And they were not going to be easy for him. They had guns, were undoubtedly not unacquainted with their use. If he was ever going to make a move on Billy Boy, and he planned very much on doing that, and as soon as the opportunity came, he was going to have to deal with them.
Or try to.
It wouldn’t hurt to know where this room was in relation to the rest of the setup. Eric stood, stretched, indicated he wanted to go outside. The Fruits looked at him, then at each other, then nodded. Eric walked out into the corridor. It was two thirty-five. He glanced for a moment out the nearest window. Hours earlier it had started to snow.
Now it was becoming a storm …
From his window in Orient Castle, Phillip Holtzman studied the increasingly violent weather. The snow was getting so thick as to sometimes obscure his view of the Atlantic waves entirely.
Phillip fidgeted terribly, fingers drumming on the sill.
“There now, Mr. Holtzman,” his nurse said gently. “Nothing to worry about.”
The fret lines along Phillip’s forehead deepened.
His nurse tried to lead him by his cane hand away from the view, but he shrugged her off, studied the murderous waters.
Phillip’s nurse wondered if she should buzz for someone.
“They’ll never land,” Phillip said then. “They could just circle for hours.”
“There now.” Soothingly.
“Edith hates the landings,” Phillip explained. “Most people, they get bad at the takeoffs. Edith was never like that. The landings, though, they bothered her.” He squinted down toward the driveway in the front of the building. “Where’s the car? How can I get to the airport if the car’s not here?”
His fingers were wild now.
“You yourself said they’d probably circle for hours,” his nurse reminded. “So there isn’t any hurry.”
“But I’d be there, don’t you see? And she’ll feel better knowing I’m down on the ground waiting.” He started to make his way toward the door. “Don’t try and stop me.”
“You’re just in a robe, you can’t go to the airport dressed like that.”
“Don’t try and stop me,” Phillip said again, and with effort, he lifted his cane above his head.
Doctor Horn appeared then.
“You either,” Phillip said, brandishing his cane again.
Doctor Horn stepped away, opening the door wide.
Phillip made it that far, stopped, went outside into the corridor, stopped again, another few paces, slower, another longer pause.
“Let him alone,” Doctor Horn said. “He’ll be exhausted before he reaches the downstairs. Get him then.”
“The weather brings this on,” the nurse said.
“Everything brings this on,” Doctor Horn said. He was moving slowly forward now, keeping Phillip well in view. Phillip carefully started down the stairs. Halfway down he had to sit. He dropped his cane then, put his head in his hands. “Phillip died when Edith did,” Doctor Horn said. He looked at the nurse then. “You know what’s sad? He’s old, yes, and his mind is feeble, yes to that too. But his body is sound, and I’m afraid he’s going to live on like this for years.”
As he stared at the corpse of W. Nelson Stewart, Ryan realized he had never been as stunned by a dead body; he had been with the police force for a dozen years, had fought through many bloody battles in the war—Princeton and Gettysburg to name but two—but nothing he had seen before prepared him for the corpse he was staring at now.
He had never seen a rich man murdered before.
And not just any rich man; this was a famous one. W. Nelson Stewart himself, lying very still, blood still draining from his nose, from his half-bitten-off tongue. Rimless glasses, shattered, still clung to the left ear. Look at his clothes, Ryan thought. Look at his beautiful clothes. And the shine on the leather shoes. And the—
—it’s a murder, he told himself, do something. He walked around the body, hoping he gave the appearance of efficiency. All he was really trying to do was put the events in order. He’d been walking his usual Gramercy Park beat, a chill but clear afternoon, nothing out of the ordinary when this aged biddy began screaming from the front door of one of the mansions and as Ryan hurried toward her, he knew it was the Stewart estate. He expected the usual: a cat in a tree, a pony misbehaving. But when he reached the old woman, he knew it was something a great deal more. He did not want to go inside—he had never come near the inside of such a place—and he was not sure that this screaming tearstained creature had the authority to let him enter, but her urgency was such he could do nothing but obey. So in he went. And there it was: a murdered millionaire.
Never any doubt of the murder. Before Ryan could as much as ask anything, this little blue-eyed small one was proclaiming his guilt. Over and over: “I did it; I did it; it was me.”
The widow, so beautiful, Ryan thought, so pale, said nothing. Simply nodded in agreement.
“I did it.”
Nod.
“I did it. It was me.”
Nod.
The old biddy was the only one in the room crying. She knelt by the rich man, starting to keen.
Ryan, a big man, big and powerful with thick shoulders, felt glad of his strength. There was something odd about the entire setup, and he knew that if his brain failed him, he could always handle the situation with his might.
The fact was, he wasn’t quite sure what to do. He’d been involved every now and then with a murder, but that had been saloon stuff, a burst of rage down in Five Points and a drunk dead on the floor. This was different. Different and strange. Why was the widow just nodding? Why was the little piece of fluff so insistent?
“Why did you kill him?” Ryan asked finally.
“Money.”
Ryan nodded. It was beginning to make a little sense—whether it was the poor or the rich, money was usually in there somewhere. “Goon.”
“He underpaid. I needed more. I asked. Instead of a raise he told me I was fired. I hated him anyway. I lost control.”
Ryan was feeling more in command every moment—until without any warning whatsoever, the little skinny killer cried out and spun around and fell to the floor hard, writhing around.
Ryan was confused; obviously it was the dawning of what had been done that unhinged the little man, but the reaction was so unusual Ryan said, “Get him something,” to the biddy, who looked up tearstained and red-faced and said “What?” and Ryan said, “Water, anything, but be quick about it,” and the force of his voice got her moving.
When she returned with the glass of liquid, she handed it to Ryan. The murderer was sitting on the floor now, staring at nothing. Ryan gave him the water. It seemed to do the trick.
“Thank you,” the killer said. And now he stood, handed the glass back to the biddy. He turned to Ryan now. “I have to go to Central Park,” he said then.
Ryan was too stupefied to reply.
“I’m in a hurry now, excuse me.”
Ryan stopped him easily, held the waif by the elbow.
“I have to go to Central Park!”
“I’m afraid your traveling days are over, son,’’ Ryan said, firmly enough.
The killer jerked free.
Ryan grabbed him again, harder.
Again the killer jerked free.
Odd, Ryan thought. I had a good grip. That was his last thought for a while, because as he watched, the little man made his hand into a fist, his arm into a club, and struck.
Ryan dropped unconscious; he had little choice in the matter .
Sally Levinson sat alone in her Fifth Avenue apartment, watching the storm build. You could sense the power of it, feel its anger. Sally sighed, looked around the room at all the beautiful Mazurskys.
Then she looked down at her lap and the pistol, her father’s heavy pistol. Old it was, but deadly too. Loaded and deadly and, when you lifted it, surprisingly heavy.
Sally lifted it now.
She stared at the thing, feeling more helpless than s
he could remember. If there was one thing she had avoided, or tried to, in her life, it was that quivering feeling of feminine weakness, the inability to accomplish without some man nodding and saying, “You can take a giant step, but only if you say ‘May I.’”
Sally opened her mouth, put the barrel of the pistol inside, closed her soft lips around the metal, hesitated a long moment. It tasted like hell. She dropped the pistol back into her lap, and studied it, then the Madonnas. The pistol and the paintings. Back and forth, the paintings and the pistol.
Dead weight, both …
As he walked up toward Central Park, Aleck Bell could not recall a more beautiful afternoon. True, it was cold, but he hated the heat. When he left Edinburgh, he first lived in Canada and that was like his home, cold. Good and cold.
But his mood did not match the day. So many confusions to sort out. All he really was, all he really wanted to be, was a teacher to the deaf. And here, now, he was involved in the world of invention. Two years before, he had been elected president of the Articulation Teachers of the Deaf and Dumb—a genuine honor and deserved or not, at least he was not some outsider. He cared for the deaf—his fiancée Mabel Hubbard had been totally deaf since she’d been stricken with scarlet fever at the age of five.
He belonged with the deaf, Bell felt; he understood the deaf. He never was perturbed when he was in their presence, but he was perturbed now, worried about his invention, the patenting of it, the odd business with Elisha Gray—
“If you please, sir.”
Bell stopped at the corner to let a carriage go by, but stopping was a mistake on Fifth Avenue, because of all the beggars.
“If you please, sir,” the beggar said again. This was a surprisingly young man with a scarred face and the left hand gone. In his right, he held a cup. He wore, Bell noted, his war uniform.
Bell dropped a coin into the cup, moved to the hopping stones, hurried on. It was extraordinary, the number of beggars on the streets, so many of them from the war. He had read the figures once: forty thousand dead from New York State, half of those from the city. And untold wounded from the city too. Thousands upon thousands. Many of them had decent jobs. Many more were taken care of by their families.
But the maimed seemed to beg.
And they were so young, many of them; so painfully young and ruined. But then, it had been just ten years plus since Appomattox.
Now a blind one loomed ahead, a small child guiding him.
Bell put another coin in this cup, moved around the two, buoyed because ahead now he could see the treetops of the park. Then he thought of Gray again, and the buoyancy deflated. He had been told of an article in The New York Times in which Gray had referred to what he was working on as a “telephone.” And had sent the sound of some tune or other hundreds of miles and a Western Union official had said that someday they would be able to transmit vocal sound, voices, over wires.
After all these years, after so many hours, what a torment it would be to come in second. Bell wondered how he would survive such an eventuality.
Perhaps not all that well.
Occasionally, ideas were current. In the air. Others were working on the transmitting of voices. Bell knew that And back in the gloried days before Jesus was selected, there were many sincere Messiahs. The idea of a Messiah was in the air. And probably there were many, dust now, forgotten dust, who licked their wounds in envy as the carpenter became legendary.
Bell stopped.
For there it was. Just across the street. The gloried park. He was about to enter when the most unsettling vision of all moved beside him: half a man. Half a man, a legless beggar, He had a thick chest and what must have been powerful arms, for he propelled himself along surprisingly quickly. His thickly gloved hands pushed into the ground and he tilted his half body forward at an angle and when it came to rest the arms switched from behind the body to well in front and then the body tilted forward again.
He stared up at Bell, the most appalling look in his bulging eyes. He held his cup in one hand, but did not raise it entreatingly.
Odd, Bell thought.
He turned his attention to crossing the street, which he did quite rapidly, leaving the half-man considerably behind. Now Bell stopped and stared at the beauty. The trees, the walks, the glory of it all. Central Park. Four o’clock. Dusk.
Ahhhh…
Theo raced out of the house and turned toward Lexington Avenue. He wore a knit sweater and a scarf and a wool coat and cap and in his pocket he carried the sharpest small knife in the kitchen.
Why the knife, why the knife?
He ran on, knowing one thing only, and that was he had to get to Central Park immediately.
But why the knife?
He hoped he would find a hansom cab to take him straight to the park but when he got to Lexington there were none in sight. Now here came a horsecar. Take it or not? It wouldn’t go straight to the park, he would have to get off at 59th and run to Fifth. Take it or not? He looked in vain for an empty cab.
The horsecar stopped, he got in, paid. It was pulled along by a single horse and there were thirty other passengers along with him, but the beast made good time. Theo took out the knife, looked at it closely. The edge was a razor, the point needle-sharp.
A woman across was watching him.
“It’s a knife,’’ he told her quietly,
She moved away.
The horsecar continued quickly on. Theo tied his scarf around his throat, pulled his cap down. Cold. It was getting cold. No point in catching cold. Odd—he was a poet but there were no rhymes —only cold, cold, cold—
—the horsecar came to a sudden halt.
Theo jumped up, ran to the driver, asked; in reply the driver pointed up ahead—
—half a dozen pigs were fighting in the middle of Lexington Avenue.
Around them were as many foreigners, all shouting at the animals, at each other, trying to get the situation straightened out without being bitten.
“I must get to the park,” Theo said.
The horsecar driver looked at him. He worked seventeen hours a day and his salary for those hours was two dollars and fifty cents. He was in no hurry.
“Central Park,” Theo said
The horsecar driver folded his arms, waited.
Theo gave a cry, jumped from the vehicle, ran to the foreigners, pushed them aside, grabbed the nearest pig, lifted it, threw it across the road. Then he grabbed the second, threw that. The third was an enormous animal and as Theo grabbed it it tried to bite him but he clubbed it and threw it the farthest of all—
—the other pigs ran—
—so did Theo, back to the horsecar. He stared at the driver and said “Central Park!” very distinctly, and the driver, frightened, took, out his fear on his beast, which never made better time to 59th Street, Theo’s stop. He raced the remaining blocks to the park.
It was dusk when he got there…
***
“… PARK…” Billy Boy said.
Trude stood beside the giant. The perspiration had never been this thick, the pain this evident—but the connection had never been this strong. It was almost like taking part in an ordinary conversation. “The time?”
“… FOUR …”
That was the moment when Bell went wandering. Down in the lower area, near Fifth, near the trees, by the pond. “Kill him,” Trude said then. “Now, right now, kill Bell.”
“… NO!…”
It was the first time he had ever been questioned by a test person. For a moment he was halted by the single negative syllable. Then he moved close and began to whisper at first, gradually building. “Evil.
The man is evil.
The man must die.
Bell.
Bell is evil.
Bell must be taken.
Taken away.”
The breathing was deepening again. Heaving desperate inhales. Trude continued his hymn.
“You
You are? the blessed.
Taking evil a
way is blessed.
You must take evil away.
Now.
Bell must be taken.
Taken and killed.
Kill Bell!”
Trude waited, watching as the giant’s body trembled. Then:
“… KILL BELL …”
The shadows were deepening, the park beginning to empty, but Aleck could not bring himself to return to his boardinghouse quite yet. The tranquillity of the place held him—hundreds of species of trees, all brought here to this magical place in the center of a giant city. Above him, he saw some red-winged blackbirds changing branches.
Tomorrow he would find peace—tomorrow the patent would be in and over and done. No more worry. He had no idea of the future of his telephone but he felt confident there would be uses.
Some, assuredly, would benefit the deaf.
Behind him now, the half-man was studying his sad reflection in the pond. Some departing citizens gave him money, though he did not openly solicit anything. Hard, Bell decided, if you were a veteran, a beggar, to suddenly alert the public that all you wanted was some quiet in the park.
Bell turned for a moment, peered toward the west side of the park. Somewhere, he had heard, ground was already broken for what was to be a splendid building for the wealthy. Enormous apartments with high ceilings and workmen imported from Italy. It was doubted that the rich would want to live in such proximity to each other, much less would they want to live as far away from everything else of interest in’ the city as 72nd Street.
And then Bell heard his name.