The Old Turk's Load Page 13

  They got off at Fourteenth and went down to Gloria’s. Vince double-parked and Woody jimmied the door right in broad daylight. It was amazing, the things you could do if you were cool enough about it.The Mushroom slammed through into Gloria’s apartment, but she was long gone. Woody performed the requisite search and came up empty.

  Then over to Eighth, back up to Twenty-Third, and across to Third Avenue, all restaurants, watch repair shops, dry cleaners, shoemakers, butchers, and delis, gay and teeming in the sun. Up through Murray Hill with its stylish deco building fronts, and past the looming Queensboro Bridge. Vince actually found a parking place on Lex a block down from Sammy’s. They went in to use the men’s room and the assistant bartender told them when Norbert would show up. They got coffee and sandwiches and sat in the car listening to music, windows rolled down, enjoying the air, waiting. Eventually, when the time came, they went in and slammed Norbert against the wall and he gave them Lloyd. Easy, boys. No trouble.

  They drove down to Lloyd’s. By this time it was early rush hour and the drive took longer than they liked. However, everything worked out perfectly. Just as they were parking across the street from Lloyd’s, his front door opened.

  Mossman’s description of Kelly was fresh in Vince’s mind. He said, “That’ll be the dick.”

  Woody said, “Will you look at that getup? Guy must buy his clothes at the PI store.”

  Kelly was stepping into the beautiful evening, having spent the day sleeping off the crank he’d done with Lloyd the night before. Lloyd was gone when he woke, probably out on his rounds. So Kelly strolled out for a cup of coffee, leaving his hat and gun behind, busily trying to remember where he’d put his car, wondering where Helen might have been all night and if the Mailman had made it home.

  The Mushroom came up behind him and enveloped him.The Lincoln squealed up to the curb and before he could finish gulping back the breath Mr. Fungu had squeezed out of his lungs, Kelly found himself in the backseat with the big guy, a gun in his ribs. The guy’s eyes were dead. Kelly didn’t even fantasize about making a move on him.

  They drove around the block a few times. Presently Woody appeared on the street and hopped in.“Nothing up there.The other one must’ve seen us on the street and beat it out the fire escape.”

  “What now?”

  “Let’s take him uptown and call the boss.”

  It was an endless ride, up and up through stop-and-go traffic, into the 200s on the Hudson River side, to the wilds of Riverdale Park. Kelly had plenty of time to analyze this latest evolution. Saw it was the culmination of a pattern that had begun to form with the German and the trannie, when he forced the issue and knocked himself off the wave.Then the mistake with Mundi.Then these guys. The entire situation had drifted from its path. Somewhere, off in the woods, down by the river, Kelly heard a train rumble through the gathering dusk—all the innocent bustle and motion of normal life unreachable. Beyond him.The driver kept whistling something. He’d whistle, stop, start it over again. An old pop tune from the fifties. Kelly could almost place it. No timing, no motivation. Mindless. Eerie. Menacing. He felt as flat as the hard blue sky.

  The car pulled up to a wrought-iron gate in a whitewashed wall topped with black spikes. Vince got out and opened the gate, then drove the car down to a garage underneath a massive villa of a house. They dragged Kelly upstairs and put him in a wooden chair in front of a big table. He could see the round fluorescent light tube on the ceiling of the kitchen across the hall, and a warm orange wall. He thought of Aunt Kay’s kitchen, and of cookies. It smelled damp, a little mildewed, as if the house hadn’t been lived in lately. He could feel the two heavies on either side of him tensing for action. The third, the monster, wiped his nose and looked at him as if he were lunch.

  The one on his left said, “This is going to hurt us more than it hurts you.”

  Kelly didn’t believe him.“I’ll talk,”he said, trying to figure out how much to say, what would be plausible, how he might make his move if one were to be made.

  “That’s right,”the man said.The big guy slapped him halfheartedly, just hard enough to knock him off his chair.

  “Let’s get him down in the cellar,” Vince said. “This is going to make a mess.”

  Vince and Woody picked Kelly up like a ventriloquist’s dummy and dragged him into the hall. Kelly lashed out with a hard right cross, but being held by his armpits three inches off the floor limited his effectiveness.

  Then everything went black. Kelly knew the monster had given him a tap on the noggin from behind. Probably’d gotten nervous about the fight he was putting up. That was all right. Like being under ether, they can’t hurt you when you’re unconscious. Not, mused Kelly, that he enjoyed being hit. It was simply the lesser of two evils. His body went limp. His shoulders slipped through muscular fingers. He slumped to the floor.

  It took him the length of that thought, lying there in the comfortable darkness, to realize that the only thing shut off was the lights. The electricity had failed. Nobody had, in fact, knocked him unconscious.

  “Vince! You got him?”

  He bellied to the wall and wriggled away from the voice. The other voice answered it.

  “He’s on your side. I can hear him crawling.”

  Just a few feet ahead of him Kelly saw the dim rectangle of a window. Double swinging sashes about waist high, with diamond shapes leaded in the glass. He dove for it. A lighter snicked on, followed by a muzzle flash.

  Dig We Must

  A

  t 10:13 that evening a surge of electricity flowed into the Northeast power grid at Cornwall, Ontario, in a direction opposite the normal flow for that hour.Technicians at the Richview control center in suburban Toronto spotted the reversal and, knowing it would seriously damage their distribution equipment, pulled switches that isolated their district from the international network of electrical transmission lines. Toronto blacked out at 10:16.

  A massive break had occurred in the circuit somewhere along the U.S.-Canadian border, and the system was compensating by drawing power from other lines in the grid. But the demand on these other lines was too great. They also shorted, tripping more relays, drawing on still other lines, and passing the power drain along in a sort of cascading domino effect.

  The surge swept down New York State and moved into parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut. At 10:25 a worker on duty in the Consolidated Edison control center on Manhattan’s West Side was monitoring a flow of 300,000 kilowatts from upstate. As suddenly as in Richview, the flow reversed, draining one million kilowatts from nine New York area generating stations. Automatic safety switches tripped, throwing the city into darkness.

  The computer-monitored system had been designed primarily to meet the periodic surges in demand for electricity in the northeastern United States. Theoretically, power generated in Canada could light lights in Washington, DC.The way it worked out, however, a break near Niagara Falls was able to extinguish lights as far away as Philadelphia.

  President Johnson ordered the FBI and the Defense Department to report on the possibility of sabotage or covert invasion. A memo to the chairman of the Federal Power Commission instigated a simultaneous investigation by that body.

  At eleven thirty p.m. the director of the United States Office of Emergency Planning told the president that there’d been a short circuit in the cable of the Niagara Mohawk power system. The Niagara Mohawk Company, which had restored power to its own customers more than an hour before, pointed out that power could not have been restored if there’d been a break in the cable. The company’s executive vice president said, “There was no repair crew out because there was nothing to repair.”

  The United States Office of Emergency Planning replied that its information had come from the Boston Edison Company. A spokesman for the Boston facility denied this, saying, “We’re not in a position to tell anyone where the failure is because we don’t know.” The dean of Engineering at Carlton University in Ottawa came to the conclusion that t
he circuit had broken on the U.S. side of the border. An officer of the Ontario Hydroelectric Commission seconded this opinion, saying he was virtually certain the break had

  168 GREGORY GIBSON

  occurred in the 345,000-volt line maintained by the New York State Power Authority. However, the general manager of the New York body maintained that all his company’s lines were intact.

  Such considerations aside, there was no electricity anywhere in New York City and environs. Tens of thousands of people were stuck on darkened subways, with thousands more stranded on electric trains of the New York Central and New Haven lines, and the Long Island Railroad. Auto traffic speed on the city’s major arteries averaged three miles per hour. Citizens rescued their stranded fellows, pedestrians volunteered to direct traffic, people guarded shops against looting, and a vast majority of residents maintained a calm spirit of cooperation. The sudden, overarching stillness fostered a sort of ethereal communion.

  Being a student of the media, Harry Jarkey understood that during the power outage the only effective mass communication was radio. Within minutes of the initial failure, stations improvised emergency hookups and activated generators. People stuck in traffic or their apartments had nothing better to do during the time of crisis than flick on their car or transistor radios and listen. Cousin Brucie’s manic patter was shoved aside in favor of broad, soothing tones.

  Jarkey recalled Marshall McLuhan’s view that electronic circuitry was just an extension of the human nervous system. Perhaps, during the blackout, New York City’s electronic web performed in a way analogous to the neural functions of the human body. With its more sophisticated systems knocked out, the city/body lapsed into a comatose condition. It kept itself together only on the most fundamental levels. Each citizen within earshot of a radio acted as a single nerve ending, responding to the messages of bemused calm that flooded the airwaves.

  Julius Roth, on the other hand, believed that a different sort of electricity—the current of fear—provided the energy that held the city together.The specter of anarchy was never far from the surface. The apparent cooperation was controlled hysteria, the good cheer a sort of gallows humor. The citizens acted as they did to fend off a deeper, more permanent darkness.

  Lloyd Chamberlain would have explained to whomever was in his vicinity that the brain part of the city’s body had seized up.

  From Norbert’s point of view it was just a question of habit. The hardships imposed by the blackout differed only in degree from the difficulties to which people had long been accustomed. All the myriad frustrations and delays they encountered each day were gathered in a single mighty stoppage of energy. Everyone that evening had the same problem. And if, as so often happened in normal times, people were lost, stuck, or out of luck, at least this once they had the satisfaction of knowing why. Because the goddamned power was out.

  Beyond that, not even the chairman of the Federal Power Commission, or the director of the United States Office of Emergency Planning, or even the president of the United States himself, could explain.

  Still, Irene Kornecki wondered, if it were true that the blackout forced people to work together, how much would freedom from the pervasive, numbing, electrical massage increase their ability to work with themselves? How much would a year without electricity enhance civilization?

  The power grid was the envy of the old Turk’s load. Everyone was strung out on it.

  Glory Train

  K

  elly rolled through the window, head and neck hunched under the shoulder of his sport coat. Glass shattered and the wood flew into splinters, then the coat flapped around his ears as he tumbled through space.

  He decided that, when he got rich, he’d hire somebody who looked exactly like him. He’d teach this double how to talk like him, how to act like him, and how to sign his name. Every day he’d load up the double with a miniature tape recorder and camera, and send him out on the streets. The double would be the one who’d yawn through meetings with clients, and when he was done with them he’d step lively to avoid being eaten by the sharks who swarmed around him. He’d fend off each day’s army of backstabbers and con men, being careful not to make any enemies. He’d run out of gas on the highway and stub his toes and spill his soup for his boss, the original, who would sleep late each morning, read the world’s newspapers over a leisurely brunch, play a little squash or chess, take a shower, and sip fifty-year-old Scotch till the double stopped off at the end of each day with a full report. Then he’d pass the night in the company of beautiful women. If the women gave him trouble he’d call the double back. The way his life had been going lately, he felt as if he were the double, taking falls for a Kelly he never saw.

  The ground surprised him. He hadn’t been expecting it so soon. His knees buckled and he rolled onto his side. A jolt of pain shot up through the old, bad ankle. Twelve feet over his shoulder the window framed someone’s silhouette. Then a flashlight beam illuminated the ground in front of him. He flattened himself against the wall under the window, shimmied to the corner of the house, and broke for the woods at the edge of the yard. The flashlight caught him then, and gunshots exploded behind him. What would the neighbors think?

  “Back here! I’ve got him!”

  Kelly begged to differ.

  The ground sloped down on the other side of the trees, but the

  going was tough.This part of the riverbank had grown into the kind of wilderness that exists only in urban areas: a dense, dirty tangle of invasives and outlaw shrubs growing up through washing machine carcasses and gutted refrigerators. He struggled past the trash and, by the dim moonlight, came upon the barest trace of a path, more traveled by rats and raccoons than humans. Branches slapped him; vines clawed his legs as he bulled his way down toward the river. Finally he was forced to pause, gasping for breath. The darkened hulk of the house loomed behind him. He’d come less than a quarter mile, though it felt like ten times that distance. The flashlight winked and waved at the top of the bank as his pursuers descended.

  Ahead of him were the railroad tracks, and beyond them the black glint of the Hudson. He knew he’d have a chance if he could make it to the river. Across the water, from atop the Jersey Palisades,

  172 GREGORY GIBSON

  two emergency beacons twinkled a message of safety. He ran for them with all he had.

  He didn’t have much.Worse,the distance to the water increased as he went on, and his bad habits overhauled him. Fluids gurgled up from his stomach and a gummy deposit accumulated at the back of his mouth. Waste products churned through his body where blood should have been. He could hear cursing and crashing behind him. He tried to increase his pace, but his legs had stopped taking orders.

  He saw the shape of the branch that had fallen across the path, but he couldn’t bring his lead foot to step over it. His shoe hooked neatly around it and the rest of him sped forward, plowing a six-foot furrow. His head came to rest against a rusting wheel rim.

  He gathered himself, drove forward, and fell a second time, gaining a body length. He picked himself up, tried to run, and fell— again and again, deeper into a haze of pain and fear. Nothing was broken. In a few days he’d be fine. Right now he was counting his time in minutes. At this rate, he was only saving them the trouble of carting his body to the river.

  Kelly stumbled into the ditch of sewer water beside the train tracks, wanted to huddle there, curl up, slip beneath the mud like a turtle, and not come up until spring. The flashlight beam was closing in behind him. His ankle didn’t hurt anymore. He wallowed across the ditch and clambered up the embankment, rolling across the tracks so as not to give them a profile to shoot at. Soon nothing would hurt, ever. As he got to the other side he looked toward his feet and saw an incredibly brilliant light bearing down. His death. A warming, pleasurable surge swept through him. He stood, in the rush of brightness and noise, to meet his end.

  The stubby switchyard diesel huffed past at a labored pace and Kelly unthinkingly threw himself onto
the utility car that rolled along behind it, snuggling down amid jackhammers and compressor hoses. It was, he thought, so strange and weird to die. Nothing like he’d imagined it. He pulled his coat around him and wished he were back at Sammy’s.

  The Getaway

  G

  loria knew Roth wasn’t scared. He didn’t get scared. His hasty departure was simply a sensible move, one she should emulate. She took a cab up to the Westchester house, did a little packing of her own, then blasted off in the Starship—a black, two-door Olds F-85 with the V-8 engine and a jet-age instrument panel. Her father had bought the car for her and at first she’d hated it. But in fact it was exactly her style—fast and understated—and now she bonded with it as never before. She made Rhode Island as the sun was coming up, and New Hampshire by mid-morning, turning on a whim down a small coastal road that wound east to Hampton Beach, then north over a humpy wooden bridge into the lovely little backwater of Wallis Sands.There was a restaurant called the Lobster Pot next to the creek, a parking lot paved with clamshells, and a rambling old two-story house with apartments on both sides, up and down, front and back. A sign said vacancy. It seemed a good place to lay low for a spell. She went in to investigate.

  A deeply tanned woman with ropey muscles and steel-wool hair came to the door. Gloria, giving her voice just the right amount of girlish trepidation, inquired about the vacancy and was promptly installed in the front apartment for a week. Cash changed hands in advance at Gloria’s insistence. She brought in her bag, stretched out on the freshly made bed, and listened to the slap and rush of surf across the road. It smelled faintly of summer cottage mildew, reminding her of beach stays from childhood.

  She thought about Daddy and their long struggle. How seeing him hurt in the hospital had so suddenly changed her feelings for him but not her determination to get her hands on the contraband. She thought, too, about Irene and Harry, and the stash’s so-called rightful owners. She and Harry had missed grabbing it, probably just by minutes. But they were still alive and safe, and now Kelly had the stuff, which was almost as good. All she had to do was hang tight, keep her eyes open, and be ready to make her move when the time came.The family in the apartment next door was getting ready to go to the beach, and the children were making happy, excited noises, sending her drifting back again to memories.