He went along the slope, losing his footing here and there on the slippery grass; he cut between the reservoir and the tennis courts and made his way across the oval drive and out of the Park by the Ninety-sixth Street gate. He felt exposed and vulnerable; he was sweating lightly in the cool air. Rickety and weak: but it was real, the lusting angry violence most people had never remotely tasted and would never understand.…
In his mailbox he found a folded mimeographed flyer letterheaded with the legend of the West End Avenue Block Association and signed in the facsimile handwriting of Herbert Epstein.
Dear West End Avenue Resident:
The residents of this neighborhood are understandably and gravely concerned with the priority-matter of SAFETY on the streets.
Police statistics show that addicts and muggers are most likely to prey on the citizenry on dark, or poorly illuminated, streets; and that improved lighting on city streets has been demonstrated to cut crime as much as 75 percent.
Your Block Association hopes to purchase and install a system of total saturation street lighting along West End Avenue and the side streets from 70th to 74th.
City funds are not available for this type of installation. Many neighborhood associations have already exercised initiative in purchasing high-saturation lighting in their areas. The cost per light is $350; within the area of our Block Association, individual contributions of as little as $7 each will enable us to saturate our neighborhood with bright lights and drive the criminals away into darker areas.
Your contribution is tax deductible. Please contribute as much as you can, for your own safety.
With sincere thanks,
Herbert Epstein
He left it open on his desk so he would remember to make out a check.
Years ago he had spent some of his weekends visiting his uncle and aunt in Rockaway. You could tell the rank and importance of the local mobsters by the brightness of the floodlights around their houses: they were the only people who had reason to fear for their lives.
* * *
Tuesday they took Carol to the rest home near Princeton. It was the first time he had seen her in weeks and although he had prepared himself he couldn’t help showing his shock. She looked twenty years older. There was no trace of the coltish girl with the sweet and touching smile. She might as well have been a display-window mannequin.
Jack kept talking to her in his gentle voice—cheerful meaningless talk, the kind you would use to soothe a skittish horse—but there was no sign she heard any of it; there was no sign she was aware of her own existence, let alone anyone else’s. They have this to pay for, he thought.
On the Amtrak train back to the city he sat beside Jack looking out the window at the slanting gray rain. Jack didn’t speak. He seemed worn out by the fruitless effort to reach Carol. Paul tried to think of something comforting to say but he quickly realized there was nothing.
There was a peculiar gratification in seeing how badly Jack was taking it. It made Paul feel the stronger of the two. He wasn’t breaking down at all; he was taking it in his stride.
But then his thoughts turned inward and he saw there was no reason to be smug; he was keeping his own equilibrium only because he seemed to have been struck by the edge of the same malaise that had infected Carol—the inability to feel anything. It was as if a transparent shield had been erected around him—as if his emotional center had been anesthetized. It had been closing in around him for several days, he realized. He remembered the mugger in Riverside Park: that had terrified him; but it was the last time he had known real fear. The second time—the man who’d tried to rob the drunk—he’d felt very little; he remembered it with vague detachment as if it were a scene from a movie he’d watched a long time ago.
He walked the streets that night but no one attacked him. At midnight he went home.
17
Wednesday morning from the office he telephoned Lieutenant Briggs, the Homicide detective. The police had nothing to report by way of progress in apprehending the intruders who had killed Esther and destroyed Carol’s life. Paul summoned enough righteous outrage to reduce the lieutenant to a string of whining apologies and excuses.
When he hung up he realized how counterfeit his indignant outburst had been. He had done it on impulse because it seemed to be the thing that was expected of him and he didn’t want to attract suspicion by any hint of unusual behavior. He was finding it surprisingly easy to act the innocent role: easy to be the injured helpless citizen, easy to look straight into people’s faces without fear that his guilt would show. How quickly he had picked up the habit of guarding his secrets—as if he had been allowed to write out his own letters of reference, leaving out everything except what he chose to put in.
That night he decided to invade a new part of the wilderness. He took the subway down to Fourteenth Street and walked over into the truck district underneath the West Side Highway. Drunks slept beneath the overhanging loading platforms of the warehouses; the huge gray doors to the loading bays were locked formidably. On the side streets under the shadow of the elevated highway the light was very poor and the big trucks were lined up in uneven rows, half blocking the narrow passages. The air was cold and heavy; it wasn’t raining but it had the feel of rain. The still thick night seemed to blot up light.
He found a car parked askew to the curb, as if it had been disabled and its driver had pushed it out of the center of the roadway and gone for help. The car had been stripped: the hood was up, the trunk-lid up, the car propped on bricks and stones. Its wheels and tires were gone. He looked under the hood: the battery had been removed. The window of the driver’s door had been smashed in. When he looked at the raised trunk-lid he saw it had been pried open; the lip of it was badly mangled. Six hours ago it might have been a good car with a leaf in the fuel line or an empty gas tank; now it was a gutted derelict.
A lump of hot rage grew in his belly.
Set a trap for them, he thought. There had to be a way. He kept walking, gripping the gun in his pocket, and after a little while he had it worked out in his mind.
Wednesday morning he phoned a rent-a-car office and reserved a car for overnight use.
At half-past ten he drove down the West Side Highway to the Eighteenth Street ramp and went rattling down the chuckholed exit to the warehouse district. On Sixteenth Street a police cruiser rolled slowly past him and the cops inside gave him an incurious glance. He went around the block and found a spot between two double-parked trucks on the right-hand side of the street, away from the street lights. He parked the car there at an awkward angle and wrote in a crabbed hand on a scrap of paper, “Out of gas—back soon,” and stuck it under the windshield-wiper blade. It was the sort of thing motorists did to avoid getting tickets. He locked the doors conscientiously and walked away from the car making a show of his disgust; went around the corner and quickly continued around the entire block; and posted himself in the shadows diagonally across the street from the car. He stood between the close-parked trailers of two semi-rig trucks, with a good field of view and good cover in the deep shadows.
Now and then a car went by. A pair of homosexual pedestrians, walking fast out of fear, touching each other intimately and laughing. He had heard the faggots sometimes drifted “the trucks” in search of pickups. It was the first time he’d seen it.
He found them vaguely revolting; they induced the same kind of discomfort he experienced when he had to look at a cripple. There was always something deeply disturbing about deformities you weren’t used to and couldn’t understand. But they were no threat to anyone except themselves and he had no impulse to do anything but let them go by. Fools, he thought, wandering this area at night unarmed. They’re asking for it.