Night of the Juggler

Chapter 24

The Arsenal is situated at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, south and east of the Mall. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century for the function its name suggests, at various times in its existence it has also been used as a police station and a weather laboratory. Presently this four-story edifice with crenellated towers is the headquarters for Central Park’s recreation and cultural affairs administration. Its rear abuts on a quad formed by the animal and bird houses, the rows of bear caves, and the park’s cafeteria. In the middle of the quad is the seal pond, guarded or decorated on all four corners by the figures of giant stone eagles.

There are no guards or attendants inside the animal and bird houses at night. There is no external security, except for random checks by pairs of policemen on bicycles and the occasional cruising squad car from the 22nd Precinct on Transverse Three.

The Arsenal is locked at the close of the business day, and only one man remains on duty, a night watchman whose presence is required by insurance regulations.

Lanny Gruber, on duty that particular night, sat in his small office on the first floor just off the main entrance preparing to enjoy his supper.

Lanny, a middle-aged man with kind and thoughtful eyes, had poured coffee from a thermos and was in the act of unwrapping a ham sandwich when something made him pause and glance toward the open door of his office. Was it a sound or simply his nerves? Glass breaking in the basement? Couldn’t be. . It had been a dreadful and disturbing night for him because he had seen the police artist’s sketch of Gus Soltik on television and had recognized it. He had called the 22nd Precinct, but they already had his name. And there had been another brutal and senseless tragedy in the park. A young Puerto Rican boy, to judge from his name.

But Lanny felt a reluctant compassion for Gus Soltik. In Lanny’s view, Gus had made a pathetic attempt to understand a world that for the most part ridiculed and despised him.

Then he heard another sound, a footstep in the corridor. He felt his heart lurch with fear. There was a gun in the locker across the room, but before he could rise, Gus Soltik, his face haggard with confusion and pain, limped into his office. He stopped at Lanny’s desk, blood dripping from the fingers of his left hand. The single word he spoke came with a gasp of anguish.

“Help,” he said to Lanny Gruber.

“Yes, I’ll help you, Gus,” Gruber said, speaking slowly and quietly, using the warmth of his voice as he might use a gentle hand to stroke a frightened animal. He was a realistic man and was keenly aware of his own danger. He fully understood that whether he lived or died would depend on whether or not he could exert a calming effect on Gus Soltik and make him understand that he must call the police.

“Help,” Gus Soltik said, and extended his right hand to Lanny.

Then he spoke again, another single word which Lanny didn’t understand. “Cage.”

A certain expectancy in Gus Soltik’s manner gave Lanny confidence.

“There is only one way I can help you, Gus,” Lanny said, again slowly and quietly. “We’ve been friends, and you can trust me.”

Gus Soltik continued to stare dumbly and hopefully at Lanny.

He’s always done everything I’ve asked him to, Lanny was thinking, and encouraged by the expression on Gus Soltik’s face, he decided to chance it. He casually lifted the phone from its cradle and smiled at Gus as he began to dial the police emergency number.

“Since you need help, Gus, we might as well get it. It’s the best way, believe me.”

But Lanny Gruber had fatally misjudged the hope and expectation in Gus Soltik’s muddy eyes and twisted features. He couldn’t know what powerful elements had been churning in Gus Soltik’s psyche tonight.

There could no longer be times without anger for Gus Soltik.

Lanny Gruber, smiling and dialing at a deliberate pace, couldn’t know that blazing in Gus Soltik’s mind was the concept “white legs” and a twisted and frenzied compulsion for revenge.

“Cages,” he said again, but insistently now. What Gus Soltik wanted were the thin metal things that opened doors. In his feverishly tortured mind he believed that if he released a cage, the great, roaring cages that were strong as he was strong but helpless as he was in their barred boxes, when it was free the cage would help. Kill them. All. And the coldness. .

“Twenty-second Precinct, Sergeant Dorman.”

Lanny Gruber said, “Officer, this is-”

Gus Soltik’s hand moved with blinding speed, his fist closing on the telephone cord and ripping it from its base in a floorboard wall socket.

“No, please!” Gruber cried, knowing this was a mistake but unable to control the hysteria in his voice, for Gus Soltik was lunging toward him, his hands forming a loop with the length of plastic telephone cord.

Gus was thinking dimly as he looked down at Gruher’s body of the time he had brought the week-old produce here and how nice Lanny had been to him, and these memories merged with memories of his mother and Mrs. Schultz and the young boy whose curly hair smelled of cherries, and tears began to well in his eyes.

Brushing them from his cheek with the back of his hand, he removed three rings of keys from a drawer in Lanny’s desk.

Male Caucasian, age twenty-nine, name, George Cobb, address, the 300 block of East Fifty-fourth. Street, Manhattan. Approximately 5 feet 9 inches in height, weight 200 pounds. Brown hair, blue eyes. No distinguishing scars. Small mustache.

That was the police description of the man who had been assaulted by Gus Soltik. George Cobb was presently being interrogated by Lieutenant Tonnelli at the CP. Crews of television and press reporters were gathered in a semicircle about Cobb, their silhouettes thrown into grotesque shadows by batteries of brilliant camera lights backed by huge aluminum reflectors.

Cobb was speaking hesitantly, almost timorously, avoiding the baleful glare of the powerfully muscled detective with the hideous scar on his left cheek.

“Well, I was watching it on television, and when I saw the dogs and helicopters, I just decided to come over and take a look-see,” Cobb said. “Just for-”

“All right,” Tonnelli cut him off and glanced at the notes he’d taken. Yellow leather hat, brown turtleneck sweater, six-two or — three. “He say anything to you, anything at all?”

“Well, he just made some noises,” Cobb said. “They weren’t words.”

Patrolman Prima pushed his way through the crowd and caught the lieutenant’s eye. “We got the heap, Lieutenant.” Prima looked at George Cobb. “Sixty-nine Pontiac, maroon with black stripes, needs some work on the front fender?”

“That’s my car,” Cobb said.

“Where did you find it?” Tonnelli asked Prima.

“In the woods, east of the Mall, on a line with Sixty-sixth Street,” Prima said.

Gus Soltik ran with lumbering strides from the Arsenal, past the seal pond, and under the Delacorte clock to the double doors of the animal house. Unlocking them, he pushed them back until metal spring plungers dropped into slots in the tile floor. His nostrils flared, and his senses were aroused by the strong smell of cat urine and disinfectant.

This narrow wing of the zoo was dark, as were all the others. Some moonlight fell in through the arched and barred windows at the back of the cages, shining on dull yellow brick walls and the black tile flooring.

Most of the animals were asleep, and at this time of the year all were quartered inside the building. In warmer seasons the big cats were allowed to prowl into the rows of outside cages which faced the greenery of the park.

Gus Soltik stepped over the wooden barrier that kept visitors a safe distance from the bars and unlocked the door of a cage which confined a black-maned African lion, the great male whose name was Garland.

The lion was lying on a thick wooden shelf built four feet above the concrete floor of its cage. The big cat was awake, yellow eyes glowing in the darkness, but it indicated no interest in the door which Gus Soltik had opened.

Gus Soltik made a clucking noise with his tongue. The big cat put its massive head on its paws and closed its eyes.

Gus stood in the darkness for what seemed a long time, feeling confusion and frustration and feeling too the pain in his left arm and the sluggish flow of blood down his wrist and fingers.

Then he remembered something Lanny had told him about animals.

Animals in forests. Animals in barns. Gus Soltik stepped back over the barrier and left the animal house and went to where there were rows of trash cans waiting a morning collection.

He ignited a newspaper with his cigarette lighter and pushed it deep into the can. Soon the brisk night wind whipped the blaze into roaring flames.

Gus Soltik put the can on his shoulder, grunting harshly at the pain in his arm, and stumbled back into the lion house.

Sparks trailed brilliantly in his passage; smoke and fire gusted toward the tiled ceiling.

Gus Soltik hurled the can of blazing trash through the open door of Garland’s cage. The heavy container fell with a metallic crash on the concrete floor, its contents scattering across the concrete floor in flaming heaps.

While Garland raced from one barred wall to another, whining at the searing barrier of fire, and other big cats began roaring in panic, Gus Soltik ran through the double doors of the lion house and out into the night.

Garland, roaring with pain and fear, leaped across the blazing trash through the door of the open cage. By then Gus Soltik was running toward a parks department vehicle and thinking with savage anticipation of “white legs.”

Uncaged for the first time in seven years, Garland faced the open double doors of the lion house and the black night beyond them. Belly close to the ground, trembling with fear and excitement at this new experience, Garland padded through the open doors and into the darkness of Central Park.

Twenty minutes later, Tonnelli was giving urgent orders to Sokolsky on the switchboard in the Central Park command post. The Gypsy himself had just received a tense report from patrolmen in a cruising squad car operating out of the 22nd Precinct on Transverse Three. The report had created a reaction like a spasm in the orderly and disciplined chaos at the CP. Squad cars had been sent streaking toward the Arsenal from all areas of the park, their revolving dome lights flashing like giant fireflies against the black trees.

Gus Soltik drove north on the East Drive, traveling at a conservative speed which in no way reflected the thoughts storming at gale force within his tortured head. The interior of the cab was dark, and his face was only a blur behind the windshield, and this, plus the parks department legend on the doors of the truck, gave him safe-conduct past clusters of uniformed patrolmen who stood with red flashlights at hundred-yard intervals along the drive.

He would leave the truck in the parking lot off the drive. Then he could hide in the darkness and make his way to her.

The headlights of oncoming traffic struck at his face like angry lances, and their glaring attacks intensified his rage and his hungers.

Tonnelli had said to Sokolsky, “First, send a homicide detail to the Arsenal. Lanny Gruber is dead. Then alert every cop and detective in this area that there’s a lion, that’s right, Sokolsky, a lion, and it’s loose in the park. The chiefs have dispatched three armored jeeps with marksmen and tranquilizer bullets. Don’t anybody try to stop him with a police special. It won’t.”

After Sokolsky had transmitted these messages to all patrolmen and squads in and around the park, he flicked his receiving switch and gestured to Tonnelli.

“Something else is coming in, Lieutenant.” Sokolsky listened for a few seconds, nodded, then glanced up at Tonnelli. “The same guys from the Twenty-second. They’ve been checking around, found a parks department truck missing. Seems Lanny Gruber usually took a swing through the zoo area around midnight. Then he parked the truck on the south side of the Arsenal, you know, after making sure there was nobody loitering-”

Tonnelli cut him off with a chopping gesture of his hand.

“When did they find it missing?”

“Couple of minutes ago, I guess.”

Potentials and timetables and routes began to form patterns into the Gypsy’s intricate perceptions. Not south but north. He wouldn’t drive south toward that barrier of squad cars on Fifty-ninth Street. North then. At least twenty minutes ago, possibly more. And the Juggler’s destination? Boyd had given him an answer to that.

West across the Ramble on a line with Seventy-seventh Street. If Kate Boyd was alive, that’s where the Juggler was heading. If she were dead, he would travel north inevitably, hoping to escape from the park through the trackless areas that merged with Meer Lake and the edges of Harlem.

Sokolsky flipped a switch and spoke into his mike. “Code Three, all units. . ” Tonnelli cut him off with an angry headshake.

“Hold it!” Tonnelli said.

Sokolsky looked at him with puzzled eyes. “Sure, Lieutenant. But I thought-”

“We’ll finesse this one,” Tonnelli said. The Gypsy turned and stared north at black stands of trees on the horizon. His expression was hard and cold, and his eyes were narrowing as if he had already caught sight of his quarry.

“Forget the report on that missing truck, Sokolsky. That’s an order.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

“One more thing. I want every cop and detective out of the Ramble. Instruct them to report to the reserve unit in the Sheep Meadow. Put that signal on the air right now.”

“Check, Lieutenant.”

Tonnelli walked with long, deliberate strides, not to his unmarked sedan, but to a row of pool squad cars which were equipped with standard dome lights and whose interior arsenals included bullhorns and riot guns. Tonnelli jerked a thumb at a young uniformed officer behind the wheel of one of these reserve squad cars. The patrolman slipped hastily from the car, and within seconds Gypsy Tonnelli was driving across the meadow that would lead him to the East Drive.

Gus Soltik crouched low in the dark, warm cab of the parks department truck and watched two young patrolmen crossing the lot in his direction, their red flashlights cutting rhythmic swaths across the paved surface of the parking area. Gus Soltik sat very quietly, but his right hand gripped the handle of his knife with painful intensity.

His thoughts were chaotic, and his body was hot and trembling with his needs.

The red beam of a flashlight flicked across the windshield of the truck; but Gus Soltik’s head was below the dashboard, and the officers continued on toward the East Drive, their lights eventually winking out in the darkness.

With an animal like moan Gus Soltik climbed from the truck and ran swiftly and silently into trees bordering the parking lot.