The Magician (8 page)

* * *

At six A.M. on Monday Terence Japhet awoke with a start. He had slept a long time. When he came out of the shower, which he started warm and gradually turned cold, Josephine was sitting up in bed.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

He didn’t answer. The expression on his face terrified her.

While he dressed, she called the hospital.

“They say Ed had a good night. Why are you looking like that?”

“Can you fix some breakfast, any kind, anything, just quickly.”

In five minutes he had finished only half his dish of cold cereal, coffee, and said, “I’m going to the police.” Driving to the station house on Croton Avenue, he kept his coat collar up. He worried for the first time about an object flying in through the open windshield and cursed himself for not taking his sunglasses from home.

“What’s up?” said the policeman behind the desk.

“Is Urek locked up?”

The policeman didn’t know what he was talking about. Mr. Japhet tried to explain calmly. The policeman dug around among his papers.

“Oh, we were waiting for you to sign the complaint.”

“The what?”

The policeman showed him the form.

“But I gave the officer at the hospital all the information.”

“His complaint isn’t valid.”

“What do you mean not valid?”

“He didn’t see it happen. His complaint’s got to have a deposition from a witness or the injured person.”

“The injured person is a boy who can hardly breathe or talk, and you let all of Sunday go by. That maniac could run away. My son was nearly killed.”

“Look, mister, calm down, we didn’t let anything go by. If you were in such a hurry, why didn’t you get yourself down here Sunday morning?”

“I didn’t sleep all Saturday night. I didn’t leave the hospital till late Sunday.”

The policeman, used to half-hysterical parents, exaggerations by complainants, pointed to the form impatiently. “If you’ll sign this one, we can tear the other one up. Yours doesn’t need any depositions, you’re an eyewitness, okay?”

Terence filled it out the best he could. While he was doing that, a sergeant came in. He was much more polite.

“I can okay this. We can get a judge to sign it at nine o’clock,” he explained.

“That’s a whole hour from now.”

“We need a warrant to pick up the Urek kid at his home.”

“But he’ll be in school by then.”

“Oh no!” said the sergeant. They hated to pick up kids at school. So many of them were hostile toward policemen. And they’d need the approval of the principal.

“We could wait till after school,” said the policeman.

“Please,” Mr. Japhet pleaded with the sergeant, “that boy is a maniac. You can’t leave him on the loose another minute. He tried to kill my—”

“We’ll handle it,” the sergeant interrupted. “Why don’t you go on home?”

Mr. Japhet’s hands were still shaking when he turned the doorknob to leave. When he was out the door, the sergeant shook his head, and the other policeman shrugged his shoulders.

“We’d better fill the chief in,” said the sergeant. “The school is his turf.”

Mr. Japhet stopped at the glass place on North Highland Avenue. They said they couldn’t get a windshield in till Friday. They’d have to order it. He drove to the hospital. They wouldn’t let him see Ed just then, though when they saw how wrought up he was they did get the resident for him, and the doctor said the boy was not in danger anymore.

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as we can ever be.”

The resident couldn’t give him any more time because a carload of skiers returning to New York City in the early-morning darkness had skidded into a stone wall on Route 9, and all seven of the people jammed into the small car were on the critical list.

He phoned Josephine. He said he was going straight on to the school for his nine-o’clock class. Yes, he said, he could have called in to have a substitute take over for the day, but he wanted to be there when the cops got Urek.

All his rage was coming back.

Chapter 9

The thick-packed auditorium bobbed with more than a thousand student heads, waves of chatter welling as Mr. Chadwick, the principal, tapped on the microphone for silence.

The entire faculty stood along the right and left walls under the high windows through which daylight streamed. When Mr. Chadwick started his career nearly thirty years earlier, the appearance of the principal on the stage was enough to turn a room of youngsters into a catacomb. Now boys and girls raucoused freely, defying him. He had permitted the longer hair. He had allowed rock in the music curriculum. He kept his door open, always, to student complaints. They had wanted freedom, they said. He had harvested rebellion. Was it ever different?

“I do not like,” he said into the uproar, “to allow the police into the school, but this morning we have no alternative.”

As if on signal, Chief Rogers strode down the aisle, the rows growing silent from back to front as he came into view. Rogers looked now, as always, as if he had just shaved and bathed and pressed his suit, the appearance not of a cop but the uniformed administrator of the community’s tensions. He spoke well, as if he had been to college, which in fact he had.

In five seconds he was onstage, facing the near-silent student body. Mr. Chadwick gladly relinquished the microphone.

“Boys and girls—a lot of you out there are my friends—I don’t think the police belong in a school either to discipline students or to guard against trouble. If we have to do that here, as they do in New York City, which is only thirty miles away, then there will be little difference between schools and reformatories—except you get to sleep at home.”

It got him a laugh, which was what he wanted. He thought of the thousand no longer chattering students as a mob, and the first thing to do with a mob is to relax it. Then he got down to business.

“Saturday night, after the midwinter prom, there was a serious occurrence just outside this building. It’s all over the morning papers, which isn’t good publicity for the community. Ed Japhet, an eleventh-grader, was beset and beaten by a gang of youths right outside these school doors. His father, who teaches here…”

All eyes turned toward Mr. Japhet, who was standing with his colleagues along the right wall.

“…had his windshield smashed by the same boys. And Ed, who put on a magic show here that night, had his equipment smashed irreparably. I have always placed a much greater emphasis in this community on physical harm to human beings than to property damage. Ed Japhet is still in Phelps, though his condition is no longer critical.”

Some students applauded the last statement, until the chief held up his hand.

“We believe that all four boys responsible for this attack are students of this school, and if so, are probably in this auditorium right now. I ask them to identify themselves.”

* * *

COMMENT BY GEORGE THOMASSY,

UREK’S LAWYER

Now, I take very strong objection to this kind of thing. Under our laws a person is innocent until proven guilty. No one has been proven guilty of anything as of now. And a person cannot be made to incriminate himself. That’s exactly what the chief did. He violated my client’s constitutional rights.

“Mr. Japhet,” said the chief, “has identified the alleged leader of the assailants as a student who was in his class last year, Stanislaus Urek.”

Heads turned toward Urek, sitting in the fifth row. And Urek, with all the force his lungs could muster, stood and shouted, “Stanley!”

“Is this the boy?” the chief asked Mr. Japhet across the heads of the audience.

“Yes,” said Mr. Japhet barely audibly.

Four uniformed policemen, who had been standing discreetly at the back of the auditorium, moved, three down the center aisle and one down the right-side aisle toward Urek. The students on both sides of Urek quickly spilled out in the aisles, leaving him alone in the row. The principal motioned them toward the empty seats on the other side.

“I didn’t do nothin’,” said Urek.

One of the three policemen in the center aisle started to sidle into the row toward Urek.

“I wanna talk to my father’s lawyer,” said Urek to the chief.

“As soon as we get to the station house.”

“I ain’t going to no station house!”

“Who were the other boys with you?” asked the chief.

“I ain’t snitching on nobody,” said Urek, suddenly darting towards the side aisle, where the row was now blocked by a lone policeman. The faculty members standing nearby against the wall scattered. The policeman seized Urek’s arm.

“Leggo my arm!” screamed Urek. Shaking free, he shoved the cop off balance, grabbed the high window ledge, and hoisted himself up.

The policeman tugged at Urek’s leg. Urek kicked backward, his heel hitting the cop’s face. A nostril gushed red blood as a moaning sound went through the student audience, suddenly all on its feet, with the chief yelling into the microphone, “Sit down! Sit down!”

Urek hoisted himself, first a knee, then altogether, up onto the windowsill, then turned, framed against the window light, shouting, “Let me alone!”

The hurt policeman wiped blood from his nose, cheek, and lip. The other three policemen were beneath the window ledge, looking up. One reached for his pistol.

“Put that away!” commanded the chief.

The policeman returned the weapon to the holster. Clearly, none of the three dared to try hoisting themselves onto the window ledge.

Mr. Chadwick whispered in the chief’s ear. “Shall I clear the auditorium?”

“No,” said the chief, “we’ll lose the other three. This’ll only take a minute.” Then to the back of the room, “Somebody bring a ladder or a chair.”

There was a bustling in back of the room as a chair from an adjoining classroom was brought down the side aisle by a faculty member.

“Now, you come down,” the chief said to Urek.

“Fuck you!” screamed Urek. “Fuck all of you!”

The tallest policeman was on the chair, grabbing for Urek’s leg. Urek stomped at the cop’s hand, which was quickly withdrawn. Another chair was brought down the side aisle and placed on the other side of the window ledge, and mounted by another policeman. With a signaled nod, both policemen reached for Urek’s legs at the same time, figuring he couldn’t stomp at both at the same time.

Urek kicked out at one, then the other, hitting neither. Then he started losing his balance. One of the cops grabbed at his ankle, throwing him further off balance, and Urek went crashing against the window, his shoulders breaking the glass as girls screamed and a shout filled the auditorium. For a moment it seemed that Urek was falling backward out the window, but the quick policeman was up on the ledge, sitting, grabbing the flailing feet, holding on as the second policeman hoisted himself to the large sill, and together they pulled with all their strength, sending Urek pitching forward into the room. There was a rush of people toward where Urek fell, the chief abandoning the stage and the microphone, rushing up the aisle, yelling, “Give him room!” He thought Urek was unconscious, some bone broken, or his spinal cord snapped.

But in an instant he knew otherwise, because as the chief leaned over, Urek reached up and grabbed his collar. Before Urek could do any harm, a mass of hands had seized his arms and legs and held him pinioned beyond need, breathless, yelling, “Lemme go!” A minute later he was being led from the auditorium, his hands handcuffed behind his back, while the principal tried to restore order and get everybody to sit back down.

Monday in the early evening, Ed was moved out of the intensive-care unit because of hospital rules: as more-serious cases came in, less-serious cases were moved out.

The doctors thought Ed probably should be in a private room. Mr. Japhet’s Blue Cross coverage provided for a semiprivate. Ed was put into a semi-private room which was otherwise unoccupied.

Ed was glad to get away from the other people in the intensive-care unit whose grim state led some of them not to another room but to the morgue.

The overhead light hurt his eyes until it was turned out by the nurse. A floor lamp in the corner cast a yellowish glow. A television set was rigged five feet up on the far wall, its potential less interesting to Ed than the telephone at his bedside, which he could not yet use because of the orange tube in his nose that went down into his throat and stomach. But it was a connection with the outside world he welcomed.

Now that he was no longer doped up, he could feel the dull pain of his bruised throat. If he breathed deeply, his rib cage ached, but instead of a hurt bundle of pain sleeping fitfully, he now began to feel alive again.

Though it was past visiting hours, the nurse stood at the door of Ed’s room with a very tall and seemingly shy young man in uniform. They were making an exception because the young man, who had seen the news about Ed in the
Times,
expected to be shifted out of Fort Dix by the end of the week. Ed was very glad to see Gil and motioned him to the bedside chair.

Gilbert Atkins, a stringbean six-foot-two, was three years older than Ed and had been inducted into the army some months previously. They had last seen each other at a meeting of the New York Chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. The fact that they were the two “kids” in the organization had brought them closer than their three-year difference might otherwise have allowed. And they liked each other because they both did not merely buy or learn tricks to do, but experimented with inventing new ways of doing old tricks. Unlike some of the senior members of the brotherhood, they were both also intensely interested in the psychology of the audience, the willingness of most people under the right circumstances to suspend disbelief.