“So what do we do?”
“I think we’ve got the upper hand. I think we can stick it out without him longer than he can without us.”
“And meanwhile we keep losing people?”
Garvin looked up sharply. “Not as many as he does. That’s the key. He’s hurting worse than we are.”
“You tell that to our widows.”
“I don’t have to tell our widows anything. All anybody can promise a woman these days is that her man’s safe as long as he stays inside his own four walls. Of course, that way they both starve, and so do their kids.”
“Look, if we make a deal with Conner, nobody dies.”
“You’re sure. You’re sure Conner means all he wants is to be the big frog in a bigger puddle. He’s not looking for extra women, or extra food for his own people. He keeps those gunmen of his in line by promising them no more than new friends to play gin rummy with.”
“All right—maybe. We can’t be sure.”
“We don’t have to be sure of anything. We just have to keep as alive as we can. Look, Gus—I’m not saying we should forget Conner. Or his offer, I’m saying that two or three weeks from now, he may not be so bossy. If we’re going to trade something with him, I want a 50-50 chance of an even deal. Right now, we don’t have that.”
“So we wait.”
“Well, we can try breaking into his building. How many widows do you figure that’ll make for us?”
“Okay. We’ll let it ride.”
A week later, the sign in the playground said:
NOTICE! Anyone Not A Member Of The East Side Mutual Protective Association, (Charles G. Conner, Pres.) is Hereby Declared An Outlaw, and is subject to trial under due authority. By The Authority Invested In Me By The Democratic Party Of The State Of New York, United States Of America.
“Oh, yeah, huh?” Matt Garvin said.
The little group of men returned to Stuyvesant from the east, cutting across the playground and access drives in the courtyards. As he led them back home, Matt Garvin shivered and hunched up his heavy collar to protect his ears. The wind was light, just strong enough to cover the quiet crunch of footsteps with its whispering, but he and the men had been out all afternoon, and the chill was beginning to sink deep into their bones.
He looked up into the moonless sky, wishing there were clouds to cover the light that filtered down from the stars.
And a new star burst into searing life between the buildings.
“Scatter!” he shouted, while the parachute flare drifted slowly down, etching each man’s shadow blackly against the white of snow, and the first fingers of rifle fire reached out.
Garvin stumbled for cover behind a car parked at the side of one of the access drives, his feet floundering in the wet snow. He was almost blind from the sudden explosion of light into his eyes, but he skidded somehow into shelter, slamming against the cold metal. His eyes snapped reflectively shut while fire pinwheeled across his retinas, but he forced them open and aimed his rifle as best he could, trying to cut up the flare’s parachute. He missed, but it made no difference, for there was a triple pop from the roof of one of the buildings, and three more of the flares hung swaying and slowly dropping above the frantically running men. He cursed and huddled beside the car, snapping almost futile shots at the windows where the red sparks were winking.
The crash of rifle fire was like nothing he had heard since the height of the plague. There was never a complete break in the echoing hammer. He judged that there were at least thirty snipers, if not more, and they were all emptying their clips as fast as possible, reloading at top speed, and pouring out ammunition at a rate no one could possibly afford.
There had been twelve men in his group, counting himself. He saw three of them lying in the snow, two of them with their rifles pinned under their bodies. Those men had simply folded forward in their tracks. The third had possibly fired once. He had been looking up, at any rate, for his upper body had fallen back, and he lay stretched out, his rifle beside him, with his legs bent under him. The rest of the men had reached cover of some kind, for there was no movement in the courtyard. Most of them were not firing back, and not even Garvin could tell where they were.
He swore steadily, the words falling out in a monotone The trap had sprung perfectly. One man had stationed himself on the roof of the opposite building with his flares, and had simply illuminated the court when he picked out the shadows of Garvin’s party. The riflemen had been waiting at their windows.
The sniping fire cut off abruptly, and when Garvin realized why, a savage laugh ripped briefly out of his throat. The first flare was almost on the ground, and the men in the buildings were looking down at it, as blind as he had been.
He jumped to his feet instantly, shouting.
“Break for it!”
There was a flounder and the sound of running footsteps in the snow as the remaining men burst out of bushes and from behind cars. Garvin ran jerkily across the driveway, hunting fresh cover, and now he saw some of the other men running with him, like debris tossed by an explosion, nightmare shapes in the complexity of wheeling light and lurching shadow thrown by the flares as they oscillated under their parachutes.
He threw a glance over his shoulder and stopped dead. One of his men had stopped beside one of the bodies, and was trying to carry it away.
“Drop him!” Garvin shouted. The flare fell into the snow, silhouetting the man. “Come on!”
The three other flares, high in the air and drifting down slowly, were only a little below the tops of the buildings, still well above most of the snipers. The man tugged at the corpse once more, then gave up. But he was starkly outlined by the flare on the ground, burning without any regard for the snow’s feeble attempt to quench it.
The man began to run. Garvin and the other seven men, swallowed up by a trick of the complicated shadow-pattern, stood and watched him, silent now.
When he was finally shot down, Garvin and someone else cursed once, almost in unison, and then the eight men slipped around a corner of the building, ran across a final courtyard, and into Garvins’ building, while the three flares settled down among the four corpses, and a triumphant yell broke out from the snipers.
[Image]
“This is the worst yet,” Berendtsen said, his face taut and his eyes cold as he sat at the table in Garvin’s living room. “I never thought of flares. This tears it—it’s no longer a question of competing with them for forage. They’re cutting off our supply route.”
Garvin nodded. “We were lucky. If they hadn’t fouled up with their flares, it wouldn’t have been just four.” He turned in his chair and let his glance sweep over the other men in his living room. They represented all the families in the building. He saw what he expected in their faces—grim concentration, indecision, and fear, in unequal but equally significant mixtures. He turned back to Gus, one corner of his mouth quirking upward. There was nothing in these men to mark a distinction between them and the snipers. In a sense, they were afraid of themselves. But they had reason to be.
“All right,” Berendtsen said harshly, “we were lucky. But we can’t let it go at that. This is just the beginning of something. If we let it go on, we’ll be starved right out of here.”
“Anybody got any ideas?” Garvin asked the men.
“I don’t get it,” one of them said in a querulous voice. Garvin checked him off as one of the frightened ones. “We weren’t bothering them.”
“Smarten up, Howard,” one of the other men cut in before Garvin could curb his own exasperation. Matt
