After the spectacular sound-volume of the theater’s speakers, the racket of Times Square seemed muted and unreal. He stopped to get his bearings, feeling strange and oddly guilty: he had never gone to movies by himself and he felt as if someone had just caught him masturbating. Once a long time ago he had been briefly in San Francisco over a weekend, waiting for his Army discharge; he had spent most of Saturday and all day Sunday going from one triple-feature to another. He had seen eleven movies—seven of them Westerns—in those two days. It was the nearest thing to a Lost Weekend he had ever experienced. After six months behind a typewriter on Okinawa and nearly two seasick weeks on a troopship he had owned no strength to take in the sights of San Francisco or enjoy its notorious night pleasures; he had lost himself in the never-never land of Tex Ritter and John Wayne and Richard Dix and Bela Lugosi.
Times Square was a running sore, jostling with the chalky bodies of hookers, open-mouthed tourists, swaggering male prostitutes, men slipping furtively into peep-show theaters and porno bookstores. Cops in pairs every few yards: they were all on the take because if they weren’t, half the people in sight would be under arrest. These were the dregs, this was their cesspool. Their dreary faces slid by in the overpowering neon daylight and Paul turned quickly uptown, full of angry disgust.
Out of the tinsel, up toward Fifty-seventh. The new car showrooms, the groups in good clothes on the corners looking for taxis to take them home from their after-theater dinners.
A cop on the corner, the steady watchfulness of his eyes: Paul walked past and felt his face twitch. Before he had done it, he had been convinced there was no danger: they could never get him. But now it had happened and he was beginning to think of a hundred ways they could find him. A witness? Fingerprints—had he touched anything? He felt his face flaming; he went on into Columbus Circle, clutching the gun in his pocket. Suppose a cop stopped him and asked him something: could he handle it? He was such a poor dissembler.
The Coliseum, now the handsome buildings of Lincoln Center looking like something miraculously spared by the bombing attacks that had reduced the surrounding neighborhood to gray rubble. The city had the look and feel of occupation: the walk up Broadway was a combat mission behind enemy lines and you never met the eyes of the hurrying head-down strangers you passed.
That was it, then, he thought; he was the first of the Resistance—the first soldier of the underground.
Monday in the lunch hour he went down into the Village and browsed the shops on Eighth Street and Greenwich Avenue and then on Fourteenth Street. At different shops he bought a dark roll-neck sweater, a reversible jacket with dark gray on one side and bright hunter’s red on the other, a cabbie’s soft cap, a pair of lemon-colored gloves.
Before ten that evening he took a bus up to Ninety-sixth Street and walked across town into Central Park. The tennis courts and the reservoir were to the right; he crossed the transverse to the left and walked along above the ball-playing fields. He was wearing the cap and the jacket gray-side-out. Come on, now.
But he walked all the way through the Park without seeing anyone except two bicyclists.
Well, everyone was afraid of the Park nowadays. The muggers knew that; they had shifted their hunting grounds elsewhere. He nodded at the discovery—now he knew; he wouldn’t make this mistake again.
At the Fifth Avenue wall he made a turn around the children’s playground and started to walk back up toward the transverse but then in a chip of light between the trees he saw a motionless figure on a park bench and something triggered all his warning systems: the short hairs prickled at the back of his neck and he moved forward through the trees, letting his breath trickle out slowly through his mouth. Something was stirring there—he had picked up movement, as insubstantial as fog, but it was there. He stopped, watched. He had to fight a cough down.
It was an old man slumped on the bench; probably a drunk. Wrapped in a ragged old coat, huddling it to him. That wasn’t what had alerted Paul; there was someone else.
Then he spotted the shadow. Slipping slowly along behind the park bench, moving up from the drunk’s blind side.
Paul waited. It might be a curious kid, harmless; it might even be a cop. But he didn’t think so. The stealthy purpose, the careful stalking silence.… Into the light now: a man in skin-tight trousers and a leather jacket and an Anzac hat cocked over one eye. Moving without sound to the back of the bench and looking down at the sleeping drunk.
The intruder’s head lifted and turned: he scanned his horizons slowly and Paul stood frozen, not breathing. Fingers curling around the gun in his pocket.
The black man came around the end of the park and as he stepped onto the path his hand came out in sight and Paul heard the crisp snap as the knife flicked open. He’s going to rob that poor drunk.
The black man looked around again before he turned and crouched down by the drunk. Paul stepped forward through the trees. “Stand up,” very soft.
From his crouch the intruder broke into an immediate run. Racing toward the safety of the farther trees.
Paul fired.
The gunshot arrested the black man: he stopped and wheeled.
He thinks I’m a cop.
Well, that wasn’t a miss, you son of a bitch. It was just to turn you around so you can watch me shoot you. He trembled in rage: he lifted the revolver and stared into the black man’s eyes, hard as glass. The man was lifting his hands into the air in surrender. The sight of his vicious sneering face electrified the skin of Paul’s spine.
He stepped forward into the light because it was important that the intruder see him. A muscle worked at the back of the black man’s jaw. Then the face changed: “Hey, man, what’s goin’ down?”
Flame streaked out of Paul’s gunbarrel; the shot laid hard echoes across the blacktop path and the firecracker stink of the smoke got into his nostrils.
The bullet plunged into the abdomen, rupturing it with a subcutaneous explosion of gases. Paul fired again; the black man fell back, turned, began to scramble toward the trees.
It was remarkable how much a human body could take and still keep functioning. He fired twice more into the back of the man’s head. It dropped him.
Paul glanced at the drunk. The drunk hadn’t even stirred. He was facing the other way, half-lying on the bench. Was he alive at all?
Paul crossed to the black man and looked at him. There were flecks of white saliva at the corners of the man’s mouth. His face was twisted to the side and the eyes stared blankly at nothing. His sphincter muscles had failed and an unmistakable odor hung around the body in a cloud.
Paul hurried to the drunk. The man was snoring softly.
He faded back into the trees along the bridle path. There might be a cop nearby. He hurried up toward the fence that surrounded the reservoir; just before he reached it he turned to the right and went along the side of the steep wooded slope, parallel to the fence but below it so that no one would see him silhouetted. Every few seconds he stopped and listened.
People would have heard the noise of the shots but no one would have a fix on it and they’d rationalize it had been a backfiring truck. It wouldn’t be reported. Gunshots never were. The only real risk was that someone might have seen something. A passing pedestrian he hadn’t spotted, or even another drunk lying concealed in the wood. He slipped out of the jacket and reversed it to show the bright red side; put the cap in his pocket and the gloves with it. The gun was back in his right front trouser pocket—the gun together with a rubber-banded roll of four hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. If a cop decided for some reason to stop him and search him, Paul wanted the cop to find the four hundred dollars. It might work; he understood such things worked.