They had agreed between them that they would not use the guns unless John the Tailor began yelling. It was their plan to reach the shop by ten minutes to eight, surprise the old man, leave him bound and gagged in the back room, and then return to Calucci’s place. The shop was only five minutes away, but because of the heavy snow, and because neither man owned an automobile, they set out at seven twenty-five.
They both looked very menacing, and they both felt quite powerful with their big guns. It was a shame nobody was around to see how menacing and powerful they looked and felt.
In the warm snug comfort of the radio motor patrol car, Patrolman Richard Genero studied the bleak and windswept streets outside, listening to the clink of the chains on the rear wheel tires, hearing the two-way short wave radio spewing its incessant dialogue. The man driving the RMP was a hair bag named Phillips, who had been complaining constantly from the moment they’d begun their shifts at three forty-five P.M. It was now seven-thirty, and Phillips was still complaining, telling Genero he’d done a Dan O’Leary this whole past week, not a minute’s breather, man had to be crazy to become a cop, while to his right the radio continued its oblivious spiel, Car Twenty-one, Signal thirteen. This is Twenty-one, Wilco, Car Twenty-eight, signal …
“This reminds me of Christmas,” Genero said.
“Yeah, some Christmas,” Phillips said. “I worked on Christmas day, you know that?”
“I meant, everything white.”
“Yeah, everything white,” Phillips said. “Who needs it?”
Genero folded his arms across his chest and tucked his gloved hands into his armpits. Phillips kept talking. The radio buzzed and crackled. The skid chains clinked like sleigh bells.
Genero felt drowsy.
Something was bothering the deaf man.
No, it was not the heavy snow which had undoubtedly covered manhole number M3860, a hundred and twenty feet south of the southern curb of Harris, in the center of Faxon Drive, no, it was not that. He had prepared for the eventuality of inclement weather, and there were snow shovels in the trunk of the black sedan idling at the curb downstairs. The snow would merely entail some digging to get at the manhole, and he was allowing himself an extra hour for that task, no, it was not the snow, it was definitely not the snow.
“What is it?” Buck whispered. He was wearing his rented police sergeant’s uniform, and he felt strange and nervous inside the blue garment.
“I don’t know,” Ahmad answered. “Look at the way he’s pacing.”
The deaf man was indeed pacing. Wearing electrician’s coveralls, he walked back and forth past the desk in one corner of the room, not quite muttering, but certainly wagging his head like an old man contemplating the sorry state of the world. Buck, perhaps emboldened by the bravery citation on his chest, finally approached him and said, “What’s bothering you?”
“The 87th,” the deaf man replied at once.
“What?”
“The 87th, the 87th,” he repeated impatiently. “What difference will it make if we kill the mayor? Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“They get away clean,” the deaf man said. “We kill JMV, and who suffers, will you tell me that?”
“Who?” Buck asked.
“Not the 87th, that’s for sure.”
“Look,” Buck said gently, “we’d better get started. We’ve got to dig down to that manhole, we’ve got to …”
“So JMV dies, so what?” the deaf man asked. “Is money everything in life? Where’s the pleasure?”
Buck looked at him.
“Where’s the pleasure?” the deaf man repeated. “If JMV —” He suddenly stopped, his eyes widening. “JMV,” he said again, his voice a whisper. “JMV!” he shouted excitedly, and went to the desk, and opened the middle drawer, and pulled out the Isola telephone directory. Quickly, he flipped to the rear section of the book.
“What’s he doing?” Ahmad whispered.
“I don’t know,” Buck whispered back.
“Look at this!” the deaf man shouted. “There must be hundreds of them, thousands of them!”
“Thousands of what?” Buck asked.
The deaf man did not reply. Hunched over the directory, he kept turning pages, studying them, turning more pages. “Here we are,” he mumbled, “no, that’s no good … let’s see … here’s another one … no, no … just a second … ahhh, good … no, that’s all the way downtown … let’s see, let’s see … here … no …” mumbling to himself as he continued to turn pages, and finally shouting “Culver Avenue, that’s it, that’ll do it!” He picked up a pencil, hastily scribbled onto the desk pad, tore the page loose, and stuffed it into the pocket of his coveralls. “Let’s go!” he said.
“You ready?” Buck asked.
“I’m ready,” the deaf man said, and picked up the voltohm meter. “We promised to get JMV, didn’t we?” he asked.
“We sure did.”
“Okay,” he said, grinning. “We’re going to get two JMV’s — and one of them’s in the 87th Precinct!”
Exuberantly, he led them out of the apartment.
The two young men had been prowling the streets since dinnertime. They had eaten in a delicatessen off Ainsley and then had stopped to buy a half-gallon of gasoline in the service station on the corner of Ainsley and Fifth. The taller of the two young men, the one carrying the open can of gasoline, was cold. He kept telling the shorter one how cold he was. The shorter one said everybody was cold on a night like this, what the hell did he expect on a night like this?
The taller one said he wanted to go home. He said they wouldn’t find nobody out on a night like this, anyway, so what was the use walking around like this in the cold? His feet were freezing, he said. His hands were cold too. Why don’t you carry this fuckin’ gas a while? he said.
The shorter one told him to shut up.
The shorter one said this was a perfect night for what they had to do because they could probably find maybe two guys curled up together in the same hallway, didn’t that make sense?
The taller one said he wished he was curled up in a hallway someplace.
They stood on the street corner arguing for a few minutes, each of them yelling in turn, and finally the taller one agreed to give it another ten minutes, but that was all. The shorter one said Let’s try it for another half-hour, we bound to hit pay dirt, and the taller one said No, ten minutes and that’s it, and the shorter one said You fuckin’ idiot, I’m telling you this is a good night for it, and the taller one saw what was in his eyes, and became afraid again and said Okay, okay, but only a half-hour, I mean it, Jimmy, I’m really cold, really.
You look like you’re about to start crying, Jimmy said.
I’m cold, the other one said, that’s all.
Well, come on, Jimmy said, we’ll find somebody and make a nice fire, huh? A nice warm fire.
The two young men grinned at each other.
Then they turned the corner and walked up the street toward Culver Avenue as Car Seventeen, bearing Phillips and Genero clinked by on its chained tires sounding like sleigh bells.
It was difficult to tell who was more surprised, the cops or the robbers.
The police commissioner had told His Honor the Mayor JMV that “a lot of police work dovetails past and present and future,” but it was fairly safe to assume he had nothing too terribly philosophical in mind. That is, he probably wasn’t speculating on the difference between illusion and reality, or the overlap of the dream state and the workaday world. That is, he probably wasn’t explaining time continua or warps, or parallel universes, or coexisting systems. He was merely trying to say that there are a lot of accidents involved in police work, and that too many cases would never get solved if it weren’t for those very accidents. He was trying to tell His Honor the Mayor JMV that sometimes cops get lucky.