Death Wish (12 page)

Dundee said, “I guess this Amercon deal's put you back on your feed, hey? That's a good break, getting that thing tossed your way. I kind of envy you.”

It made him feel guilty because by now he ought to be on top of the case, he ought to have every figure and fact on the tip of his tongue; he felt like a schoolboy who'd daydreamed his way through his homework.

That afternoon he made a great effort to buckle down to it. But when he left the office he realized how little of it had penetrated. His mind was too crowded to admit digits and decimals; they simply didn't matter enough any more.

Now damn it, straighten up. It's your job you're risking
.

He had a hamburger in Squire's coffee shop on the corner and afterward he still felt hungry but he didn't order dessert. He kept remembering Dundee's compliments. He walked home and weighed himself and discovered he was down to 175 for the first time in ten years. The skin hung a little loose on his face and belly but he could feel his ribs. He decided to join a health club and start doing daily workouts in a gym—there was one in the Shelton Hotel a few blocks up from the office, three or four of the accountants went there every day.
You've got to be in shape
.

In shape for what?

He thumbed through the
Post
and his eyes paused on an ad for a karate school and that put everything together; he said aloud, “You're nuts,” and threw the newspaper across the room. But ten minutes later he found he was thinking about going back to that same bar on Broadway and he was now alert enough to realize why: it wasn't the bar he was thinking of, it was the walk home.

It brought him bolt upright in the chair. He wanted that kid to try it again.

He got up and began to pace back and forth through the apartment. “Now take—take it easy. For God's sake don't get carried away.”

He had started talking to himself sometime in the past week or two; he realized he was going to have to watch that or one day he'd catch himself doing it on the street. At least he began to feel he understood the people you saw doing it on the sidewalks—walking along by themselves having loud animated arguments with imaginary companions, complete with gestures and positive emphatic answers to questions no one in earshot had asked. You passed them all the time and you edged away from them and refused to meet their eyes. But now he was beginning to know them.

“Easy,” he muttered again. He knew he was getting as filled up with inflated bravado as that kid had been last night. One accidental victory and he had become as smug as an armed guard in a prison for the blind.

You were lucky. That kid was scared. Most of them aren't scared. Most of them are killers
. And he remembered the rage that had flooded his tissues, overcoming every inhibition: if he'd pulled that on a veteran street mugger he'd have been dead now, or in an emergency ward bleeding from sixteen slices.

He'd had twenty-four hours of euphoria; it was time to be realistic. It wasn't his courage that had saved him; it wasn't even the poor weapon, the roll of quarters; it was luck, the kid's fear. Maybe it had been the kid's first attempt.

But what if it had been a hardened thug? Or a pack of them?

His toe caught the discarded
Post
and he bent to pick it up and take it to the wastebasket. The ad for the karate school returned to mind, and the resolve to take up gym workouts. That's no answer, he thought. It took years to develop hand-to-hand skills; he'd heard enough cocktail party chitchat to know that much. Two, three years and you might be good enough to earn yourself a black belt or whatever they called it. But what good was that against a killer with a gun, or six kids with knives?

He turned on the TV and sat down to watch it. One of the local unaffiliated channels; a rerun of a horse-opera series the networks had canceled years ago. Cowboys picking on sodbusters and a drifting hero standing up for the farmers against the gun-slingers. He watched it for an hour. It was easy to see why Westerns were always popular and he was amazed he hadn't understood it before. It was human history. As far back as you wanted to go, there were always men who tilled the soil and there were always men on horseback who wanted to exploit them and take everything away from them, and the hero of every myth was the hero who defended the farmers against the raiders on horseback, and the constant contradiction was that the hero himself was always a man on horseback. The bad guys might be Romans or Huns or Mongols or cattlemen, it was always the same, and the good guy was always a reformed Roman or Hun or Mongol or cattleman; either that or a farmer who learned to fight like a Hun. Organize the farmers into imitation Huns and beat the real Huns at their own game.

There had never been a successful TV series about a Gandhi; there were only cowboys and private eyes. Robin Hood was a gunslinger in a white hat and the Sheriff of Nottingham was a gunslinger in a black hat and there was no difference between ways of fighting, it was only a question of who fought best. And most of the time the theme was the same: you had to be willing to stand and fight for your own or the gunslingers on horseback would take it away from you.

You had to be willing to fight. That was what the hero always taught the sodbusters.

We have been teaching ourselves that lesson for thousands of years and we haven't learned it yet
.

He was beginning to learn it. It was what made him want to return to the dark street and find the scared kid with the knife.

I feel like a fight. So help me I feel like a fight
.

But you had to use your head. Your guts said one thing, your head said another, and your guts usually won; but still you had to use your head, and the head made it crystal clear it wasn't enough to let blind rage sweep over you—because next time it wouldn't be a scared kid, next time it would be a hoodlum with a gun, and lunatic rage was no match for a gun. The only match for a gun was a gun of your own.

12

Jack handed him the drink. “Prosit.”

He carried it to the couch and sat. “You think she's really feeling better then.”

“Dr. Metz said he was encouraged.”

“They're not going to use insulin shock?”

“He wants to hold off a little while and see if she comes out of it by herself.” Jack pulled a chair out and sat down with elbows on the dining table. A pack of cards sat neatly squared on the table; he had probably worn them out playing solitaire. He looked haggard. “I guess there's nothing else to do. Just wait and see. Christ, but it doesn't get any easier, Pop.”

“I know.”

“Watching her just sit on the edge of the bed like that, picking fluff.…”

“I'd like to see her.”

“Believe me, it wouldn't make you feel any better.”

“They're excluding me from things, these doctors. There's no sane reason for it.”

“Her reasons aren't sane right now, Pop. But I'll ask Metz, I'll see what I can do.”

Paul swallowed a sulfurous comment. He knew if he kicked up enough of a fuss they would let him see her, but was there sufficient point to it? Yet in the meantime they were acting as though he were a poor relation with some sort of communicable disease. He was insulted. But Jack seemed too vulnerable; his eyes now pleaded with Paul not to ask him any more questions to which he didn't have answers.

He set down his glass empty. He was doing a lot of fast drinking lately. Well it was understandable, wasn't it; he wasn't going to start worrying about
that
, there were too many other things to think about right now.

He knew what he wanted to ask Jack; he wasn't sure how to lead into it. Finally he said, “I was attacked the other night.”

“You
what
?”

“A kid on the street. He had a knife. I suppose he wanted money.”

“You suppose? You don't know?”

“I scared him off.” He took pride in saying it.

Jack gaped at him. “You scared.…” It was unconsciously a comic reaction; Paul had to force himself not to smile. “For God's sake, Pop.”

“Well, I suppose I was lucky. A Negro kid, probably not more than twelve or thirteen. He had a knife but he didn't seem to know what to do with it. I yelled at him and started to hit him—I was mad clear through, you can understand that. I didn't stop to think. I suppose if he'd known what he was doing I'd have been sliced to ribbons.”

“Jesus,” Jack whispered. He stared, not blinking.

“Anyhow the next thing I knew he was running away.”

“But—where'd this happen?”

“Right around the corner from the apartment. Seventy-fourth between West End and Amsterdam.”

“Late at night?”

“Not very late, no. It must have been around eleven.”

“What did the police do?”

“Nothing. I didn't call them.”

“Christ, Pop, you should have—”

“Oh, to hell with that, I didn't get much of a look at him. What could they have done? By the time I got anywhere near a phone that kid was six blocks away.”

“A junkie?”

“I have no idea. I guess it's likely, isn't it?”

“Most of them are.”

“Well, the truth is I was angry. I was madder than I've ever been in my life.”

“So you just started hitting the kid? Jesus, that's a ballsy thing to do.…”

“Well, I wasn't thinking straight, obviously. I never landed a blow on him—he bolted and ran the minute I started to swing at him. I had a roll of coins in my hand, I suppose he mistook it for something more lethal.” Paul leaned forward for emphasis. “But suppose it hadn't been a mixed-up kid? Suppose it had been a real tough?”

“You're leading up to something, aren't you?”

“Jack, they're on every street. They jump people at five o'clock in broad daylight. They hold up subway cars as if they were stagecoaches. All right, it happens all the time, but what are we supposed to do about it? What am
I
supposed to do about it? Throw my arms up over my head and yell for help?”

“Well, usually if you just keep calm and give them the money they'll leave you alone, Pop. All most of them want is money. There aren't too many of them like the ones who killed Mom.”

“So we're just supposed to turn the other cheek, are we?” He stood up abruptly. It made Jack's head skew back. Paul said, “Damn it, that's not enough for me. Not any more. The next time one of the bastards accosts me in the street I want to have a gun in my pocket.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“What for? Wait until the next mugger jumps me and decides to stick a knife in me?” He was on his feet and it felt stagey, foolish; for something to do he picked up his empty glass and carried it to the bar cabinet. He talked while he mixed a drink.

“Jack, you're in with all the criminal lawyers, you know people in the District Attorney's office. I want a pistol permit.”

“It's not that easy, Pop.”

“I read somewhere there are half a million New Yorkers who own firearms.”

“Sure. Shotguns for hunting, mostly. The rest of them are mainly war souvenirs and rifles. A certain number of people own guns illegally, of course, but that's a violation of the Sullivan Law—you could get sent up for twenty years for carrying a gun without a ticket.”

“What about all the storekeepers who keep pistols under their cash registers? What about them?”

“Pop, it's a different kind of ticket. The Bureau of Licenses issues pistol permits in two categories—premises and carry. You could probably get a premises permit if you wanted to stow a captured German Luger in your apartment or something like that, but that's totally different from getting a permit to carry a concealed weapon on the streets.”

“Then what about all these gangsters who've got licenses to carry guns?”

“It's a corrupt city, Pop, we all know that. If you've got ten or twelve thousand dollars to spare to grease certain people, you can get a concealed-pistol permit. It's not fair but it's the way things work. It's an outrageous price, but the Mafia can afford it and it protects them from the inconvenience of being run in on a weapons charge. But I never heard of an ordinary law-abiding citizen willing to spend that kind of money on a gun. Even if you did, it would make them suspect you were some sort of criminal. They'd start bugging your apartment and your phone and you'd live your whole life under surveillance. Is that what you want?”

“All I want is the machinery to defend myself.”

“Have you thought of moving out of the city?”

“Have you?” he countered.

“God damn right I have. As soon as Carol's on her feet we're getting out of this hell-hole. I've already started reading the real estate ads. You ought to do the same thing, Pop.”

“No. I thought about it. I won't do it.”

“Why?”

“I was born here. I've spent my whole life here. I tried living in the suburbs. It didn't work. I'm too old to change, I know my limitations.”