Night of the Juggler

gave the haunted impression that if he ever saw clearly it might be unbearable, were suddenly alert.

“My father wouldn’t mind, really he wouldn’t. And once you met him you could ask him if you could take me out on a real date. . ”

Father and shame and punishment. The coldness was a torturing demon in his skull.

“My father is-”

Gus Soltik’s hand moved with blurring speed, flexed powerfully; the collar of Kate’s ski jacket tightened cruelly across her throat, cutting off her words in mid-sentence, and the echo of her single strangled sob faded swiftly in the rising winds. .

Chapter 17

The New York police department command post had been established at the head of the Mall in the cruciform esplanade bordering the open-air theater, and the scene now was one of disciplined chaos.

Remote units from the TV networks had flooded the area with their arc lights. Patrolmen Sokolsky and Maurer had been moved to the CP to man portable switchboards. Ambulances with crews at the ready were on the scene.

Detectives Corbell, Karp, and Fee were standing by for orders, while Sergeant Boyle and Detective Tebbet had proceeded north with fifty-odd patrolmen and a van of transistor radios.

From Gypsy Tonnelli’s unit Carmine Garbalotto and August Brohan were also standing by, while Detectives Scott and Taylor had joined the skirmish file of uniformed patrolmen who were advancing north to Seventy-second Street at ten-foot intervals, their powerful torchlights probing into every shadow and gully and every pocket of darkness on their line of march. Present also were a hundred-odd patrolmen in uniform. The sniper teams were in cars with motors turning over softly.

In the northwest corner of the esplanade there was a huge contour map of Central Park so large, in fact, that it was supported on sawhorses placed at six-foot intervals.

Deputy Chief of Detectives Walter Greene stood studying this immense map, which featured all of the park’s terrain and buildings and grottoes. Flanking the deputy chief were Detectives Scott and Taylor. They had all been dubious about Tonnelli’s orders to Boyle.

But Borough Commander South Chief Larkin had overruled them; the chief knew of Luther Boyd, had heard him speak at a police convention in Cincinnati only the year before, and Chief Larkin realized not only that the tactic made sense, but that it stemmed from Luther Boyd rather than Tonnelli.

Rudi Zahn sat in the rear of a squad car with Barbara Boyd. The medics had taped his ribs and applied a bandage to his slashed cheek and had given him an injection to ease the pain temporarily. This sedation, plus his agitated emotional state, had led him into a dark fantasy in which he imagined himself failing again to try to save Ilana.

“You were so brave,” Barbara had told him at least a half dozen times, but he had shaken his head and said in a low, discouraged voice, “I didn’t help her.”

“No one could have done more.”

Paul Wayne of the Times had recognized Zahn and was presently on his way to the Plaza Hotel to try to get a story from Crescent Holloway.

Meanwhile, TV cameras were relentlessly probing the expressions and reactions of Borough Commanders Larkin and Slocum, who was an oak of a man, the highest-ranking black in the New York police department, and who held a degree in criminalistics from Stanford University. The commanders were in uniform, their two stars gleaming under the glaring lights and reflectors of the cameras. Reporters held microphones in front of the chiefs and asked them rapid, insistent questions.

“Commander Larkin, can you give us a yes or no on this: Is the girl still alive?”

“We believe that she is.”

“Is that a positive affirmative?”

“Of course it isn’t,” Commander Slocum said. “We’ve got reason to think she’s alive, but we aren’t commenting on those reasons.”

While the questioning went on, Chief Larkin was thinking of that stretch of the park bordered by Seventy- second Street, Transverse Number Three, Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. It was a corridor a dozen street blocks wide and a half mile long, but if they could trap the Juggler in that area, huge as it was, they’d have a chance.

“Commander, if you’ve got a fix on this psycho, why aren’t you using helicopters?”

“At this point, I won’t comment on that,” Chief Larkin said.

“Every year the police budget gets bigger. Isn’t this the time to put the taxpayer’s money to work?”

Chief Slocum was not a political man.

“We’ll spend every goddamn dime of his money if we have to,” he said. “But not till the time is right.”

“You’ll have to excuse us now, gentlemen,” Chip Larkin said, and turned from the mikes and walked through hurrying streams of police personnel to join Deputy Chief Greene at the contour map of Central Park. Chalk marks had been drawn across the map on east-west lines at Seventy-second Street and Transverse Three, which curved from Eighty-fourth Street at Fifth Avenue to Eighty-sixth Street at Central Park West.

Commander Larkin’s mind was like a gridiron with each square flashing its own particular warning lights. The Juggler would be only one of his problems on this particular night. He was presently awaiting reports on the following events: a murder in Greenwich Village; a bank robbery in progress in the financial district; nineteen hostages held by a gunman in an all-night supermarket; a French delegate to the UN and his wife, bound and gagged in their St. Regis suite, a quarter of a million in jewels stolen, the contessa raped; a five-car collision in the Lincoln Tunnel which had backed up traffic for miles on the New Jersey Turnpike in addition to claiming six lives.

There would be, and this was a statistical certitude, more than one hundred stickups and armed robberies throughout Manhattan that night. The police had a profile of the criminals: They were poor, they wore sneakers, could run fast, sixty-two percent of them were black, and most of them used cheap handguns (so-called Saturday Night Specials which frequently exploded upon firing, occasionally killing the would-be robbers as well as their victims).

Deputy Chief Greene glanced toward Chief Larkin and said in his low, growling voice, “The Gypsy just called in. They lost the track of the Juggler.”

“Then dispatch a dozen squads to Fifth Avenue north of Seventy-fourth and a dozen more to strengthen the line from the Seventies to the Eighties on Central Park West. The Juggler may know he’s in a trap. . ”

Mrs. Schultz was watching the action at the command post on her television set. They didn’t know who he was, but she did. Things were gone from his room. The knife and the rope. She wondered if she had always known, all these years.

It was good they didn’t know who he was. They couldn’t come here with questions.

Sixty-two years ago her father and mother had brought her from Canada to Minnesota without papers. How they had got from Germany to Canada, she never knew. But it was the terror of their lives. No papers. They dreaded signing things. For ration books in the war. For getting gas lines connected. There was always fear they’d ask for papers.

But it wasn’t fair. There were so many of them after him, with speeding police cars and men at switchboards. And the girl. Maybe she was no better than she should be. Why would a girl go into the park after dark? Where was her mother?

In halting English she had been taught by nuns, Mrs. Schultz began to say a Hail Mary for Gus.

At approximately the same time John Ransom sat huddled despondently on a bench in a subway station in the borough of Brooklyn. He had thought it would be so simple and gratifying just to close his eyes and step into triumphant oblivion under the wheels of a hurtling train.

He had planned it with such painstaking care. For one thing, no note.

He had called a friend in Brooklyn to tell him he’d like to stop by for a visit, assuring his wife he’d be home within an hour or so. It would have to be presumed an accident, and all his dreams and the dreams of his wife and