Acceptable Losses (28 page)

When the last rattle of laughter subsided, Damon asked, “Are you a practicing Jew?” He had never seen any particular signs of piety around the Weinstein house.

“Well,” Weinstein said, immediately serious, “I eat pork and the only time I’ve ever been in a synagogue is when I’ve gone in to make an arrest, but there’s no doubt about my being a Jew, whether I like it or not. I’ve read the Bible, but …” He shook his head. “Practicing no, I don’t think anybody could call me that. Religion …” He frowned, as though it was difficult to put his feelings into words. “It’s like a huge round cloud with a mystery hidden inside it.” He held his hands apart, as though he were grasping a great invisible globe. “As big as the planet, maybe as the solar system, maybe it’s so big across it can only be measured in light-years. And every religion is creeping along on the outside of the cloud, one religion getting one quick look at part of what’s inside, another one getting a look at another part in the flick of an eyelash and so on and so on, nobody getting to see what’s at the heart of it. Or, like my fucking brother-in-law, the atheist, used to say, maybe the whole thing’s just an invention to console the human race because everybody knows we’re going to die and religion feeds you the Big Lie. What’s the Big Lie? you ask. Immortality.” He made a grimace as though the beer he had drunk had just turned sour in his stomach. “He was so damned sure of himself you wanted to kick him in the ass. One thing I can’t stand is people being sure of something they can’t prove with numbers or arithmetic or at least expert witnesses. Let’s say that as far as I’m concerned the jury’s still out.” He played absently with the empty glass on the bar. “Consolation. It’s not a bad word. But what I know for sure about myself is that I’ve turned into a sorry old man. Nothing consoles me. I’m not consoled about the fact that I’m going to die. Or that
you’re
going to die. One thing I know I’ll never be consoled about is my wife’s dying. And if it really turns out that I’ve got an immortal soul, that’ll be the worst punishment of all. I sure as hell don’t want to have to stand up when the trumpet blows for the Last Judgment. As for forgiveness—like I was saying the other day—we can all use some of that—but I still haven’t even forgiven myself for trying to make that damn fool throw from deep short, and that was almost fifty years ago. Ah …” He made an impatient gesture. “Beery nighttime talk.” He called to the bartender for another drink. “Roger,” he said, “I postpone permission to break my arm until after the next one.” He tried to smile. “Maybe you ought to ask Schulter when you see him what consoles
him.
I’m sorry,” he said, “talking so much. About things I know fuck-all about. I’ve been living alone so long that when I go out in company I run off at the mouth.”

“I’m married and I don’t live alone,” Damon said, “but I run off at the mouth pretty often myself. You ought to hear me when I get on the subject of Ronald Reagan or the Broadway theatre.” He had spoken lightly, in an attempt to lighten Weinstein’s gloom, but he could see he had failed.

“The world …” Weinstein said morosely. He shook his head and didn’t continue, as though for this evening at least, the enormity of the world’s evil was beyond his powers of description. He turned away for a moment to stare at the action on the television screen. It was a commercial for a beer company. There were brilliantly photographed shots of husky men, some white, some black, working on an oil rig, sweating healthily in bright sunlight as they carried pipe, fitted joints, wrestled with giant valves. Then as the sun was setting in a golden glow, the men stopped work, dropped their tools, slung their denim jackets and windbreakers over their shoulders and strode off happily toward a bar where amid silent laughter and back-slapping, they were served foaming glasses of beer, which they were never seen drinking because of network rules.

“What horseshit,” Weinstein said, growling. “The merry, interracial American working man. Who do they think they’re kidding?” He finished his beer with one last powerful gulp. “Let’s get out of here.”

It was almost midnight by the time they got back to the apartment and Weinstein was yawning. Before he went into the little room where he slept, he said, “I’m sorry about my blowing off back there. I’ll be better company in the morning. Sleep well, kid.” By the time Damon got into his own bed and put out the light, Weinstein’s snores were rumbling through the apartment.

The ringing of the telephone awoke him. He had been deep in sleep and he seemed to be swimming up through dark waters to reach the surface. He rolled over and picked up the telephone. He was conscious that the snoring from the other room had stopped. The illuminated dial of the bedside clock pointed to twenty past three.

“Damon?” He recognized the voice. “Zalovsky. I’ve got to see you. You got ten minutes. I’m right-near you …”

“Wait a minute,” Damon said. “I’m still asleep.”

He saw the door to the bedroom open and there was Weinstein, in pyjamas, outlined against the light streaming in from the hallway.

“Listen good,” Zalovsky said. “I’ll be waiting for you in ten minutes, like I said. In the Washington Mews. You know where that is, I hope.”

“I know where it is.”

“It’s a nice dark quiet place for a little serious conversation. If you know what’s good for you you won’t try any funny stuff. Consider yourself warned.”

“I’m warned.”

Zalovsky hung up.

“It’s him,” Damon said, as he put the phone back in its cradle.

“I gathered,” Weinstein said.

“He’s in Washington Mews. We passed it tonight on the way home from the bar. The entrance is off Fifth Avenue just before you get to the Square. There’re pedestrian gates on the other end.”

“I’ll trail you,” Weinstein said. “Maybe seventy, eighty yards behind you.”

“Give me a little time to talk to him, find out what it is that he really wants,” Damon said as he began to dress.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be there when you need me. How do you feel, kid? Nervy?”

“Not particularly. Curious, mostly.”

“Good boy.” Weinstein went back to his room to dress.

They didn’t leave the house together. Weinstein waited in the downstairs hall for almost a minute after Damon went out, then slipped out and started to follow Damon just as Damon turned the corner onto Fifth Avenue.

There was very little traffic on the avenue. Occasionally a car sped by and Damon overtook the only people in sight, two drunks with their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing hoarsely as they wove their way unsteadily downtown. They were singing “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along,” and Damon guessed that they had been together in the army.

Damon walked swiftly, feeling clear-headed and remarkably calm. He didn’t look back to see if Weinstein was following him. When he got to the entrance to Washington Mews he stopped. The little street which was really more of an alley than a street was dark, except for a pale glow coming from a single lit window near the entrance to the Mews. There was no movement that he could see anywhere on the street, which was only about a hundred yards long. He walked down the center of it toward the gates at the other end.

The sound of the two drunks singing came closer as they neared the entrance to the Mews, and Damon was fearful that by some mischievous chance one or both of them lived in one of the pretty houses that lined the cobbled street. He was about twenty yards from the last house when a shadow that was only a slightly deeper shadow in the darkness detached itself from a shallow doorway. “All right,” the remembered voice said, “you can stop there.”

Damon could not see the man’s face and could only guess at his size and shape.

“Now, finally,” Damon said coolly, “what the hell is all this about?”

“I told you no funny business, didn’t I?” The shadow moved closer to him.

“I’m here, aren’t I? Alone.” Damon suppressed the almost irresistible urge to turn for a moment to see if Weinstein was visible.

“Those your friends?”

“Those who?”

“Those two guys singing.”

“I don’t know who they are. Two drunks. I passed them on the way here.”

“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? Drunks. Where’d you learn
that
trick?”

The noise of the singing was louder now, echoing between the buildings. Damon turned. The two men had stopped at the entrance to the Mews, two dark shapes outlined against the faint lights of the street lamps of Fifth Avenue. The drunks seemed to be serenading the inhabitants of the Mews. Then a shadow moved from the wall of one of the buildings near the entrance and was caught in the glow from the one lit window on the street. It was Weinstein.

“Fuck it,” Zalovsky said. He pushed Damon violently and Damon half-fell against a doorway. There was an enormous noise as Zalovsky fired and Damon saw Weinstein go down. Damon threw himself at Zalovsky and spun him to one side. Another shot boomed. There was a cry of pain and Damon saw one of the singers crumple to the pavement. At the same moment light blazed in the front windows of the house across from where he and Zalovsky were struggling. Zalovsky was terribly strong and tore his arm away from Damon’s grasp. The light was behind him and Damon couldn’t see what the man looked like. Zalovsky was panting heavily. “You fucker,” he said, “you’re not getting away with this.”

Damon started to run toward the entrance to the Mews. He had only gone about five feet when there was another shot. But this time it was in front of him. Weinstein, kneeling on the cobblestones, had fired. He heard a grunt from Zalovsky, then the noise of metal hitting the cobblestones. He stopped and turned. Zalovsky was running away from him toward the gates at the rear of the Mews. He ran holding his right arm, clumsy but swift. In two seconds he was through the gate and had disappeared.

Damon ran toward where Weinstein, no longer kneeling, lay stretched out on his back, with his blood dark on the cobblestones.

From far off there was the wail of the first police siren.

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

“Y
OU CAN GO IN NOW
,” the doctor said. “Mr. Weinstein is conscious and he’s asking for you. But only just a couple of minutes, please.”

Damon was sitting with Lieutenant Schulter in the little waiting room on the same floor as the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital to which Weinstein and the drunken singer who had been hit by Zalovsky’s second bullet had been brought. The singer wasn’t asking to see anyone. He had been pronounced dead on arrival.

It had been a long day. The shooting had taken place a little after three-thirty in the morning, and it was now seven
P.M.
First some other detectives had questioned Damon while Weinstein had been on the operating table and then Schulter had come down and taken over. Mercifully, the police had kept all newspapermen out of the hospital, but Damon could imagine what the front pages had been like. He hadn’t been able to call Sheila until one o’clock, but she was on her way down from Vermont and was due to arrive any minute now.

Schulter had been surprisingly gentle and had insisted upon sending for some sandwiches and coffee for Damon as he asked him over and over again to describe every movement everybody involved in the shooting had made. There was a trail of blood, Schulter told Damon, from the spot where the gun that Zalovsky had used had been found to the gates and onto the curb on Waverly Place. A witness had seen a man throw himself into a car that had been parked there and drive off. Unfortunately, the witness had not noted the license number of the car. Even more unfortunately, Damon could give no description of the assailant, except that he seemed of medium height, was heavy set, very strong, and had staggered and nearly fallen when he had been shot, but had managed to recover and stumble off. The bullet must have gone into his right side or his right arm because he had been holding his gun in his right hand and had dropped it immediately after he had been hit.

“He won’t get too very far with a big hole in him,” Schulter said. “And sometime soon—very soon—he’ll have to get hold of a doctor to patch him up, and we’ll be right on his ass ten minutes after he leaves the doctor’s office or the hospital.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” Damon said. “And me, too.” He did not feel as confident as Schulter.

Weinstein had been hit in the knee, which had been shattered. He had quickly lost a great deal of blood, and Schulter marveled that even so, he had been able to get a shot off and hit his man in the wavering pale light. Schulter casually dismissed the death of the man who had been singing “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along” at the Fifth Avenue entrance to Washington Mews. It was the sort of thing that happened every day in New York, Schulter said. “The law of averages,” was the phrase he used. It was obvious that Schulter considered onlookers as a normally endangered species.

Damon didn’t say so, but felt that the actuarial scales by which Schulter judged the chances of anybody’s survival varied greatly from his own. In his case the law of averages for the past two weeks had been monstrously broken. It was true that the early-morning singer was the first person with whom he had had anything to do as he made his way to the rendezvous with Zalovsky, if passing a drunk on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the night could be described in those terms, but Schulter’s statistics did not include those other victims on Damon’s list, such as Maurice Fitzgerald, Melanie Deal, Elsie Weinstein, Julia Larch, and Sheila’s mother, as well as Manfred Weinstein himself. Damon knew that he was being neurotic and morbid, but he couldn’t help but feel that if you were in any way connected to Roger Damon, you could be a victim without actually being killed on the spot or in the past two weeks.

The man who had been shot had been identified. His name was Bryant and he had come to New York from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a conference of insurance executives. Damon remembered Maurice Fitzgerald’s speech about acceptable losses and wondered if Schulter would include the luckless Mr. Bryant among them.

Weinstein lay pale and still on the hospital bed, drainage and transfusion tubes attached to him by intravenous needles. His cheeks were shrunken, and his inert figure under the sheet seemed also to have been diminished, but his eyes, now deep in their sockets, were alert. He was the only patient in the room.