the job. Because the next step is, we’re the ones who decide the method of transfer. And to bring us to the transfer point, they have to produce the cash, the two million for us to look at and touch. We can make it a part of the arrangement, that we see the cash before we give them the bonds.
They’d expect that. They’d expect us to be careful with them, because they’d expect us to be afraid of them.
What they wouldn’t expect is a double cross right back.
As Tom said, money isn’t just green pieces of paper in your wallet, it’s credit cards and charge accounts and all kinds of things. It’s bonds. It’s anything you think is money.