Some nights you can’t make a nickel.
So after fifteen minutes of some very fancy footwork designed to befuddle and unsettle La Bresca, with Brown utilizing his very special logically persistent method of questioning while Willis sniped and jabbed around the edges, they knew nothing more than they had known that afternoon. The only difference was that now the commissioner was dead. So they thanked Mrs. La Bresca for the use of the hall, and they shook hands with her son and apologized for having pulled him out of bed, and they wished him luck at his new job, and then they both said good night again and went out of the house and heard Mrs. La Bresca locking the kitchen door behind them, and went down the rickety wooden steps, and down the potholed driveway, and across the street to where they had parked the police sedan.
Then Willis started the car, and turned on the heater, and both men talked earnestly and softly for several moments and decided to ask the lieutenant for permission to bug La Bresca’s phone in the morning.
Then they went home.
It was cold and dark in the alley where Steve Carella lay on his side huddled in a tattered overcoat. The late February snow had been shoveled and banked against one brick alley wall, soiled now with the city’s grime, a thin layer of soot crusted onto its surface. Carella was wearing two pairs of thermal underwear and a quilted vest. In addition, a hand warmer was tucked into one pocket of the vest, providing a good steady heat inside the threadbare overcoat. But he was cold.
The banked snow opposite him only made him colder. He did not like snow. Oh yes, he could remember owning his own sled as a boy, and he could remember belly-whopping with joyous abandon, but the memory seemed like a totally fabricated one in view of his present very real aversion to snow. Snow was cold and wet. If you were a private citizen, you had to shovel it, and if you were a Department of Sanitation worker, you had to truck it over to the River Dix to get rid of it. Snow was a pain in the ass.
This entire stakeout was a pain in the ass.
But it was also very amusing.
It was the amusing part of it that kept Carella lying in a cold dark alley on a night that wasn’t fit for man or beast. (Of course, he had also been ordered to lie in a cold dark alley by the lieutenant for whom he worked, nice fellow name of Peter Byrnes, he should come lie in a cold dark alley some night.) The amusing part of this particular stakeout was that Carella wasn’t planted in a bank hoping to prevent a multimillion dollar robbery, nor was he planted in a candy store someplace, hoping to crack an international ring of narcotics peddlers, nor was he even hidden in the bathroom of a spinster lady’s apartment, hoping to catch a mad rapist. He was lying in a cold dark alley, and the amusing part was that two vagrants had been set on fire. That wasn’t so amusing, the part about being set on fire. That was pretty serious. The amusing part was that the victims had been vagrants. Ever since Carella could remember, the police had been waging an unremitting war against this city’s vagrants, arresting them, jailing them, releasing them, arresting them again, on and on ad infinitum. So now the police had been presented with two benefactors who were generously attempting to rid the streets of any and all bums by setting them aflame, and what did the police do? The police promptly dispatched a valuable man to a cold dark alley to lie on his side facing a dirty snowbank while hoping to catch the very fellows who were in charge of incinerating bums. It did not make sense. It was amusing.
A lot of things about police work were amusing.
It was certainly funnier to be lying here freezing than to be at home in bed with a warm and loving woman; oh God, that was so amusing it made Carella want to weep. He thought of Teddy alone in bed, black hair spilling all over the pillow, half-smile on her mouth, nylon gown pulled back over curving hip, God, I could freeze to death right here in this goddamn alley, he thought, and my own wife won’t learn about it till morning. My own passionate wife! She’ll read about it in the papers! She’ll see my name on page four! She’ll —
There were footsteps at the other end of the alley.
He felt himself tensing. Beneath the overcoat, his naked hand moved away from the warmer and dropped swiftly to the cold steel butt of his service revolver. He eased the gun out of its holster, lay hunched on his side with the gun ready, and waited as the footsteps came closer.
“Here’s one,” a voice said.
It was a young voice.
“Yeah,” another voice answered.
Carella waited. His eyes were closed, he lay huddled in the far corner of the alley, simulating sleep, his finger curled inside the trigger guard now, a hair’s-breadth away from the trigger itself.
Somebody kicked him.
“Wake up!” a voice said.
He moved swiftly, but not swiftly enough. He was shoving himself off the floor of the alley, yanking the revolver into firing position, when the liquid splashed onto the front of his coat.
“Have a drink!” one of the boys shouted, and Carella saw a match flare into life, and suddenly he was in flames.
His reaction sequence was curious in that his sense of smell supplied the first signal, the unmistakable aroma of gasoline fumes rising from the front of his coat, and then the flaring match, shocking in itself, providing a brilliant tiny explosion of light in the nearly black alley, more shocking in combination with the smell of the gasoline. Warning slammed with physical force into his temples, streaked in a jagged electric path to the back of his skull, and suddenly there were flames. There was no shock coupled with the fire that leaped up toward his face from the front of his coat. There was only terror.
Steve Carella reacted in much the same way Cro-Magnon must have reacted the first time he ventured too close to a raging fire and discovered that flames can cook people as well as saber-toothed tigers. He dropped his weapon, he covered his face, he whirled abruptly, instinctively rushing for the soot-crusted snowbank across the alley, forgetting his attackers, only vaguely aware that they were running, laughing, out of the alley and into the night, thinking only in a jagged broken pattern fire run burn fire out fire fire and hurling himself full length onto the snow. His hands were cupped tightly to his face, he could feel the flames chewing angrily at the backs of them, could smell the terrifying stench of burning hair and flesh, and then heard the sizzle of fire in contact with the snow, felt the cold and comforting snow, was suddenly enveloped in a white cloud of steam that rose from the beautiful snow, rolled from shoulder to shoulder in the glorious marvelous soothing beneficial white and magnificent snow, and found tears in his eyes, and thought nothing, and lay with his face pressed to the snow for a long while, breathing heavily, and still thinking nothing.
He got up at last and painfully retrieved his discarded revolver and walked slowly to the mouth of the alley and looked at his hands in the light of the street lamp. He caught his breath, and then went to the call box on the next corner. He told Sergeant Murchison at the desk that the fire bugs had hit, and that his hands had been burned and he would need a meat wagon to get him over to the hospital. Murchison said, “Are you all right?” and Carella looked at his hands again, and said, “Yes, I’m all right, Dave.”
Chapter 4