Yet his heart was running already.
Down some rickety backstreet fire escape, his feet in heavy army brogans feeling, step by step, for the iron leading downward into some basement doorway, down any old dead-end alley at all. Headlong and heartsick down into any dark-curtained sanctuary where no one could find him at all.
No one but Sergeant McGantic.
It was always December in the query room. A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room.
When someone yanked the cord of the unshaded night bulb suspended from the ceiling like an inverted question mark – it had once held a gas flare instead of a Mazda – shadows would leap from the corners in a single do-or-die try for the window; only to subside and swing awhile with the bulb’s slow swinging.
Then the wooden benches along the walls, where so many outcasts had slept, would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning till the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Till morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.
It was not so much a room as a passage wherein were conveyed the pursued, by squadrol, panel wagon and Black Maria, out of the taverns, into the cells and thence swiftly down all the narrowing corridors of tomorrow.
Belonging, as it did, to no one and everyone, a place through which all passed and not one stayed, no one knew what it really looked like. Not even Record Head could have told its color, not even men who had confessed premeditated murder in it could have said whether its ceiling was low or high. Yet exactly as in the cells below, idlers wrote upon its walls: This is my first affair. So please be kind. Never once seeing how the walls upon which they wrote had been hallowed by pain. Only that bleak autumnal light, that had drifted down on so much anguish, told how these walls had been thus made holy.
For these were the very walls men meant when they said of another that he had his back to the wall. Here it was that they put their stubborn necks hard up against the naked brick, lied first to the right and then to the left, denying everything, explaining with scorn, swearing truth was truth and all falsehood wicked: and every word, from the very first burning oath, one long burning lie.
Indeed your query room is your only house of true worship, for it is here that men are brought to their deepest confessions. The more false and farfetched their lies, the deeper and truer the final passion of their admission.
It was here that the truth, so calmly concealed from priest, mother, lawyer, doctor, friend and judge – from their very selves indeed – rose with such revealing fury at last to the tongue. It was here that certain couples, after sleeping beside each other for a decade, came to know one another at last: here the hardened tissue of lies was slit to expose the secret disease. Here the confession which salvages whatever love may remain was brought forth.
As well as the one word spoken too late. Sometimes penitently, sometimes triumphantly, sometimes shamefaced or feigning cynicism, the one word was spoken within this gutter-colored gloom. Too late.
That could, but for pride or fear, have been spoken in daylight and ease only a few hours before.
It was also the place to which they brought those for whom all was over and done, the final hope wrung out like last year’s dishrag and washed down the Drainage Canal. Out to where the walleyed sturgeons roll.
Here too guilt was fashioned, like a homemade church-bazaar cross, out of those materials handiest to the law: a pack of greasy cards, a shopping bag with its bottom ripped out; or a little brown drugstore bottle.
It was here they brought Sparrow Saltskin, a baseball cap clutched in his hand, to sit in a cell by himself and think with a pang: ‘I’m in for it now.’
All day long the voices of women came down to him. Sisters, sweet-hearts, mothers and wives bringing packages and messages, arguments and pleas. Money and tears and light, forced laughter.
Or just hope wrapped in an old comic strip.
The packages had to be left at the desk but fresh hope could be carried all the way down to the very last cell. Where some poor mutt of a cabbie, his tongue still burdened by a dying jag, kept boasting that his Gracie had actually come to see him. Just as if Solly Saltskin had ever said she wouldn’t.
‘Gracie came. Like she said she would. They wouldn’t let her past the desk but she hollered down at me, “Still wit’ you, DeWitt!”’ – all his worries solved because some dowdy old doll with a double chin and hair cascading down to her ears had hollered down to him through the concrete, the steel and the stone. He could face one to fourteen now with a splitting headache and a double-crossing lawyer because some Gracie or other had called some nonsense to him. Hope, tears and nonsense.
Borne on the FM waves of the heart.
There was neither sister, mother, wife nor any Gracie at all to call nonsense down to Solly Saltskin. Only Pokey, one button off his fly and one button on, pouring fuel oil from a rusty little tin can about the legs of the stool where he would keep an all-night vigil. The oil kept the bugs from crawling up his legs and the stool kept his elephantine bottom off the floor.
Only some muttonheaded Pokey. And Record Head Bednar.
The captain kept the punk waiting for him in the query room so long that, when he entered at last he saw, with an inner gratification, that the punk started to his feet – then changed his mind merely to sit looking bleakly anxious.
With the light from some long-dead December filtering down from that one window so far above that even the tireless last leap of the evening shadows could not reach it.
It was always December in the query room.
‘Cards on the table, Steerer,’ Record Head told Sparrow right off, with no intention of revealing his own hand at all. The punk sat with his cap in his hand as if he’d just dropped in for a bit of a chat and would take off as soon as Bednar began to bore him. ‘We got a jacket for you that’ll fit as close as nineteen does to twenty,’ Bednar told him. ‘This ain’t malicious mischief or tampering, that you can get cut down to thirty days, Solly. We can call it the Harrison Act this time. Then it’s the government holdin’ the hammer.’
‘Don’t start the heavy stuff till you feed me,’ Sparrow protested. ‘I was the oney one in the block didn’t get coffee this morning.’
‘It’s the new way we have of doin’ things these days,’ Record Head explained. ‘First you answer the questions, then you eat. You know how long you’re going to fall this time?’
‘I was under the influence of a dramshop, somethin’ legal like that, I didn’t know what I was doin’,’ was the best the punk had for reply. ‘Anyhow you’re s’pposed to feed me just like anybody. I was the oney one in the block didn’t get coffee this morning.’
‘If you didn’t know what you were doing you were out of your mind ’n we’ll put you away in a room of your own. Is that what you’re drivin’ at, Solly?’
‘What I’m drivin’ at is somethin’ to eat.’
‘In the booby house you eat every day.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Sparrow answered earnestly. ‘You’re not allowed to do that because I just ain’t that crazy. I don’t have all my marbles so I ain’t responsible for no Harrison Act. But I got too many marbles to get put away. I was the oney one in the block this morning-’
‘I don’t want to hear about your diet. I want to know about them marbles.’