“Yeah, right, now Donald, I want you to start drivin’ uptown on Madison. The speed limit is thirty-five, red mean stop, green mean go. Fiftieth, cut over to Lex an drop us off. Now, move.”
Walker did as he was told, driving like an old lady on the way to church. The night was cool and the traffic fairly light. He made it to the subway station in a little over eight minutes and pulled up to the curb.
The two other men got out. Louis came around to the driver’s side. He said, “Listen here, Snowball. You goin’ to drive to the Olympia Hotel, that’s at Tenth Avenue, ’round 23rd Street. There’s an all-night garage across the street. Put the car in there. Before you do that, pull over somewheres and change the plates. You got that? You got a screwdriver, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but Stack, I sick now. I’m fucking crawlin’, don’t you got anything to fix me up?” He snuffled back his running nose.
“Oh, I got some good stuff for you, Snowball, but I gotta go back to my place for it. Tell you what-take this here bottle and put yourself to sleep tonight. When you wake up I be there with your money an what you need.”
“You sure, Stack? I be bouncin’ off the walls come mornin’.”
Louis reached in and patted Walker on the cheek. “Yeah, Snowball, I be there, you my man, you part of my gang, ain’t you?”
Like the fly fisherman or the duck hunter, Man Louis had a solid practical understanding of the psychology of his particular prey, which in his case was the dope addict. He knew that junkies owned only two psychic states: fixed and looking for it. At a certain stage of looking, he knew, they were the most suggestible beings on earth, the promise of dope being enough to cancel any normal sense of suspicion or caution. He needed Walker in a certain place, alone, for at least twenty-four hours, and experience had shown him that a scared junkie would hold still that long on the expectation of a freebie hit of good dope.
Walker put the car in gear and drove off. Louis watched him go and then turned to Elvis.
“That asshole. Pres, my man, let me tell you. Some people they just tools, oughta have a damn on-off switch top their head. This Snowball, now, I meet him two weeks ago, hangin’ around Stacy’s out in Queens? I know this dude pushes shit round there. Lil Donald’s one of his prime clients. Anyway, I ask around, the man’s in trouble, got a fifty dollar Jones on him, in hock up to his ass. We get to talkin’, me and Donald, an I slip him something from my private stash. He’s flying, man, I his momma and his poppa. I tell you, Pres, you want to own a dude, get you a smackhead. I tell you somethin’ else. When you done, they got that switch on ’em, you jus’ reach up and switch it off. Dig?”
Elvis dug. “How you gonna do it?”
Louis looked pained. “I ain gonna do nothin’. He gonna do it. We jus gotta set up the situation, hey. That’s the other part of your job. Now let’s go home.”
As the two men descended into the steam-smelling passages, united as they were in the camaraderie of the deed, their minds held quite different thoughts. Elvis was elated, but at the same time calm with the sense that his immediate future was safely in someone else’s hands, that the awful necessity for daily choices was in abeyance. In this he was like a monk or a woman who has just become pregnant. To him, the reality of the murder, the horror that was about to descend on Mrs. Marchione and her family, was utterly opaque. He had no imagination, or rather, his imagination was suspended at the level of a child who can say, “Bang, bang, you’re dead,” without being able, in fact, to grasp the nature of death.
Louis, on the other hand, had plenty of imagination and his mind was continually writhing with plans and contingencies. Although he affected the style and speech of a bad street thug, he was in fact the product of a comfortable middle-class home, his mother a schoolteacher, his father an undertaker and part-time preacher. Straight had been the gate and narrow the way in the Louis household: Mandeville’s two older brothers and younger sister had grown up strong in the church and, riding the crest of the civil-rights movement, had risen well in the world-dentist, lawyer, high-school principal.
But in one of those quirks of human development that confounds liberal philosophy, Mandeville, at eight, had had an illumination, or rather its opposite. It suddenly occurred to him that the complexities of the moral life-thinking of others, giving rather than receiving, following the commandments-and the plaguing guilt and conscience that enforced them, could be dispensed with. If one was clever enough to avoid detection and capture, one could do anything, anything. You could curse God in church and nothing would happen. You could sneak into the church and pee on the altar cloth and the minister’s robes. You could steal a kitchen knife and dismember your sister’s kitten. And if you slipped and got caught (and this was almost the best part), you could wail and beg forgiveness, and promise never to do it again and quote the gospel about the prodigal son and all that bullshit, and they believed it!
Of course, one does get a reputation. By fifteen, Mandeville was known around his suburban Philadelphia neighborhood as a bad boy, although he was protected from major consequences by the mighty respectability of his family, by the inability of the community to believe that so sterling a house could bring forth such a monster, and by the belief, sadly strained by the passage of years, that he “was young yet,” and would “grow out of it.”
Mandeville by this time had discovered his talent for armed robbery. He was a highwayman in the lanes behind the elementary school, growing rich on the lunch money and allowances of his terrified victims; lacking sword and pistol he made do with an ice pick. So effective was this instrument, when applied gently to the eyelids, at producing instant compliance, that Mandeville was unprepared when an unusually spunky eleven-year-old girl had not only refused him her lunch money, but had called him a dumb asshole and kicked him painfully in the shins.
He felt he had no choice but to chase her down and work her over a little with the ice pick, thus discovering both the limits of his community’s tolerance and the foolishness of leaving witnesses.
The girl had staggered home, bleeding from dozens of wounds, with a piece of Mandeville’s windbreaker clutched in her hand. The police were called, Mandeville was arrested while trying to burn the torn and bloody windbreaker in his backyard, and at the juvenile hearing scores of children and their parents came forward to accuse him. For his part, Mandeville was outraged that his sincere repentance, his neat suit and polished shoes, and the reputation of his family cut no ice with the presiding judge. He was sentenced to a year in the state reformatory.
On the evening of his first day on the inside he was given the obligatory beating by the boss kid of his cottage, a huge and brutal redneck youth who had by no means enjoyed Mandeville’s advantages in life, and knew it, and was looking forward to making the thin, scholarly looking black boy’s life hell on earth.
This was an error. Simple brutality is rarely a match for evil. Mandeville scrounged around under the cottages the next day until he found a foot and a half of siding with a rusted tenpenny nail sticking through it. He twisted the nail out of its hole, put it in his pocket, and shoved the slat into his belt under his shirt. He also picked up a small chunk of cinder block.
That night, Mandeville was beaten again and forced to perform a sexual act upon the body of the boss kid. This gave him the opportunity to crawl under his blanket and sob, the sound of which provided a cover for what he was really doing, which was putting a needle point on his nail by rubbing it against the cinder block.
Around three in the morning, Mandeville forced the nail back into the hole in the slat, and carrying the slat and the chunk of cinder block, padded over to where the big youth lay sleeping. By the moonlight filtering in through the wire-meshed window he carefully positioned the nail over the youth’s eye and drove it home with a powerful blow of the cinder block. Then he went back to bed.