In the future. What is it that I’m planning to do?
The hell with it. He wasn’t going to lie to himself. The streets and parks were public places. He had a right to use them whenever he chose. And anyone who tried to attack him or rob him would have to take his chances.
Friday evening he met Jack at a Steak & Brew and they talked about the technicalities of the commitment. Paul contained his grief by channeling it into anger; he was resigned to Carol’s pain and his own loss; beginning to think less of his own agonies and more of those who hadn’t been victimized yet. By stopping Marston he had prevented God knew how many future crimes from happening.
He took a cab straight home and stared at the television until he fell asleep in front of the set.
Saturday he awoke with a throbbing headache. He’d had nothing to drink the night before; he couldn’t understand it. Possibly the air pollution. He swallowed aspirins and went across the street to the Shopwell to get groceries for the week. He had to stand in a slow line at the checkout counter; the headache was maddening and he wanted to elbow his way straight to the cash register. The headache dissipated during the morning but by midafternoon it had returned; he tossed the crossword puzzle on the floor and decided to take a nap, sleep it off.
It was dark when he came to. The darkness unnerved him; he went around the place switching on lights. When he looked at his watch he found it was nearly nine o’clock. Christ I can’t spend another night in this place. Maybe a movie. He examined the newspaper listings; the only thing worth trying was the double-bill rerun of James Bond films — he didn’t have the patience for an intellectual artsy picture and everything else was pornographic dreck.
The features ran at even-numbered hours but it didn’t matter. He took the subway local to Fiftieth Street and walked down Broadway to the theater. Entered the auditorium in the midst of a Technicolor car-chase and found his way to a seat and let the choreographed wide-screen violence absorb him.
The second film ended with someone being crushed to death in an enormous machine that reduced an automobile to a chair-sized cube of metal. He left the theater shortly before midnight, too restless to sit through the first half of the other film.
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.