PLATINUM POHL (30 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
But not fast enough. La Croy had the guard’s gun, and he had not taken his hand off it. The shot went into Julius’s throat, right between the Adam’s apple and the chin, and spatters of blood flew back to strike Marcus’s face like hot little raindrops. Two other men boiled out of the guard shack, one limping and swearing, the other Marcus’s pretend-father, his face scared and dangerous. As La Croy pushed Julius out of the way and shoved himself behind the wheel the other two jumped into the back of the car, fat, fearsome Muzzi reaching for the backpack of weapons and money with an expression of savage joy … .
And from behind them, a sudden roar of an engine and the quick zap of a siren.
Everybody was shouting at once. Marcus, crushed under the weight of the killer Muzzi, could not see what was happening, but he could feel the car surge forward, stop, spin and make a dash in another direction. There was a sudden lurch and crash as they broke through something, and then it stopped and the men were out of the car, firing at something behind them. Julius would never get back on the force, Marcus thought, struggling to wipe the blood off his face—and whether he himself would live through the next hour was at best an open question.
For Johnny Harvey everything had begun going terribly wrong even before they broke through the wall, and gone downhill ever since. It was just luck they’d been able to kill the security guard and get his gun, just luck that they’d been able to hide in a place where there was a telephone, long enough for Muzzi to make his phone call on the secret number and beg, or threaten, the big man to get them out. The arrangements were complicated—a delivery of guns and money, a faked holdup to send the cops in the wrong direction, a whomped-up riot to keep the cops busy—but they’d been working pretty well, and that was luck, too, lots of luck, more than they had a right to expect—
But the luck had run out.
When the boy came with the guns it was bad luck that the driver was an off-duty cop who recognized La Croy, worse luck still that there was a police car right behind them. La Croy did the only thing he could do. There was no way out of the street they were in except back past the cops, and that was impossible. So he’d slammed the car through the gate of the powerplant. And there they were, inside the powerplant, with four terrified engineers lying facedown on the floor of the control room and forty thousand New York City cops gathering outside. The boy was scared shitless; the old man, his vision gear
crushed, was lying hopeless and paralyzed beside the guards. “At least we’ve got hostages,” said La Croy, fondling his gun, and Muzzi, staring around the control room of the nuclear plant, said:
crushed, was lying hopeless and paralyzed beside the guards. “At least we’ve got hostages,” said La Croy, fondling his gun, and Muzzi, staring around the control room of the nuclear plant, said:
“Asshole! We’ve got the whole fuckin
city
for a hostage!”
city
for a hostage!”
The job as companion and bedpan changer to old Mrs. Feigerman paid well, worked easy and was generally too good to last. When it ended Nillie de Harcourt didn’t complain. She turned to the next chapter in her life: bag lady. That meant eight hours a day sitting before a screening table in her pale green smock, chatting with the bag ladies on either side of her; while magnets pulled out the ferrous metals, glass went one way, to be separated by color, and organics went another. The biggest part of the job was to isolate organics so they would not poison the sludge-making garbage. The work was easy enough, and not particularly unpleasant once you got past the smell. But that was too good to last, too, because anything good was always going to be too good for Gwenna Anderson Vanilla Fudge de Harcourt. So when she saw The Man moving purposefully toward her through the clinking, clattering, smelly aisles she was not surprised. “Downstairs, Nillie,” he said, flashing the potsie. “We need you.” She didn’t ask why. She just looked toward her supervisor, who shrugged and nodded; and took off the green smock regretfully, and folded it away, and did as she was told. He didn’t tell her what it was about. He didn’t have to. Trouble was what it was about, because that was always what it was about. She followed him into the waiting police car without comment. The driver in the front started away at once, siren screaming. In the back, the cop turned on a tape recorder, cleared his throat and said, “This interview is being conducted by Sergeant Marvin Wagman. Is your name Gwenna Anderson?”
“That was my name before I married de Harcourt.”
“According to records, Mrs. de Harcourt, you have fourteen arrests and six convictions for prostitution, five arrests no convictions for shoplifting, two arrests one conviction for possession of a controlled substance and one arrest no conviction for open lewdness.”
Nillie shrugged. “You’re talking about fifteen years ago, man.”
Wagman looked at her with annoyance, but also, Nillie noted, a lot more tension than anything he had said so far would justify. “Right,” he said sarcastically, “so now you’re a success story. You married the boss and went into business for yourself. Dope business, numbers business, bookmaking business.”
“If I was all those things, would I have to get work as a bag lady?”
“I ask the questions,” he reminded her, but it was a fair question and he knew it. He didn’t know the answer, but then hardly anybody did but Nillie herself—and most people wouldn’t have believed it if told. “You have a son named Marcus Garvey de Harcourt?” he went on.
Suddenly Nillie sat bolt upright. “Mister, did something happen to Marcus?”
The sergeant was human after all; he hesitated, and then said, “I’m not supposed to tell you anything, just make sure I’ve got the right person. But your son’s in good health last I heard.”
“Mister!”
“I have to ask you these questions! Now, did you ever work for Henry Gambiage?”
“Not exactly. Sort of; all the girls did, at least he was getting a cut on everything. But that was before his name was Gambiage. What about Marcus?”
“And do you and your husband work for him now?”
“Not me!”
“But your husband?” he insisted.
“Take the Fifth,” she said shortly. “Anyway, you ain’t read me my rights.”
“You’re not under arrest,” he told her, and then clicked off the tape recorder. “That’s all I can say, Miz de Harcourt,” he finished, “so please don’t ask me any more questions.” And she didn’t, but she was moving rapidly from worry to terror. Mentioning her son was bad enough; mentioning Gambiage a lot worse. But when a cop called her “Miz” and used the word “please”—then it was time to get scared.
It was all but physically impossible for Nillie to plead with a policeman, but she came as close to it in the rest of this ride as ever since the first afternoon she’d been picked up for soliciting a plainclothes on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, fifteen years old, turned out on the turf just two days before and still thinking that some day, maybe, she’d get back to the Smokies of eastern Tennessee. She gazed out at the dirty, rainy streets as they whizzed by at fifty miles an hour through rapidly moving traffic, and wished she could be sick. Marcus! If anything happened to him—
Her view of the dingy streets was suddenly streaked with tears, and Nillie began to pray.
When Nillie prayed she did not address any god. What religion she had she had picked up in the Women’s House of Detention, the last time she was there—the last time she ever would be there, she had vowed. It was just after the big riots in New York, and the first night in her cell she dropped off to sleep and found herself being touched by a big, strong woman with a hard, huge face. Nillie automatically assumed she was a bull-dyke. She was wrong. The woman was a missionary. She got herself arrested simply so she could preach to the inmates. Her religion was called “Temple I”—I am a temple, I myself, I am holy. It didn’t matter in her church what god you worshipped. You could worship any, or none at all; but you had to worship in, for and to yourself. You should not drug, whore or steal; above all, no matter what wickedness went on around you, you should not let them make you an accomplice … and so when Nillie got out she went to seek her pimp to tell him that she was through … .
And found Dandy in far worse shape than she. No more girls to run. No money left. And both kneecaps shattered, because he had made the mistake of getting in the middle of a power struggle in the mob. So she nursed him; and when she found out she was pregnant by him she kept it to herself until he was able to hobble around, and by then it was too late to think about a quick and easy abortion. It was a surprise to her that he married her. Dandy wasn’t really a bad man—for a pimp—though even for a pimp he damn sure wasn’t a specially good one; but he wanted a son, and it was joy for both of them when it turned out she was giving him one. Uneasy joy, sometimes—the boy was born small, caught every bug that was going around, missed half of every school year until he was eight. But that wasn’t a bad thing; in the hospitals were Gray Ladies and nurses to teach him to read and give him the habit; he was smarter than either of his parents right now, Nillie thought—
If he was alive.
She straightened up and rubbed the last dampness from the corners of her eyes. She
recognized the streets fleeting by—they were in her own neighborhood now, only blocks from the candy store. But what had happened? The streets were littered with rain-smeared placards, and the smell of tear gas was strong. There was a distant bellow of bullhorns blaring something about evacuation and
warning
and nuclear accident—
recognized the streets fleeting by—they were in her own neighborhood now, only blocks from the candy store. But what had happened? The streets were littered with rain-smeared placards, and the smell of tear gas was strong. There was a distant bellow of bullhorns blaring something about evacuation and
warning
and nuclear accident—
The police car nosed across the LIRR tracks, with a commuter special flashing away along the maglev lines as though it were running from something. As Nillie saw that the car was approaching the power plant, she thought that it was probably time to run, all right, if there was anywhere to run to.
They parked at the end of the cul de sac, with barricades and police cars blocking off the road, and ran, dazzled by the spinning blue and white and red emergency lights, along one side of the street, across from the utility’s chainlink fence, into a storefront. And there were cops by the dozen, and not just cops. There was supercop, the commissioner himself, giving orders to half a dozen gray-haired police with gold braid on their caps; and there was a hospital stretcher, and out of a turban of white bandages looked eyes that Nillie instinctively recognized as her husband’s; and there was Mrs. Feigerman’s sullen elderly son, David Tisdale, looking both frightened and furious—
And there, his scar pale and his lips compressed, staring at her with the cold consideration of a butcher about to put the mercy killer to the skull of a steer, was Henry Gambiage.
The situation wasn’t only bad, it was worse than Nillie had dreamed possible. If Marc was alive—and he had been, at least, a few minutes earlier on the telephone—he was also a hostage. Not just any hostage. Captive of one of the maddest, meanest murderers in the New York prison system, Angelo Muzzi. And not just at the mercy of the mad dog’s weapons, but right at Ground Zero for what the convicts threatened would be the damnedest biggest explosion the much-bombed city had ever seen. The argument that was going on when Nillie came in had nothing to do with the hostages. It was among three people, two engineers from Con Ed and a professor from Brooklyn College’s physics department, and what they were arguing was whether it lay within the capacities of the escaped convicts merely to poison all of Bedford-Stuyvesant, or if they could take out the whole city and most of Long Island and the North Jersey coast. The Commissioner was having none of that. “Clear them out,” he ordered tersely. “The mayor’s going to be here in half an hour, and I want this settled before then.” But Nillie wasn’t listening. She was thinking of Marcus Garvey de Harcourt, age ten, in the middle of a nuclear explosion of any kind. Nothing else made much impression. She heard two of the police wrangling with each other over whether they had done the right thing by following Marcus with his bag of weapons to see where the escapees were, instead of simply preventing him from delivering them as soon as they realized the story of the candy-store holdup was a lie. She heard the commissioner roaring at Gambiage, and Gambiage stolidly, repetitiously, demanding to see his lawyer. She heard her husband whisper—even harder to understand than usual, because his lips were swollen like a Ubangi maiden’s—that Muzzi had made him get the boy to try to deliver weapons, had made him lie about the fake holdup and then had beaten him senseless to make the story more realistic. She gathered, vaguely, that the reason she and Dandy were there was to force Gambiage to get his criminals away from the powerplant by threatening to testify against him—David Tisdale the same—and none of it made any impression on her. She sat silent by the window, peering at the chainlink fence and the low, sullen building that
lay behind it. “Listen, shithead,” the commissioner was roaring, “your lawyer wouldn’t come if I let him, because if you don’t get Muzzi out of that control room the whole city might go up!”
lay behind it. “Listen, shithead,” the commissioner was roaring, “your lawyer wouldn’t come if I let him, because if you don’t get Muzzi out of that control room the whole city might go up!”
And Gambiage spread his hands. “You think I don’t care about the city? Jesus. I
own
half of it. But there’s nothing I can do with Muzzi.” And then he went flying, looking more surprised than angry, as Nillie pushed past him. “There’s something I can do,” she cried. “I can talk to my little boy! Where’s that phone?”
own
half of it. But there’s nothing I can do with Muzzi.” And then he went flying, looking more surprised than angry, as Nillie pushed past him. “There’s something I can do,” she cried. “I can talk to my little boy! Where’s that phone?”
Marcus H. Garvey de Harcourt, king of the jungle, strong and fearless—Marcus who faced up every day to the threat of Dandy’s cat-o’-nine-tails and the menace of bigger kids willing to beat him bloody for the dimes in his pocket and the peril of pederasts who carried switchblade knives to convince their victims, and stray dogs, and mean-hearted cops, and raunchy winos—that dauntless Marcus was scared out of his tree. Dead people, sure. You couldn’t live a decade in Bed-Stuy without coming across an occasional stiff. Not often stiffs you had known. Not often seeing them die. Julius had not been any friend of his—at best, a piece of the furniture of Marcus’s life—but seeing him sob and bubble his life away had been terrifying. It was all terrifying. There was old Mr. Feigerman, his seeing gear crushed and broken; the blind man was really blind, now, and it seemed to cost him his speech and hearing as well, for he just lay against a wall of the power-station control center, unmoving. There was his soi-disant father, Johnny Harvey, not jovial now, not even paying attention to him; he was standing by the window with a stitch-gun in his hand, and Marcus feared for the life of anyone who showed in Harvey’s field of fire. There were the power-station engineers, bound and gagged, not to mention beaten up, lying in the doorway so if anyone started shooting from outside they would be the first to get it. There was that loopy little guy with the crazy eyes, La Croy, screaming rage and obscenities, shrieking as though he were being skinned alive, although he didn’t have a mark on him. And there was—
There was Muzzi. Marcus swallowed and looked away, for Muzzi had looked at him a time or two in a fashion that scared him most of all. Marcus was profoundly grateful that Muzzi was more interested in the telephone to the outside world than in himself. There he was, looking like Pancho Villa with his holstered guns and the twin bandoliers crossed over his steel-ribbed flak jacket, yelling at the unseen, but not unheard, Mr. Gambiage. “Out!” he roared, “what we want ith fuckin out, and fuckin damn thoon!”
“Now, Moots,” soothed the voice over the speakerphone.
“Now
thit!
We had a fuckin deal! I keep my fuckin mouth thut about MacReady and you get me out of the fuckin joint!”
thit!
We had a fuckin deal! I keep my fuckin mouth thut about MacReady and you get me out of the fuckin joint!”
“I didn’t kill MacReady—”
“You wath fuckin right there watchin when I gave him the fuckin ithe pick, tho get fuckin movin!”
Gambiage’s self-control was considerable, but there was an edge to his voice as he said, placatingly, “I’m doing what I can, Moots. The Mayor’s on his way, and he’s agreed to be a hostage while you get on the plane—”
“Not jutht the Mayor, I want the fuckin Governor and the fuckin Governor’th fuckin kid! All three of them, and right away, or I blow up the whole fuckin thity!”
Just to hear the words made icy little mice run up and down Marcus’s spine. Blow up the city! It was one thing to listen to Mrs. Spiegel tell about it in the third grade, and a whole other, far worse thing to imagine it really happening. Could it happen? Marcus
shrank back into his corner, looking at the men around him. Muzzi certainly wouldn’t have the brains to make it happen, neither would La Croy. The engineers and Mr. Feigerman might know how, but Marcus couldn’t imagine anything the convicts could do that would make them do it.
shrank back into his corner, looking at the men around him. Muzzi certainly wouldn’t have the brains to make it happen, neither would La Croy. The engineers and Mr. Feigerman might know how, but Marcus couldn’t imagine anything the convicts could do that would make them do it.
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