LITMIR.BIZ

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me, I was at the very bottom of my career that night. For five cents cash I would have parked the car, thrown the keys in the East River, and taken the first bus out of town. I was absolutely positive that the story would be a bust and all I would get out of it would be a bad cold from walking around in the snow.

      And if that doesn’t show you what a hot newspaperman I really am, nothing will.

      * Sol began to act interested as we reached the corner Harrison had told us to go to. “That’s Chris’s,” he said, pointing at a little candy store. “And that must be the pool hall where the Leopards hang out.”

      “You know this place?”

      He nodded. “I know a man named Walter Hutner. He and I went to school together, until he dropped out, couple weeks ago. He quit college to go to the Police Academy. He wanted to be a cop.”

      I looked at him. “You’re going to college?”

      “Sure, Mr. Van Pelt. Wally Hutner was a sociology major—I’m journalism—but we had a couple of classes together. He had a part-time job with a neighborhood council up here, acting as a sort of adult adviser for one of the gangs.”

      “They need advice on how to be gangs?”

      “No, that’s not it, Mr. Van Pelt. The councils try to get their workers accepted enough to bring the kids in to the social centers, that’s all. They try to get them off the streets. Wally was working with a bunch called the Leopards.”

      I shut him up. “Tell me about it later!” I stopped the car and rolled down a window, listening.

      * Yes, there was something going on all right. Not at the corner Harrison had mentioned—there wasn’t a soul in sight in any direction. But I could hear what sounded like gunfire and yelling, and, my God, even bombs going off! And it wasn’t too far away. There were sirens, too—squad cars, no doubt.

      “It’s over that way!” Sol yelled, pointing. He looked as though he was having the time of his life, all keyed up and delighted. He didn’t have to tell me where the noise was coming from, I could hear for myself. It sounded like D-Day at Normandy, and I didn’t like the sound of it.

      I made a quick decision and slammed on the brakes, then backed the car back the way we had come. Sol looked at me. “What—”

      “Local color,” I explained quickly. “This the place you were talking about? Chris’s? Let’s go in and see if we can find some of these hoodlums.”

      “But, Mr. Van Pelt, all the pictures are over where the fight’s going on!”

      “Pictures, shmictures! Come on!” I got out in front of the candy store, and the only thing he could do was follow me.

      Whatever they were doing, they were making the devil’s own racket about it. Now that I looked a little more closely I could see that they must have come this way; the candy store’s windows were broken; every other street light was smashed; and what had at first looked like a flight of steps in front of a tenement across the street wasn’t anything of the kind—it was a pile of bricks and stone from the false-front cornice on the roof! How in the world they had managed to knock that down I had no idea; but it sort of convinced me that, after all, Harrison had been right about this being a big fight. Over where the noise was coming from there were queer flashing lights in the clouds overhead—reflecting exploding flares, I thought. * No, I didn’t want to go over where the pictures were. I like living. If it had been a normal Harlem rumble with broken bottles and knives, or maybe even home-made zip guns—I might have taken a chance on it, but this was for real.

      “Come on,” I yelled to Sol, and we pushed the door open to the candy store.

      At first there didn’t seem to be anyone in, but after we called a couple times a kid of about sixteen, coffee-colored and scared-looking, stuck his head up above the counter.

      “You. What’s going on here?” I demanded. He looked at me as if I was some kind of a two-headed monster. “Come on, kid. Tell us what happened.”

      “Excuse me, Mr. Van Pelt.” Sol cut in ahead of me and began talking to the kid in Spanish. It got a rise out of him; at least Sol got an answer. My Spanish is only a little bit better than my Swahili, so I missed what was going on, except for an occasional word. But Sol was getting it all. He reported: “He knows Walt; that’s what’s bothering him. He says Walt and some of the Leopards are in a basement down the street, and there’s something wrong with them. I can’t exactly figure out what, but—”

      “The hell with them. What about that?”

      “You mean the fight? Oh, it’s a big one all right, Mr. Van Pelt. It’s a gang called the Boomer Dukes. They’ve got hold of some real guns somewhere—I can’t exactly understand what kind of guns he means, but it sounds like something serious. He says they shot that parapet down across the street. Gosh, Mr. Van Pelt, you’d think it’d take a cannon for something like that. But it has something to do with Walt Hutner and all the Leopards, too.”

      I said enthusiastically, “Very good, Sol. That’s fine. Find out where the cellar is, and we’ll go interview Hutner.”

      “But Mr. Van Pelt, the pictures—”

      “Sorry. I have to call the office.” I turned my back on him and headed for the car.

      *

      The noise was louder, and the flashes in the sky brighter—it looked as though they were moving this way. Well, I didn’t have any money tied up in the car, so I wasn’t worried about leaving it in the street. And somebody’s cellar seemed like a very good place to be. I called the office and started to tell Harrison what we’d found out; but he stopped me short. “Sandy, where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to call you for—Listen, we got a call from Fordham. They’ve detected radiation coming from the East Side—it’s got to be what’s going on up there! Radiation, do you hear me? That means atomic weapons! Now, you get th—”

      Silence.

      “Hello?” I cried, and then remembered to push the talk button. “Hello? Harrison, you there?”

      Silence. The two-way radio was dead.

      I got out of the car; and maybe I understood what had happened to the radio and maybe I didn’t. Anyway, there was something new shining in the sky. It hung below the clouds in parts, and I could see it through the bottom of the clouds in the middle; it was a silvery teacup upside down, a hemisphere over everything.

      It hadn’t been there two minutes before.

      *

      I heard firing coming closer and closer. Around a corner a bunch of cops came, running, turning, firing; running, turning and firing again. It was like the retreat from Caporetto in miniature. And what was chasing them? In a minute I saw. Coming around the corner was a kid with a lightning-blue satin jacket and two funny-looking guns in his hand; there was a silvery aura around him, the same color as the lights in the sky; and I swear I saw those cops’ guns hit him twenty times in twenty seconds, but he didn’t seem to notice.

      Sol and the kid from the candy store were right beside me. We took another look at the one-man army that was coming down the street toward us, laughing and prancing and firing those odd-looking guns. And then the three of us got out of there, heading for the cellar. Any cellar.

      Priam’s Maw

      My occupation was “short-order cook”, as it is called. I practiced it in a locus entitled “The White Heaven,” established at Fifth Avenue, Newyork, between 1949 and 1962 C.E. I had created rapport with several of the aboriginals, who addressed me as Bessie, and presumed to approve the manner in which I heated specimens of minced ruminant quadruped flesh (deceased to be sure). It was a satisfactory guise, although tiring.

      Using approved techniques, I was compiling anthropometric data while “I” was, as they say, “brewing coffee.” I deem the probability

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