Текст книги "Death Wish"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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“I talked with Theodore Perrine, the famous forensic psychiatrist, in his office at the Columbia University Medical School. After issuing the usual disclaimer to the effect that a psychiatrist shouldn’t be taken seriously when he tries to psychoanalyze a patient he’s never even met (Dr. Perrine does not admire such long-distance whimsies as Dr. Ernest Jones’s attempt to psychoanalyze Shakespeare’s Hamlet), the shrink who has probably testified in more banner-headline criminal cases than any other psychiatrist in America made this estimation of the character of the vigilante:

“‘We live in a death-oriented society. We anticipate the ultimate calamity and many of us are convinced there’s no hope of avoiding it. Our world is a world of conscience-stricken nuclear scientists, and young people who’ve become disabused of the notion that we have simple problems for which there are solutions. Everyone feels personally betrayed by the way things are going—the future is no longer a rational extension of the past; everything’s up for grabs, so to speak. We all tend to feel like laboratory animals who know nothing about the science except what we can observe while we’re in the process of being vivisected. That’s the milieu in which we all have to navigate, and it’s hardly surprising that some of us resent it so much that we’ve begun to hurl ourselves against it more and more irrationally.

“‘There’s a large reservoir of aggression in all of us. We hate crime, yet we don’t do anything about it. We begin to feel that we’re not merely decent people, we’re so decent that we’re immobilized. That’s why a man like this captures our imagination so vividly—he’s acting out fantasies we’ve all shared. He’s not the only one acting them out, of course—we’ve seen how a great many groups who claim to be for or against something find it necessary to take the law into their own hands. Terrorism has become a legitimized political tool. In that respect the only unusual thing about this fellow is that he’s doing it as a one-man operation. If it were an organized effort like the Jewish Defense League or the Black Panthers we’d find it far less fascinating. It’s the lone-wolf aspect of it that appeals to the American sensibility. One rugged individualist out there battling the forces of evil—it fits right into our mythology, you see. But other than that, this fellow is merely carrying the accepted concept of political terrorism into the criminal arena.’

“I asked, ‘You mean you don’t believe this killer is much more insane than the rest of us?’

“‘Insanity is a legal term, not a medical one. But I should think this man is hardly a raving lunatic. Except for the nature of his crimes themselves, there’s nothing inherently irrational in his behavior. It could be interpreted as the logical result of a certain series of psychological inputs. For example, suppose he’s a combat veteran who’s recently returned from Indochina where GI’s take it for granted that if someone gives you a hard time you simply kill him with a fragmentation grenade. That occurrence has become so common in Southeast Asia that “fragging” has become a part of our language.’

“‘Are you suggesting he’s a Vietnam veteran?’

“‘No. He may be, but we have no evidence. If he were, it would be easy to see how he might simply be carrying over the system of values he learned over there to the situation he finds here.’

“‘You said you feel the vigilante is acting out fantasies many of us share. Do you think that means his actions will influence other people to do the same thing?’

“‘I expect it to, now that they have this man’s example.’

“‘Then you’re saying we’re all capable of it—it’s only a matter of degree.’

“‘Not at all. It requires a psychopathic personality—the kind that’s capable of muting what we think of as the civilized inhibitions. Guilt, anxiety, social rules, the fear of being apprehended.’

“‘Then he doesn’t know right from wrong, is that what you mean? The legal definition of insanity?’

“‘No. I’m sure he knows right from wrong quite acutely. He’s probably more of a moralist and less of a hypocrite than most of us.’

“Dr. Perrine is a tall man, bald with a white monk’s fringe clasping his skull above the ears. He talks with vast lunges and gestures; his hands describe large arcs as he talks. He has a commanding Presence, a great force of personality; it is easy to see why he is in such demand as a witness at dramatic trials. At this point in the interview he pulled his chair over close to me on its casters, leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘He’s less inhibited, that’s the controlling factor. He shares that quality with the criminals he assassinates. Most of us have the gut reaction now and then—we see a crime take place, or we hear of one, and we think to ourselves, “I’d have killed the son of a bitch.” But we don’t kill anyone. We’re conditioned against it, and we believe it’s wrong to descend to the criminals’ level because there has to be a difference between us and them. Look, most of us are all right as long as we don’t know the worst for sure. We can pretend. We can stay on the tightrope because we’ve erected sufficient defenses against the hopelessness that inspires this violence in our society. Most of us really don’t want to know the things that have set this man to killing his fellow men.’

“Dr. Perrine halved his professional smile; his words fell heavily, dropped like shoes, spaced out, as though he were lecturing to a class of first-year Med students. ‘He’s a benighted idealist, really; I would judge he’s a man who has seen injustice and frustration to an unbearable degree. His experience has made him hate criminals enough to be willing to destroy himself if he can take some of them down with him. It’s an idée fixe, with him; he’s filled with rage and he’s found a way to channel his rage into action. He’s transfixed by this obsessive hate.

“‘But I see no signs that it’s interfered with his capacity to reason. Take, for example, the fact that all his victims—or all we know about, anyway—have been killed with the same gun. Now guns aren’t that difficult to obtain, unfortunately. He could easily have used a different murder weapon each time. He didn’t. Why? Because he wants us to know he’s out there. It’s a message to the city, a warning cry.’

“‘Like the come-and-get-me phone calls of that mad killer in San Francisco?’

“‘No. You mean the Zodiac killer. No, I would judge that one is truly psychotic. He’s probably pointed a loaded revolver at his own head and found he couldn’t pull the trigger; ever since, he’s gone around looking for someone who’ll do the job for him. No, our man here is not self-destructive—or to be more precise, that’s not his primary motivation. What he’s trying to do is to alert the rest of us to a danger he believes we aren’t sufficiently concerned with. He’s saying to us it’s wrong to throw up our hands and pretend nothing can be done about crime in the streets. He believes there is something we can do—and he believes he’s showing us what it is.

“‘It’s rather like the legend of the Emperor’s New Clothes, isn’t it. The legend has value only because it includes one naïve honest child who’s frank and uninhibited enough to announce that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. As soon as there’s no longer a single honest child to proclaim the truth, the legend loses its meaning.’

“The smile, this time, is deprecatory. ‘I shouldn’t like to give the impression that I regard this man as a brave valiant savior holding back crime in the city like a boy with his finger in the dike. Too many people are beginning to idolize him that way. Actually he’s only contributing to the chaotic anarchy of which, God knows, we have more than enough. In terms of practical effect, these killings of his are having about as much effect on the total crime picture as you’d get by administering two aspirin tablets to a rabid wolf. I hope you’ll emphasize this point in your article. It’s no good condoning any of this man’s actions, it’s no good trying to put a high moral tone on them. The man’s a murderer.’

“‘In that connection, doctor, I’ve heard it said that the vigilante cares less about seeing people dead than he cares about watching them dying. The argument goes, if he really wants justice why doesn’t he cruise the streets with an infra-red camera and take pictures of these criminals in the act, instead of shooting them dead in their tracks?’

“‘I’ve heard the same thing, even from some of my own colleagues. But I think that argument misses the point. This is a man who’s been deeply grieved and distressed by some intimate and violent experience. Now if you give a man a universe of pain to live in, he’ll do anything he can to get out. I would guess this man has already tried formal justice and found it wanting. He’s not concerned with bringing criminals to trial, he’s concerned with averting immediate dangers immediately—by removing the miscreants in the most positive and final way possible.’

“‘You think perhaps he was the victim of a crime and saw the criminal thrown out of court, something like that?’

“‘Quite possibly, yes. If you know our courts at all you must have seen occasions when a case the prosecution has spent months of agony to build is destroyed by one misguided witness who cuts through all their reasoned legal arguments simply because he doesn’t like the color of the prosecutor’s necktie or he had a sister who resembled the defendant’s mother. Our legal system is a shambles, we all know that. Punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial, and in our courts it is neither. I have a distinct feeling this man knows that firsthand; he’s probably been the victim of it.’

“For a psychiatrist Dr. Perrine seems to have a few unorthodox ideas. I put that to him: ‘Isn’t it more common for members of your profession to side with the defendants? Crime is a disease to be treated, and all that?’

“‘I don’t subscribe to those old shibboleths. Personally. I tend to believe the so-called humanitarian approaches have added greatly to the suffering of society as a whole. We have laws because we need to protect ourselves. To break those laws is to injure society. I long ago gave up believing in the therapeutic approach to crime, except in those cases where you’ve got a demonstrably curable case of aberrant behavior—certain sex offenses, for example, that are known to be curable by various drug treatments or psychotherapies. But we’ve gone much too far in the baby-bathwater direction. The function of punishment is not to reform the criminal, it’s to protect society by preventing and deterring certain types of misbehavior. The original idea behind putting offenders in jail was simply to get them off the streets and thereby prevent them from committing any more crimes during the period of their punishment. Capital punishment was the same in theory, except of course that its effect was permanent. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say this is our “vigilante’s” primary objective—to prevent these people from committing any more crimes. The primary goal of protecting society seems to be what many of us have forgotten in our rush to safeguard the rights of accused persons—and perhaps that’s what this man is trying to remind us of.’

“Dr. Perrine pushed his chair back and stood up. He spoke slowly again, choosing his words; the act of standing up was deliberate, I’m sure, intended to emphasize what he was going to say.

“‘This man has spent his life as a liberal of good conscience. I’m convinced of it. And now he’s reacting against many things he’s been taught—principal among those things being the idea of tolerance. He’s come to realize that tolerance isn’t always a virtue—tolerance of evil can be an evil itself. He feels he is at war, and as Edmund Burke put it, ‘Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.’ To this man his private war is the ultimate necessity. Otherwise he wouldn’t have started it—he’d have been too frightened. He’s a very frightened man.’

“‘I had the feeling he was just the opposite. You get the impression he has steel cables for nerves.’

“‘Quite the reverse. He’s terrified. It’s only that his rage is even greater than his fear.’

“‘Do you think his fear is real or imaginary?’

“‘Fear is always real. The question is whether it’s justified by the actual conditions. If it isn’t you have paranoia in some form.’

“‘Then he’s paranoid?’

“‘Most of us are, to some degree, certainly if we live in the cities. Usually we get along, we’re protected by our neurotic defenses. But sometimes those defenses fail and the ego collapses, and the unconscious terrors burst through into the conscious centers. I’m sure to this man it’s a vital and very personal fact, not just a dry statistic, that the heroin addicts in New York outnumber the police by a factor of several thousand to one.’

“‘Doctor, if you were asked to draw in words a composite psychological portrait of the vigilante, what would you say?’

“‘It’s difficult. So much depends on factors we don’t know—his upbringing, his experiences. But I think you can say this much. He’s careful, methodical, quite intelligent. Probably an educated man to some degree. Certainly he’s not terribly young. I’d say he was at least in his middle thirties and more likely well over forty.’

“‘What makes you think that?’

“‘Well, it’s rather analogous to our emotional reactions to space flights. Those of us in my generation are rather mystified by the whole thing, we don’t pretend to comprehend it on the emotional level even though we may understand the scientific basis for it. On the other hand children take it for granted—my younger daughter, for example, has never lived in an age without space flight and television. A little while ago she asked me quite seriously, “Daddy, when you used to listen to the radio, what did you look at?” Do you know I couldn’t remember? But the point is that the young people have grown up accustomed to shifting circumstances and unstable values. They may not like the things they see happening, they may even act violently to express their idealism, but at bottom they understand and accept the fact that these things do happen. When they act, they act in groups, because that’s the dominating ethos. You don’t find solitary teenagers going off into the backwoods to start organic farms; they do it in communes. You don’t find individuals protesting the war at the Pentagon—it’s always groups, however badly organized. Our youth have become group-oriented; perhaps it’s the influence of Marxism. But the rugged individualism, if you want to call it that, which this man stands for, is something our youth have rejected vehemently. And it’s also fairly clear that this man is bewildered and hurt by all the drastic things he sees around him—he doesn’t understand them, he can’t comprehend what’s happened, let alone accept it. He’s fighting back, but he’s doing it according to the traditions of his generation—not theirs.’

“‘Then you say you’d draw a picture of a middle-aged man, reasonably well-educated, careful, intelligent. Could you add anything to that?’

“‘Well, I’ve already said I think he’s probably a confused liberal. If he were a right-winger he’d have access to like-minded groups and we’d be more likely to have an entire wave of assassinations—an entire gang of them out there murdering people, rather than one isolated killer. That’s the strange things about rightists, of course, they preach individualism but they’re far more adept at organizing themselves than the left. And I’d add that he’s probably a man who’s alone—really alone—and that this situation is something new and sudden in his life. That is to say, it’s quite likely his family was recently taken from him. Killed by criminals, perhaps. That’s merely speculation—everything I’ve said is. But it would explain a number of things, you see. We all know people who seem to lose all their inhibitions the day they get divorced. They do things they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before they were married.’

“‘You seem convinced the vigilante is a man. Isn’t it possible it’s a woman?’

“‘It’s less likely, although anything’s possible. Women don’t resort to overt violence nearly as much as men do. The gun isn’t a female weapon.’

“‘It’s been suggested in the press a few times—the fact that the murder weapon is a .32. That’s a rather small caliber—they used to call them ladies’ pistols.’

“‘It may also be a practical matter. A small caliber pistol makes far less noise than a .45, you know. But my own impression is that he’s a man who’s not intimately acquainted with the use of firearms. A small pistol is much easier to handle. Somewhat more accurate, certainly less recoil and noise, and easier to conceal in your pocket of course.’

“There wasn’t much more. But if Dr. Perrine is right—and he has the reputation—then be on the lookout for a middle-aged, middle-class liberal who has just lost his family, possibly to criminal attackers.

“It could be anyone, couldn’t it. Someone I know, someone you know. It could be you.”

20

He spent the weekend in the apartment except for the Sunday ride to Princeton with Jack. The psychiatrist’s pontifications made him uneasy; to what extent were the police guided by his opinions? Would it occur to them to start questioning every middle-aged male whose wife had been the fatal victim of an unsolved crime? How many like him were there?

The gun was the only real clue they could find. It kept coming back to that. He ought to hide it. But he needed it: without it he would be easy prey for any junkie overdue for a fix. Without it he would again have to walk in fear, circumscribing his movements in time and place. It was the only city he knew of in which it was the well-off citizens, the honest people, who were herded into ghettos. Through most of the city you could not walk unarmed at night; through some of it you could not walk unarmed at any time of day.

Take the chance. It was better than the fear.

“I had a call from George Eng,” Henry Ives said. He watched as if he were peering into strong light: with his aged head down and his eyes narrowed to slits.

Paul sat forward, forearms resting on knees. He felt the muscles and nerves twitch in his face, worry pulling at his mouth: I blew it, he thought, I fucked up something.

Ives’ smile was without menace but Paul felt a chill. A vein throbbed above Ives’ eyebrow, embossed as if by contained anger. Paul pinched his mouth closed with tight compression and breathed deep through his nose.

After a silence that nearly cracked his nerves he heard Ives say in his cool precise voice, “You did a thorough job on the Jainchill matter, Paul. George is deeply grateful. He’s on his way to Arizona to close the deal for Amercon. He asked me to pass on to you his congratulations—we all know what a strain you’ve been under. It takes a great deal of strength to carry on as you have.”

Paul straightened in relief; he made an effort to dispose the muscles of his face toward lines indicative of modest appreciation.

“Quite frankly,” Ives said, and his eyebrows contracted sternly, “we’d been watching to see how you bore up under it. I can confess now that there were a few who thought it was only a matter of time before you’d be taking three martinis for lunch and letting your work go to pot. Personally I felt you were made of better stuff than that, but I allowed the partners to persuade me to wait and see. I can tell you now you’ve passed the test with flying colors.”

Test? Paul said with uncertain hesitation, “Ye-es?”

“We met this morning in Mr. Gregson’s office. I proposed that you be invited to join the firm as a full partner. I’m glad to say the motion was passed unanimously.”

Paul pulled his head up in amazement.

Ives’ voice dropped almost out of hearing with avuncular confidential smugness. “We all feel you deserve it, Paul.” With an effort he lifted himself to his feet and shuffled around the desk, hand outstretched, beaming.

In the night he re-read the New York interview with the psychiatrist; he had bought a copy for himself at the stationery store on Seventy-second Street with the same feeling he recalled from boyhood when he’d bought forbidden pulp adventure magazines: the furtive haste, the fumbled coins.

The psychiatrist was uncomfortably close to the truth in his summation. To what extent were the rest of his speculations valid?

What kind of a monster am I?

He studied himself in the mirror. His face seemed haggard; there were unhealthy pouched blisters under his eyes.

“… about as much effect on the total crime picture as you’d get by administering two aspirin tablets to a rabid wolf.” Well, that was wrong. He’d had a staggering effect on the city. It was in all the media. It was the only topic of conversation. Cops were stating publicly that they applauded the vigilante. And in today’s Post, a story about a Puerto Rican boy—an addict with a lengthy arrest record—found stabbed to death in an alley beside a school in Bedford-Stuy-vesant. It added strength to the news item three days ago about a man found murdered by three .22-caliber bullets on East Ninety-seventh Street—a man who had served two terms for armed robbery; he’d been found with an automatic pistol in his pocket. The newspapers were speculating: Has the vigilante’s .32 become too hot to handle—has he traded it in? But these killings were not Paul’s doing; people were getting on the bandwagon.

Have I done enough? It made him think of countless cowboys in countless Westerns who only wanted to hang up their guns.

That was no good. It wasn’t a horse-opera with all the bad guys dead in the last reel. They were still out there.

They would always be out there. You couldn’t stop them all. But that was no excuse for giving up. The important thing—the only thing—was knowing you weren’t going to give up. Perhaps there were no victors, perhaps there were only survivors; perhaps in the end it would gutter out like the noxious stub of a used-up candle. Perhaps it was all solipsism and none of it mattered to anyone but himself. But what difference did that make?

He called Jack. “Did you talk to them today?”

“Yes. No change. I think we’re going to have to learn to live with it, Pop.”

“I guess we are.”

After he hung up he got into his reversible jacket and picked up his gloves. Touched the gun in his pocket and checked the time—eleven-ten—and left the apartment.

21

From the trees of Central Park he looked across 110th Street at the shoddy stores and tenements. Addicts probably used half of them as shooting galleries.

The cold wind drove right through him; he tucked his face toward his shoulder against it and stared into Harlem. Traffic moved in desultory spurts through the lights.

He moved along inside the park at the edge of the timber. The lights of the taller buildings moved along with him, just beyond the treetops. He stepped out onto Fifth Avenue and crossed northward with the light and began to walk east along 111th Street, across Madison Avenue and on along the dark foul-smelling block to the barricade which the stone-butted, elevated tracks made on Park Avenue. It was like the Berlin Wall, he thought.

He turned north into the ghetto with the solid railway wall to his right and the brooding slum tenements at his left shoulder. He had never been in this area by night; he had only been through it a few times in his life by day, and then only in cars or on the train. It had the air of a foreign city, it didn’t have the feel of New York: the buildings were squat and low, there was no bustly traffic, he saw no pedestrians. Not even drunks slept on the steps here; they probably knew it meant sure suicide. It was the antithesis of Times Square and yet the doomed sense of evil was the same. The icy wind made it seem darker; the occasional snowflake drifted on the swaying air; his heels echoed on the pavements and cobblestones and he imagined himself a last survivor searching the streets of a dead abandoned city.

He saw them in silhouette on the rooftop of a four-story corner tenement: the shifting shadows of a group of people—three or more, he couldn’t tell how many. They kept coming over to the edge and canting themselves outward to look downtown. They reminded him of commuters in subway stations leaning out from the platform to see if the lights of the train were coming into the tunnel. That made him realize what these were looking for: the same thing—a train.

He’d heard about this game. A vicious and dangerous one.

He moved close to the wall into the deeper shadows and slipped toward the corner. He stopped before he reached it; stayed out of the pool of corner lamplight, kept to the shadows, fixed his attention on the rooftop beyond the T-intersection. He thought he heard the distant rumbling of the train but perhaps it was only the hum of the city.

He watched them on the rooftop and began to single them out as individuals. Teen-age boys, at least three of them, and there was one girl who appeared at intervals. They seemed to be making trips to and from the roof parapet and he realized they were crossing the roof to pick things up, bringing the things over to the edge and stacking them there.

Ammunition.

Faintly he heard their nasal laughter.

From this low angle they seemed terribly far above him but it was only a real distance of some seventy feet—the width of the street and half the height of the building if you measured it as a right triangle; Paul’s line of vision formed the hypotenuse.

He had never shot anyone at quite such a long range; he remembered hearing it was difficult to shoot accurately at a steep upward angle. It would have to be done with care.

At least four of them; he had to take that into account too. He felt in his jacket pocket for the spare cartridges and counted them with his fingers—ten. Add to those the five in the cylinder of the revolver. Not much to waste; three shots per target, no more.

He eased closer to the corner and looked around. The spiderwork of a fire escape clung to the side of the opposite building. He thought about that but decided it would be too risky; they could see him if he went to cross the street.

Then he had another idea. He faded back into the shadows and waited.

The train approached. He saw the three boys lift objects in their hands and brace their feet against the low parapet that ran around the edge of the roof. The racket increased and when Paul turned his head he saw the lights of the train rushing along the top of the stone wall. The ground began to shake under him. The train came parallel with him and he saw heads at windows; he swiveled his glance to the rooftop and they were starting to lift and throw their missiles: bricks and chunks of cement, some of them so heavy the boys could hardly lift them and heave. The big ones fell short but there was a thundering rattle of bricks thudding the roof and sides of the train and Paul heard the tinkle of shattered glass. Had it hit someone inside the train?

Another window rattled. A brick bounced off the side of the train and pulverized itself in the middle of the street. The girl on the roof was throwing things too now; Paul counted them carefully and was satisfied there were only the four.

A crash of glass; he was sure he heard an outcry from the last car; then the train had gone, its rumble hanging in its wake.

He looked back to the rooftop and they had disappeared. He moved quickly to the near corner and put his head out just far enough to see the fire escape across the street.

They were coming down. Running down the metal stair from landing to landing. Their laughter was a cruel abrasion.

He let the first of them get to the bottom landing. The boy extended the jump-ladder with his weight, coming down to the sidewalk as the ladder squeaked rusty resentment. In the uncertain light Paul steadied his aim across his left wrist and as the boy turned to shout up at the others he squeezed the trigger with steady even pressure until the gun went off with a little kick and a squirt of noise and the boy’s head snapped to one side under the bullet’s impact.

The others saw him fall but didn’t know the cause of it and they hurried coming down. Paul waited; there was time, they still didn’t know he was there.

They came down and clustered around the prone one and now Paul pumped the trigger and saw it register upon them as one of them dropped with the quick spineless looseness of instant death and Paul’s second shot went through the same one and then ripped up a yard of stucco. The third one was wheeling back under the fire escape with amazing quick presence of mind and the girl was diving for a doorway. Paul heard her scream: “Get that mother!” and then the one from under the fire escape was coming after him, running in deadly swift silence with a knife whipping up.

One shot left or two? Sudden terror gripped him and he knew he had to wait, had to make it point-blank because there was no chance for a miss. The boy came straight at him, terrifyingly without sound; Paul had a clear sight of him, the blazing tight expectant eyes, the lips peeled back from the teeth, the wide nostrils flexed like biceps.… and then Paul fired and the spinning plug of lead punched a dark disk in the boy’s face just below one eye. The boy’s scream was a dead cry, but he fell against Paul and Paul scrambled back in thundering panic as the falling knife scraped across his wrist; the gun fell to the sidewalk and skittered away and Paul fell against the wall bent over almost double hugging his stinging wrist: sweat sprang from his face and sucked-in breath hissed through his teeth. The boy rolled and toppled onto his shoulder and Paul pounced on the gun with primitive clear cunning and shot the groaning boy once more in the face.

It was empty now, he knew it, and he swung the cylinder out and punched the empties and dug in his pocket while his eyes scanned the street opposite—the two boys down. Where was the girl?

He heard running footsteps somewhere; a door slammed and he winced.