Cat of Many Tails

7

The so-called “Cat Riots” of September 22–23 marked the dread appearance in New York City of mobile vulgus for the first time since the Harlem disorders of almost fifteen years before. But in this case the mob was predominantly white; as a wry vindication of the Mayor’s dawn press conference of the previous month, there was no “race angle.” The only racial fears involved were the primitive ones of all mankind.

Students of mob psychology found the Cat Riots interesting. If in one sense the woman whose hysterical outburst set off the panic in Metropol Hall exerted the function of the inevitable meneur — the leader each mob tends to throw up, who starts the cheering or the running away — if the hysterical woman represented the fuse which sparked the explosion, she in her turn had been ignited by the inflammatory Citizens’ Action Teams which had sprung up all over the Greater City during the immediately preceding Four Days and whose activities were responsible for her presence in the Hall. And no one could say with certainty who originally inspired those groups; at least no individual responsibility was ever determined.

The shortlived movement which came to be known as the Four Days (although from inception to culminating riot it spanned six days) was first publicly taken note of early on Monday, September 19, in the late morning editions of the newspapers.

An “association of neighbors” had been formed over the past weekend on the Lower East Side under the name of “The Division Street Vigilantes.” At an organizing meeting held Saturday night a series of resolutions had been drawn up in the form of a “Declaration” which was ratified “in full convention assembled” on the following afternoon. Its “Preamble” asserted “the rights of lawabiding American citizens, in the failure of regular law enforcement,” to band together “for common security.” Anyone in the prescribed neighborhood was eligible to join. World War II veterans were especially solicited. Various patrols were to be set up: a Streets Patrol, a Roofs Patrol, an Alleys Patrol. There was a separate Unit Patrol for each dwelling or other building in the area. The function of the patrols was “to stand guard against the marauder who has been terrorizing the City of New York.” (There was some intra-organizational protest against the use of “fancy language,” but the language stood when the Resolutions Committee pointed out that “on Division Street and around here we’re supposed to be a bunch of pigs.”) Discipline was to be military. Patrolmen were to be equipped with flashlights, armbands, “and available weapons of defense.” A 9 P.M. curfew for children was to be enforced. Street level lighting was to be maintained until daybreak; special arrangements were being made with landlords of dwellings and stores.

In the same news story was noted the simultaneous formation of three similar organizations, apparently unconnected with one another or with the Division Street Vigilantes. One was in the Murray Hill section and called itself “The Murray Hill Committee of Safety.” Another took in the area between West 72nd Street and West 79th Street and was named “The West End Minutemen.” The third centered in Washington Square, “The Village Home Guard.”

Considering the differences among the three groups culturally, socially, and economically, their avowed purposes and operating methods were astonishingly similar to those of the Division Street Vigilantes.

Editorials that morning commented on “the coincidence of four widely separated communities setting the same idea over the same weekend” and wondered “if it is so much of a coincidence as it appears.” The anti-Administration papers blamed the Mayor and the Police Commissioner and used phrases like “the traditional American way” and “the right to defend the American home.” The more responsible journals deplored the movement and one of them was “confident that the traditional good humor of New York will laugh these well-meaning but overexcited people back to their senses.” Max Stone, editorial writer of the leading liberal paper, wrote: “This is fascism on the sidewalks of New York.”

By 6 P.M. Monday the newscasters were reporting to their audiences that “at least three dozen action committees have sprung up in scattered neighborhoods of the five boroughs since the announcement this morning of the organization of the Division Street, Murray Hill, West End Avenue, and Greenwich Village groups.”

The late evening editions of the newspapers were able to say that “the idea is spreading like an old-fashioned prairie fire. By press time the number of action committees was over a hundred.”

By Tuesday morning the count was reported as “hundreds.”

The term “Citizens’ Action Teams” seems to have first appeared in a Tuesday Extra story on the amazing citywide phenomenon. The story was bylined “Jimmy Leggitt.” The phrase took hold when Winchell, Lyons, Wilson, and Sullivan noted in their columns that its initials spelled “cat.” And CATs they remained.

At an emergency meeting in the Mayor’s office Monday night, the Police Commissioner expressed himself as being in favor of “taking tough police measures to stop this thing dead in its tracks. We can’t have every Joe, Moe, and Schmo in town a selfappointed cop. It’s anarchy, Jack!” But the Mayor shook his head. “You’re not going to put out a fire by passing a law against it, Barney. We can’t stop this movement by force; it’s out of the question. What we’ve got to do is try to control it.”

At his press conference Tuesday morning the Mayor said with a smile, “I repeat that this Cat thing has been exaggerated far out of proportion and there is absolutely no basis for public alarm with the Police Department working on it twenty-four hours a day. These groups will function much more in the public interest with the advice and assistance of the authorities. The Police Commissioner and his various heads of department will be on hand all day today to receive delegations of these groups with the end in view of systematizing and co-ordinating their activities, in much the way that the splendid ARP groups operated during the War.”

Disturbingly, the groups did not appear to be received.

On Tuesday night the Mayor went on the air. He did not in the slightest impugn the integrity and good intentions of the people forming home defense groups, but he felt sure all reasonable people would agree that the police power of the greatest city in the world could not be permitted to be usurped by individual citizens, no matter how honest or well-intentioned, in defiance of legal authority. “Let it not be said that the City of New York in the fifth decade of the twentieth century resorted to frontier town vigilante law.” The dangers implicit in this sort of thing were recognized by all, he was certain, as far exceeding any possible threat of one homicidally inclined psychotic. “In the old days, before the establishment of official police systems, night patrols of citizens were undoubtedly necessary to protect communities from the robberies and murders of the criminal element; but in the face of the record of New York’s Finest, what justifications is there for such patrols today?” He would regret, the Mayor stated, having to resort to countermeasures in the allover public interest. He knew such a step would prove unnecessary. “I urge all already functioning groups of this nature, and groups in the process of organizing, to get in touch immediately with their police precincts for instructions.”

By Wednesday morning the failure of the Mayor’s radio appeal was apparent. The most irresponsible rumors circulated in the City: that the National Guard had been called out, that the Mayor had made an emergency-flight personal appeal to President Truman in the White House, that the Police Commissioner had resigned, that in a clash between a Washington Heights CAT patrol and police two persons had been killed, and nine injured. The Mayor canceled all appointments for the day and remained in continuous conference. Top officials of the Police Department were unanimous in favor of presenting ultimatums to the CAT groups: Disband at once or face arrest. The Mayor refused to sanction such action. No disorders had been reported, he pointed out; apparently the groups were maintaining internal discipline and restricting themselves to their avowed activities. Besides, the movement by now embraced too many people for such measures. “They might lead to open clashes and we’d have riots all over the City. That might mean calling for troops. I’ll exhaust every peaceful means before I lay New York open to that.”

By midafternoon Wednesday word came that “the central committee” of “the combined Citizens’ Action Teams of New York City” had engaged the vast and windy Metropol Hall on Eighth Avenue for “a monster mass meeting” Thursday night. Immediately after, the Mayor’s secretary announced a delegation of this committee.

They filed in, a little nervous but with stubborn looks on their faces. The Mayor and his conferees regarded the deputation with curiosity. They seemed a cross-section of the City’s people. There were no sharp or shady faces among them. The spokesman, a tall man in his 30s with the look of a mechanic, identified himself as “Jerome K. Frankburner, veteran.”

“We’ve come here, Mr. Mayor, to invite you to talk at our mass meeting tomorrow night. Metropol Hall seats twenty thousand people, we’ll have a radio and television setup, and everybody in the City will be sitting in. It’s democracy, it’s American. What we’d like you to tell us, Mr. Mayor, is what you’ve done to stop the Cat and what plans you and your subordinates have for the future. And if it’s straight talk that makes sense we guarantee that by Friday morning there won’t be a C.A.T. in business. Will you come?”

The Mayor said, “Would you gentlemen wait here?” and he took his people into a private office next door.

“Jack, don’t do it!”

“Why not, Barney?”

“What can we tell them that we haven’t told them a hundred times already? Let’s ban the meeting. If there’s trouble, crack down on their leaders.”

“I don’t know, Barney,” said one of the Mayor’s advisers, a power in the Party. “They’re no hoodlums. These people represent a lot of good votes. We’d better go easy.”

There were other expressions of opinion, some siding with the Police Commissioner, some with the Party man.

“You haven’t said anything, Inspector Queen,” said the Mayor suddenly. “What’s your opinion?”

“The way I see it,” replied Inspector Queen, “it’s going to be mighty tough for the Cat to stay away from the meeting.”

“Or to put it another way,” said the Mayor — “although that’s a very valuable thought, Inspector — I was elected on a people’s platform and I’m going to stay on it.”

He opened the door and said, “I’ll be there, gentlemen.”

The events of the night of September 22 began in an atmosphere of seriousness and responsibility. Metropol Hall was filled by 7 P.M. and an overflow crowd gathered which soon numbered thousands. But there was exemplary order and the heavy concentration of police had little to do. The inevitable enterprising notions distributor had sent hawkers out to peddle ticklers with a cat’s head on the end and oversized C.A.T. lapel buttons of cardboard, and others were peddling orange-and-black cats’ heads with grisly expressions which were recognizably advance stocks of Halloween gimcrackery, but there were few buyers in the crowd and the police hustled the vendors along. There were noticeably few children and an almost total absence of horseplay. Inside the Hall people were either quiet or spoke in whispers. In the streets around the Hall the crowds were patient and well-behaved; too patient and too well-behaved, according to old hands of the Traffic Division, who would have welcomed, it appeared, a few dozen drunks, a rousing fistfight or two, or a picket line of Communist demonstrators. But no drunks were visible, the people were strangely passive, and if Communists were among them it was as individuals.

The Traffic brass, testing the wind, put in a call for more mounted police and radio-patrol cars.

A noose dropped quietly around the entire area at 8 P.M. Between 51st and 57th Streets south to north, and between Seventh and Ninth Avenues east to west, solid lines of police appeared to screen off each intersection. Automobile traffic was detoured. Pedestrians were permitted to penetrate the police lines entering the area, but none were allowed to leave before identifying themselves and answering certain questions.

Throughout the district hundreds of plainclothesmen circulated.

Inside the Hall there were hundreds of others. Among them was one Ellery Queen. On the platform sat the central committee of the combined Citizens’ Action Teams of New York. They were a polyglot group in which no single face stood out; they might have been a jury in a courtroom, and they all wore the intent but self-conscious expressions of jurymen. The Mayor and his official party occupied the seats of honor — “which means,” as the Mayor remarked behind his hand to Dr. Edward Cazalis, “where they can keep an eye on us.” The speaker’s rostrum was flanked with massed American flags. Radio and public address microphones clustered before it. The television people were set up and waiting.

The meeting was opened at 9 P.M. by Jerome K. Frankburner, acting chairman of the evening. Frankburner wore a GI uniform. On the breast of his tunic glittered several decorations, and his sleeve carried an impressive weight of overseas stripes. Above the military figure hung a grim face. He spoke without notes, quietly.

“This is the voice of a New Yorker,” Frankburner began. “It doesn’t matter what my name is or where I live. I’m speaking for hundreds of New York neighborhood groups who have organized to protect our families and our neighbors’ families from a citywide menace. Lots of us fought in the last war and we’re all lawabiding Americans. We represent no self-seeking group. We have no axes to grind. You won’t find any chiselers, racketeers, or Commies among us. We’re Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Liberals, Socialists. We’re Protestants, Catholics, Jews. We’re whites and we’re Negroes. We’re business people, white collar people, laboring people, professional people. We’re second-generation Americans and we’re fourth-generation Americans. We’re New York.

“I’m not going to make a speech. We’re not here to listen to me. All I want to do is ask a few questions.

“Mr. Mayor, people are being murdered right and left by some lunatic. It’s almost four months since the Cat got going and he’s still on the prowl. All right, you can’t catch him or you haven’t been able to yet. Meanwhile what protection do we have? I’m not saying anything against our police. They’re a hardworking bunch like the rest of us. But the people of New York ask you: What have our police done about it?”

A sound went through the Hall and met another from outdoors. It was very little, a distant flutter of thunder, but in the Hall and throughout the surrounding streets police nervously fingered their clubs and tightened ranks and on the platform beside the speaker the Mayor and his Police Commissioner were seen to go a little pale.

“To the last man and woman,” said Frankburner, a ring coming into his voice, “we’re against vigilante law. But we’re asking you, Mr. Mayor, what other recourse we have. My wife or my mother might be feeling that silk cord around her throat tonight, and the police wouldn’t be in on it till it was all over but the funeral arrangements.

“Mr. Mayor, we’ve invited you here tonight to tell is what plans you and the law-enforcement authority have for giving us the protection we feel we haven’t got.

“Ladies and gentlemen. His Honor, the Mayor of New York.”

The Mayor spoke for a long time. He spoke in a sober, neighborly way, exercising his considerable charm and knowledge of the City’s people. He traced the history of the New York Police Department, its growth, its gigantic organization, its complexity. He cited the record of its eighteen thousand men and women in guarding law and maintaining order. He gave some reassuring statistics on homicide arrests and convictions. He went into the legal and social aspects of vigilantism and its threats to democratic institutions, its tendency to degenerate from original high purposes to mob rule and the satisfaction of the worst passions of the lowest elements. He pointed to the dangers — violence begetting violence, leading to military intervention, to martial law, and to the suppression of civil liberties, “the first step on the road to fascism and totalitarianism.”

“And all this,” the Mayor said goodhumoredly, “because temporarily we have failed to locate a single homicidal maniac in the haystack of a city of over seven and one-half millions of people.”

But the Mayor’s speech, for all its ease and sanity and persuasiveness, was not eliciting those little signs and responses by which veteran public speakers gauge the success or failure of their exertions. This audience gave no signs and responses whatever. It simply sat, or stood, listening. A multibreathing, unstirred entity waiting for something... a loosening word.

The Mayor knew it; his voice took on an edge.

His party knew it; they whispered to one another on the platform with exaggerated ease, conscious of the eyes, the television cameras.

Rather abruptly, the Mayor asked the Police Commissioner to give an accounting of the specific measures already taken and “being planned” for the apprehension of the Cat.

As the Commissioner approached the rostrum, Ellery rose in the audience and began to walk down the central aisle toward the press section, scanning the ranks of human heads.

He spotted Jimmy McKell shortly after the Commissioner began to speak.

McKell was twisted about in his seat, glaring at a girl three rows behind him. The girl, pink, was looking at the Commissioner.

Celeste Phillips.

Ellery could not have said what thought, feeling, intuition kept him in the vicinity. Perhaps it was merely the sight of familiar faces.

He dropped to his heels in the aisle at the end of Celeste’s row.

He was uneasy. There was something in the air of Metropol Hall that affected him unpleasantly. He saw that others were in the grip of the same disquiet. A sort of mass auto-intoxication. The crowd breathing its own poisons.

And then he knew what it was.

Fear.

The crowd breathing its own fear. It came out of people in invisible droplets, loaded down the air.

What had seemed patience, passivity, expectancy... nothing but fear.

They were not listening to the voice of the man on the platform.

They were listening to the inner voice of fear.

“THE CAT!”

It came as the Commissioner turned a page of his notes in the silence.

He looked up very quickly.

The Mayor, Dr. Cazalis, half-rose.

Twenty thousand heads turned.

It had been a woman’s scream, pitched to a rare level and held there. It raised the flesh.

A group of men were pushing their way with flailing arms through the standees at the rear of the Hall.

The Commissioner began to say: “Get that woman qui—”

“THE CAT!”

A little eddy of noise began to spin; another; another. A man rose from his seat, a woman, a couple, a group. Craning.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated. Just a hyster—”

“THE CAT!”

“Please!” The Mayor, on the rostrum beside the Commissioner. “Please! Please!”

People were running along the side aisles.

At the rear, a fight was going on.

“THE CAT!”

Somewhere upstairs a man’s voice bellowed. It was choked off, as if he were being throttled.

“Take your seats! Officers!”

Bluecoats materialized all over the auditorium.

The disturbance at the rear was now a yeasty corruption, eating into the main aisle, nibbling at the seats.

“THE CAT!”

A dozen women began to scream.

“HE’S HERE!”

Like a stone, it smashed against the great mirror of the audience and the audience shivered and broke. Little cracks widened magically. Where masses had sat or stood, gaps appeared, grew rapidly, splintered in crazy directions. Men began climbing seats, using their fists. People went down. The police vanished. Trickles of shrieks ran together. Metropol Hall became a great cataract obliterating human sound.

On the platform the Mayor, Frankburner, the Commissioner, were shouting into the public address microphones, jostling one another. Their voices mingled; a faint blend, lost in the uproar.

The aisles were logjammed, people punching, twisting, falling toward the exists.

Overhead a balcony rail snapped; a man fell into the orchestra. People were carried down the balcony staircases. Some slipped, disappeared. At the upstairs fire exits hordes struggled over a living, shrieking carpet.

Suddenly the whole contained mass found vents and shot out into the streets, into-the frozen thousands, in a moment boiling them to frenzy, turning the area about Metropol Hall into a giant frying pan. Its ingredients sizzled over the police lines, melting men, horses, machines, overflowing the intersections and pouring uptown and down, toward Broadway and toward Ninth Avenue — a smoking liquid that burned everything in its path.

Ellery remembered shouting Jimmy McKell’s name as the stampede began, remembered pointing to a petrified Celeste Phillips, trying himself to buck the wall of flesh which pushed him back. He managed to struggle on to a seat, keep his footing there. He saw Jimmy fight his way slowly over three rows, reach the terrified girl, seize her waist. Then they were sucked into the mass and Ellery lost them.

He devoted himself thereafter to keeping off the floor.

A long time afterward he found his father helping the Mayor and the Commissioner direct rescue operations. They had no time for more than a few words. Both were hatless, bleeding, in tatters; all that was left of the Inspector’s jacket was the right sleeve. No, he had not seen McKell or the Phillips girl. Or Dr. Cazalis. His eye kept stealing toward the neat and lengthening line of the dead. Then the Inspector was called away and Ellery plodded back into Metropol Hall to help with the casualties. He was one of an impromptu army: police, firemen, ambulance doctors, Red Cross workers, volunteers from the streets. Sirens kept up their outcry, silencing the moans of the injured.

Other horrors took shape as reports kept pouring in. The mob in fleeing had accidentally broken some shop windows in the side streets between Eighth Avenue and Broadway. Looting had begun, led by hoodlums, loiterers, kid gangs. Bystanders who had tried to interfere had been beaten; shopkeepers had been assaulted and in some instances knifed. For a long time the looting had threatened to get out of hand; there was a furious hour as theaters emptying into Broadway had fed the chaos. Hotels had locked their doors. But the police drove patrol cars into the mobs, mounted patrolmen charged concentrations of rioters, and gradually they were dispersed. Hundreds of stores had sustained broken windows and rifled stocks as far south as 42nd Street. Polyclinic Hospital was bedding the injured in corridors; Red Cross emergency first-aid stations had been set up throughout the Times Square area. Ambulances were speeding into the district from as far north as Fordham Hospital. Lindy’s, Toots Shor’s, Jack Dempsey’s, other restaurants in the vicinity were sending coffee and sandwiches to the relief workers.

At 4:45 A.M. one Evarts Jones, an attorney, handed the following statement to the press:

Pressed by reporters for a personal statement, Frankburner shook his head. “I’m too punchy to say anything. What can anybody say? We were dead wrong. The Mayor was dead right.”

At dawn the Cat Riots were quelled and the Four Days were a bloody paragraph in the unwritten almanacs.

Later, the Mayor in silence distributed the statistics of the night’s disorders to the press.

The woman whose screams touched off the panic and the rioting that followed, said the Mayor, was trampled to death. Her name was Mrs. Maybelle Legontz, 48, a widow, childless. Her body was identified at 2:38 A.M. by a brother, Stephen Chorumkowski, steamfitter, of 421 West 65th Street. Persons in the audience in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Legontz had testified that to the best of their recollection she had not been attacked or molested by anyone; but the standees had been packed together and an accidental nudge by some bystander may have exploded her nervous fears.

Mrs. Legontz had a medical history of neurasthenia, a condition which first appeared following the death of her husband, a sand-hog, of the “bends.”

There was no possibility that she had been the Cat.

It had been, the Mayor agreed with the reporters, one of the worst outbreaks in New York’s history, perhaps the worst since the draft riots of 1863.

Ellery found himself in the milky darkness seated on one of the benches of Rockefeller Plaza. There was no one else in the Plaza but Prometheus. Ellery’s head was dancy and the chill of the New York morning against the torn places on his hands and face was deliriously personal, keeping him in a rare consciousness.

Prometheus spoke from his watery niche in the sunken court and Ellery took a certain comfort in his company.

“You’re wondering how it all came about,” began the golden giant, “that this beast in human form you call the Cat has been able, through the mere bawling of his name, to drive thousands of men out of their heads and send them like frightened animals to an animal death.

“I’m so old I don’t recall where I originally came from, except that it’s supposed to have been without women — which I find very unconvincing — but I seem to remember that I found it necessary to bring to men the gift of fire. If I really did that, I’m the founder of civilization, so I feel qualified to make certain extended remarks on the late unpleasantness.

“The truth is, what happened last night had nothing to do with the Cat at all.

“The world today reminds me of the very old days, when religions were being born. I mean, modern society resembles primitive society to an amusing degree. There’s the same concentration on democratic government, for example, while certain of your number who claim to be in touch with higher powers push to the top to rule. You make the same virtue out of common names and common bloods, investing both with mystic mumbo jumbo. In sexual affairs, your women are equally overrespected and kept inside a convenient cage of sanctity, while important affairs are arrogated to themselves by your males. You’ve even reverted to food taboos in your worship of diets and vitamins.

“But I find the most interesting similarity,” continued Prometheus, apparently impervious to the cold dawn which was making Ellery rattle like an old gourd, “in the way you react to your environment. The crowd, not the individual, is the thinking unit. And the thinking power of a crowd, as last night’s unfortunate events demonstrated, is of an extremely low order. You’re bursting with ignorance, and ignorance breeds panicky fears. You’re afraid of nearly everything, but most of all you’re afraid of personal contact with the problems of your time. So you’re only too happy to huddle together inside the high magic wall of tradition and let your leaders manipulate the mysteries. They stand between you and the terrors of the unknown.

“But once in a while your priests of power fail you and suddenly you’re left to face the unknown in person. Those on whom you relied to bring you salvation and luck, to shield you from the mysteries of life and of death, no longer stand between you and the dreadful darkness. All over your world the magic wall has crumbled, leaving your people paralyzed on the edge of the Pit.

“In such a state of affairs,” said Prometheus, “is it to be wondered at that a single hysterical voice, screaming a single silly taboo, can frighten thousands into running away?”

Ellery awoke on the bench to pain and an early sun burnishing his tutor. There were people in the Plaza and automobiles were rushing by. It seemed to him that someone was making an awful lot of noise and he got up angrily.

The cries were coming from the west, hoarse and exultant.

Boys voices, booming in the canyons.

Ellery limped up the steps, crossed the street, and made his way stiffly toward Sixth Avenue.

There’s no hurry, he thought. They’re peddling the obituary of the C.A.T. So many dead, so many injured, so many dollars’ worth of wreckage. Read all about it.

No, thank you. Hot coffee will do nicely instead.

Ellery limped along trying not to think at all.

But bubbles kept bobbing up.

Obituary of C.A.T. Obituary of Cat... now that would be something. Obituary of Cat. Come seven.

Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.

Ellery laughed.

Or as another immortal put it, I should of stood in bed.

Brother Q, you’re through. Only you had to rise from the dead. To chase a Cat.

What next?

What do you do?

Where do you look?

How do you look?

In the fresh shadow of the Music Hall marquee the boy’s mouth was going through an acrobatic exercise under his popping eyes.

Never an ill wind, thought Ellery as he watched the pile of papers dwindle.

And he began to pass, to cross Sixth Avenue for his coffee, when a shouted syllable made sense and something on top of the heap flew up and lodged in his brain.

Ellery fumbled for a coin. The coin felt cold.

“Extra.”

He stood there being elbowed right and left. There was the familiar Cat, but he had an eighth tail and it was not a question mark.