Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

She flipped Angeli out then, and over he went — and wham. Edward grabbed his ankles. Angeli flapped his arms and kicked his legs, trying to get free, but Edward — Edward the Great! — wouldn’t drop him. Instead, he swung his trapeze back, and then gave Angeli a flip and

Farnings grabbed Angeli’s wrists.

Farnings flipped Angeli up, and Sue Ellen caught him, and then Sue Ellen swung her trapeze all the way back and tossed Angeli to Edward, and I began to get the idea of what was going on up there.

Edward tossed Angeli, and Farnings caught him, and then Farnings tossed him to Sue Ellen, and Sue Ellen tossed him right back again. Then Farnings climbed onto Sue Ellen’s trapeze, and they both swung back to the platform.

Edward took a long swing, and then he tossed Angeli head over heels, right back to the platform, where Sue Ellen and Farnings grabbed him with four eager arms.

I was grinning all over by this time, and the crowd was booing at the top of its lungs. Who cared? The big shots were stirring restlessly, but they’d probably heard that Angeli sometimes fell coming down the ladder, and so they didn’t leave their seats.

Only tonight, Angeli wasn’t doing any falling coming down any ladder. Because Sue Ellen had one of his wrists and Farnings had one of his ankles, and one was behind him, and the other was ahead of him; and even if he pitched himself off into space, he wouldn’t have gone far, not with the grips they had on both him and the ladder. I saw the big shots get up and throw away their cigars, and then everybody began booing as if they wanted to tear down the top with their voices. Angeli came over to me, and his face didn’t hold a pleasant smile this time. His face was in rage, and it turned red, as if he would explode.

“You tricked me!” he screamed. “You tricked me!”

“Oh, go to hell,” I told him, and all at once he wasn’t there any more.

Well, I’m not John Ringling North, and I don’t run the greatest show on earth. I’ve just got a small, unimportant circus, and it gives me a regular small income, but it’s also a lot of trouble sometimes.

I still have my soul, though; and, what’s more, I now have a soulmate, and she answers to the name of Sue Ellen Mullins, which is in a way most euphonic, you will agree.

They were telling the same tired jokes in the squadroom when Randolph came in with his prisoner.

Outside the grilled windows, October lay like a copper coin, and the sun struck only glancing blows at the pavement. The season had changed, but the jokes had not, and the climate inside the squadroom was one of stale cigarette smoke and male perspiration. For a tired moment, Randolph had the feeling that the room was suspended in time, unchanging, unmoving and that he would see the same faces and hear the same jokes until he was an old, old man.

He had led the girl up the precinct steps, past the hanging green globes, past the desk in the entrance corridor, nodding perfunctorily at the desk sergeant. He had walked beneath the white sign with its black-lettered DETECTIVE DIVISION and its pointing hand, and then had climbed the steps to the second floor of the building, never once looking back at the girl, knowing that in her terror and uncertainty she was following him. When he reached the slatted rail divider, which separated the corridor from the detective squadroom, he heard Burroughs telling his old joke, and perhaps it was the joke which caused him to turn harshly to the girl.

“Sit down,” he said. “On that bench!”

The girl winced at the sound of his voice. She was a thin girl wearing a straight skirt and a faded green cardigan. Her hair was a bleached blonde, the roots growing in brown. She had wide blue eyes, and they served as the focal point of an otherwise uninteresting face. She had slashed lipstick across her mouth in a wide, garish red smear. She flinched when Randolph spoke, and then she backed away from him and went to sit on the wooden bench in the corridor, opposite the men’s room.

Randolph glanced at her briefly, the way he would look at a bulletin board notice about the Policeman’s Ball. Then he pushed through the rail divider and walked directly to Burroughs’ desk.

“Any calls?” he asked.

“Oh, hi, Frank,” Burroughs said. “No calls. You’re interrupting a joke.”

“I’m sure it’s hilarious.”

“Well, I think it’s pretty funny,” Burroughs said defensively.

“I thought it was pretty funny, too,” Randolph said, “For the first hundred times.”

He stood over Burroughs’ desk, a tall man with close-cropped brown hair and lustreless brown eyes. His nose had been broken once in a street fight, and together with the hard, unyielding line of his mouth, it gave his face an over-all look of meanness. He knew he was intimidating Burroughs, but he didn’t much give a damn. He almost wished that Burroughs would really take offence and come out of the chair fighting. There was nothing he’d have liked better than to knock Burroughs on his ass.

“You don’t like the jokes, you don’t have to listen,” Burroughs said, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Thank you. I won’t.”

From a typewriter at the next desk Gene Fields looked up. Fields was a big cop with shrewd blue eyes and a friendly smile. The smile belied the fact that he could be the toughest cop in the precinct when he wanted to.

“What’s eating you, Frank?” he asked, smiling.

“Nothing. What’s eating you?”

Fields continued smiling. “You looking for a fight?” he asked.

Randolph studied him. He had seen Fields in action, and he was not particularly anxious to provoke him. He wanted to smile back and say something like, “Ah, the hell with it. I’m just down in the dumps” — anything to let Fields know he had no real quarrel with him. But something else inside him took over, something that had not been a part of him long ago.

He held Fields’ eyes with his own. “Any time you’re ready for one,” he said, and there was no smile on his mouth.

“He’s got the crud,” Fields said. “Every month or so, the bulls in this precinct get the crud. It’s from dealing with criminal types.”

He recognized Fields’ manoeuvre and was grateful for it. Fields was smoothing it over. Fields didn’t want trouble, and so he was joking his way out of it now, handling it as it should have been handled. But whereas he realized Fields was being the bigger of the two men, he was still immensely satisfied that he had not backed down. Yet his satisfaction rankled.

“I’ll give you some advice,” Fields said. “You want some advice, Frank? Free?”

“Go ahead,” Randolph said.

“Don’t let it get you. The trouble with being a cop in a precinct like this one is that you begin to imagine everybody in the world is crooked. That just ain’t so.”

“No, huh?”

“Believe me, Frank, it ain’t.”

“Thanks,” Randolph said. “I’ve been a cop in this precinct for eight years now. I don’t need advice on how to be a cop in this precinct.”

“I’m not giving you that kind of advice. I’m telling you how to be a man when you leave this precinct.”

For a moment, Randolph was silent. Then he said, “I haven’t had any complaints.”

“Frank,” Fields said softly, “your best friends won’t tell you.”

“Then they’re not my best...”

“All right, get in there!” a voice in the corridor shouted.

Randolph turned. He saw Boglio first, and then he saw the man with Boglio. The man was small and thin with a narrow moustache. He had brown eyes and lank brown hair, and he wet his moustache nervously with his tongue.

“Over there!” Boglio shouted. “Against the wall!”