Make Room! Make Room! (22 page)

There were no more questions. Detective Dwyer left before they had been given their assignments and they did not see him again. The rain had almost stopped when they went out, but had been replaced by a heavy cold mist that swept in from the lower bay. There were two canvas-covered trucks waiting at the curb, and an old city bus that had been painted a dull olive drab. Half of its windows were boarded up.

“Put’cher fares in the box,” Steve said as he followed Andy into the bus. “I wonder where they resurrected this antique from?”

“City Museum,” Andy said. “The same place they got these riot bombs. Did you look at them?”

“I counted them, if that’s what you mean,” Steve said, swinging heavily into one of the cracked plastic seats next to Andy. They both had their satchels of bombs on their laps so there
would be room to sit. Andy opened his and took out one of the green canisters.

“Read that,” he said, “if you can read.”

“I been to Delehanty’s,” Steve grunted. “I can read Irish as well as American. ‘Grenade, pressurized—riot gas—MOA-397…’”

“The fine print, down at the bottom.”

“ ‘… sealed St. Louis arsenal, April 1974.’ So what, this stuff never gets old.”

“I hope not. From what our political officer said it sounds like we might need them today.”

“Nothing’ll happen. Too wet for riots.”

The bus shuddered to a halt on the corner where Broadway passed Worth Square and Lieutenant Grassioli pointed at Andy and jerked his thumb toward the door. “You’re interested in markets, Rusch, take the beat from here down to Twenty-third. You too, Kulozik.”

Behind them the door creaked shut and the bus pushed slowly away through the crowds. They streamed by on all sides, jostling and bumping into each other without being aware of it, a constantly changing but ever identical sea of people. An eddy formed naturally around the two detectives, leaving a small cleared area of wet pavement in the midst of the crowd. Police were never popular, and policemen in helmets, carrying yard-long, lead-filled riot-clubs, were to be avoided even more. The cleared space moved with them as they crossed Fifth Avenue to the Eternal Light, now extinguished because of the fuel shortage.

“Almost eight,” Andy said, his eyes moving constantly over the people around them. “That’s when the Welfare stations usually open. I suppose the announcement will go on TV at the same time.”

They went slowly toward Twenty-third Street, walking in the street because the clustering stalls of the flea market had pushed outward until they covered most of the sidewalk.

“Hubcaps, hubcaps, I got all the best,” a merchant droned as they passed, a small man who was almost lost in the raveling folds of an immense overcoat, his shaved head projecting above the collar like a vulture’s from a ruff of matted feathers. He rubbed his dripping nose with cracked knuckles and appeared to be a little feebleminded. “Get’cher hubcaps here, officer, all the
best, make good bowls, pots, soup pots, night pots, make good anything….” They passed out of earshot.

By nine o’clock there was a different feeling in the air, a tension that had not been there before. The crowd seemed to have a louder voice and to be stirring about faster, like water about to boil. When the detectives passed the hubcap stall again they saw that most of the stock had been locked away and the few hubcaps left on the counter were rusty and scarcely worth stealing. Their owner crouched among them no longer shouting his wares, unmoving except for his darting eyes.

“Did you hear that?” Andy asked, and they both turned toward the market. Above the rising hum of voices there was an angry shout, followed by others. “Let’s take a look,” Andy said, pushing into one of the narrow paths that threaded through the market.

A shouting crowd was jammed solid between the stalls and pushcarts, blocking their way, and only stirred without moving aside when they blew their whistles. The clubs worked better, they rapped at the barricades of ankles and legs and a reluctant opening was made for them. At the center of the mob were three crumb stands, one of them knocked off its legs and half overturned, with bags of weedcrumbs dribbling to the ground.

“They been jacking the price!” a thin-faced harridan screamed. “Against the law jacking the price. They asking double for crumbs.”

“No law says, we can ask what we want,” a stall owner shouted back, clearing the area in front of him with wild swings of an old connecting rod. He was ready to defend with his life his stock of broken bits of weedcracker. Weedcrumbs, the cheapest and most tasteless nourishment ever consumed by man.

“You got no rights, crumby, those prices don’t go!” a man called out, and the crowd heaved and surged.

Andy blasted on his whistle. “Hold on!” he shouted above the voice of the mob. “I’ll settle this—just hold on.” Steve stood and faced the angry crowd, swinging his club before him, as Andy turned to the stall owner and talked in a low voice. “Don’t be stupid. Ask a fair price and sell your stock out….”

“I can ask any price I want. There ain’t no law—” he protested and broke off when Andy slammed his club against the side of the stall.

“That’s right—there’s no law unless the law is standing right
here. Do you want to lose everything, including your own stupid head? Fix a price and sell out, because if you don’t I’m just going to walk away from here and let these people do whatever they want.”

“He’s right, Al,” the crumby from the next stall said, he had sidled over to listen to Andy. “Sell out and get out, they gonna walk all over us if we don’t. I’m knocking the price back.”

“You’re a jerk—look at the loot!” Al protested.

“Balls! Look at the hole in my head if we don’t. I’m selling.”

There was still a lot of noise, but as soon as the crumbies started selling at a lower price there were enough people who wanted to buy so that the unity of the crowd broke up. Other shouts could be heard, on the Fifth Avenue side of the Square.

“This’ll keep here,” Steve said. “Let’s get circulating.”

Most of the stalls were locked now and there were gaps between them where the pushcart owners had closed up and moved shop. A tattered woman was sprawled, sobbing, in the wreckage of her beanwich stall, her stock, cooked beans pressed between weedcrackers, looted and gone.

“Lousy cops,” she choked out when they passed. “Why didn’ you stop them, do something? Lousy cops.” They went by without looking at her, out into Fifth Avenue. The crowd was in a turmoil and they had to force their way through.

“Do you hear that, coming north?” Steve asked. “Sounds like singing or shouting.”

The surging of the crowd became more directed, taking on a unity of movement heading uptown. Each moment the massed chanting grew louder, punctuated by the stentorian rasp of an amplified voice.

“It’s the Eldsters,” Andy said. “They’re marching on Times Square again.”

“They picked the right day for it—everything is happening today.”

As the crowd pressed back to the curb the first marchers appeared, preceded by a half-dozen uniformed patrolmen, their clubs swinging in easy arcs before them. Behind them was the first wave of the elderly legion, a gray-haired, balding group of
men led by Kid Reeves. He limped a bit as he walked, but he stayed out in front, carrying a compact, battery-operated bull horn: a gray metal trumpet with a microphone set into the end. He raised it to his mouth and his amplified voice boomed over the noise of the crowd.

“All you people there on the curbs, join in. March with us. Join this protest, raise your voices. We’re not marching for ourselves alone, but for all of you as well. If you are a senior citizen you are with us in your heart because we’re marching to help you. If you are younger you must know that we are marching to help your mother and father, to get the help that you yourself will need one day….”

People were being pushed in from the mouth of Twenty-fourth Street, being driven across the path of the marchers, looking back over their shoulders as the force of the crowd behind them drove them forward. The Eldsters’ march slowed to a crawl, then stopped completely in a jumble of bodies. Police whistles shrilled in the distance and the policemen who had been marching in front of the Eldsters fought vainly to stop the advance, but were swallowed up and lost in a moment as the narrow exit from Twenty-fourth Street disgorged a stampede of running figures. They crashed into the crowd and merged with the advance guard of the Eldsters.

“Stop there, stop!” Reeves’s amplified shout boomed out. “You’re interfering with this march, a legal march….” The newcomers pushed against him and a heavy-set man, streaked with blood on the side of his head, grabbed for the bull horn. “Give me that!” he ordered and his words were amplified and mixed with Reeves’s in a thunderous jumble.

Andy could clearly see what was happening, but could do nothing to stop it since the crowd had separated him from Steve and carried him back against the quacking row of stalls.

“Give it to me!” the voice bellowed again, overridden by a scream from Reeves as the bull horn was twisted violently from his hands.

“They’re trying to starve us!” the amplified sound hammered across the crowd; white faces turned toward it. “The Welfare station is full of food but they locked it up, won’t give us any. Open it up and get the food out! Let’s open it up!”

The crowd roared agreement and surged back into Twenty-fourth Street, trampling over many of the Eldsters, pushing
them to the ground, driven on by the rancorous voice. The crowd was turning into a mob and the mob would turn into a riot if they were not stopped. Andy lashed out with his club at the people nearby, forcing his way through them, trying to get close enough to the man with the bull horn so that he could stop him. A group of Eldsters had locked arms about their injured leader, Reeves, who was shouting something unheard in the uproar, holding his right forearm in his left hand to protect it; it dangled at an odd angle, broken. Andy flailed out but saw that he would never get through, the mob was surging away, faster than he could move.

“… keeping the food for themselves—anyone ever see a skinny cop! And the politicians, they’re eating our food and they don’t care if we starve!” The nagging boom of the voice drove the crowd closer and closer to riot. People, mostly Eldsters, had already fallen and been trampled. Andy tore open his satchel and grabbed out one of the riot bombs. They were timed to explode and release their clouds of gas three seconds after the fuse was pulled. Andy held the bomb low, tore out the ring, then hurled it straight-armed toward the man with the bull horn. The green canister arched high and fell into the crowd next to him. It didn’t go off.

“Bombs!” the man bellowed. “The cops are trying to kill us so we don’t get that food. They can’t stop us—let’s go—let’s get it! Bombs!”

Andy cursed and tore out another gas grenade. This one had better work, the first one had only made things worse. He pushed the nearest people away with his club to make room to swing, pulled the pin and counted to two before he threw.

The canister exploded with a dull thud almost on top of the man with the stolen bull horn, the tearing sound of his retching cut across the roar of voices. The crowd surged, its unity of purpose lost as people tried to flee the cloud of vapor, blinded by the tear gas, with their guts twisted by the regurgitants. Andy tore the gas mask from the bottom of his satchel and swiftly and automatically put it on by gas-drill procedure. His helmet slid down his left arm, hanging from its strap, while he used both hands, thumbs inside, to shake out the mask and free the head straps. Holding his breath, he bent his head and tucked his chin into the mask and, with a single swift motion, pulled the straps over his head that held the mask in place. His right palm sealed
the exhaust valve over his mouth as he expelled the air violently from his lungs, it rushed out of the vibrating sides of the mask clearing away any traces of gas. Even as he did this he was straightening up and putting his helmet back on with his other hand.

Though the whole operation of donning the mask had taken no more than three seconds, the scene before him had changed dramatically. People were pushing out in all directions, trying to escape from the spreading cloud of gas that drifted in a thin haze over a widening area of road. The only ones remaining were sprawled on the pavement or bent over, racked by uncontrolled vomiting. It was a potent gas. Andy ran to the man who had grabbed the bull horn. He was down on all fours, blinded and splattered by his own disgorgement, but still holding on to the loudspeaker and cursing between racking spasms. Andy tried to take it away from him, but he fought back viciously and blindly, clutching it with a grip of death, until Andy was forced to rap him on the base of the skull with his club. He collapsed onto the fouled street and Andy pulled the bull horn away.

This was the hardest part. He scratched the microphone with his finger and an amplified clattering rolled out; the thing was still working. Andy took a deep breath, filling his lungs against the resistance of the filters in the canister, then tore the mask from his face.

“This is the police,” he said, and faces turned toward his amplified voice. “The trouble is over. Go quietly to your homes, disperse, the trouble is over. There will be no more gas if you disperse quietly.” There was a change in the sound of the crowd when they heard the word “gas,” and the force of their movement began to change. Andy fought against the nausea that gripped his throat. “The police are in charge here and the trouble is over….”

He clutched his hand over the microphone to deaden it as he doubled over with agony and vomited.

New York City trembled on the brink of disaster. Every locked warehouse was a nucleus of dissent, surrounded by crowds who were hungry and afraid and searching for someone to blame. Their anger incited them to riot, and the food riots turned to water riots and then to looting, wherever this was possible. The police fought back, only the thinnest of barriers between angry protest and bloody chaos.