The Man with the Golden Arm

while the mike was being moved. While Frankie looked straight ahead.

‘Not a nerve in his body,’ the wondering listeners heard the captain murmur at last.

In the brief interval between the departure of one line and the arrival of the next the captain leaned forward on his elbows and spread his fingers gently across his temples; the light kept hurting his eyes. And didn’t feel he had heart enough left to face one more man manacled by steel or circumstance until his own heart should stop hurting.

Yet they come on and come on, and where they come from no captain knows and where they go no captain goes: mush workers and lush workers, catamites and sodomites, bucket workers and bail jumpers, till tappers and assistant pickpockets, square johns and copper johns; lamisters and hallroom boys, ancient pious perverts and old blown parolees, rapoes and record-men; the damned and the undaunted, the jaunty and condemned.

Heartbroken bummies and the bitter rebels: afternoon prowlers and midnight creepers. Peeping Toms and firebox pullers. The old cold-deckers and the young torpedoes coming on faster than the law can pick them up.

The unlucky brothers with the hustlers’ hearts.

‘It says here you were annoying a ten-year-old girl.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Beg my pardon for what?’

‘It was a ten-year-old boy.’

The captain crossed himself. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he apologized, adding under his breath, ‘through your jugular vein.’ The captain felt ready for almost anything tonight, in the weariest sort of way. For knowing the answers to every alibi and having a tailor-made quip ready for every answer only seemed to make him wearier than ever of late.

‘Snatched a purse where Sinatra was singing.’

‘Do you swoon too?’ The captain was weary tonight all right.

Worst of all were the witnesses who snickered after every questioning. If only, just once, one of them would laugh out from the heart.

And felt the finger of guilt again tap his forehead and the need of confession touch his heart like touching a stranger’s heart. A voice like his own voice, confident and accusing: ‘That’s your man, Captain. That’s your man.’ A voice like his own voice. Yet a heart like a hustler’s heart.

‘I’m affiliated with two bolts of poster paper,’ the odd fish near the end of the line announced before he was asked.

‘Are you sure you’re not incorporated?’ the captain wanted to know.

‘Put a cigar in my pocket ’n set my coat on fire,’ the next youth offered cheerfully.

‘Why didn’t you pull the firebox?’

‘What do you think I’m here for?’

‘I picked up a drunk,’ a South State Street strongarmer explained.

‘I’ll say you did. By the pockets.’

‘I got a perforated eardrum,’ the next pointed out as though that condition justified all felonies under ten thousand dollars.

‘You must have got it crawling in ’n out of transoms,’ the captain diagnosed him, ‘you can still hear a squad car coming, can’t you?’

‘If I could I wouldn’t be here.’

‘How long were you in Leavenworth?’

‘Five years eight months twenny-eight days.’

‘How many minutes?’

‘Next time I’ll take a watch.’

‘Next time you won’t need one. You’re a habitual.’ Just as the captain said that his mind jumped to a conviction as automatic as it was without basis in the charge sheet: the dealer had had the punk with him.

Out of the file he kept in his head Bednar slipped a certain arrest slip. Then slipped it back feeling pleased with Mr Schnackenberg’s bill that made two felonies, of the same nature, add up to recidivism. The punk must have had a quicker eye for that ace in the draperies.

‘Not off one conviction I ain’t no habitual,’ the ex-con on the platform answered the captain’s accusation at last.

‘You’ll have your day in court,’ the captain assured him. ‘Tell the court that Belgian.22 was to pick your teeth with. Maybe they’ll believe you. I don’t.’

The man with the Southern Comfort accent and the true assassin’s mug complained sullenly, ‘I ain’t been in trouble in eleven years. They made a believer of me on Governor’s Island. When I got out I got a lunch pail.’

‘Next time get a transparent one so the officers can see what’s in it.’

The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.

‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’

‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.

‘I’ve been defrocked.’

‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’

‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’

That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I don’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.

‘I ain’t used the stuff for fourteen years,’ he lied right into the mike the moment it was moved to his lips.

‘Then how come you were shooting that girl in the arm when the cops come in? You were putting her on it too, you Fagin.’

‘How could I? She been on it longer than I have.’

‘Tell that to a mule and he’ll kick your head off. The girl is nineteen and you’re forty-four and on top of that you had her so drunk she didn’t even know her own name.’

‘Well, she acts older.’ N I ain’t forty-four. I’m thirty-nine ’n that chick is twenty if she’s a month.’

The heroin head smiled virtuously at having established his innocence so irreproachably.

As the final line shuffled off the listeners rose in the rows as though to wish all such irreproachable innocents long life and good health on the way. Under the dimming lights the innocents filed through a green steel doorway into a deepening darkness.

But the listeners straightened their trousers and smoothed their dresses down and one by one, by twos and threes, by smiling threes and laughing fours, all left through a well-lighted door onto a clean well-lighted street.

With nothing, it seemed, to fear in the world at all.

Only the captain, trapped between the hunters and the hunted, looked mournfully through that green steel door as though yearning to follow his innocents there.

To follow each man to a cell all his own, there to confess the thousand sins he had committed in his heart.

For he seemed to see them still, each with the left hand manacled and the right thrown protectively across the eyes.

As his own left hand, in dreams, seemed cuffed, of late, to smooth cold steel. As he had one morning wakened to find his own right hand flung across his eyes. ‘I’ll get dark shades for the bedroom,’ Record Head decided restlessly, ‘the light is wakin’ me up too early.’

For there was no priest to wash clean the guilt of the captain’s darkening spirit nor any judge to hear his accusing heart. The court forbade him entrance to that narrow green steel door. Justice had been done; his case was closed. He could not even tell the names of those who’d taken the rap for him.

To leave him, of all men most alone, of all men most guilty of all the lusts he had ever condemned in others.

What was it that the defrocked priest had said? ‘We are all members of one another.’ What had the holy-