Death Wish

1

Later he worked out where he had been at the time of the attack on Esther and Carol.

It must have been a few minutes after the lunch broke up. It had been a bibulous meeting with the clients and Paul had felt the effect of the gibsons. A trifle unsteady, he had come outside with Sam Kreutzer and they had ambushed a cab at Fifty-fifth Street. Going down Seventh Avenue they had got caught in the jam in upper Times Square and Paul remembered half choking on the blurted noxious gases of a bus beside the cab. It must have happened right about then: the police placed the time of the attack at two-forty.

The middle of a torpid day. Tourists and hookers moved along the curbs empty-eyed in wilted clothing. On the corners men in sooty T-shirts sold toys and belts. Ordinarily you couldn’t see the pollution working on your lungs so you ignored it; but the fumes from the bus started Paul coughing and that brought on a taut gin headache. He rubbed his eyes.

Sam Kreutzer lit up. “It’s getting so you don’t dare breathe anything that hasn’t been filtered through a cigarette.” Blew smoke at his match. “Christ, will you look at that monstrosity.”

“Which?”

“One Astor Plaza.”

Concrete and plastic on the site of the old Astor Hotel. “I’ll meet you at the Astor Bar,” Sam Kreutzer said musingly, and it stirred Paul’s recollection.

“A God damn shame. The politicians complain about vandalism while they’re tearing down historic monuments to make room for those egg-crates.”

The cab jerked forward and made half a block. Paul said, “How’s the house-hunting?”

“No progress. We spent the weekend looking in Westchester.”

“Maybe you ought to try looking farther out.”

“I couldn’t stand a long commute. But we’re starting to think about renting a house — maybe Leonia or Fort Lee. Anything to get out of Manhattan. We should’ve done it years ago.” Sam tapped his knee. “You and Esther ought to do the same thing. Why stay here when you don’t have to go on living in a war zone?”

“We tried it once,” Paul said and made a negative gesture with his hand, turning it over.

“Twenty years ago. Things have changed, Paul.”

Above the 42nd Street roofs the sun was weak and watery through vapors, too frail to burn the eye. “You’re a nut,” Sam said. “You think you can tell me with a straight face you still love the city — but I’d like to hear you explain why.”

“If you need to have it explained you won’t understand it anyway.”

“I used to know a priest who used that argument to prove the existence of God.”

“Well, it made sense to the priest because he didn’t need proof.”

“Yeah.” Very dry. Sam flashed his keyboard-length rows of teeth under the flimsy mustache he had grown on vacation and was planning, he said vaguely, to shave off. It gave him a rakish look; he was a thin slothful Minnesotan who in eight years with the firm had assimilated all the New York styles: sideburns obscured his ears, his hair fluffed out fashionably in the back, he wore flared striped suits and modish loud ties and he had learned the accepted litanies of outspoken disrespect for every Establishment value. All that, and he would never be a New Yorker. You can’t take the small town out of the boy.

The cab driver was edging frantically to the left to make the left turn off Broadway into Forty-second.

“Look at this mess.” Sam waved his cigarette at Times Square, the crowds, the traffic. “It just doesn’t make sense any more. You can’t get a guy on the phone because he’s always in a taxi stuck in a traffic jam on his way to a meeting. The phone system’s no good, the mails don’t get through.”

Sam threw his hands up helplessly; he enjoyed exposition. “The sanitation trucks grind down my street in the middle of the night like Sherman tanks with busted mufflers and they spend a Goddamned hour slamming garbage cans around right under the window. If we get a snowstorm it takes them a week to clean the streets. It’s madness. Only one answer to it.”

Paul smiled a little. “All right, since you obviously want me to feed you your line. What’s the answer to it?”

“Only one solution to it. Abolish the environment. There won’t be anything left to pollute.”

Paul gave it the polite chuckle it deserved.

Sam said, “You pay for private schools for the kids. You pay for private security guards on the door. You pay out money and flesh to burglars and muggers. You write off your freedom of movement after sundown. And so on and so forth.” He looked at Paul in alarm. “Christ, what am I doing here?”

“Making a living,” Paul drawled. “And reciting the standard catechism of complaints just like the rest of us.”

“Well, at least I’m not carrying it one step beyond that into your lunatic extreme of liberal goodness.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a Goddamned bleeding-heart, Paul, do you know that? You and Esther actually go out into the wilderness and do things. Look at those hideous pinholes in your lapel — what was that, your Lindsay campaign button or your Support Prison Reform badge?”

“Somebody’s got to give a damn,” Paul said.