At Penn Station the workmen got off and Paul was alone in the car. The line’s green traffic lights whipped past the filthy windows. He began to read the advertising placards above them.
The train screeched into the lights of the Times Square station and threw Paul around on the seat when it braked to a sharp halt. Two tough kids entered the car and sat down facing Paul. Hubcap collectors, he thought drily. They gave him insolent looks and one of them took out a pocket knife, opened it and began to clean his fingernails.
You could tell they were scum by looking at them. How many old women had they mugged? How many tenement shops had they knocked over?
The earsplitting racket of the train would cover the sound of the shots. He could leave them dead in the car and they might not be found until the train got somewhere in the Bronx.
No. Too many risks. At least three people had seen him in this car — the patrolman and the two workmen. They might remember. And suppose someone at Seventy-second Street boarded the car while Paul was stepping out of it? A subway was a trap; too easy to be cornered.
If they accosted him he would take the risk. Otherwise he would let them go. So it’s up to you two. He watched them narrowly.
They didn’t pay him much attention. They both looked sleepy — strung out on heroin? In any event they didn’t stir until the train scraped into the station. They were on their feet ahead of Paul and he followed them across the platform and up the stairs. Maybe they would stop and jump him here.
They didn’t. Out through the turnstiles, through the back door, across the traffic island and the pedestrian crossing to the corner of Seventy-first and Amsterdam. The boys walked south across the street and down the avenue sidewalk and Paul let them go; the precinct station was just around the corner down there and anyhow it was too close to his apartment. He wondered if they could realize how lucky they were.
19
The party was overcrowded in Sam and Adele’s small apartment; people stood around in shifting clusters and the place smelled of the rain guests had brought in on their coats. Despite the cold outside, the air conditioners were running at full blast. There were four couples from the office and Paul knew most of the Kreutzers’ other friends but there were five or six strangers — a new couple from down the hall who’d recently moved in from Queens, a psychiatrist Adele had met a party somewhere, a girl who said she was a free-lance magazine writer doing a piece on East Side apartment dwellers, another couple whose identities Paul didn’t catch but whom he kept glancing at because the wife had a hard-pinched mouth and the husband had the kind of impersonal efficient eyes you associated with police officials and major-generals. The rest were regulars except for a smartly dressed fortyish lady stockbroker and an old college roommate of Sam’s who was in town for the weekend on business — it turned out he was the director of marketing research for a packaging firm in Denver. They were all easy to place and easy to dismiss except for the hard-eyed couple.
The talk was loud and blasphemous with forced heartiness, everyone shouting to be heard; they pounded their speeches through the litany of personal questions and world problems, current movies and politics. Sam and Adele prowled the room refilling drinks and making sure people were mixing with one another — they had always been expert hosts; they introduced Paul to the lady stockbroker and later to the girl magazine-writer as if to say “Take your choice,” and a few moments later he spotted them doing the same with the ex-roommate from Denver.
The lady stockbroker revealed a new side he hadn’t detected during office hours — a knife-edged garrulous militancy for Women’s Lib — and he managed to separate himself from her quickly. The girl doing the article on East Side cave dwellers was jittery and afflicted with a tendency to reach too frequently and aggressively for fresh drinks. She smoked steadily with suicidal drags, jetting smoke from her nostrils. Paul found her equally off-putting and drifted into conversation with the Dundees until Adele went around nudging everybody toward the dining table to collect food from the buffet selection she had laid on. There was a confusion of finding places to sit; they sat on the windowsills and the floor and ate with paper plates on their knees.
Sam brought him a fresh drink. “Careful with this stuff — it’s got water in it. You know what they say about pollution.”
Paul waved his thanks with the glass. “Happy anniversary, Sam.”
The talk became looser; crowded together the guests dropped confidences with increasing frankness. Gradually the men became more lecherous, the women more amorous, unburdening themselves to one another with hurt I-want-to-be-loved smiles. The girl who wrote magazine articles said to Paul, “You really seem to understand,” and reached out for his hand.
He went to the bathroom less because he needed to than because he wanted escape. He wondered how professional spies stood the pressure.
The Kreutzers were the kind who left things to read in the john. There was a new issue of New York magazine that trumpeted The Vigilante: A Psychiatrist’s Portrait and he opened it and sat on the throne reading about himself.
“A righteous man stalks New York. While the rest of us sit by and talk idly of the administration in city hall and the way the city is going to the dogs, one man is doing something about it. Who is he? What has triggered him?
“Everyone has an opinion. To most of the lawyers I questioned, the vigilante is a vicious outlaw no better than the criminals he stalks. One lawyer said to me, ‘Remember the trial in Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen says, “Sentence first, verdict afterwards?”’ To some cynics — including several police officers I interviewed — he is doing what we are all tempted to do. Deputy Inspector Frank Ochoa, detailed to nail the vigilante, shrugged when I asked him what he thought of the vigilante. ‘He’s got a wire down somewhere but I don’t think he’s a raving maniac. Figure it out, look at yourself. What would you do if you knew you’d never be found out? We’ve had these guys before. They think they’re too smart to get caught.’ To the liberals the vigilante is a beast of another species, beyond comprehension. To the blacks of Harlem the vigilante is a Ku Klux Klan-style racist (never mind the fact that of his five victims only two have been black). To a thirteen-year-old boy at P.S. 120 the vigilante is a comic-book sort of hero, an adventurer who wants the chase and flies about the city with a flowing cape bringing vengeance upon wrongdoers à la Batman. To a thoughtful elderly grocer in Spanish Harlem the vigilante is a member of an extinct species which died out about 1918. To a beat patrolman in the West Village he is a good citizen assisting the Police.
“I talked with Theodore Perrine, the famous forensic psychiatrist, in his office at the Columbia University Medical School. After issuing the usual disclaimer to the effect that a psychiatrist shouldn’t be taken seriously when he tries to psychoanalyze a patient he’s never even met (Dr. Perrine does not admire such long-distance whimsies as Dr. Ernest Jones’s attempt to psychoanalyze Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the shrink who has probably testified in more banner-headline criminal cases than any other psychiatrist in America made this estimation of the character of the vigilante:
“‘We live in a death-oriented society. We anticipate the ultimate calamity and many of us are convinced there’s no hope of avoiding it. Our world is a world of conscience-stricken nuclear scientists, and young people who’ve become disabused of the notion that we have simple problems for which there are solutions. Everyone feels personally betrayed by the way things are going — the future is no longer a rational extension of the past; everything’s up for grabs, so to speak. We all tend to feel like laboratory animals who know nothing about the science except what we can observe while we’re in the process of being vivisected. That’s the milieu in which we all have to navigate, and it’s hardly surprising that some of us resent it so much that we’ve begun to hurl ourselves against it more and more irrationally.