Death Wish

A nurse came in and touched the cop on the arm. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to stop the man bleeding.”

“It’s not arterial, officer. And it’s better to let him bleed a little than to put an unsterilized handkerchief on the wound.”

“Miss, I’ve seen enough cases of shock from loss of blood. Now I know you people are swamped. I’m only trying to help out.”

“Thank you, then. That’ll be all.” The nurse took the injured man by the arm and led him away. The man looked over his shoulder at the cop but never changed expression.

The cop came back to the bench. Jack said, “What happened to him?”

“He was in a bar. Somebody broke a bottle in half and carved his arm. No particular reason—he didn’t even know the man. These hot summer days people go a little crazy. But I guess you know enough about that.” The cop seemed to feel an obligation to apologize for everything that had happened in the world. Paul understood how he felt. It was as if whatever happened was your fault and you ought to try and make amends.

Paul said, “Can you tell me anything about this?”

The cop said, “I don’t know too much about it myself. Later on you could call the precinct. You want the number?”

“Please.” Paul took out his pen and found a scrap of paper in his pocket—the American Express receipt from lunch. He wrote on the back of it as the cop dictated:

“Twentieth Precinct. Seven-nine-nine, four one hundred. The station house is right around the corner from your building, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. One-fifty West Sixty-eighth, that short little block between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“Who should I ask for?”

“I don’t know who’ll be in charge of your case. Probably one of the Detective Lieutenants.”

“Who’s the head man there?”

The cop smiled very slightly. “Captain DeShields. But he’d only refer you down to whoever’s in charge of the case.”

“Do you mind telling me whatever you do know?”

“It’s not much. I wasn’t the first one to get there. It looks like some men got into the building without the doorman seeing them. Maybe they were junkies, they usually are. Looking for something to steal.”

“How did they get into our apartment?”

“Afraid I don’t know. If the door wasn’t double-locked they could’ve slipped the lock with a plastic card. Or maybe they just knocked and your wife let them in. Burglars often do that—knock to find out if anybody’s home. If nobody answers the door they break in. Otherwise most of them make up some lame excuse about being on the wrong floor, and go away.”

“But these didn’t go away.”

“No sir, I guess not.” The cop’s delivery was impersonal, as if he were testifying in court, but you could feel his compassion.

Paul said, “They got away,” not a question.

“Yes sir. We still had patrolmen searching the building when I left, but I don’t think they’ll find anyone. It’s possible somebody saw them in the building or on your floor. Maybe somebody rode with them in the elevator. There’ll be detectives over there, they’ll be asking everybody in the building if they saw anyone. It’s possible they might get descriptions. Anyhow I imagine your daughter will be able to describe them as soon as she’s feeling a little better.”

Paul shook his head. “They’re never found, these animals. Are they?”

“Sometimes we catch them.”

Paul’s glance flicked belligerently toward the doorway to the corridor. For God’s sake, when were they going to tell him something? He was begi

The cop said lamely, “They’re doing everything they can.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant the detectives or the doctors.

There was a loud groan. It could have been any one of a dozen people in the room. Paul wanted to bolt to his feet and force his way through the door; but he wouldn’t know where to turn once he got past it. And someone would throw him out.

The rancid stink was maddening. After a while—he wasn’t reckoning time—the cop got to his feet clumsily, rattling the heavy accoutrements that hung like sinkers from his uniform belt. The thick handle of the revolver moved to Paul’s eye level.

The cop said, “Look, I shouldn’t have stayed this long. I’ve got to get back to my partner. But if there’s anything I can do, just call the station house and ask for me, Joe Charles is my name again. I wish I could’ve been more help.”

Paul looked up past the revolver at the cop’s hard young face. Jack reached up to shake the cop’s hand: “You’ve been damned kind.”

They sat endlessly waiting for Authority to come and speak. Jack offered him a cigarette, forgetfully; Paul, who had never smoked, shook his head. Jack lit up the new cigarette from the glowing stub of the old one. Paul glanced up at the No Smoking sign but didn’t say anything.

On the opposite bench a woman sat in evident pain but she kept stolidly knitting at something yellow: a man’s sock? A child’s sweater? Her face was taut and pale. Whatever her malaise she managed to clothe it in dignified resistance to fate. Paul felt like a voyeur; he looked away.

Jack muttered, “They may have been kids you know. Just kids.”

“What makes you say that?”

“We get them every day at Legal Aid. They’re out of their heads, that’s all. They’ll swallow ten of everything in the medicine cabinet and shoot up whatever they can lay their hands on.”

“You think these were hopped up?”

“Well, that’s an obsolescent phrase, Pop, it doesn’t exactly apply any more. Maybe they were tripping on speed or maybe they were junkies overdue for a fix. Either drugs they’d taken or drugs they couldn’t get—it works both ways.”

“What’s the point of speculating?” Paul said bleakly.

“Well, it’s the only thing I can think of that might explain this. I mean there’s no rational motive for a thing like this.”

“We always have to make sense out of things, don’t we.”

“Something happens like this, you have to know why it happened, don’t you?”

“What I’d like to know,” Paul answered viciously, “is why it couldn’t have been prevented from happening.”

“How?”

“Christ, I don’t know. There ought to be some way to get these animals off the streets before they can have a chance to do things like this. With all the technology we’ve developed you’d think there’d be some way to test them psychologically. Weed out the dangerous ones and treat them.”

“A couple of hundred thousand addicts in the streets, Pop—who can afford to treat every one of them as long as we go on spending seventy percent of the budget beefing up weapons to overkill the rest of the world?”

You sat in a dismal emergency waiting room and talked tired generalities. It always came around to that. But neither of them had any real heart for it and they lapsed quickly into fearful silence.

It was the kind of place in which you did not look at things; you avoided looking. Paul’s eyes flicked from the door to his knotted hands and back again.

Jack got up and began striding back and forth, too vinegary to sit still. One or two people glanced at him. Interns and nurses came in, got people, took them away. An ambulance arrived with a stretcher case whom two attendants carried straight through into the corridor. Esther and Carol must have been brought in like that, he thought. Possibly the theory was that if you were able to navigate into the place on your own feet you were healthy enough to wait six hours. Paul felt his lip curl; he straightened his face when a nurse appeared but she had come for someone else.

Jack sat down with a grunt and lit a new cigarette. The floor around his feet was littered with crushed butts. “God. I can’t take this, Poor Carol—Jesus.” A quick sidelong glance at Paul: “And Mom. What a rotten——”

Paul put his elbows on his knees and held his head between his hands, feeling as if it weighed half a ton.