Death Wish

The Coliseum, now the handsome buildings of Lincoln Center looking like something miraculously spared by the bombing attacks that had reduced the surrounding neighborhood to gray rubble. The city had the look and feel of occupation: the walk up Broadway was a combat mission behind enemy lines and you never met the eyes of the hurrying head-down strangers you passed.

That was it, then, he thought; he was the first of the Resistance—the first soldier of the underground.

Monday in the lunch hour he went down into the Village and browsed the shops on Eighth Street and Greenwich Avenue and then on Fourteenth Street. At different shops he bought a dark roll-neck sweater, a reversible jacket with dark gray on one side and bright hunter’s red on the other, a cabbie’s soft cap, a pair of lemon-colored gloves.

Before ten that evening he took a bus up to Ninety-sixth Street and walked across town into Central Park. The te

But he walked all the way through the Park without seeing anyone except two bicyclists.

Well, everyone was afraid of the Park nowadays. The muggers knew that; they had shifted their hunting grounds elsewhere. He nodded at the discovery—now he knew; he wouldn’t make this mistake again.

At the Fifth Avenue wall he made a turn around the children’s playground and started to walk back up toward the transverse but then in a chip of light between the trees he saw a motionless figure on a park bench and something triggered all his warning systems: the short hairs prickled at the back of his neck and he moved forward through the trees, letting his breath trickle out slowly through his mouth. Something was stirring there—he had picked up movement, as insubstantial as fog, but it was there. He stopped, watched. He had to fight a cough down.

It was an old man slumped on the bench; probably a drunk. Wrapped in a ragged old coat, huddling it to him. That wasn’t what had alerted Paul; there was someone else.

Then he spotted the shadow. Slipping slowly along behind the park bench, moving up from the drunk’s blind side.

Paul waited. It might be a curious kid, harmless; it might even be a cop. But he didn’t think so. The stealthy purpose, the careful stalking silence.… Into the light now: a man in skin-tight trousers and a leather jacket and an Anzac hat cocked over one eye. Moving without sound to the back of the bench and looking down at the sleeping drunk.

The intruder’s head lifted and turned: he sca

The black man came around the end of the park and as he stepped onto the path his hand came out in sight and Paul heard the crisp snap as the knife flicked open. He’s going to rob that poor drunk.

The black man looked around again before he turned and crouched down by the drunk. Paul stepped forward through the trees. “Stand up,” very soft.

From his crouch the intruder broke into an immediate run. Racing toward the safety of the farther trees.

Paul fired.

The gunshot arrested the black man: he stopped and wheeled.

He thinks I’m a cop.

Well, that wasn’t a miss, you son of a bitch. It was just to turn you around so you can watch me shoot you. He trembled in rage: he lifted the revolver and stared into the black man’s eyes, hard as glass. The man was lifting his hands into the air in surrender. The sight of his vicious sneering face electrified the skin of Paul’s spine.

He stepped forward into the light because it was important that the intruder see him. A muscle worked at the back of the black man’s jaw. Then the face changed: “Hey, man, what’s goin’ down?”

Flame streaked out of Paul’s gunbarrel; the shot laid hard echoes across the blacktop path and the firecracker stink of the smoke got into his nostrils.

The bullet plunged into the abdomen, rupturing it with a subcutaneous explosion of gases. Paul fired again; the black man fell back, turned, began to scramble toward the trees.

It was remarkable how much a human body could take and still keep functioning. He fired twice more into the back of the man’s head. It dropped him.

Paul glanced at the drunk. The drunk hadn’t even stirred. He was facing the other way, half-lying on the bench. Was he alive at all?

Paul crossed to the black man and looked at him. There were flecks of white saliva at the corners of the man’s mouth. His face was twisted to the side and the eyes stared blankly at nothing. His sphincter muscles had failed and an unmistakable odor hung around the body in a cloud.

Paul hurried to the drunk. The man was snoring softly.

He faded back into the trees along the bridle path. There might be a cop nearby. He hurried up toward the fence that surrounded the reservoir; just before he reached it he turned to the right and went along the side of the steep wooded slope, parallel to the fence but below it so that no one would see him silhouetted. Every few seconds he stopped and listened.

People would have heard the noise of the shots but no one would have a fix on it and they’d rationalize it had been a backfiring truck. It wouldn’t be reported. Gunshots never were. The only real risk was that someone might have seen something. A passing pedestrian he hadn’t spotted, or even another drunk lying concealed in the wood. He slipped out of the jacket and reversed it to show the bright red side; put the cap in his pocket and the gloves with it. The gun was back in his right front trouser pocket—the gun together with a rubber-banded roll of four hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. If a cop decided for some reason to stop him and search him, Paul wanted the cop to find the four hundred dollars. It might work; he understood such things worked.

He went along the slope, losing his footing here and there on the slippery grass; he cut between the reservoir and the te

In his mailbox he found a folded mimeographed flyer letterheaded with the legend of the West End Avenue Block Association and signed in the facsimile handwriting of Herbert Epstein.

Dear West End Avenue Resident:

The residents of this neighborhood are understandably and gravely concerned with the priority-matter of SAFETY on the streets.

Police statistics show that addicts and muggers are most likely to prey on the citizenry on dark, or poorly illuminated, streets; and that improved lighting on city streets has been demonstrated to cut crime as much as 75 percent.

Your Block Association hopes to purchase and install a system of total saturation street lighting along West End Avenue and the side streets from 70th to 74th.

City funds are not available for this type of installation. Many neighborhood associations have already exercised initiative in purchasing high-saturation lighting in their areas. The cost per light is $350; within the area of our Block Association, individual contributions of as little as $7 each will enable us to saturate our neighborhood with bright lights and drive the criminals away into darker areas.

Your contribution is tax deductible. Please contribute as much as you can, for your own safety.

With sincere thanks,

Herbert Epstein

He left it open on his desk so he would remember to make out a check.

Years ago he had spent some of his weekends visiting his uncle and aunt in Rockaway. You could tell the rank and importance of the local mobsters by the brightness of the floodlights around their houses: they were the only people who had reason to fear for their lives.