City of the Dead

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DeSoto glances at his wristwatch again. He knows now that something is wrong. There’s been a hitch somewhere. The man with the Gladstone bag appears restless too. Several times during the past hour he’s glanced at his wristwatch, then gazed around impatiently, as if he were waiting for someone. DeSoto’s main worry now is what he would do if the man should suddenly rise and start to go. Then he would have to follow suit, thus blowing his cover. That would be very awkward. Very awkward indeed.

Only a few minutes ago the fellow had stood up, turned around, and stared into the deep woods behind the carousel, as if he expected someone to emerge from there. For a moment it appeared he was about to go, and DeSoto held his breath and waited till the man sat down again.

Sitting there, the young cop toys with the idea of moving off to some different spot, out of sight, but where he can still keep his man under surveillance.

A steady stream of traffic drones languidly up and down Woodhaven Boulevard in front of the park. DeSoto glances wistfully toward it, hoping at any moment to see the gray unmarked patrol car roll into sight. But if Haggard is around someplace, there is no sign of it.

Suddenly, the man on the bench rises, muttering, and starts to go. The muscles in DeSoto’s legs coil, ready to spring, but he cannot make any precipitate motion, lest he give himself away. Instead, he forces himself to sit there, staring hard at the Sports Illustrated, while the man in the raincoat strides swiftly down the lane in the opposite direction.

In his agitation, with his mind racing a mile a minute, all of DeSoto’s attention has been riveted on the man. Only now does he notice that the Gladstone bag, with its $300,000 in unmarked tens and twenties, remains unattended on the bench.

Something like panic overtakes the young cop. Already the man in the raincoat has turned a bend in the lane and is out of sight. If he doesn’t go after him, he surely will lose him. Still, he cannot abandon the bag with the money. Perhaps Meacham’s people had set it up this way to force any tail to blow his cover. Haggard had provided for a whole set of contingencies. This was not one of them.

Near panic, DeSoto gazes desperately around for some sign of his own people. Seeing none, he bolts. In the next moment he’s on his feet, moving quickly toward-the bench where the old Gladstone sits, an air of malevolence about it, waiting spitefully for him. Snatching it on the run, he bounds forward down the lane after the raincoated figure receding now into a landscape of trees and shrubbery and people. Having blown his cover, he’s committed now. He must take the man.

Rounding the bend of the lane, he has a momentary glimpse of the fellow up ahead nearly two hundred yards off, moving toward one of the park exits on Woodhaven Boulevard. There’s a bus stop ahead and several buses are stopped there, their motors idling, disgorging and taking on passengers. It is toward those buses that DeSoto sees his man going.

In the next moment he’s loping like a wild man across the green toward the exit, the Gladstone and its sharp buckles banging cruelly at his knee.

The man in the raincoat is waiting in a queue behind three other people. There’s no one behind him, and the moment he steps onto the bus the doors close behind him. At that moment, DeSoto bursts through the park exit, gesturing wildly at the driver. For anyone sitting there, he simply looks like a man determined to catch a bus. But the driver doesn’t see him, or at least pretends not to, and the bus, with a wheeze and a sigh of its great diesels, starts to swing out onto the boulevard.

It’s then that De Soto, gasping like a winded creature, sees a gray blur of motion out of the corner of his eye. There’s an awful sound of brakes squealing, the crunch of metal impacting, glass shattering, the blare of horns, people shouting. In the next moment he sees the bus at a dead halt in the middle of the boulevard, traffic starting to back up behind it, and the gray unmarked patrol car, with a smashed right front fender, directly in front and athwart it where it had veered suddenly in front of the bus, blocking any further movement.

DeSoto is already at the bus, banging on its doors, when he sees Francis Haggard bulling toward him through the jammed traffic, his face purple with rage.

In the park, the oom-pah-pah of the “Gold and Silver Waltz” scratches fitfully out through the PA System, while the horses on the old carousel, rising and falling alternately, swing around and around. The children squeal with delight and shout back and forth at one another from horse to horse. On one of those carousel horses, a big gray-white Percheron with beautiful eyes and a pink muzzle, sits a young man. He might be anywhere between eighteen and thirty-five, with one of those perennially boyish faces that will look just as youthful even in old age. It is a refined, intelligent face, with thin, angular patrician features. The rather bookish air about him is heightened by an indoor pallor as well as by a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. The evident pleasure he takes in the carousel ride appears to be no less than that of the squealing children all about him.

He is looking out across the park now to the boulevard, where there appears to be some excitement. Traffic has stopped out there; crowds gather; horns blare. Several patrol cars out of the Queens 53rd Precinct have rolled up into the area, and the place is starting to fill with police. Stepping down out of the commandeered bus, several men—two in uniform, one a tall, white-haired plainclothes-man—appear to be escorting the man in the raincoat from the bus.

The young man sitting on the carousel smiles curiously to himself while the music plays and the beautiful old wooden Percheron with the big eyes and the flaring nostrils whirls him round and round.