Hail to the Chief (87th Precinct), page 13
“Okay, but I’m not responsible,” the intern said, and walked out.
“What do you say, Pacho?”
“I told you all I got to tell you.”
“Tell me about the piece.”
“No comment.”
“You got a license to carry that weapon?”
“You know I ain’t got no license.”
“Okay, so to begin with, we got you on a gun charge. You know what else we got you on?”
“You got me on nothing.”
“You’re mistaken, Pacho. We got you on a couple of things that are very interesting. You were holding a loaded weapon in your hand, and you were pointing it at your nice little girlfriend who already cut you up, and who’s going to be charged with firstdegree assault. We can charge you with the same thing, at the very least, since—”
“The gun in my hand don’t mean nothing.”
“Uh-uh, it means a lot, Pacho. It means you violated section 240 of the penal law. You assaulted another person with a loaded firearm.”
“I never touched her. I never fired a shot.”
“You stuck the gun in her face. We can presume you intended firing it. But assault is the least of your worries, Pacho. We might decide to charge you with attempted homicide instead. That’s an even heavier rap.”
“I didn’t try to kill nobody. I only wanted to scare her. Anyway, it was self-defense.”
“Yeah, well, let’s not try the case right here and now, okay, Pacho? I’m just trying to tell you how much time you’re going to absolutely spend in jail, and how much time you might spend in jail if a jury sees it the same way the DA sees it. On the gun charge, you’ll absolutely and without question get a year for carrying a loaded firearm without a license. On the assault, you can get ten years, and on the attempted murder, you can get twentyfive. How old are you, Pacho?”
“Nineteen.”
“Either way, by the time you get out of prison, you won’t be a teenager anymore. How does that appeal to you?”
“It don’t.”
“So tell me why you were carrying that piece.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Pacho said.
Bert Kling was about to propose to Augusta Blair.
It was almost 9:30, and they had finished their meal and their coffee, and Kling had ordered cognac for both of them, and they were waiting for it to arrive. There was a candle in a red translucent holder on the tabletop, and it cast a gentle glow on Augusta’s face, softening her features, not that she needed any help. There was a time when Kling had been thoroughly flustered by Augusta’s beauty. In her presence he had been speechless, breathless, awkward, stupid, and incapable of doing anything but stare at her in wonder and gratitude. Over the past nine months, however, he had not only grown accustomed to her beauty, and comfortable in its presence, but had also begun to feel somehow responsible for it—like the curator of a museum beginning to think that the rare paintings on the walls had not only been discovered by him, but had in fact been painted by him.
If Kling had been a painter, he would have put Augusta on canvas exactly the way she looked, no improvements, no embellishments; none were necessary. Augusta’s hair was red, or auburn, or russet, depending on the light, but certainly in the red spectrum, and worn long most of the time, usually falling to just below her shoulder blades, but sometimes worn back in a ponytail, or braided into pigtails on either side of her face, or even piled on top of her head like a crown of sparkling rubies. Her eyes were a jade-green, slanting upward from high cheekbones, her exquisite nose gently drawing the upper lip away from partially exposed, even, white teeth. She was tall and slender, with good breasts and a narrow waist and wide hips and splendid wheels. She was surely the most beautiful woman he had ever met in his life—which is why she was a photographer’s model. She was also the most beautiful person he had ever met in his life—which is why he wanted to marry her.
“Augusta,” he said, “there’s something serious I’d like to ask you.”
“Yes, Bert?” she said, and looked directly into his face, and he felt again what he had first felt nine months ago when he’d walked into her burglarized apartment and seen her sitting on the couch, her eyes glistening with tears about to spill. He had clumsily shaken hands with her, and his heart had stopped.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said.
“Yes, Bert?” she said.
The waiter brought the cognac. Augusta lifted her snifter and rolled it between her palms. Kling picked up his snifter and almost dropped it, spilling some of the cognac onto the tablecloth. He dabbed at it with his napkin, smiled weakly at Augusta, put the napkin back on his lap and the snifter back on the table before he spilled it all over his shirt and his pants and the rug and maybe the silk-brocaded walls of this very fancy French joint he had chosen because he thought it would be a suitably romantic setting for a proposal, even though it was costing him half-a-week’s pay. “Augusta,” he said, and cleared his throat.
“Yes, Bert?”
“Augusta, I have something very serious to ask you.”
“Yes, Bert, you’ve said that already.” There seemed to be a slight smile on her mouth. Her eyes looked exceedingly merry.
“Augusta?”
“Yes, Bert?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Kling,” the waiter said. “There’s a telephone call for you.”
“Oh, sh—” Kling started, and then nodded, and said, “Thank you, thank you.” He shoved his chair back, dropping his napkin to the floor as he rose. He picked up the napkin, said, “Excuse me, Augusta,” and was heading away from the table when she very softly said, “Bert?”
He stopped and turned.
“I will, Bert,” she said.
“You will?” he asked.
“I’ll marry you,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, and smiled. “I’ll marry you, too.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
He walked swiftly across the room. The waiter regarded him curiously, because he had never seen a man looking so completely ecstatic over the mere prospect of answering a telephone. Kling closed the door of the booth, waggled his fingers at Augusta across the room, waited for her to waggle her fingers back at him, and then said, “Hello?”
“Bert, this is Steve. I tried to get you at home, your service gave me this number.”
“Yeah, Steve, what’s up?”
“You’d better get up here right away,” Carella said. “All hell is breaking loose.”
As the president, I make it my business to know everything that’s going on everyplace. From the wire we had in the Scarlets’ clubhouse on Gateside, we found out exactly where they were keeping Big and Jo-Jo prisoner. The idea, of course, was to free them. But that wasn’t enough. It was also necessary to punish the Scarlets for what they done.
I want to make something clear. You guys are writing this down, and you’re also taping it, and so I want to make it clear. It’s not always easy to understand why a person does such and such a thing. You look at the externals, and you think, Oh, he done that for selfish reasons, or, Oh, he done it out of spite, or because he lost his temper, or whatever. You can come up with a thousand speculations as to why a person done something, when actually it’s only the person himself who knows why. So I want to tell you exactly why I done it, and I also want to make sure you know what I done and what I didn’t do.
You found me with blood all over my hands tonight. Okay, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I can tell you with absolute honesty that I never killed nobody. I can also tell you that although I ordered the raids that ended the war once and for all—and don’t forget I did end the war, the war is over, there’s never going to be no more trouble in this neighborhood—it was not me personally who did any of the killing. No matter what it looked like (and I admit my hands were covered with blood), evidence can be misleading lots of times, as I’m sure you guys know. And if you look at just the blood, then you can forget the very real things I accomplished. That’s the reason I’m telling you all this. You think I don’t know you can’t force me to say anything I don’t want to? I’m telling you all this because I want to set the record straight. I don’t want you to forget what I done. I don’t want you to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
The place they were holding Big and Jo-Jo was in the cellar of this candy store on Gatsby and Fifty-first. The candy store is owned by this guy called Lamp Hawkins. He’s a nigger who lost his eye in a street fight back in the ‘50s, some guy stabbed him in the eye. He used to live in Diamondback, and the gangs down there were rumbling all the time back in those days, but very unsophisticated, low-level combat, you understand? Like they used zip guns and ripped-off car aerials and switchblades, and they used to throw bricks down from the rooftops. Kid stuff. When you compare that to the weaponry we got today, but which we always use with restraint, it’s almost laughable. Because the point is, you see, you can go to jail for carrying a homemade piece in your pocket, so you might as well carry the real thing, am I right? I want to point out, by the way, that I wasn’t carrying nothing when you picked me up. You did not find no firearm on my person, and don’t forget it.
Anyway, this Lamp character moved up from Diamondback after he got out of jail for pushing dope, and he opened this candy store on Gatsby, which is really a front for a numbers drop. I guess you guys already know that. He probably pays you off, don’t he? And the reason he let the Scarlets bring two prisoners there was that he needed their clique for protection. Against us, you dig? Because he knew the one thing the Yankee Rebels cannot abide is anything that has to do with dope. Now, you may say that Lamp got picked up for pushing way back in the ‘60s, and he done his time and paid the penalty, but that’s not good enough for me. I got a memory like an elephant. Once a guy has pushed dope on innocent little children, you can bet he will one day or another go right back to pushing again. Which is why this clique shows no mercy whatsoever to anybody who is involved with dope on any level—using, dealing, we don’t care what. One of our club rules is no junk and no junkies. That is an ironclad rule. No junk and no junkies. So Lamp lived in fear of his life all the time because he knew if we ever caught him out in the open, we would do to him what he done to countless little children back in the ‘60s. We would ruin him. And that’s why he let Mighty Man bring the two prisoners to the candy store and lock them in the cellar. He was taking a chance, sure, but it was a worse chance for him to walk the streets without Scarlet protection.
I spent all afternoon today doping out a plan of attack.
Toy gave me a lot of support, I have to say that. She is a tireless person. She sets a fine example for the other girls in the clique. She is such a lady. And this afternoon, when I was figuring out the raids, talking out loud to myself most of the time, Toy was there to ask if I needed a cup of coffee, or if I would like her to do the back of my neck (she massages my neck whenever I get these tension headaches), and just generally lending me support. By about four o’clock I had figured out what I thought was a good plan, and whereas I would not normally have called the council for their opinion, this was a matter of great importance to the clique and to the entire neighborhood. So I put it to them.
The most important thing, I told them, was to get the prisoners back, and nothing should be done to jeopardize their safe return. I figured that a frontal attack on the candy store was the best approach here, since Big and Jo-Jo were in the cellar and could not possibly be harmed by any shooting that was done upstairs. We were not concerned for our own safety, as we intended to go in there heavily armed, and we also had the element of surprise on our side. We had been in that candy store once or twice before, risking capture or bodily harm from the Scarlets, but eager to tell Mr. Lamp Hawkins that if we so much as saw him walking on the street alone at any time of the day or night, we would string him up from a lamppost. On those occasions we didn’t risk actually doing anything to Lamp while we were in Scarlet territory because that would have caused an escalation of the war we were trying so hard to end.
The layout of the candy store was very simple. On a wooden stand outside, Lamp kept his newspapers. Just inside the door, on the left, there was a rack with magazines and paperback books, most of them dirty porn stuff, which was another good reason for giving Lamp the full treatment if the opportunity ever presented itself. Opposite that was the counter, with stools in front of it, and ice cream bins and soda spigots and everything behind it. There was a door at the far end of the store, and we figured it led to the back room where Lamp lived and where the numbers drop was. We also figured there must be another door back there that led to the cellar. So the plan was to go right in blasting, get rid of Lamp on the spot and be careful not to harm any innocent bystanders in the store. The raiders would go in the back room, find the door to the basement, kick it in because it would probably be locked, and get rid of any Scarlets who were there guarding Big and Jo-Jo. I figured we needed a force of no more than four good men to take the candy store.
Mace, my war counselor, suggested that we go in with hand grenades, taking out the front of the store without any risk. The council voted, and it was decided that two men would throw in the grenades (we have sixty-four grenades in our arsenal, but they are getting more and more difficult to come by) and they would be backed by two more men, if in case something went wrong—like maybe Lamp or somebody in the store tossing the grenades out again, you know what I mean? In which case, the four would just go in and shoot up the place. In other words, Plan A would be blowing up the front of the store and then running back and down to the cellar. Plan B, in case the grenades failed, was to go in shooting.
But that wasn’t all of it. It seemed to me that there was only one way to end this war once and for all, and that was to completely annihilate the enemy. I told the council that by the enemy I didn’t mean only the Scarlets, who were holding our men prisoner. I meant the Heads as well, that the thing to do since they had not learned their lesson of a week ago when we staged the double-hit was to move in fast and wipe them out to the last man. I knew this was a drastic measure, but I reasoned with the council that if there is nobody left to fight a war, then the war automatically stops.
One of the kids on the council, a dope named Hardy, said he didn’t understand why we were fighting this war to begin with, and I told him the war wasn’t our doing, but that as the most powerful clique in the neighborhood, if not the entire city, it was our duty and our responsibility to bring peace, even though we hadn’t started the shooting. I also reminded him of what had happened to a former Yankee Rebel named Jonathan Quince, who had started questioning the way things were run, and Hardy right away apologized and said he wasn’t questioning nothing, he was simply wondering out loud, since the war seemed to have been going on for as long as he could remember, practically from when he was a kid in diapers. I told Hardy that the reason the war hadn’t ended till now was because I hadn’t been president.
So Hardy, the dope, tells me in front of everybody that this is my second term as president, and if I had all these ideas about ending the war, why didn’t I do it in my first term, end the war right then and there, without more bloodshed and killing? He was beginning to sound like Johnny all over again, but I kept my cool, I did not blow up. There were important things we were about to do, and I couldn’t waste time dealing with a jerk. I just reminded him that the enemy was intransigent, which was why I had finally decided to take drastic measures. Then I told him to shut up and listen for a change, and maybe he might learn something. He started to say something else, and Chingo rapped him right in the mouth, and that was the end of Hardy’s little private protest.
Following the raid on the candy store, I told the council that I wished to hit the clubhouse of the Scarlets and the clubhouse of the Heads. I told them that I wished these to be full-scale attacks, with a large part of our membership involved, and that as commander in chief I personally would lead the raid on the Scarlet clubhouse, as I was anxious to confront Mighty Man, who had told me the obscenity on the telephone. I told the council that I wished there to be nothing left of the Scarlets or the Heads by the time we got finished with them tonight. I told them we had given both those clubs ample opportunity to negotiate, but they had refused to accept our kindnesses and our compromises, and so now it was time to quit kidding around, it was time to destroy their capability for waging war, and therefore to end the war itself in that way. I also mentioned, and I sincerely meant this, that I hoped tonight would mark the last of the killing and the bloodshed, that perhaps from now on we could walk the streets of this neighborhood without fear, and that we could do so with pride, knowing that we had not compromised our honor. I think the council was moved. They voted eleven-to-one to carry out my plan as I had conceived it, and then The Bullet suggested that the man who had voted against it (Hardy, of course) change his vote to make it unanimous, and he did so without no further urgings.
The hit on the candy store was scheduled for nine-thirty.
We figured that after we got Big and Jo-Jo back, the Scarlets would call a meeting in their clubhouse to discuss how they were going to deal with this new development. We knew from past experience that they could move very fast when they wanted to, and we figured they would be assembled by ten, and that a safe time to hit the Gateside building would be ten-thirty. So that was the zero hour for the second hit.
As for the Heads, we planned to hit them with a separate force at exactly the same time, ten-thirty, on the assumption that news of the increased hostilities between the Scarlets and us would cause them also to call a meeting, and we would catch them all together in their rathole clubhouse with four-eyed Henry presiding, and that would be the end of the whole conflagration.
We did not know at the time that the Heads had plans of their own.
It was the Heads who messed everything up.
Patrolman Franciscus of the 101st was riding shotgun in the RMP car when he and the driver, Patrolman Jenkins, heard the blast. It had begun snowing more heavily, and they had pulled to the curb not twenty minutes before to put skid chains on the car. But Jenkins instinctively hit the brake when he heard the explosion, and despite the chains, the car’s tail whipped sharply to the left, and he swore, and turned into the skid, and then said to Franciscus, “What the hell was that?”
