‘Don’t like shashlyk.’
The captain didn’t press the point. He watched the punk wipe sweat off his glasses. The punk looked sick to death. He felt the shoulders tremble under his hands and took his hands away – the captain didn’t like the feel of a trembling man.
Then looked at the punk just as at some sort of thing, and his tone came as hard as newly forged manacles. ‘Pick up your cap. Either you’ll play ball or I’ll give you to Mr Schnackenberg. I’ll be in court myself to make it stick.’
Just outside the room someone was trying to strike a bargain with a couple arresting officers. ‘You let me alone ’n I’ll let you alone.’ In that moment the captain saw the punk more clearly than he had ever seen him before: a sharp little alley terrier driven to the wall, trying to understand, out of cunning and unmixed fright, what his pursuer’s next move would be.
‘You’re nailin’ me to the cross, Captain,’ Sparrow pleaded.
The captain started, he hadn’t really seen it in that light at all. ‘I’m nailin’ you?’ he wanted to know with genuine indignation. ‘What the hell you think they’re doin’ to me?’
‘I’ll take the rap first myself,’ Sparrow told him with something like finality.
For that was just how that Chester Morris had said it that time he was Boston Blackie at the Pulaski. Yet a tiny bubble swelled in his throat and could not burst. ‘You must think you’re talkin’ to some kind of stool pigeon ’r somethin’,’ he challenged the captain. Just as if Bednar had seen Boston Blackie that time too and knew his own part, he leaned over and touched Sparrow’s shoulder paternally.
‘Get a lawyer, lad,’ he counseled the punk gently. ‘Get a good lawyer. I want to see you get every break you got comin’. You’re going to need every one of them.’
‘Can I have coffee now, Captain?’ Sparrow asked wistfully.
But the captain had put his head upon his hands as if he were the one in need of confession. Sparrow leaned forward and saw, with a strange uneasiness, that the captain was feigning sleep.
They didn’t call him Machine any more. The marks didn’t want a junkie dealing to them. He didn’t look regular to them any longer, they were not certain why. They sensed something had gone wrong, he looked so like a stranger at times. He saw this in their eyes and felt it in their voices; and somehow didn’t care at all. He had the feeling he wouldn’t be hanging around Schwiefka’s long enough for it to matter.
Bednar was working on the punk was the word at Schwiefka’s. There was no word that Bednar had broken him down. Frankie saw a small bet made, between Meter Reader and Schwiefka, that the punk wouldn’t break at all. But it was Meter Reader who believed in Sparrow – and who had ever heard of Meter Reader winning a bet on anything? ‘I’ll wait till I see Umbrellas backin’ the kid,’ Frankie thought wryly, ‘when I see that I’ll know it’s time to run.’
Meanwhile he wandered restlessly between the room, the Tug & Maul, and Schwiefka’s. He couldn’t stand the room and he couldn’t afford to drink all day with Antek and he no longer belonged at Schwiefka’s.
‘The dealer’s on the needle,’ was the whisper, and overnight he was an outcast of outcasts and a new dealer – that very Bird Dog to whom Frankie had misdealt – sat in the slot. If Frankie wanted to take a hand the boys made room for him. Just a bit too much room, he fancied; the way they’d make room for a syphilitic. For the man on the needle, though he be your brother, is a stranger to every human who lives without morphine.
He sensed pity mixed with fear in the voices of those who spoke to him now. Yet Schwiefka let him take care of the door that Sparrow had so long and so faithfully guarded. He drew five dollars a night and tips, the same wage Sparrow had drawn. And each night, when he paid Frankie off, Schwiefka averted his eyes and asked, ‘You tried Kippel’s, Frankie?’ Frankie would shrug, he understood well enough. Schwiefka wanted him to be working for somebody else if the punk should start pointing.
Frankie would try to look as though he didn’t know he were hot at all. He needed that fiver too badly. Each night now, after closing time, he spent half of it for a quarter-grain fix in Louie’s old room. He paid Blind Pig the two-fifty in quarters and halves and fixed himself with the help of one of Louie’s flashy ties and that same hypo he’d stolen overseas. ‘Just enough to put me to sleep,’ he would tell Blind Pig, ‘I ain’t doin’ no joy-poppin’ these days. All I want is enough to keep from gettin’ sick.’
‘Thought you was off the stuff, Dealer.’ Pig would feign surprise that anyone who wanted to be off it should go on feeding the habit all the same.
‘When you come to the end it’s the end, that’s all.’ Frankie acknowledged his defeat in the wan winter light.
Each night at Schwiefka’s felt like the last night of guarding any man’s door: as each day seemed now it must surely be the last of all with Sophie. Sometimes he wondered idly how long it could be before she caught on to what was wrong. Then it would come over him that she had known from the day he’d come back and every day since. ‘She don’t say nothin’ because it’s her one big kick. Like watchin’ me crawl around the floor pickin’ up the dishes that time.’ An hour later, recalling that he had entertained such a suspicion, would reproach himself. ‘I ought to be ashamed of myself, thinkin’ of Zosh like that – how could she know about me when all I’m ever doin’, when we’re in the room together, is layin’ on the bed?’ He would make up his mind, there and then, to run for it. If she knew it was time to run and if she didn’t know it was time to run before she found out.
Yet each night found him back at the door trying to overhear some mention of Solly Saltskin’s name. Though he listened every night for word of the punk all he could learn was that the punk was still being held in one station or another. And would try in his heart to believe that Sparrow wouldn’t finger him in any station at all.
The dread stirred with his every waking. ‘This is the day Bednar busts the kid.’ Then the need of the quarter-grain charge would start coming on so strong he would have to admit, even to himself, that the reason he hadn’t yet run, in the very teeth of arrest, was that he feared to go far from the room above the Safari. ‘That’s just what Bednar’s bankin’ on too,’ he felt.
One night when the table was filled and Schwiefka didn’t want the door opened for anyone for a while, Frankie stood on the fire escape and saw how the unseen lights of the Loop were reflected in the sky like light from some gigantic forge beating in the pit of the city’s enormous heart. A heart seeming now to beat in suppressed panic. A panic lying in wait, each midnight hour, at his own heart’s forge.
Night of the All Nite restaurants, the yellow-windowed machine-shop night where daylight was being prepared on lathes. Night of the thunderous anvils preparing the city’s iron heart for tomorrow’s iron traffic. Night of the city lovers, the Saturday Night till Sunday Morning lovers, making love on rented beds with the rent not due till Monday.
Night of iron and lovers’ laughter: night without mercy. Into a morning without tears.