A room with two lamps, one red and one blue. A heart-shaped face, so dear, so dear, that came to him out of the gloom. Near a candle red as wine.
He came to the open street and from somewhere near at hand, as if borne by the wires overhead, heard the familiar revelry of some old juke-box tune.
Directly across the street, above a tavern built below street level, an unlit neon legend announced:
PINK KITTEN KLUB
All cats welcome
That must be the joint, he hoped vaguely, and just as he went down the steps, as if they’d been waiting all morning only for his arrival, the neon legend lit up in green and red and the juke-box tune came clearer.
‘I wonder who’s boogin’ my woogie now?’
Frankie touched the bandage below his elbow where his fix money was wadded; his drinking money was in the half-dozen halves and quarters in his pockets. He pushed at the big red door.
‘Looks like some cats swing right here,’ Frankie observed, looking all about.
The captain felt impaled. It had been a bit too long since he had laughed. Felt joy or sorrow or simple wonder. When a light ripple, half protest and half mockery, moved down the other side of the wall he felt somehow appalled that caged men should laugh at anything. The ragged edge of that careless laughter hung like a ripped scarf upon an iron corner of his heart.
An iron heart, an iron life. Laughter and tears had corroded in his breast. In the whitish light of the query room a tic took a corner of his mouth and his lips worked trying to stop it, like a drunk trying to work off a fly.
For something had happened to the captain’s lips as well as to his heart. All his honest policeman’s life he had guarded both so well, knowing how little time there was, in the roistering world, for pity and loose talk and always too much traffic in the sort of thing anyhow. Too many women holding out pity like a day-old sweet roll out of a greasy bag – ‘We are all members of one another’ – what had that half-crazed priest of the line-up meant by that?
Something that even the punk had seemed to know when he’d said, ‘Everybody’s a habitual in his heart’? What did it mean that all the guilty felt so certain of their own innocence while he felt so uncertain of his own? It was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry. As if those caged there had learned secretly that all men are innocent in a way no captain might ever understand.
‘I know you,’ Bednar assured them quietly, ‘I know you all. You think you’re all members of one another, somethin’ like that.’
They thought they were putting something over on him in there; while all the while it was himself who was putting it over on them.
Yet the glare in his eyes seemed to fill some small part of a need he had never felt before. And the unrecorded arrest slips littering his desk seemed written in a code devised by ancestral enemies.
‘If you don’t pull out of the blues you’ll be writin’ your own name on the sheet,’ Cousin Kvorka had joked with him that forenoon. Since that moment Bednar had been trying to rid himself of a compulsive yearning to write his name there where for so long he had written only the names of the guilty and the doomed.
The guilty and the doomed. He saw that steerer’s small white face, exhausted like a child’s from crying in his cell, and in one moment his own heart seemed a bloodstained charge sheet with space left upon it for but one more name.
In a suffocating need of absolution he took the pen and wrote, in a steady hand, corner to corner across the sheet, the meaningless indictment: Guilty.
Immediately he had done that through his mind there careened a carnival of rogues he had long forgotten. All those he’d disposed of, one way or another, from behind this same scarred desk. A shambling gallery of the utterly condemned. With that same exhausted small white face following everyone so anxiously, from so far behind. ‘I only done my honest copper’s duty,’ the captain defended himself against the steerer and against them all, his fingers spreading involuntarily to conceal the word written across the sheet.
Yet somewhere along the line a light in his heart had gone out like an overcharged light bulb, leaving only some sort of brittle husk for a heart; a husk ready to crumble to a handful of dust. ‘My honest copper’s duty,’ he repeated like a man trying to work a charm which had once worked for someone else: to cast out blue-moon moods, low-hanging memories and all bad dreams.
He said it twice and yet guilt like a dark bird perched forever near, so bald and wingless and cold and old, preening its dirty feathers with an obscene beak. ‘I’m one sick bull,’ Bednar decided, ‘it’s time to go home.’ But it had been time to go home for hours and yet he sat on as though manacled to his unfiled arrest slips and that single word so firmly written beneath his hand.
He dried the sweat off his forehead with a blood-red bandanna, then tossed the rag aside as if he had touched his temples with the blood of others. ‘He wasn’t nothin’ to nobody, the punk,’ the captain recalled.
Then why did it feel like turning informer, why did he feel he had sold out a son, like being paid off in gold? For if everyone were members of one another – he put the notion down. That would mean those on the other side of the wall were his own kind.
It could not be. For if they were anything less than enemies he had betrayed himself a thousandfold. It would be too much to make a traitor out of a man for having done his simple duty. But what if he had done traitor’s work all his life without realizing it? He tried to rise, for he had to find out, he had to find out what he had done to himself by doing his simple captain’s duty.
‘Cut out that racket in there,’ he warned the ceaseless murmur behind the walclass="underline" for a moment he had the delusion that they were examining his anguish through some peephole, nudging each other and winking, as convicts do, as they watched. ‘I never hated a man of you,’ he tried to appease them. And heard a knowing reply: ‘Nor loved any man at all.’
Heard his own lips say that and felt himself growing angry. What ghostly kind of good would it have done a soul if he had? What except to delay justice awhile? For every man of them, he knew, had been guilty to the hilt, guilty of every sort of malice of which the human heart is capable. What they hadn’t done to others had been only through indolence and lack of a proper chance.
For every man was secretly against the law in his heart, the captain knew; and it was the heart that mattered. There were no men innocent of intent to transgress. If they were human – look out. What was needed, he had learned long ago, was higher walls and stronger bars – there was no limit to what they were capable of.
Somewhere along the line he had learned, too, that not one was worth the saving. So he’d been right in saving none but himself. And if that had left them all to be members of one another, then it had left him to be a member of no one at all. Had, indeed, left him feeling tonight like the most fallen of anybody.
The captain realized vaguely that the thing he had held secretly in his heart for so long against them all was simply nothing more than a hostility toward men and women as men and women.
And now so lost to all men and women that the murmur beyond the walls troubled him like the voices of friends he had denied ever having known. ‘The bums ’r gettin’ my goat, that’s all,’ he decided, pulling himself together. They had begun by stealing his sleep. He listened in fevered hope of hearing them call out to all the world that he was no better than the very worst of them. That he knew as well as themselves who was guiltiest tonight.
Silence. They blamed no one. They had the brassbound nerve to take the rap and forgive him for everything. Everything.