Look, I call them when we got some big fire and Fred Clumly sends away his boys on a picnic. He won’t work with us. Won’t work with anybody, not even his own men. He’s dangerous, that’s the truth. Just like a rattlesnake. All right, I know what his argument is: can’t do everything, first things first. But never mind. Suppose I said that—”Sorry Mrs. Block, we’re working on a fire on North Street right now, we’ll be over soon as we’re finished.” I’d never last a minute! No sir! A fire starts in Batavia and we put it out, that’s it. You just do it, whether it’s possible or not. Can’t do it yourself, you call in help from Attica.
JUDGE: In the last days great cities shall be consumed.
FIRE CHIEF: Maybe so, I don’t know about last days. But there ain’t gonna be no cities consumed while I’m the Fire Chief.
JUDGE: Commendable.
FIRE CHIEF: Maybe. (Flustered:) I’m not a man of words, I guess you know. So. But get rid of him. And once he’s out of the police department—
JUDGE: Not yet. Sometime later, perhaps.
FIRE CHIEF: If you won’t—
JUDGE: You’ll manage it yourselves, you and Mullen and the rest.
FIRE CHIEF: I thought if you would take care of it—
JUDGE: Not at this time. As I say, I’m doubtful that I could in any case. But I’ll say this. When he comes to talk I’ll mention the problem.
FIRE CHIEF: You’re expecting him?
JUDGE: Not definitely, but I have lines out, so to speak. Your family’s well?
FIRE CHIEF: Well. Yes. As far as I know. Times like these … Fine, I believe. Yes. Lines?
JUDGE: Good-day, then.
FIRE CHIEF: Yes. (He moves toward the door.)
JUDGE (aside, scraping his moustache with two fingers): Righteous old fool! There are fires and fires, Mr. Uphill! And you, sir, can be replaced by a tidal wave.
FERE CHIEF (at the door): Your Honor. I ought to explain—
JUDGE: No need.
FIRE CHIEF: I don’t mean to offend you. I’ve got my duty to the City, you know.
JUDGE: Of course.
FIRE CHIEF: I’ve always been very grateful for whatever favors—
JUDGE: Certainly.
FIRE CHIEF: Good. That has to be clear. I assume this disagreement—
JUDGE: Don’t mention it! A trifle! Glad you could drop by, Phil.
FIRE CHIEF: Good-bye, then.
JUDGE: Good-day. Don’t forget your hat.
FIRE CHIEF: I have it. I don’t often forget things, as you know. Well, never mind.
[Exit Fire Chief. The Judge draws back with a sigh into his smoke. The desk he has leaned his elbows on is reduced by his withdrawal to an object, or, rather, to an assembly of objects—pencils, an open ink bottle, papers, books, magazines. Among the magazines a stack of five with bright covers: Hodge’s folly. The shadow of a blowing curtain reaches toward them, misses, reaches again. A sound of retreating footsteps on the stairs.]
2
Chief of Police Fred Clumly suffered a sleep full of troublesome dreams, agitations, old memories. When he turned his head on the pillow he felt his thoughts tumbling from the left side of his head to his right, reappearing there as seemingly new, unrelated dreams and agitations. He had stepped through a familiar door and had emerged in a strange place, and now he’d gotten turned around somehow, had lost his bearings. At odd twistings of the maze he encountered his wife—naked, at one point, with an ecstatic smile which repelled him—but in general he encountered only strangers with muffled chins and with hats drawn low, who spoke to each other with voices as muffled and unrecognizable as their faces. Once he caught sight of the waitress in the magazine picture, sitting at her window high above the street, smiling. It was snowing. The buildings—he was in a city of some sort, not Batavia but some large, dark city where there were chemical plants, or tanneries—the buildings were heavily draped in snow, and there was snow like sifted flour on the sidewalks, treacherous stuff to walk in. He was in a great hurry, though he could not remember what his appointment was, and there was something in the way of his getting wherever it was he had to get. Once a tree fell slowly and solemnly in his path (the crowd drew back, unconcerned, as if they’d been forewarned that the tree would fall). Another time a truck plunged slowly and solemnly over the curb directly in front of him and there, without a sound, turned over, like an elephant falling dead with a heart attack. He came to a peculiar, elaborately wrought concrete portal—columns on each side, statuary (armless figures in attitudes of greed, agony, debauched pleasure: a naked leering fat man, at his feet young girls, also naked, looking up with expressions of mingled delight and disgust—in all this nothing shocking, Clumly felt, nothing out of the ordinary), around the bases of the statues bits of broken glass, a hubcap, a bleeding hand. From a window, a naked, emaciated old woman without a face extended a ticket to Clumly. He took it and tipped his hat. The woman was his wife. He started down the steps; cold, wet stone slabs on which rats scampered. “Terrible place,” Clumly said without either delight or distaste. The fat man beside him nodded curtly. “Terrible.” A public official of some kind, here merely to inspect, like Clumly. A bearded man in a high black hat. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Clumly said. The official smiled, and Clumly saw that the mouth had no teeth in it. He jerked himself awake.
“Incredible,” Clumly said. “Horrible!”
It was light out now, time he should be getting up, but he closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift back into sleep. The dream seemed to continue, but it was another dream. He seemed to be standing in a public dancehall—in colored lights above the stage the enormous legend THE FAT PEOPLE’S PLEASURE CLUB. All the people were fat and naked, pinkish and bluish in the mysterious light, and all the men were alive, all the women dead. This did not seem strange. Some of the couples were dancing, the men straining and heaving, dragging around their dead partners. Here and there a man stood kicking the body of his partner, or beating the body with a club. “This won’t do,” Clumly said. But someone was clutching at him, dragging him toward the floor, stripping his clothes from his back like skin as she pulled him along. “All right,” he said irritably. He could think of no reason to refuse, though it gave him no pleasure. “It’s time,” she said. She gave him a loaf of bread. “You’re supposed to feed me. It’s time,” she repeated, cross. “What’s the matter with you?” He opened his eyes and, half awake half asleep, saw the staring, scrawny hen’s face of his wife.
“Wake up, Fred,” she said, “it’s almost ten. They want you on the phone.”
The room beyond her gray face was toneless and drab.
“A minute,” he said. He struggled to clear the images out of his brain, but against the undertow of his weariness his effort was paltry. “Later,” he said. He scowled, forcing himself to think. “Tell them—” He let himself relax.
“Well all right, Fred,” she said doubtfully. He heard her drawing away.
“Half an hour,” he said.
She gave no answer. The door closed and he felt himself sinking, a little sickeningly, as though it were the earth itself that was falling toward sleep. If he dreamed, this time, he could not remember it later. He knew only that all at once he was wide awake, though lying with his eyes closed. Were the stories true? Had the man really kept a Negro boy locked in his cellar all that time? Impossible! And yet Clumly had half-believed it—half-believed it yet. The image of the horrified white woman leaning toward the windshield, the image of the purse in the grass—convincing. He would telephone St. Louis. And then San Francisco. Yet clearly both stories couldn’t be true. Was one of them a lie, a joke? Both? It came to him that what was convincing was less the details than the mockery, the godlike indifference of the man. What in the world could make a man so indifferent? Was that the lie, after all? The dreams came back into Clumly’s mind and shocked him. He insists on calling me his friend, Clumly thought. He was suddenly angry, but in the same motion of his mind he felt himself drawing back, spying on hims
elf—it was as if he crouched at the foot of his own rumpled bed peeking at himself, or sat on the red asbestos shingled porch roof outside his window, peering suspiciously in. What makes me so angry, then? he thought. But there was no time, always no time, always the pressure of events: trouble at the station, they wouldn’t have phoned him otherwise, and something else—he struggled to remember, then placed it: some unlikely story Esther had told him when he came up to bed, or when she got up, it wasn’t clear: a visitor last night, some weird message on a paper airplane. Was that, too, just a dream? But the message was there on the dresser, waiting: he must meet the Sunlight Man again this afternoon. He wouldn’t do it, of course. His foolishness was over; he’d send in Miller and Kozlowski to arrest him, and any talk they had from now on would be down at the station. Anything else would be asking for disaster. No question.
But if he did decide to meet the Sunlight Man this afternoon, which he wouldn’t, he had work to do first. He got out of bed and called down to Esther. While she worked on his breakfast, he looked over the mysteriously delivered note—a map and instructions—then stuffed it in his pocket with the other slips of paper and carried the box wrapped in chains out to the garage, where he had a hacksaw. When he’d sawed the chain through and sawed off the lock he opened the box and found another inside it, wrapped in binding twine, old and dirty, wound round and round and repeatedly knotted—it would have taken an ordinary man a good hour to tie up—and when he’d cut the twine and sawed the second lock he found the pistol. It was still loaded. He hurried back into the house.
Esther said absently while he ate, “Miss Buckland phoned. She noticed you weren’t out on the porch this morning, and she wondered if you were all right.”
“Mmm,” Clumly said.
Esther talked on, mere words, as if her mind were far away, but he scarcely heard her. Nothing was secret, a town like this. Had anyone seen him outside the Mayor’s house, bent to the windowsill? A chill went through him. Have to watch that, he thought. He’d known at the time it was not quite sane, and he’d known very well that he’d hear nothing. And yet it had been oddly exhilarating, to tell the truth. The absolute silence of the street, the surprising distance of lawn between the shelter of shrubs along the sidewalk and the shelter of bushes below Mayor Mullen’s window. He’d felt alive, more awake than he’d felt in years, and bending over the hose faucet projecting from the stone foundation of the house—a smell of mint all around him, the earth a little soggy beneath his shoes, lilac leaves scratching at his ear and cheek—he had felt, all at once, indestructible, as if it no longer mattered that if he was caught he would be ruined. There was nothing on earth that could ruin him. It was like standing lightly balanced on the prow of the S. S. Carolina, looking down, far down, at his perfect shadow on a sea as smooth as glass. He remembered the time he’d gone off the road in his breadtruck, years ago, and had broken through the guardrail and plunged into the Tonawanda Creek. As the car settled slowly he’d thought “I’m a goner!” and he had felt, to his astonishment and delight, no fear—it was only later he’d felt fear, and even then not real terror: a kind of memory of fear that he might have felt. It had been just like that, crouched outside Mayor Mullen’s window, listening to the subdued, tinny noise of the Mayor’s television. The news. The murderer reportedly took the nurses from the room one by one, threatening them with a knife. He listened with the indifferent curiosity of a visiting Martian. And then for some reason the Mayor was at the door—not because of any sound from Clumly but from some mysterious jungle intuition that someone was there, spying. But looking straight at where Clumly crouched, the Mayor could not see him, and he did not trust his jungle feeling, and he looked the other way, then cleared his throat and went back inside. Clumly had smiled. He had crouched there for fifteen minutes, and now it was as if he’d forgotten why he’d come. When the Mayor and his wife talked, Clumly scarcely bothered to listen. He bathed in the feeling of leaves against his face, the ache of his cramped knees, the smell of mint and moist earth. It was something that had happened outside time and space, or so it had seemed then. But time and space were always there, reaffirmed like shrubs and flowers every spring, like birds flitting down to the night crawlers on the lawn with every sunrise. Nothing went unseen. He could almost remember, in fact, that someone had seen him—that he had felt eyes watching him critically, perhaps amused or scornful. He said, breaking into his wife’s vague monologue, “Who phoned?”
She paused. After a moment: “Miss Buckland.”
“No, from the station.”
“Oh. It was Miller. He says Mayor Mullen—”
“All right,” Clumly said. He spoke too quickly, unwilling to hear how much Esther knew. He wiped his mouth and stood up. “I’ll be late again tonight,” he said.
“Very late?”
“No telling.”
Esther sighed. “Be careful,” she said.
As he stepped out onto the porch he saw the fat old lawyer, Will Hodge Sr, just getting out of his car to mail a letter at the box on the corner. Clumly knew at once that something was fishy. “Morning, Will,” Clumly said.
Will Hodge nodded and waved. When he’d dropped the letter he returned to his car and switched on the motor. Clumly had come down the steps now. The morning was already too warm, stuffy as an overheated room in some cheap hotel far from home. Will Hodge said, “Getting a late start, aren’t you?”
“Little bit,” Clumly said. He covered his chin with his hand and watched Hodge pull away from the curb, the rattling old car smooth and dutiful as a lawyer’s reasoning; he drove toward Lyon Street. Clumly shook his head, denying the butterflies under his belt, and went toward the garage.
When he slipped the key into the lock on his office door he found the door already open. The Mayor stood with his arm on the file cabinet, waiting. Back in the cells there was commotion, Miller chewing someone out, and boys’ voices, someone crying.
“All right, Clumly,” the Mayor said, straightening up, “what the devil do you mean?” His face was red as fire, the jaw muscles tight.
“Mean?” Clumly said. He took his cap off slowly, turned half-away from the Mayor, and hung the cap on the rack.
“I’ve been waiting down here for two hours. I’m a busy man.”
“I’m sorry,” Clumly said. “The men will tell you—”
“The men have told me as much as I want to hear. You’re in trouble, Clumly. You think about that.”
Clumly moved over to the window to look out, scowling. The Mayor said behind him, “I asked you over to my office for a friendly chat. Gave you every opportunity. Result? No result! All right, what’s the matter over here, I ask myself. Who’s throwing a monkeywrench in the works? Somebody’s not doing his job, I say to myself. By God, it’s time for a look-see. I come over and I sit here for two whole hours, a busy man, and where are you—”
“If all you’ve got on your mind—” Clumly started.
“Fred, you hear me out. I’ve got plenty on my mind.” He was pacing now. “I’ve got murder—two murders—on my mind. Thievery. Prowlers out there in my own goddamn yard. Found the footprints. Right. No kid’s footprints, either. Are you aware this thing’s cast a horror over the whole entire city of Batavia? People can’t sleep! I get phonecalls from morning to night, and your man out at the desk—well, ask him! And what are you doing? Have you got so much as a shred of a clue?”
His head came suddenly to Clumly’s shoulder. The face had gone gray. “Right outside my window, you hear? Right outside my own window!”
“We’ve been doing—” He paused, compressing his lips, tempted to smile.
The Mayor looked startled. But he said: “And now I get a call from the District Attorney. You won’t cooperate, he says. ‘Walt,’ he says, ‘what the devil’s come over Fred Clumly?’ You had a man here, he says, and you had him dead to rights, but you let him slip through your fingers. I talk to Miller. ‘Yes it’s true,’ he says, ‘we could’ve nailed him.’ Course he doesn’t com
e out with it quite like that. Out of pity, you know; sorry to see the Old Man losing his grip. But push him a little, he admits it. You let the man off. Why?” He jerked his head away. After a moment: “Because the man’s your friend, that’s why. You had him dead to rights, but it turns out the man was your friend.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Clumly said.
“Is it? Is it? You were seen out walking the streets with him.”
It was a great stroke, the Mayor seemed to think. He beamed malevolently.
Clumly sneered. “Idiotic,” he said. “You tend to your business, I’ll tend to mine.”
“Oh I will,” Mayor Mullen said, “I promise you. And my business is you.” His face was red again now, the ashen look gone completely. “I’m here to tell you you’re in for a formal investigation. You understand that? I give you until tomorrow morning to give me your explanation for all this fol-de-rol—in writing.”
Clumly nodded, touching the sash of the window though he felt no need to steady himself.
“In writing,” the Mayor said again.
Clumly nodded. Then: “How long will this take?”
“What take?”
“The investigation.”
The Mayor sneered, trembling a little with anger. “Not long, you’ll see. A day, two days …”
Clumly nodded. The Mayor walked away. With his hand on the doorknob he stopped and considered a moment, perhaps getting control of himself.
“Listen,” Mayor Mullen said then, forcing himself. “I’m sorry, you hear? I’m God damned sorry about this.”
Clumly nodded. It came to him that he was rattling the little white stones in his pocket, pleasantly clicking them together.
“You’ve been a good cop,” Mayor Mullen said, “and God knows I’m sorry we couldn’t—”
Once again Clumly nodded. “You have to do your duty,” he said. And again he almost smiled but forced a scowl. He looked out the window. Across the street they were washing the firetrucks. They often did that in hot weather. Uphill supervising it, very official. A couple of men stood talking to Uphill, looking over something on a clipboard. The firetrucks shone like Christmas tree balls in his childhood. (He would go swimming with his cousins, hot days like this. He would hold his hand up and let himself sink, showing the others how deep it was, and he would bend his knees and crouch to make them think it was over their heads.)