Sitting with her arms around the shivering boy, Kathy tried to make some sense out of the maps, the radio equipment, and the snatches of conversation she overheard between Sy and her husband. The radio equipment was a necessary part of their plan, she knew, but she could not understand how they hoped to utilize it. The maps, too, were important, but again she could forge no connecting link between the radio and the maps set up near the chair in front of the equipment. The radio equipment included the oscillators and the transmitter Sy had mentioned, in addition to a microphone, and a dial which seemed far removed from any radio equipment she had ever seen.
She knew from the conversation that another phone call to King was in order, this one to ascertain that he had the money and to give him instructions about its delivery. After that, she knew, Sy was going to leave the house in the car while Eddie remained behind. More than that she did not know.
The boy trembled in her arms, and she held him close, and she wondered for perhaps the fiftieth time how the man she loved could possibly have become involved in a crime she considered heinous. The word “heinous” did not enter her mind; it wasn’t even a part of her vocabulary. But she considered kidnaping something unspeakably horrible, something almost inhuman, and she wondered what it was in Eddie, what drive, what lust for money, what search for identity, that could have led him into this final shattering act. It was her fault, of course. She knew that instantly. She knew with the intuition of a Cleopatra detaining an Antony, a Helen launching the Trojan war. The affairs of men were governed by women. This she knew, as all women know, with infallible instinct. And if Eddie had taken part in a kidnaping, was now taking part in the final stages of the theft of a child, then she was in part responsible for it.
She recognized in her own attitude about crime a peculiar dichotomy. She had, for example, sanctioned yesterday’s excursion because she presumed Eddie and Sy were going out to rob a bank. The concept was almost amusing. In the hands of skilled players, it could indeed become a hilarious satirical sketch. “Is this what you do to me?” the actress gun moll complains to the returning actor gangster. “After I’ve given you the best years of my life? You go out to rob a bank, and you bring home a kid instead?” Very funny. Ha-ha. It was not humorous to Kathy, because it happened to be true in her case. Believing he was about to rob a bank, she had in effect given him her blessings. Confronted with a kidnaping instead, she heaped upon him her scorn.
Nor could she honestly say that she had exercised a great deal of effort over the years in pulling her husband away from crime. He had been in trouble as a youth, had been sent to reform school, where, under the skilled tutelage of tougher, more experienced youths, he had learned tricks he had never dreamed of. She hadn’t met him until he was twenty-six, and by that time crime was as much a part of Eddie Folsom as his kidney. Was it this about him which had first attracted her? This attitude of non conformity carried to its furthest extreme? This anti-social outlook which made the beatniks seem like members of a British soccer team? Perhaps, but she did not really believe so.
Eddie Folsom, in the eyes of Kathy Folsom, his wife, was not a crook. It is probably difficult to understand that because the good-guy—bad-guy concept is a part of our heredity, drummed into our minds together with the knight-on-a-white-charger ideal, and the only-bad-girls-lay taboo, and the slit-dresses-are-sexy fetish. There are good guys and bad guys, damnit, we all know that. Sure. But does the bad guy ever think of himself as a bad guy? When a gangster watches a gangster movie, does he identify with the police or with Humphrey Bogart?
Eddie Folsom, you see, was a man.
Short and simple, sweet and easily understood. Man. M-a-n. Kathy knew him as a man, and loved him as a man, and thought of him as a man who earned his living through stealing. But this did not make him a crook. True, Kathy knew the difference between right and wrong, between law and anarchy, between good and evil. But this did not make her husband a crook. A crook was the man at the butcher shop who thumbed the scale when weighing out lamb chops. A crook was the cab driver who had shortchanged Kathy in Philadelphia once. Crooks were people in charge of labor unions. Crooks were hired killers. Crooks were men who ran huge corporations.
And, unfortunately, crooks were people who planned and executed kidnapings.
And perhaps this was why the job disturbed her so much. In a single day, in the space of several hours, Eddie Folsom had stopped being a person who earned his living by stealing and had begun being a crook. And if this were the end product, if a person as sweet and as kind and as full of love as Eddie could turn into a crook, was not his wife to blame? And if she was to blame, where along the line had she compromised the ideal, where had the good-guy—bad-guy concept ceased to have any real meaning, when had she decided that stealing was not a crime, it simply wasn’t the kind of life she wanted for her man?
Wasn’t this why she wanted to go to Mexico? So that Eddie could stop stealing, so that he could have his radio and do with it what he wanted, so that the demands of every-day living—simple things like wanting to eat, and wanting to be warm, and wanting a roof over one’s head—could be satisfied with a maximum of security and a minimum of cold hard cash? A bank job, a last-time big splash. No more hiding, no more running. Mexico, and sun-washed streets, and skies as blue as Monday morning. Safety. Wasn’t this all she really wanted for herself and her man?
Now, clutching a shivering eight-year-old boy to her bosom, Kathy Folsom felt something she had never in her life felt before. Holding a boy who was not her own, listening to the whispered plans of the men across the room, she wanted more than safety. She wanted the good to return and the bad to be over with. The trembling of the boy touched something deep inside her, a well-spring as old as Eve. She knew in that instant that the good-guy—bad-guy fiction was a legend designed not to fool but to inspire. And she knew why she was at fault in leading Eddie into his current dilemma. There was good in her man, a great deal of good. She had done a disservice to the good by casually accepting the evil. What she wanted to voice now was something spouted by every thief in every Grade-B melodrama. What she wanted to cry now were the words that poured from the mouth of the gangster as he lay bleeding in the gutter. What she wanted to sob out was the criminal’s straight-man dialogue designed as a setup for Jack Webb’s devastating closing punch line.
“Give me a break, will you?”
In the movies, the thief is instantly manacled and dragged bleeding to jail. On the television screen, the thief’s eyes are wide with pleading. “Give me a break, will you? Please. Give me a break.” And the taciturn spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department answers, “Did you give him one?”