OPUS 21 (42 page)

Such clothes as I had on were soaked clear through again. I was thinking about changing when the door knocked and the cop stood there with some other men--in and out of uniforms.

"He's moved."

"I know."

"We can't get at him good, there. A net won't be possible. We've got some guys looking over the picture on the roof. But it's risky. Twice, that squad has gotten a line around somebody-and had them get loose and go. One bird threw the rope off before they could pull it tight. And a woman cut it while she was hanging over the street. Can we come in?"

I opened the door. They looked at
me.
"My name's Black," one said. "Captain--

your precinct." He introduced the rest the way an undertaker presents pallbearers to each other. They all went over near the windows and knelt and peeked furtively at Paul.

"Should I stay out there?" I asked.

The tough, bright-looking cop gave me the once-over. "High-shy?"

"Some."

"Do you think he's likely to go?"

"Christ knows! I'm not an expert in this sort of thing."

"Still--you do know him. Mr. Harrison, here, says he works on the atom bomb."

"That's right."

Black swore. "Make dandy headlines. Police allow suicide of scientist."

The younger cop said, "What sort of kid is he? Determined? Gutty? He looks that way."

"Yeah. And a little spoiled."

The cop whistled without making any sound. "Girl?"

I nodded.

"Where's she?"

"Hattie Blaine's," I replied, after thinking it over.

He looked out the window and shook his head. "Jesus!"

I sketched in a little. The men listened.

Black said, "I could send a cruise car up for her--and get her back here--"

I shook my head. "I suspect--he'd bail out for sure, then. His life plan was based on the idea that what she had been--would be rubbed out. Forgotten. If you understand.

But she went back to work."

"The higher they are the harder they fall!" Black was grimly amused at the accuracy of the cliché.

And the younger cop said, "It isn't possible to be smart all ways at once, is it?"

"What do we do?" I asked.

He looked at me some more. "Take a shower and put on dry clothes, Mr. Wylie.

We'll figure for a while. These things can last hours."

I did that.

They didn't figure much.

"The best we can do," Black informed me, "is to get set up there on the roof. The angle's bad--but we have two good men. If he shows signs of definitely going, we'll take a chance and try to rope him."

They'd been out on the narrow terrace, talking to him. The young cop was fascinated. "He told us that he was working out a personal problem against a background germane to the problem and equivalent to the other stresses of his life. Something like that. What the hell does 'germane' mean?"

"Appropriate," I said. It was near enough. "When those double-domes go nuts--

they still keep talking in their double-dome lingo."

"The nut," I said, "never realizes he's nutty. He thinks you are. That's why there're so many of them."

The cop nodded. "I'd say--the majority of people, sometimes." He shrugged. "I guess when you get into the atom-bomb class of brains, you get pretty chinchy everywhere else."

I shook my head. "The fact is otherwise. The brighter they are--the less likely they are to pull one like this. Only--they still do, occasionally."

Captain Black absently tossed his smoking cigar butt into the artificial fireplace and stepped over the windowsill. We could hear him, down the terrace, talking to Paul--

but not the words.

"He got a family we could send for? Anything like that?" the young cop asked.

I shook my head. "His mother died--not by what's called suicide, but by the psychological means that amounted to the same thing. He's a case of a dame-starved kid growing up with too much emphasis on dames and too little knowledge about what they're really like."

The cop gazed at me with a different speculation. "Tough for you."

"I can stand it. I like him. It makes me angry. And it's--embarrassing."

' I'll say."

Time passed.

"They ought to have a gadget!" I talked to pass more time. "Something that they could shoot at a man on such a spot. A light, large net discharged by a Very pistol--

maybe--that went too fast to duck and tangled you all up."

The cop wiggled his chin affirmatively. "The number of good, practical ideas buried in Headquarters runs to thousands."

Captain Black came in. "No dice."

Then Dave Berne arrived.

His eyes were the same faithful blue, but unnaturally vivid. He patted my back and shook hands with Black, whom he knew. He stood in the room a moment, peeling off a light-weight jacket and looking at the yellow roses. Then he went over and leaned out the window.

"Hi, Paul!"

"Et tu?" Paul called back.

Dave chuckled. "You've got quite a crowd down there. Had trouble pushing through!" He pulled his head back and said to us, "What gives?"

We told him such plans as existed.

Dave listened and smelled the flowers and moved his eyes to whoever was talking. Finally we'd finished and he grinned. "Well," he said, sighing a little, "let's go and get the damned fool in."

He went and I went after him and the others stayed, peering into the fading light.

Dave whispered to me to hang back a little and I did and he moved on along the parapet till he came to a point just out of range. Paul was watching him with a wary, scornful expression. Dave leaned over the parapet and looked down--and Paul took a look, too.

"Funny," Dave said. "All those yokels. I suppose most of 'em will go along home pretty soon. Suppertime. And soon be too dark to see the fun, anyhow. But some of 'em would hang around all night--even though the street is a God-damned stove-top. Waiting.

Waiting and hoping. Hoping. Imagine it! Hoping to see a human being come sixteen stories in slow somersaults. Hoping to see him hit and spatter. Hoping his feet will burst and his shoes will fly off--the way they do, sometimes. Hoping they'll be a Christ-to-be-Jesus big puddle of blood to tell the family about--and blood spattered up to the second story. And a dent in the sidewalk. What the hell is wrong with a bunch of yahoos that'll stand around for hours on account of a hope like that?"

"Very graphic," Paul said.

Dave took a long look, then, at the surrounding roofs--the vertical rows of windows, some now electrically lighted, and some flared with the last copper rays of a sun that was going down in Jersey behind the Orange Mountains where I used to make field maps when I was a Boy Scout. He took still another look at the blue-powder sky, drew one deep breath, and hopped lightly up astride the parapet.

Paul was startled.

So was I.

And so were the cops. They yelled, "Hey!"

Dave made a "cease-fire" gesture behind his back. He inched along the parapet toward Paul, a ways. "You're going inside in a bit, son," he said quietly. "I haven't decided. And don't rush me."

"But you will. Look, Paul. You know me--pretty well. And you know a good deal about me. From Phil. So listen. I'm a no-account yid bastard who never got--and will never get--a fair shot at using the ability he thinks he has. All I can do is outsmart other corporation lawyers--and get paid big dough for it."

Paul said sneeringly, "If you want to start a self-pity contest--"

"Nope. I was thinking about something else. Pride. Real pride. Things to be proud of. One's you. You weren't born behind any eight-ball. You've got ten times the brains of Phil, here, and me put together. You're in there fighting. And you're a guy--one of the guys who run about three in a hundred--who can look at a yid like me and not see that two thousand year old, imaginary eight-ball. I appreciate that. I'm proud some people can be like that."

"Don't be childish."

' I'm not. I'm just pointing out that--potentially--you're valuable. I have no value.

You--and the guys like you--can probably figure out the stuff we need to go on fighting for freedom. You can probably lick the new tyranny, and maybe even without carving holes in the country and paying out the best young blood. And then we'll have a chance to go on with the liberty scrap. That's what you can do. It means a lot to guys like me--who never had a chance to draw one free-and-equal breath in his life. Not you as a person.

You as ideas. So all right. That's that. Maybe you hate your job. Maybe it's a wrong thing.

Maybe all the world has left, for now, is a choice among wrong ways. Personally--if that's so--I take our choice. America's. I'm no Stephen Decatur--but that's how my feelings go."

"If you don't mind," Paul said, "I'd just as soon be spared the patriotic harangue."

"Sure. I'm through. And you're coming in, soon, now." Dave let go of the ledge, pulled back his shirt sleeve, and peered at his wrist watch. "You're coming in--or I'm bailing out. In five minutes, Paul, my son, if you don't get off--I take off."

I was listening to Dave's voice and a terrible fear possessed me. But Paul heard only the shouting of agony within himself. "Wiseguy," he said.

Dave smiled a slow, gentle smile. "Wiseguy? Maybe so. But how long this wiseguy lives--is up to you, now."

"Do you think I believe you? Do you think I'm so stupid?"

"I mean it." Dave looked up from his watch and his eyes fixed on Paul. ''I'm not kidding, son."

I could see the color change in Paul's cheeks. He'd been pale. He became ghostly.

He locked eyes with Dave Berne.

The slightest stir moved the hot, early-evening air.

People sat at windows and on roofs; people stood in penthouse gardens with highballs and binoculars, enjoying the sensation, making a new ritual of it. A flashbulb blazed lip and died in the instant, on a setback, across and down the street, where some news cameraman with a telephoto lens was getting a shot for his tabloid.

"I have," Dave said quietly, "about two hundred seconds left."

"What a cheap thing to do!" Paul spoke harshly.

Dave smiled even more and he nodded. "It's all I have--my life. Cheap--I said so."

Paul stood up.

It was horrifying. He'd been sitting that long while. His arms were cramped. His legs must have been asleep. He tottered to his feet, rocked on, the near-motionless air, careened his arms, stamped, glanced down with a round and dreadful focus of his eyes, caught his balance, and looked triumphantly at Dave.

"You're kind of forcing my hand," he said.

Dave stood up, too, then--very quickly, and without tottering. Stood up--and looked at his watch. "I mean, too, of course, Paul, that if you go--I'll also go. I'll try for you--and standing, like this--we'll go together. You see--you have no choice but to go in, or take me along. And there's only about a minute left."

I went closer. "Dave, for the love of God!" My voice was a cackle. "If this thing has to be gone through with--I'm the guy. After all, Dave--I've only got a little bit left anyhow! Get down, for Christ's sake--and let me get up--"

Dave hardly glanced at me. "Be quiet, Phil. Stay where you are." He turned again to look at Paul.

And there they stood, swaying slightly, their eyes, their wills fastened together in conflict over the simple stake of life and of death. They defied each other--against the pale-blue heat of the evening sky. A murmur came up from the street, a muddled sob, as the watchers noted the change of position, the new precariousness, and sensed the imminence of climax. The sound boiled and grew and beat the bricks all the way up from the infested thoroughfare.

"Half a minute," Dave said, above the susurration.

I couldn't move.

Paul couldn't tear away his eyes from Dave: each instant stood alone and almost still. "Ten seconds," Dave said. And he turned around--facing nothing--to jump.

A great cry escaped Paul.

He toppled on the terrace--and passed out.

Dave about-faced and stepped down lightly.

11

It was twenty-one o'clock, which is to say, nine that evening.

Dave had eaten dinner with me and gone off to another meeting of his maestros.

To look, he said, for the silver lining of the silver screen.

Not even mentioning Paul.

Not seeming to be affected.

Paul was in a hospital.

A private hospital. The cops had wanted to send him to Bellevue for observation.

But Dave had persuaded them and arranged to have my nephew taken on a stretcher down the service elevator and transported by ambulance to a safe place.

I'd called Ricky and told her about it. Told her again that I'd be back in Buffalo by the following evening, in all likelihood.

And I'd called Karen, my daughter, and warned her of what she would see and read when the morning papers reached her country doorstep in Connecticut.

Nine o'clock.

The next day would be Monday.

I waited.

Dr. Adams was late. The charred cigarettes piled up.

At last, he phoned from the lobby.

Come up.

One of those psychiatrists about whom interviewers write: . . . nothing of the abnormal about him; he would be mistaken anywhere for a successful businessman . . .

Because Dr. Adams took considerable pains to look exactly like a successful American businessman who would be mistaken anywhere.

dark, chalk-striped suit, polished brown brogues, foulard tie, fifty-one years old, seventy-one inches high, a hundred and seventy-one pounds, heavy horn-rims in his breast pocket with the Parker 51, smoothly brushed iron-gray hair, smoothly brushed iron-gray eyebrows, smoothly unbrushed iron-gray eyes, the outdoor complexion that is imperative for indoor men of distinction, and the prize already awarded for filling in the last line of the limerick:

Healthy, wealthy and wise. You couldn't help liking him if you tried, and believe me, I tried. I tried because Adams (Hargrave H. P.) was the head of the private hospital where Dave had sent Paul and I wouldn't have one of those top-notch third-rate psychiatrists fooling with my nephew.