A Bad Man (22 page)

The library was ship-in-the bottle, oakey. “Oakey-doakey,” Feldman said. Wing-chaired. Beamish. Rifles over the mantelpiece, a clock with a visible movement, dark portraits of the founders of banks. “Generations of gentiles,” Feldman said. There was a big desk behind which a landlord with a
schmear
in his integrity could kill himself. “After brandy,” Feldman said, “a silver bullet in a silver sideburn.” The will would be read here to out-of-towners in black suits.

There were decanters of whiskey and silver bottles of soda. He fixed a drink, drank it off quickly and made another. When he turned, the warden, in carpet slippers and a red silk smoking jacket, was watching him. Feldman raised his glass. “To crime and punishment,” he said.

The warden motioned Feldman to go ahead. “I’m pleased you came,” he said, “and glad you’ve made yourself comfortable, though I doubt the sincerity of your ease. I wanted the sergeant to show you this room first. Do you like it?”

“A showcase, Warden,” he said.

The warden smiled. “I’m being urbane,” he said. He sat in a wing chair and crossed his legs smartly. Feldman saw the bright bottom of a carpet slipper, like the clean soles of the shoes of an actor on a rug on a stage. He stared at the light that slipped up and down the smooth stripe of his trousers. “Say what you will, Feldman,” the warden said, “but urbanity is a Christian gift. Rome, London, Wittenberg, Geneva—
cities
, Feldman. The history of us Christians is bound up with the history of the great cities. I mean no offense, of course, but yours is a desert sensibility, a past of pitched tents and camps. Excuse me, Leo, but you’re a hick. Have you held canes? Have binoculars hung from your jackets?” He indicated a portrait in a gilt frame. “Just a moment,” he said, standing. He moved to the portrait and pulled a small chain, turning on the light in an oblong reflector. “Where would you buy one of these? Tell me, merchant. You see? You don’t know. You’ve seen them, but you haven’t experienced them. I’ve stood beside sideboards and spent Christmas with friends. There’s leather on my bookshelves, Feldman. I’ve been to Connecticut. I know how to sail. What are you in our culture? A mimic. A spade in a tux at a function in Harlem.

“I make this astonishing speech to you not out of malice. It’s way of life against way of life with me, Feldman. I show you alternatives to wholesale and retail. I push past your poetics, your metaphors of merchandise, and scorn the emptiness of your
caveat emptor
. I, the least of Christians, do this. Come, the others will have gathered.”

They went to the drawing room, where, as the warden had said, the others had gathered. They must have collected suddenly, but as he and the warden entered they were already lounging in a stiff, suspect sereneness. Feldman recognized none of them, but their ease was familiar to him. He was reminded of his own casual duplicities, the petite infighting of maneuvered-for advantage and self-control. They were people one step ahead of other people, he thought, like schoolchildren whose teacher has come back to find them all studying. Or spies who have rifled drawers, suitcases, the seams of pillows. As he preceded the warden, who had turned deferential, he had a sense of the queer, sedate violence of entering a strange room. He thought with wonder of all the times he had arrived early for appointments, guiltily examining the instruments in doctors’ offices, a lawyer’s framed degrees, family photographs, of all the times, left alone in hotel rooms while others shaved and apologized through closed doors for their lateness, he had picked candy from boxes open on the table.

Though he no longer cared, there were women. Men in dinner jackets stood with ladies in cocktail dresses. “Excuse me,” the warden said, abandoning him, “I have to see to some guests.” Feldman stayed nervously where he was, smiling back tentatively into the remote stares of the others.

A tall graying man came up to him. “Tell me,” he said, “which is worse for you, the day or the night?”

“
That
old chestnut,” another said, slowly wheeling from the margin of a small group to which he had attached himself. “Paul’s still espousing those malfeasant ideas. As Chargé de Disease, I couldn’t permit his theories to become operational in any institution in which I had an infirmary.”

“I believe, Chargé de Disease,” the tall man said with much dignity, “that I was addressing the thief here.”

“I’m not a thief, sir,” Feldman said shyly.

“There’s only one crime,” the man said. “It’s theft.”

“A dietary approach to punishment,” the second man said. “Paul, it’s medieval.”

“Please, Chargé, let him answer.” He turned grimly back to Feldman.

“The day is worse,” Feldman said.

“Morning or afternoon?”

“Afternoon.”

“Early or late afternoon?”

“Early afternoon.”

“You see?” the tall man said. “He means that dead center of a waking life fifteen minutes past lunch, three hundred forty-five minutes before dinner. My techniques would extend that desperation. Stretch the fabric of his hopelessness—all crimes are wishes, Chargé—over an entire day, and you’ve returned his aggressions to his dream life, where they belong. Let him writhe in bed. Cut out this fellow’s lunch, remove the water coolers, make the water in the sinks as nonpotable as on European trains. Forbid him cigarettes. Abolish his coffee breaks and canteen privileges, poleax the penny gum machines as if they were gaming tables, Chargé, and you’ve denatured him. Nullify his oral gratifications, and you’ve stripped his hope, I tell you, and made his imagination as incapable of crime as of epic poetry.”

“Well perhaps—”

“Not perhaps, Chargé—certainly, absolutely. It’s historical, Chargé. When was the golden age of obedience in this country?”

“His
tor
ical, Paul? His
tor
ical? Pooh pooh, tut tut.”

“When was the golden age of obedience in this country?” Paul insisted.

“Well—”

“It was the
sweatshop
age, Chargé. It was the
piecework
age. It was the twelve- and fourteen-hour-day age. The simultaneity of those hard times with the flourishing of the city park system, when parks were safe, was no coincidence. Where were your Coca Cola machines then, Chargé? Where were your
refreshment
stands? Sweat and hopelessness, Chargé, is our only hope.”

“Well, I agree with you in principle, of course, Paul, but do you really think you can keep hope down? ‘Hope springs eternal.’”

“Hope does not spring eternal
forever
, Chargé,” the tall scholarly man said.

Feldman excused himself and went up to a servant who carried a tray of drinks. He had already had three in the library, but they had not been enough. He removed a glass from the tray and nodded his thanks. The servant looked at him blankly. A plainclothesman, Feldman thought. He finished it quickly, and the servant handed him another. Flatfoot, Feldman thought. I’d better not get drunk here. Keep me sober, he prayed. He reminded himself merely to sip the next drink, but in a few minutes the servant was beside him again, extending the tray. “No, no, I’m fine,” Feldman said. The servant did not move, and Feldman drank the rest of the liquor in his glass and took another from the tray. Watch your step, he thought. Watch my step, he prayed.

He remembered an empty, comfortable-looking couch he had seen on first entering the room, and now he looked for it again. There were no empty couches. He was very puzzled. That’s funny, he thought, they must have taken it out. There was a couch just where he remembered the empty couch to have been, but five people were sitting on it.

It was essential that he make himself inconspicuous, so he went up to the couch and squeezed in. Because it was already crowded, he had to place the edge of one thigh in a woman’s lap. He had not had this close a contact with a woman in months, and soon he had a hard-on. In those close quarters his erection was pretty apparent, but he reasoned that because of her age—she was about seventy—the woman might not mind.

“Recidivism’s not important, Julia. What counts is that we catch these guys,” the man on Feldman’s left said. “The very fact that we have statistics on recidivism demonstrates the efficacy of our policework.”

“I don’t contest that,” Julia said. It was the old lady. She had a gentle voice. Feldman fought off a vagrant impulse to blow in her ear. “It isn’t that at all. It’s the older parolees. Men who’ve done twenty and thirty years. It annoys me that
they
don’t behave.”

“You think age quiets those old thieves down?” the man asked. “Infirmity? How thick is plate glass? How heavy is a watch? A diamond bracelet?”

“The inspector’s right,” said a man at the other end, half of whose body Feldman’s presence had forced far over the arm of the couch. He supported himself with his right arm extended on the floor, so that he looked like a downed boxer waiting to rise. Feldman hoped someone would step on his watch. “And I’ll tell you something else. Science in its development of transistorized equipment has made our problem tougher. A thief’s armload today is worth more than a thief’s armload was yesterday, and a thief’s armload tomorrow will be worth even more. I foresee a time when the thief’s armload will be approximate in value to the thief’s truckload of yesteryear.
That’s
what science has done with its vaunted miniaturization!”

With the strain on his arm the man had spoken louder than he had perhaps intended, and Paul heard him. “And not only that,” Paul said, “but improper diet—the snack-food industry is a three-billion-dollar-a-year business today—has made his thief’s arms longer.” He saw Feldman. “Which it worse for you, the day or the night?”

“The night,” Feldman said. He got up quickly and moved away from them. Across the room he blew a kiss covertly to Julia.

Behind him the warden was standing with two men. “Keep them under,” one was saying.

“But there’s no need to keep them under,” the second man said. “You’ve changed the goal,” he objected. “Hasn’t he, Warden? Hasn’t he changed the goal?”

“Well—” the warden said evasively.

“What’s the goal?” Feldman asked, turning around.

“Order,” the second man said.

“Acquiescence, I’d say,” said the first man.

“Acquiescence?” Feldman said.

“Well, silence,” the first man said.

Feldman nodded. He joined another group. He was afraid he was drunk. The Lord has failed me, he thought miserably. On his own he avoided the servant with the tray, turning his back whenever the man approached. In a while, though, he could no longer remember his reason for wanting to remain sober. What am I afraid of, he asked himself—that I won’t be invited again? He giggled and sought out the fellow with the drinks. “Thanks, gumshoe,” he said, taking another drink from the cop. They were all cops here. It was the Policemen’s Ball. He could smell rectitude. The odor of ordinance was in the air.

Suddenly he felt compassion for his fellow inmates. It was a shame, he thought. They talked about the underworld—“Keep them under,” someone had said—but what about the overworld? They talked about organized crime, but Feldman couldn’t think of two hoods who could stand each other. If one had a gun, sooner or later the other was a dead man. The real organization belonged to the overworld. Did cops shoot each other, horn in on each other’s territory, beat each other’s time? No, the cops had their cop cartels, their FBI’s and state troopers and Policemen’s Benevolent Associations. It was the poor crook who was alone. The crook had no ecumenical sense at all. For one Appalachia Conference, and he could just imagine the screaming and backbiting that must have gone on, there were hundreds of parties like this one. He was consumed by a truth, sudden and overwhelming. He had to share it at once or he would burst. He rushed up to someone. “There isn’t any,” he told him passionately.

“What’s that?”

“There
isn’t
any. It doesn’t exist.”

“There isn’t any what?”

“There isn’t any Syndicate. There isn’t any Mafia. There isn’t any Cosa Nostra. You can all go home.”

“Try to eat something,” the man said. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked solicitously.

“No,” Feldman said glumly. He found a chair and sat down. They’d probably have to shut him up, now they knew he was on to them. Already the man was conferring with someone; together they were staring at him. It was all a fake. Maybe even evil was a fake. He’d better keep his ears open and his mouth shut. (The thought nauseated him.) He had to focus, concentrate. There were things to learn he could bring back to the boys. He thought fondly of the boys. Good old Bisch. That grand old man Ed Slipper. And Hover—fine, maligned Hover. Sky and Flesh and Walls were the best pals a guy ever had. He thought of his friends asleep on their cots. They might be thieves and murderers, but they were good old boys. He had a duty to the guys to sober up, to tell them what he’d learned: that they were a myth. He imagined a youthful eagerness in his voice as he told them. It was news to make a tenor of a man.

Concentrating, he was astonished at the enormous varieties of cophood there were in the room. In addition to those he had already met, the sheriffs and marshals and constables and private detectives, there were insurance investigators and high officials in the National Guard. There was a man who trained German shepherds and leased them to department stores and warehouses. Another man was in charge of an army of crowd handlers at ball parks and arenas. There was a chief of house detectives for a large hotel chain and a woman who headed up an agency of store detectives. There were polygraph experts and fingerprint men and a police artist who was introduced to Feldman as the Rembrandt of his field. There were prison chaplains and expert witnesses for the prosecution at murder trials.

He felt as if he had been caught in the guts of an enormous machine. As he had noted before, there were no windows, and he rushed instead to the door to get some air. Outside stood the deputy who had brought him to the prison. The man passed him by, smiling. “It’s ten thirty-seven,” he said, waving his wrist with Feldman’s watch on it.

When he was calm enough Feldman went to the buffet table; his new knowledge had made him hungry. He was surprised at the meager character of the food. Perhaps there was something in the make-up of good men that subdued their tastes and deadened their appetites, something surly in their hearts that made them trim their lettuce and chop their food, as though matter had first to be finely diced and its atoms exposed before they would eat it. Feldman almost gagged on the liquescent potatoes and minced loaves of meat and could not even look at the colorless gelatinous molds with their suspended chips of pimento and halved olives and thin, biopsic bits of carrot, like microbes in a culture.