Blue City

chapter 10

I left the highway at the first crossing, so as not to pass the Cathay Club again. On one side of the road there was a patch of woods, identified by a sign as Dingle Dell Developments, Inc. On the other side there was a scattering of houses, new and pretentious, with built-in two-car garages, high, tiled roofs, and leaded windows. All the windows were dark, but a dog behind one of the houses woke up and barked at me as I went by. I hated the smug, sleeping occupants of those closed houses. At the same time there was a strong wish deep in my mind to be safe in bed behind one of the blinded windows, with a plump wife to keep me warm.

There was a bus-stop sign at the next corner, and I sat down on a concrete bench and waited. Down the road towards the city I could see a lighted ferris wheel turning in the sky. After a while a bus appeared from the direction of the city and turned around at the corner. I got on and slumped in a seat behind the driver.

He said: “Pretty nice night for this early in the spring, eh, bud?”

“Yeah, and pretty soon the bunny will be bringing Easter eggs besides.”

He gave me a startled look over his shoulder and dropped me from his mind. My consciousness began to operate in fits and starts, like a bored conversation, and finally blanked out in sleep. I woke up momentarily when the bus stopped and filled up with passengers at the amusement park. They climbed in, laughing and talking and yelling drunkenly: an apprentice seaman clutching a papier-mâché doll in one hand and a girl in the other; a couple of sleek youngsters in zoot suits, sharing a girl with precocious breasts and a dopey look on her face; an obvious floozie with purple eyelids, embraced by a tall, pale boy whose forehead was shining with sweat; a little man who wanted to fight, being soothed by a larger companion; a sleepy young man in an imitation llama coat, accompanied by a henna redhead and a peroxide blonde.

He stopped beside me and leaned over clumsily: “Say, haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“Never,” I said. “I just arrived from South Africa where my father owns the Kimberley Diamond Mines. His name, curiously enough, is Jan Christian Smuts.”

“That a fact?” said the sleepy young man. He looked at me in sudden horror, doubled up, and vomited on the floor.

“Gracious Jesus!” the driver said. “Do I have to ride with the smell again all night?”

“I’m sorry, Christ, I’m sorry,” the young man said. He took a figured silk scarf from around his neck and got down on his knees to wipe the floor.

I pushed back in my corner and went to sleep again. A man with a changing face followed me down a street that I knew well. I was only a young kid and he frightened me. It was dark and growing darker. I came to the mouth of an alley and ran into it, scurrying silently between blind brick walls. A door opened in the wall and I slammed it shut before the man could catch me. The moose head and the hall tree were there, and I climbed the stairs to my own room. But the room was full of unfriendly faces, jostling and pushing towards me. I ran down the hall to my father’s room, calling to him to come and help me. The room was empty, the windows were broken, the bed was covered with dust. A smiling rat hopped out of the abandoned bed and ran between my legs, brushing me with his tail.

I woke up with tears wet on my face. The bus was nearly empty, and the last few passengers were standing in line in the aisle, waiting to get out.

“Can you tell me where the Mayor lives?” I asked the driver.

“Yeah, he lives here on the north side. I don’t know exactly where. You can ask them in the terminal.”

Another bus took me within a couple of blocks of Allister’s address, and I got out and walked the rest of the way. It was a white frame colonial house, with decorative green shutters opening at the sides of the windows. There were no lights on, but I went up the red brick walk, climbed the shallow porch, and knocked on the door with its bronze lion’s head.

In a minute the light on the porch came on, then the light in the hall inside. Slippered feet shuffled down the stairs into the hall, the lock was snapped back, and the door opened. A thin man in his late thirties with nervous lines in his face peered out at me.

“Mr. Allister?”

“What do you want?” His graying hair was rumpled, and his eyes were bleared with sleep.

“I want help–”

“My God, you people never give me any rest! Look, you can get a free bed down at the Center. They’ll give you breakfast in the morning.” He started to close the door.

“Not that kind of help. I’m J.D. Weather’s son. You must have known my father.”

“J.D. Weather didn’t have a son.” He looked into my face suspiciously.

I pulled out my wallet and showed him the photostat of my discharge papers. “You can see my name’s Weather. I want to talk to you–”

“What about? This is a hell of a time of night to wake me up.”

“I was told that you’re an honest man.”

“Come in,” he said then, and opened the door wide. I stepped in and followed him down the hall. “We’ll go into the den.”

A plain camel’s-hair bathrobe tied with a rope gave his thin shoulders and back a monkish look. The impression of monastic austerity was continued in his den, which was as sparsely furnished as a monk’s cell. A solid table with a typewriter on it, a wire basket full of papers, a straight chair in front of it, a leather armchair to one side by the window, the walls lined with shelves of books. When he turned on the green-shaded desk lamp I noticed some of the titles: Civil Statutes, Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, William James’s Psychology, Malraux’s La Condition Humaine.

He motioned me into the armchair, turned the straight chair away from the table, and sat down facing me. His face was lean and intelligent, with a strong brow and a sensitive mouth. His nose was thin, but his nostrils were heavily winged and flared when he breathed like a race horse’s. His blue eyes were steady, but their gaze was clouded by something. I suspected that he saw the world through a haze of dreamy idealism. A strange man, I thought, to become a successful politician in such a city.

“Well,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“Maybe I can do something for you. This is the way I see it – correct me if I’m wrong. You ran for Mayor on a reform platform and got in, probably to your own surprise. But once you were in the City Hall you found out that it wasn’t so easy to clean up the city. Corruption was solidly entrenched and backed by powerful interests. You had to welch on your promise to the decent people that supported you–”

“The city government was an Augean stable,” he said with a doleful smile. “But you didn’t come here in the middle of the night to tell me that.”

“I don’t know how much you’ve been able to do, but it looks to me as if it still is. I know the police are a bloody scandal – I had my pocket picked by one of them tonight.”

“Can you give me the man’s name? I’m on the police board–”

“I’m not interested in pointing out one man to you. The whole force is rotten. In spite of the fact that you’ve been on the police board for nearly two years.”

“I’ve done what I could,” Allister said soberly. “You don’t know the situation. You’ve got to remember that I’m a minority of one on the police board. The other members are appointed by the city council, and I don’t control the city council. I’ve tried more than once to force through a full-scale investigation of the police. I’ve got enough evidence in my files to turn the whole department upside down. But the council blocked me. Most of them have been bought.”

“Why don’t you appeal directly to the voters?”

“I’m going to.” He leaned forward tensely. “But I have to fight the council with their own weapons. If I come out in the open too soon, they’ll get together to defeat me in the next election, and that’ll be the end of municipal reform. I can’t afford to act now, with the election coming up in April. But I’m building up a machine that will beat them at their own game. The people are learning that I’m on their side.”

He settled back and took a deep breath, like an orator drinking a glass of water between paragraphs. His blue gaze rested on my face, clearing suddenly as if he were seeing me now for the first time.

“It’s queer that I should be talking like this to J.D. Weather’s son.” He smiled the formal smile of a humorless man. “Municipal reform isn’t exactly part of your family tradition.”

“Don’t start telling me that my father dirtied this town. Apparently he did his share, but one man can’t corrupt a town all by himself. It takes co-operation.”

“You’re right, Weather. I saw that only too clearly after your father died. You’ve got to realize that he and I were political enemies for years. I fought him when I was in Cranbridge in the D.A.’s office, and I fought him when I came back here to run for the council. I began to feel that one man was holding back this town, and that he was the man. But I was wrong. He died and things went on as before. It wasn’t a man I had to fight – it was a system. There were always others to take his place.” He lowered his head in a slightly actorish gesture.

“Kerch, for instance,” I said. “My father was a saint compared with R. Kerch.”

“I never denied in private that J.D. had his virtues,” Allister said. “But this Kerch is evil through and through. I’d give anything to have this town rid of him.” There was a faint note of unreality in everything he said, as if the true nature of the world had always escaped him. But his face and his whole body were passionately sincere.

I said: “You don’t have to give anything. Lend me fifty dollars and a gun.”

“I can let you have some money,” he said slowly. “But I haven’t a gun. Why do you want a gun?”

“For self-protection. I’m going to kill Kerch with my bare hands, and I’ll need a gun for self-protection while I’m doing it.”

He looked shocked. “You’re not serious?”

“I’m dead serious. You think the town would be better off without him. You can’t touch him yourself, but you want to get rid of him. This is your chance. Get me a gun.”

“What you’re proposing is murder.” He jumped up quickly and walked back and forth across the room. “And you’re asking me to be an accessory to it.”

“Murder is nothing new to this town.”

“Is Kerch a murderer? Is that what you mean?”

“My father was murdered, and Kerch took over his business. If Kerch didn’t do it himself, he got somebody to do it for him.”

He stood still in the center of the room and faced me. He looked harried and distraught, his thin face and body worn down fine by the friction of an environment that was too rough for him: “You don’t realize what you’re proposing, Weather. You couldn’t even get to Kerch. He never goes anywhere without a bodyguard. Even if you did, you’d never get away.”

“I’ll take my chance. The only chance I’m asking you to take is one on me. And you can count on me. If I’m caught, I won’t talk about you.”

“I don’t like this,” he said uncertainly.

“I don’t expect you to like it. But you said yourself that evil has to be fought with its own weapons. Can you get me a gun?”

Determination crystallized slowly in his eyes. He bit his lip. “Wait here,” he said finally.

He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. I heard him lift a telephone receiver and ask for a number: 23748. After that his voice was too low for me to hear anything but scattered words. Twice he said gun.

Then he slammed down the receiver and thrust his head in at the door. He spoke quickly as if rapid speech and action could shake off the doubts that nagged at his face:

“Wait here. I’ll have to get dressed and go out for a minute. Read a book if you like.”

“I’m not in the mood for reading. Can you get me one?”

“Yes. I think so. In my profession, you know, you make contacts with all sorts of people. I’ll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.” He withdrew his head with the suddenness of a startled gopher, and ran up the stairs, two at a time. A few minutes later I heard him come down and leave the house.

Allister was a queer duck, I thought, but he had his points. Not everyone would leave a total stranger alone in his house at night. And he had gone much further than that – gone out of his way to provide me with the one thing I needed to go on living in the same town with Kerch. He hated Kerch as sincerely as I did, and though he didn’t seem to have much physical courage, he had moral daring. In spite of his position, he had the daring to step outside the law for a purpose that seemed good to him. He wasn’t my type at all, but I felt respect and affection for him, as if he were at the same time both my older and my younger brother. The idealism that made him seem unrealistic and a little silly was the thing in him that I knew I could depend on, because he was a man ruled by general ideas. In a way he reminded me of Kaufman, the radical who sat in the back of his secondhand shop like an old spider, too disinterested to catch flies.

My mind skipped from Kaufman to his granddaughter Carla. Where would she be in five years? What would she be doing? How did she feel about me? Would I ever see her again? Probably, because I certainly seemed to be getting around. It didn’t occur to me that I could ever die.

The night had passed its three o’clock crisis, and the patch of earth where the city stood was turning now not away from evening but towards morning. An hour before, I had felt almost finished, beaten down and about ready to quit. Since then a tide had turned in my blood. My head was light and sore, but I felt ready to fight the city again. I waited for Allister impatiently. I wanted to be on my way.

I lit a cigarette, the first I had remembered to smoke all night. But the smoke I drew into my lungs had a predawn bitterness. I crushed it out in the bottom of a steel wastebasket. There were no ashtrays in the room.

Then I heard hurrying footsteps coming up the walk to the porch, and the front door opening. I opened the door of the den, and Allister trotted in, wearing a gray pin-stripe suit and a fedora. He closed the door behind him with a conspiratorial gesture that made me smile to myself.

“Did you get it?”

He brought his hand out of the pocket of his outer coat, holding a heavy automatic by the muzzle. “I hope you know how to work an automatic, because I don’t. Be careful how you handle it. It’s loaded.”

I took it from him and saw that it was a Colt .45. I slid out the clip and ran my fingers over the copperheaded bullets nestling together like peas in a pod. I dropped it in my pocket, where it made a reassuring weight.

“I can use it. Have you got any extra shells?”

He handed me a small cardboard box which dragged down my other pocket. There was a confused gleam in his eyes, as if he was frightening himself but was pleased and surprised by his own temerity.

“And I need some money. My pockets were cleaned out.”

He took out an alligator billfold and counted out five tens. “If you need more, you can come to me,” he said. “But if you get into trouble, it wouldn’t do to bring me into it. It wouldn’t help you, and it would do me a terrible lot of harm. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I told you you could count on me. I’ll send back your money when I can.”

“Forget about it. I don’t need it. But you won’t send the gun back, will you?”

“If it does what I hope it will, I’ll have to ditch it anyway.”

He opened the front door for me and gave me his slender hand in a rigid boy-scout grip. “Good luck. Take care of yourself.”

“I think I can, now,” I said. “I won’t forget your help.”

I went down the walk to the dark street and turned towards the center of town.