City of the Dead

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Young Sam DeSoto sits alone on a park bench in the cool shade of a full-blooming chestnut. The big white blossoms, like great puffs of cotton, hang low from the branches all about him. On the ground, strewn about his feet, are the myriad tiny blossoms that have showered intermittently downward during the past three-quarters of an hour he has been sitting there.

Slightly after three o’clock now, with school out, the park is beginning to swarm with children. They bike past the bench where DeSoto sits reading a Sports Illustrated and looking like a hobo; they roll past him on skates; mothers push infants past in carriages. Back up to the left in’ a concrete playground encircled with a wrought-iron fence, kids swing on swings, slide on slides, soar up and down on seesaws, and stream all over a Junglegym. Out beyond the playground, in a field across the way, there are kite fliers and softball players. Almost directly behind him, in a thick clump of trees, an old circus carousel whirls more squealing children around and around to the tune of Strauss waltzes wheezing out across the park.

Along with the very young there are, of course, the very old. They sit idly on benches, some dozing, some reading—the retired pensioners, the sick and the resigned.

DeSoto glances up now from the glossy pages of the Sports Illustrated. His eyes stray fleetingly off to the right, to a bench about one hundred yards down from him. There sits another man, an innocuous-looking fellow with colorless hair and a recessive chin. His dress is shabby but respectable enough—shirt, tie, suit, raincoat, although there is not the slightest sign of rain. The tatty, rather soiled appearance of the man suggests that he hasn’t changed his costume for quite some time. He reads a newspaper, and beside him on the bench sits the battered old Gladstone.

Sam DeSoto has followed this man out from the city, out from Grand Central Station. For the first part of the trip he followed him in the gray unmarked radio patrol car along with Haggard, Zabriskie, and DeGarmo; then later he rode with him in the subway, when he’d taken over from Donnello, who’d followed the man out of Grand Central Station onto 42nd Street and west to Sixth Avenue, where they had both descended into the IND.

By means of small, powerful radio transmitters carried by Donnello, his movements in the subway had been quite easily charted from the patrol car riding along above. Just before entering a train, Donnello had been able to radio that he was boarding an eastbound F train. From there it was a relatively simple matter to follow a series of steady, rhythmic beeps along the well-known route of the F train, moving east under the river and out toward Queens.

The chief danger of this technique was that the followers would, in turn, be followed by Meacham’s people. Since the trains in the early afternoon are fairly empty, anyone lingering too long in proximity to the man carrying the Gladstone would be conspicuous. In order to minimize that danger, they had worked out yet another fairly simple system of rotation that involved the patrol car’s reaching stations along the route shortly before the train itself. This, too, was a fairly simple matter. And so it was that when Donnello got off the train at Lexington and 53rd, Zabriskie got on. He stayed in the-small vestibule one car down from the pick-up man, watching him through the glass door all the way under the East River, through 23rd and Ely and on through Long Island City. When Zabriskie got off at Roosevelt Avenue and Jackson Heights, young Sam DeSoto, who’d arrived there seven minutes before, got on.

It had all gone quite smoothly. When the man with the Gladstone got off at 71st and Continental Avenue, so did DeSoto. From there, by lagging quite far behind and moving at a stroller’s pace, he had shadowed the man through the quaint, narrow, Tudorish streets of Forest Hills Gardens right on out through to Woodhaven Boulevard and across to the park, where he sits now far enough away from the man to arouse no suspicions.

He has been sitting there now for nearly an hour, ostensibly reading a magazine but actually watching the man with the Gladstone’s every move. His orders from Haggard were not to let the man out of his sight, and under no circumstances to apprehend him.

DeSoto glances at his watch. It’s going on 3:30 now, and it troubles him a bit that no one has yet shown up to rotate him out of there. Surely any of Meacham’s people in the area to pick up the money had observed him by now. He has simply been sitting there too long to go unnoticed. Obviously, they wouldn’t move until they were absolutely certain about him. DeSoto sits there now with a growing sense of unease.

Still, he’s not unduly alarmed. He knows that DeGarmo is to replace him there. True, DeGarmo is now a half-hour late, but the small, powerful radio transponder beneath his shirt continues to beep reassuringly, beaming out sharp, powerful electronic signals that will guide the men in the unmarked patrol car directly to him.

DeSoto puts his magazine aside now and sits back, closing his eyes, pretending to sleep, but watching the man on the bench through the moist cage of his eyelashes. The thudding oom-pah-pah of Strauss waltzes from the carousel continues to roll out, stridulous and tinny, across the park. And in the air, mingled with the scent of hyacinth, jasmine, and the first lush growth of grass, is the smell of frankfurters and sauerkraut wafting from the vendor’s refreshment stand near the carousel.

Aside from the tension of his job there, the scene is all very pleasurable to young DeSoto, a weed sprouted on the city streets, sprung from the hot pavements, the airless brown brick tenements sprawling up around the Hunt’s Point district of The Bronx. For him, grass and trees, the sound of children rooting at a softball game, squealing on a carousel, are rare pleasures, and despite the urgency of his job, he succumbs to them. He does not know, has no way of knowing, that Haggard, along with his replacement, DeGarmo, and several others, is still somewhere back there in Jackson Heights, where the battery of the unmarked patrol car had given out, cutting all radio communication between him and them. At that very moment, while the battery is being replaced, Haggard has not the slightest idea where young Sam DeSoto has gone.