A glare that made any man look like a plastic job with a prefabricated expression grafted on, according to some criminologist’s graph or other, to fit the crime of which the captain’s charge sheet had him accused: here was a pickpocket’s deadpan mask and here a shoplifter’s measured manner. Here the brutal lines of the paid-in-full premeditated murderer and there the coneroo’s cynical leer.
Yet the man behind the murderer’s mask was under the lights for stealing a bushel of mustard greens and the coneroo’s leer had been picked up for oversleeping in a Halsted Street hallway.
‘Why you living on Skid Row?’
‘’Cause I’m on the skids. That’s plain enough.’
And the black and bitter orange of the brownskin buck’s sweater standing out so strongly and strangely against the fluffy white and pale blue of the aging white beside him.
The listeners watched the captain survey the next man, up and down, head to toe and back again, to ask at last: ‘Where’s your shoes, boy?’
‘Left ’em in the tavern.’
‘Hadn’t there been a fight in there?’
‘Lord, there’s always a fight in there.’
‘Then you know the place.’
‘Sure. I hang in there.’
‘Where? On a hook?’
‘No. By the bar. I preach salvation there.’
‘Where were you ordained?’
‘I just have a local preacher’s license.’
‘How do you get one of those?’
‘You have to see the pastor and the deacon.’
‘How about the precinct captain?’
‘He’s in jail.’
‘I think that’s where you get most of your philosophy yourself.’
‘That’s where I took up the ministry all right.’
‘Can’t you preach salvation with your shoes on? Is that some Hindu cult out there says you have to take off your shoes?’
‘No, sir. I was collectin’.’
‘But couldn’t you collect with your shoes on?’ The captain sounded determined.
‘It was my shoes I was trying to collect.’
The captain leaned forward, steadied his head with both hands and pleaded as if already fearing the reply: ‘Just tell me one thing – who had your shoes?’
‘Why, the precinct captain, of course. That’s what I been tryin’ to tell you.’
The captain shook his head with the melancholy manner of any man who knows he can’t win and motioned wearily for the mike to be moved on.
‘Next man, what for?’
‘For standin’ by watchin’.’
‘Watchin’ what?’
‘The officers linin’ up the boys on Thirty-first Street.’
Bednar took a moment to raise himself slowly onto his toes to make certain that this one was wearing sandals or any sort of footwear at all. ‘I don’t want to go through that again,’ he cautioned himself aloud. ‘They lined you up too?’
‘One of the officers called me “boy” and I told him I was a man so I had to come along.’
‘The milk’s still wet behind your ears, a boy is all you are. But you’ll be Joliet-bound before they’re dry ’n they’ll make a man of you there. Next.’
‘I’m accused of rape.’
‘How old was that child?’
‘Thirty-seven. She volunteered her services.’
‘She volunteer her ring and watch too?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a man. Weren’t you the one who was in here last August for assaulting your baby?’
‘That’s some misidentity. All that happened was I dropped the lid when the Mrs slugged me with the fuel-oil can.’
‘What about that gun charge in 1944? Was that “some misidentity”?’
‘I was a janitor then ’n had to protect myself from tenants.’
‘Making you a janitor is like putting an automobile thief in charge of a parking lot. You’re the biggest misidentity ever walked in shoe leather.’
The captain’s eyes went down the line. The masks were managing to change, slowly and ever so slyly, to look less like plastic men and more like some plastic zoo: animals stuffed for some State Street Toyland the week before Christmas. Here was the toothless tiger and here the timid lion, here the bull that loved flowers and there some lovelorn moose.
The toothless tiger stood in a faded yellow hat from some long-faded summer, his stripes blurred by the city jungle’s dust and sprayed blood dried on the hat’s stiff brim: but still trying to look like a tiger. It always seemed some long-faded summer for those who lived in that feral glare under one hard straw kelly or another; or any old hat at all.
‘My buddy hit me wit’ a Coca-Cola bottle,’ the toothless tiger explained, ‘so I bust his plate-glass window.’
‘You’re mixed up with so many busted windows you ought to join the fire department. Ever do time?’
‘Just a week once, for robbery.’
‘Only a week?’
Frankie had to crane his head to get a glimpse of this one. For every time the audience snickered Frankie snickered too. He’d have to remember all the things these fools said to tell Molly-O some day.
‘It was just a small robbery.’
The captain’s eyes besought the darkened rows for help but the rows only looked back at him bleakly. Till the next odd fish stood forth.
‘Officers don’t like my looks is all. I sell strictly American merchandise and don’t have no complaints.’
‘If they don’t complain it’s because they’re ashamed to admit buying the stuff. You sneak up and offer them phony jewelry as if it were hot stuff,’ the captain accused him.
‘It ain’t phony, it’s American-made,’ the coneroo begged off.
‘Well,’ the captain pondered, ‘you been acting funny since 1919 and most of the cops who used to arrest you are dead. How’d you beat that federal rap? You must have had a good lawyer.’
‘No lawyer at all.’
‘Who prepared the writ?’
‘Another con. He shuffled off a little time for me.’
A nerve tugged suddenly at the captain’s left wrist as if someone unseen were trying to cuff it to the mike. ‘You another one of them window smashers?’ he asked the boy in the black-and-white lumber-jack.
‘No, sir. I’m a seaman.’
‘Then how’d the window get broken?’
‘Knocked my old man through it.’
‘You’re a seaman all right. On the Humboldt Park lagoon.’
The Humboldt Park salt snickered. ‘Very funny,’ he observed. ‘Captain, you’re killing me.’
The flat-nosed, square-faced, tousled blond with the dark lines under the eyes was next. With his left sleeve slit to the shoulder. As if his life, like his knife, had been turned upon himself at last.
‘Francis Majcinek, Division Arms Hotel,’ and added indulgently: ‘That’s on Division.’
‘Thank you. I always thought it was on Eighth and Wabash – where’s the punk?’
‘Wasn’t picked up with no punk.’
‘Talk into the mike, not at me. And get off that back rail. What were you up to with the shopping bag at Nieboldt’s, Dealer?’
‘Went to buy an eye-ron.’
‘With a shopping bag?’
‘Had to stop by the butcher’s on the first floor.’
‘You should of stayed on the first floor. Those weren’t lamb chops fell out of the bag.’
Frankie grinned. He could still see those damned irons bouncing.
‘Get that grin off your puss – what else did you boost over the holidays?’
Frankie managed a look of blandest innocence. ‘You got me wrong, Captain. I was lookin’ around for the cashier—’
‘When the bag broke,’ the captain finished for him. And eyed him broodingly. ‘I like liars,’ he decided at last, ‘but you suit me too well. What did you need six irons for? I don’t suppose you were planning on selling them?’
‘No, nothing like that, Captain,
’ Frankie assured Bednar earnestly, ‘I needed one for the wife ’n the others were for when that one wore out. They make things so cheap these days.’
‘I don’t know who you think you’re kidding or whether you’re trying to be funny,’ Bednar told him, studying him to find out what was really the matter. There was something wrong all right, the dealer really wasn’t trying to be funny at all; his face had somehow altered in the past month. At the moment it looked both pious and weak. ‘Come down off that cross ’n give me a straight story,’ the captain pleaded – and as he asked it he got it – in one moment he knew beyond any doubt at all. ‘How long you been on the stuff, Frankie?’
Frankie heard the small, reluctant note of surprised sympathy under Record Head’s voice.
‘Not too long,’ he acknowledged easily, coming down off the cross in return for that small reluctant note. ‘I’ve kicked it.’
‘Where you’re going you’ll have to kick it. You think you can straighten up out there?’ ‘I’m straight now.’
‘And you won’t go right back on it when you make the street again?’
‘I’ve learned my lesson, Captain.’
‘I hope to God you have.’
The captain took off his glasses and covered his eyes, to rest them from the light a moment. When he replaced them he studied Frankie’s charge sheet a long minute, while Frankie shifted restlessly in the glare and wished they’d move the damned mike away from his chin. When he heard the captain’s voice again he turned his head attentively toward the shadow out of which the voice came at him.
‘Here’s a man with thirty-six months service and the Purple Heart,’ he heard Bednar telling the listeners, ‘he was a fast hustler with a deck when he went in the service and he’s probably faster now. Are you one of Kippel’s torpedoes now, Frankie?’
‘All I do is deal, Captain.’
‘How long you been out of the army?’
‘Over a year.’
‘And Louie Fomorowski been dead how long?’
‘I didn’t even know the fellow was sick, Captain.’
‘Then you did know the man?’
‘Heard of him.’
‘Seen him on your bedpost lately?’
‘I sleep pretty sound.’
‘You don’t look it. Frankie, you don’t look like you slept in a month.’ And never took his eyes off Frankie all the while the mike was being moved. While Frankie looked straight ahead.
‘Not a nerve in his body,’ the wondering listeners heard the captain murmur at last.
In the brief interval between the departure of one line and the arrival of the next the captain leaned forward on his elbows and spread his fingers gently across his temples; the light kept hurting his eyes. And didn’t feel he had heart enough left to face one more man manacled by steel or circumstance until his own heart should stop hurting.
Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, square johns and copper johns; lamisters and hallroom boys, ancient pious perverts and old blown parolees, rapoes and record-men; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned.
Heartbroken bummies and the bitter rebels: afternoon prowlers and midnight creepers. Peeping Toms and firebox pullers. The old cold-deckers and the young torpedoes coming on faster than the law can pick them up.
The unlucky brothers with the hustlers’ hearts.
‘It says here you were annoying a ten-year-old girl.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘Beg my pardon for what?’
‘It was a ten-year-old boy.’
The captain crossed himself. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he apologized, adding under his breath, ‘through your jugular vein.’ The captain felt ready for almost anything tonight, in the weariest sort of way. For knowing the answers to every alibi and having a tailor-made quip ready for every answer only seemed to make him wearier than ever of late.
‘Snatched a purse where Sinatra was singing.’
‘Do you swoon too?’ The captain was weary tonight all right.
Worst of all were the witnesses who snickered after every questioning. If only, just once, one of them would laugh out from the heart.
And felt the finger of guilt again tap his forehead and the need of confession touch his heart like touching a stranger’s heart. A voice like his own voice, confident and accusing: ‘That’s your man, Captain. That’s your man.’ A voice like his own voice. Yet a heart like a hustler’s heart.
‘I’m affiliated with two bolts of poster paper,’ the odd fish near the end of the line announced before he was asked.
‘Are you sure you’re not incorporated?’ the captain wanted to know.
‘Put a cigar in my pocket ’n set my coat on fire,’ the next youth offered cheerfully.
‘Why didn’t you pull the firebox?’
‘What do you think I’m here for?’
‘I picked up a drunk,’ a South State Street strongarmer explained.
‘I’ll say you did. By the pockets.’
‘I got a perforated eardrum,’ the next pointed out as though that condition justified all felonies under ten thousand dollars.
‘You must have got it crawling in ’n out of transoms,’ the captain diagnosed him, ‘you can still hear a squad car coming, can’t you?’
‘If I could I wouldn’t be here.’
‘How long were you in Leavenworth?’
‘Five years eight months twenny-eight days.’
‘How many minutes?’
‘Next time I’ll take a watch.’
‘Next time you won’t need one. You’re a habitual.’ Just as the captain said that his mind jumped to a conviction as automatic as it was without basis in the charge sheet: the dealer had had the punk with him.
Out of the file he kept in his head Bednar slipped a certain arrest slip. Then slipped it back feeling pleased with Mr Schnackenberg’s bill that made two felonies, of the same nature, add up to recidivism. The punk must have had a quicker eye for that ace in the draperies.
‘Not off one conviction I ain’t no habitual,’ the ex-con on the platform answered the captain’s accusation at last.
‘You’ll have your day in court,’ the captain assured him. ‘Tell the court that Belgian.22 was to pick your teeth with. Maybe they’ll believe you. I don’t.’
The man with the Southern Comfort accent and the true assassin’s mug complained sullenly, ‘I ain’t been in trouble in eleven years. They made a believer of me on Governor’s Island. When I got out I got a lunch pail.’
‘Next time get a transparent one so the officers can see what’s in it.’
The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.
‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’
‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.
‘I’ve been defrocked.’
‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’
‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’
That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I don’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.
‘I ain’t used the stuff for fourteen years,’ he lied right into the mike the moment it was moved to his lips.
‘Then how come you were shooting that girl in the arm when the cops come in? You were putting her on it too, you Fagin.’
‘How could I? She been on it longer than I have.’
‘
Tell that to a mule and he’ll kick your head off. The girl is nineteen and you’re forty-four and on top of that you had her so drunk she didn’t even know her own name.’
‘Well, she acts older.’ N I ain’t forty-four. I’m thirty-nine ’n that chick is twenty if she’s a month.’
The heroin head smiled virtuously at having established his innocence so irreproachably.
As the final line shuffled off the listeners rose in the rows as though to wish all such irreproachable innocents long life and good health on the way. Under the dimming lights the innocents filed through a green steel doorway into a deepening darkness.
But the listeners straightened their trousers and smoothed their dresses down and one by one, by twos and threes, by smiling threes and laughing fours, all left through a well-lighted door onto a clean well-lighted street.
With nothing, it seemed, to fear in the world at all.
Only the captain, trapped between the hunters and the hunted, looked mournfully through that green steel door as though yearning to follow his innocents there.
To follow each man to a cell all his own, there to confess the thousand sins he had committed in his heart.
For he seemed to see them still, each with the left hand manacled and the right thrown protectively across the eyes.
As his own left hand, in dreams, seemed cuffed, of late, to smooth cold steel. As he had one morning wakened to find his own right hand flung across his eyes. ‘I’ll get dark shades for the bedroom,’ Record Head decided restlessly, ‘the light is wakin’ me up too early.’
For there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain’s darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart. The court forbade him entrance to that narrow green steel door. Justice had been done; his case was closed. He could not even tell the names of those who’d taken the rap for him.
To leave him, of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others.
What was it that the defrocked priest had said? ‘We are all members of one another.’ What had the holy-sounding fraud meant by that? Why had several snickered then and not one had laughed out from the heart? Bednar hadn’t understood then and could not let himself understand now. It had been too long since he himself had laughed from the heart.