Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

  They were all a bunch of ungrateful bastards. Where were they when he needed them? The selfish greedy bunch of cock-suckers. But he knew where they were now. Most of them. Exiled from the district, by crime, filth, poverty, hopelessness. Why hadn't he been able to hold back the tide of garbage that had rumbled down on them?

  Now Sully wished to hell he had supported the Campaign Finances Act, instead of watering it down to nothing to protect incumbents. "It's political suicide," he argued when the bill was introduced. "Why the hell should any challenger get dough from the public till?"

  Traffic was picking up now, and the shops, such as they were, were guardedly beginning to unlock and fold back the gates that protected their fronts. Sully sat down on a scarred, graffiti-covered bench beside

  a bus stop to rest for a moment. He tried to imagine the streets alive and bustling with energy as they had once been, but he felt a sense of ennui, a kind of creeping paralysis. He knew that he should act, do something, plan a countermove to Yomarian's effort. Only Perlmutter seemed able to find the reserves, the discipline, to persevere.

  "We'll just have to husband all resources," Perlmutter had advised, his glass es sliding downward on the oiled skin of his nose as he jotted notes on a yellow pad. He reported that even the bored housewife, the mainstay of the volunteer effort, wasn't coming forward, as if they had all been sucked into the giant Yomarian machine. All the best storefronts had been spoken for, at premium prices, and the two big billboards overlooking the bridges were already plastered with YOMARIAN FOR CONGRESS signs. One billboard carried a telephone number and proclaimed: "Find out what he stands for." That, too, had cost money. April had dialed the number, and Sully listened to the stock charges that had served so many campaigns — irrelevance, anachronism, a staccato hammering away in the hope that it would somehow get into the brain of the primary voters.

  In e early afternoon the television reporter had arrived, an encouraging sign. His name was Smith, and he was followed by a scruffy black cameraman in blue jeans and self-important beard.

  They went downstairs and Sully was positioned in front of the Grand Dutchman's marquee, the SULLIVAN FOR CONGRESS banner whipping in the breeze behind him. He had done this countless times before, and always there was a sense of power in it. But yesterday he felt worn, and went through the motions without conviction. He realized that he was no longer simply demoralized, he had fallen into the pit. Lord, how he had tried to stay out of it. Would it come over the tube? Would the camera pick it up? He took a comb from his pocket and tried to make his hair neater, but the wind kept it awry. Then he remembered that he had forgotten to wear his television makeup, but it was too late. The questions came. He answered, perfunctorily, hoping that he would not be obliged to observe his performance.

  He was glad when it was over. Back in the suite he picked up his drink again and greedily swallowed its remains. The ice had melted. Other reporters called. He answered their questions as well as he could. It was difficult being in a defensive position. It was too new a pose. It had never happened before. Finally he decided to stop taking calls. They were beginning to annoy him. But now even he was perceiving himself as the victim — the fox pursued by the hare. It was that perception that was depressing his spirit. _By God, they're succeeding in making me think of myself as a loser_. He knew how destructive that could be.

  He rose stiffly from the bench and, more grimly than before, continued his walk through the decaying streets. The exertion forced oxygen to his brain, and his rage began to build. _They've ganged up on me. The bastards are together in a conspiracy_.

  It began to emerge in a torrent, gushing through the defective dam, which had at last burst. Of course it was a conspiracy. Deegan — that traitorous Irish bastard — was only a single cog in a massive configuration of gears intent on the political destruction of John J. Sullivan. Everything tied together — the timing of the owners of the Dutchman, the obvious buying off of Fountain, the story in the _Post_, the inability to rent storefronts or billboard space, the drying up of volunteers. Even the thing with Ben seemed suspect. They had left nothing to chance. And now, best of all, they were gaining his cooperation. Sully himself had begun to believe in his own defeat.

  A tired old woman looked into his face as he walked past her. He knew that his lips had been moving, an affliction when his thoughts moved swiftly in tandem with the rising gorge of his anger. This was no Mickey Mouse attempt to unseat him. This was a juggernaut, carefully devised and ruthlessly executed, and aimed only incidentally at himself. Theirs

  were ambitions far beyond his own Congressional seat. There was far too much artillery ranged against him, far too much logistical support.

  He came to one of those little patches of park that someone decided years ago would raise the quality of life in the neighborhood. The grass died ages ago, and in its place was a sheet of brown caked mud encrusted with cast-off beer cans and cigarette butts, an obscene clue to civilization's demise in this part of the globe.

  Sully's hands began to shake. He folded them together to keep them steady. Perhaps it was the realization that so much was ranged against him that made the shock of discovery so intense. In the privacy of his own self-appraisal, he did indeed see himself as a relatively important power source, able to accelerate power when allied with similar sources. But he knew that alone, even with his many years of seniority, he had not yet reached the stage in the system where he was truly formidable. He could not yet make Presidents quake.

  In the still-gray morning, with the sunless light defining the world in bleak patterns, Sully could make a "warts and all" assessnt of himself. He had not done so in many years, preferring the act of movement to questions of purpose or reality.

  There was little to inspect with pride in the bloated carcass of John

  J. Sullivan, he told himself darkly. He was an affliction, a parasitic drone sucking on the public tit, and he wondered if ever in his twenty- six years of politics he had made a single decision that had no political basis. _What would have been the point?_ he thought. The basic act of political life was simply survival. What other reason could there possibly be? Certainly there could be no truck with idealistic nonsense purveyed by schoolteachers. Things like the "good of the people." Who knew what that good was? Once he had really believed it. Now all he had to do was look around him, to observe the sewer of his constituency with all five senses. Whatever he had done down there in Washington, whatever they all had done, had damaged this place, these people, irreversibly. He had not really cared a fig beyond the next election and the sheer fun of wallowing in the political trough. Could he have done it any other way? Could he have played the game differently? Sully probed that one, deeply, cutting through the mist of abstraction. If he had played it differently, he probably would no longer have been playing it at all. Long gone from the political scene, he would have been honing his Gaelic wit in the word-infested sty of some barroom, where the truth passed cheaply along the moist surface of the wooden bar to be wiped away at intervals by the bartender's rag.

  But was it self-pity that was the corrosive factor eating at his gut, or that sad, sick depression that comes only when contemplating missed moments, lost opportunities, unquenchable thirsts? By God, he wanted to confess it all, now, right now, before he drowned in it, a dying man choking on his own phlegm.

  He remembered his mother dragging him along to the priests, literally pulling him along while his heart screeched and protested at the ignominy of having his mental entrails probed by those solemn gray monsters. But whatever it was that she injected with her fanatical soul into his cells was now screaming to be placated.

  "I must confess," he said aloud, hearing a foreign voice in himself imploring, pleading. He walked on, trying to get his bearings in the now-unfamiliar neighborhood, deciding on some vague path that somehow took him off the main thoroughfares.

  He did not contemplate where he had found the strength to press forward so swiftly, nor did he realize that he was plung
ing into the very heart of the ghetto. It was only when he looked upward, vainly searching for some familiar spire of a Catholic church, that he realized he was walking on dangerous turf at a dangerous hour in the morning. Yet, instead of fear, a random boyhood thought intruded, reassuring him

  that if your mission was in God's name, then God would protect you.

  "Hey, honky man, gimme your watch," a voice said behind him. He could feel the surge of warm breath as the voice spoke. He continued to walk forward, wondering, perhaps, if the words were really meant for him.

  "Wristwatch, man," the voice said again, this time accompanied by a physical prod in his lower back. Sully knew then that he was indeed the confronted. He stopped, turned, and saw two young black boys, about sixteen, skinny, sneakered, and grinning. One held a switchblade knife in front of him with the blade sheathed.

  He looked at them, so formidable and threatening in the grayness, their eyes menacing.

  "I haven't got a wristwatch, boys," Sully said, lifting both hands and placing them forward in a straight line from his body. "Sorry about that."

  They grabbed his hands and felt both wrists up to his forearms. The boy with the switchblade clicked it open and placed the point on Sully's belly. He could feel it creasing his skin. "You muvvafucka."

  They grabbed him by the arms and pushed him into an alley. He felt the strength of their young hands on hibiceps. He let them move him without any resistance. The intrusion had come upon him so swiftly that for the moment his mind was beyond being receptive to any strategy for getting out of this situation. Nor had he had any previous experience of being mugged.

  "Bread, man?" the boy with the knife said.

  Sully opened his jacket, his hands on both lapels.

  "I have no money. I have no wallet. I guess I just forgot to take it with me."

  They turned him around roughly and felt with their hands along the pockets of his clothes and the insides of his thighs. The boy with the knife then ripped the back of his coat down the middle and began to cut away the back pockets of his pants.

  "Muvvafucka got no brade."

  "We oughtta cut the muvva."

  "Honky white muvva."

  "You got nothin', white muvva."

  Sully found himself facing the wall, breathing the uncommon odor of brick dust. He turned around and faced the two boys, who taunted him with the knife blade, slicing away at his lapels, his shirt.

  "We gonna kill yo ass, muvva," one of them said. It was the one without the knife. He grabbed him by the throat.

  "You got nothin', man?"

  Sully felt his eyes bug out as the strong hand pressed his windpipe. He felt the air cut off, and he knew that a few moments of this could be his last. Was it the raw thrust of some evolutionary imperative to survive or simply the sudden realization that this would be an ignoble way to die that summoned the last focus of his strength and made him lash back with his knee to the assailant's groin? With a scream of pain that echoed and was amplified in the alley, the boy released his grip and doubled up in pain.

  Yet even as he acted, even in the full explosion of his energy, he was conscious that his impetus for violence came less from the boy's attack on him than from all the circumstances and frustrations of his own life that had come together at this moment.

  The boy with the knife seemed too stunned to react, but Sully could not stop. He brought down folded fists on the other boy's head and lifted his knee under the boy's chin to meet the impact, a bone-crushing blow that drew blood immediately as tongue and lips were sliced into by teeth. He saw the glint of the switchblade as the boy menaced it before him, shifting it from one hand to the other. Sully could feel his heart pounding, the poorly conditioned organ straining to meet the sudden demand on it. He grabbed the fallen boy's hair and held the head back.

  The blood slobbered over the lower lip and down the sides of the boy's chin.

  "Gonna cut your heart out, honky," said the boy with the knife, still moving it from one hand to the other, but somehow reluctant to move himself. Sully could barely catch his breath.

  "Come near me … I'll poke his eyes out," he said, sobbing inside, ashamed that he could be brought to such heights of cruelty. _God forgive me_, he told himself.

  The boy hesitated, perhaps seeing the stark reality of the blood moving relentlessly down his friend's face, onto his clothes, and to the garbage-strewn pavement. He began to back off, unable to act now, fearful, the bravado leaving him in an engulfing wave.

  "Sheet," he said, spitting. "You muvvafucka."

  They glared at each other across the space of no more than ten feet. It was, indeed, a standoff, but the inaction could only work to Sully's disadvantage. _What happens now?_ he thought.

  Sully looked around him in the dirty alley. Two stories up windows began, many of them boarded. He imagined that someone had moved in an upper window. "Help me," he wanted to scream, but checked himself, knowing he was alone here. They continued to face each other, the head in his hands becoming moist with sweat and blood. The boy was moaning in pain now, a low, unpausing sound, eerie in its pitch.

  "You animal," Sully hissed.

  "Muvvafucka," the boy spat back, the hate in his eyes beyond humanness.

  "Put down that knife," Sully said.

  "Sheet."

  "For God's sake, hasn't this gone far enough?"

  "Muvvafucka."

  "You can't get away with it."

  "Muvvafucka."

  It was futility incarnate. No understanding passed across the ten-foot void, a vacuum of all human communication. _Is this the real world?_ Sully thought. _How have I lived this long without confronting it?_ He could see people on the street beyond the alley, black faces moving swiftly. He wondered if he could make it to the street. Would they help him out there? Would the boy still act out his rage? _Of course he would,_ Sully thought. He, Sully, was the enemy.

  He tightened his grip on the boy's hair and, reaching under one arm, began to drag him toward the place where the alley opened onto the street. The boy was slight, but he was still deadweight, and dragging him required much effort on Sully's part. When the boy with the knife guessed Sully's motive, he moved toward him, and Sully was forced to stop and stick the thumb and forefingers of his right hand over his captive's eyes.

  "One more step, and I'll punch his eyes out," he said, knowing it was something he could never do. No, he would never go that far. Even if it were a question of survival. He hoped — _My God_ — he hoped he would never have to make that choice. The boy stopped but continued to shift the bared switchblade from hand to hand.

  "I'm gonna cut _your_ eyes out, muvvafucka," he said, his lips curling over his teeth. Sully lifted the boy again and began backing out of the alley. He wondered when the boy with the knife would make his move. Somewhere out on the busy street someone, one person, might lift a hand to help. At best, it was a tenuous possibility.

  Behind him he could hear the voices of people, the honking of horns, the screeching of brakes … people. The sounds were getting closer as he painstakingly moved the body, his eyes never leaving the face of the boy with the knife, glistening now in its sweat.

  Finally he reached the end of the alley. From quick glances he was aware of a vast panorama of activity, people sitting on stoops, hanging

  around doorways, walking, moving about. The morning was in full swing. The faces were black, but, by God, they were human beings. Suddenly, he dropped the boy and charged out into the street, his ripped clothes trailing behind him like the tail of a comet. He ran across the path of a car, which screeched to a halt in a burst of angry horn sounds, intruding into the consciousness of everyone within earshot. He caught the scene, frozen as a photograph, all eyes on him, a trapped cockroach caught in the glare of a spotlight.

  The boy with the knife caught up with him in the middle of the street, literally at center stage. He could see heads staring out of newly opened windows, faces turned in mid-sentence, minds suddenly diverted from private though
ts, cars stopping, the whole faded, hopeless collage of the ghetto suddenly coming to a halt.

  The boy lunged, his knife catching Sully in the fatty part of his shoulder. Sully wrenched free and lurched clumsily between the stalled cars in the street, pounding at windows and confronting indifferent faces that quickly turned away.

  "Help me," he shouted. "Help me."

  The boy's pursuit was relentless, his appetite for violence still apparently unappeased. Sully felt panic, as if he were in the middle of a dream with these people watching him suffer, a bulky graying white man bouncing around in a cage, for their amusement.