William McGivern - Night of the Juggler

He stood shrouded in darkness, laughing and softly calling Gus Soltik’s name.

When Manolo disappeared from view, Samantha tried to scream a warning at him, but Tonnelli saw the tightening cords of her throat and swiftly clamped a hand across her mouth, stifling the sound into a strangled sob. Several of the police marksmen turned, reflexes instinctively triggered by the silent struggle between Samantha and Lieutenant Tonnelli.

The Juggler spotted movement in the trees at the east side of the glade. Frowning lines formed on his wide, rounded forehead. At first only a dim curiosity stirred in his mind. Somebody. . somebody else wanted the boy.

But after that first jealous thought, which made him wince like the cut of a whip, other thoughts formed in his mind, ugly and dangerous. His animal instincts were suddenly aroused. He listened, and he sniffed the air, and his small, muddy eyes focused on the trees on the other side of the clearing. The shadows there were merging into patterns.

He saw the shapes of men. While numbers confused him, he singled out four shapes, counting them on the fingers of his massive right hand. He saw more shapes, but trying to count them deepened the texture of his confusion and anger. The shapes stood still, like people waiting. He could smell the essence of cherries in the oil glistening on Manolo’s curly black hair; but the word “wall” had appeared in his mind, and his hands were beginning to tremble with fury.

He knew why those men were waiting. They were here to hurt him, using the boy to trap him inside walls. His name. Sometimes he forgot his own name. But the boy knew his name. Someone had told him.

They always said calm down. Stay calm. His mother, Mrs. Schultz, Lanny at the zoo. They said it was the other thing, the anger, that caused the trouble. Always. But Gus Soltik couldn’t fight the rage that gripped him now. It was like an animal inside him, a snarling that roared in his head, claws slashing at his heart and lungs, screaming for release.

Resisting a compulsion to bellow his rage at this betrayal, Gus Soltik opened the flight bag and removed his heavy hunting knife. Then he ran silently into the shadows behind Manolo, and before Manolo could scream even once, the Juggler’s knife had flashed across his throat, opening an inch-deep furrow in that soft, vulnerable flesh, the flesh he had wanted only to touch, he thought, as he sobbed and lifted Manolo’s body high above him and hurled it like a broken doll into the moonlight of the glade.

And then, while rifle fire erupted and muzzle blasts glowed in the night like angry, flaming eyes, Gus Soltik fled in terror toward the sanctuary of the trees.

Luther Boyd threw aside the scarlet-yellow leaf he had been examining and wheeled in the direction of the fusillade of gunfire that was exploding through the dark trees on a line far to the east of him.

He experienced a sick and savage anger at Tonnelli’s betrayal, for these were not the precise and meticulously squeezed-off shots of marksmen aiming only to wound. No, this was barrage fire, random and reckless and murderous, and he knew from its volume and intensity that it was designed not to disable the Juggler, but to execute him.

Tonnelli might believe this was a first priority, a cop’s duty, in fact, but if they killed the Juggler, his daughter might also die, because only that psycho knew where in the vastness of this park Kate Boyd was held captive.

In his anger, Luther Boyd felt in his gut that Gypsy Tonnelli didn’t give a good goddamn about that. He wanted only this dramatic, crowd-pleasing performance, that notch on his gun. .

Gypsy Tonnelli ran across the glade to Manolo’s lifeless body, laboring for breath and feeling despair in the uneven stroke of his heart. Ahead of him the line of marksmen were fanning out through the woods where the Juggler had disappeared, like a figure of myth, vanishing into the mystery of the night after wielding the savage, sacrificial knife.

Tonnelli was screaming into his two-way radio, “Command! Command!”

To responses he cried, “Scramble our choppers. The Juggler’s about two hundred yards west of the drive, between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth.” Breathing hard, his mouth open, the Gypsy stopped running and looked down at Manolo’s small, slack body, the white fur jacket stained scarlet with his blood.

Samantha knelt beside Manolo and put a hand out toward him but didn’t touch him. Then she looked up at Tonnelli with tears glistening in her enormous white-rimmed eyes.

“I told you I was scared for him,” she said.

Close to hysteria, she repeated herself, but now her voice was shrill and ugly. “I told you I was scared for him.”

“We didn’t want this to happen,” Tonnelli said. There was naked anguish in his face. “Jesus, we didn’t want this to happen.”

“No, you didn’t want it to happen,” Samantha said, “but you made it happen, Gypsy. And if you’d made the bust, you wouldn’t give a shit one way or the other, would you?”

Gypsy Tonnelli ran the tip of his thumbnail slowly and painfully down the length of his disfiguring scar and looked from her accusing eyes toward the black trees.

Detectives Carmine Garbalotto and Clem Scott hurried into the clearing where Sergeant Rusty Boyle lay on the ground, hands gripping the wooden lever of the tourniquet fashioned by Luther Boyd.

The big redhead was pale, and despite the cold wind blowing in eddying gusts across the glade, there were blisters of perspiration on his upper lip and forehead. The helicopters were flying again, and the sound of their blades and the powerful lights from their fuselage hurt his ears and eyes.

Carmine Garbalotto flipped the switch on his two-way radio and called the CP. He gave the approximate grid coordinates of their position and yelled for an ambulance. Clem Scott knelt beside Sergeant Boyle and took over the task of maintaining pressure on his thigh above the wound.

“You’ll be fine,” Scott said.

“Sure. Got it stopped in time.”

“Who’s the dead one?” Scott said, glancing at Ransom’s body.

“Funny,” Rusty Boyle said, in a voice weary with pain. “I mean, he’s fine, too. Just fine.”

Out of his skull, Scott thought.

“They find the girl?” Boyle asked him.

“Not yet, Sarge.”

“The Juggler?”

“No. But some clown who drove in to look at the action was found lying with his head busted in a gutter on the East Drive. Said a guy that could be the Juggler pulled him out of his car about twenty minutes ago.”

“So the bastard’s on wheels now.”

Luther Boyd now knew that the Juggler was alive. On Babe Fritzel’s radio he had monitored Lieutenant Tonnelli’s screamed orders to the command post, and while he knew that Rusty Boyle was also alive, he didn’t as yet know the Juggler was on wheels, for that exchange between Scott and Sergeant Boyle hadn’t been on the police channel.

Boyd felt a stir of hope. He had, in a sense, infiltrated the police positions and had access to their movements and intelligence reports through Babe Fritzel’s two-way radio.

Boyd felt secure behind enemy lines; in classic guerrilla tactics, attack from the rear inevitably offered the promise of ferocity and surprise.

But there was a dreadful irony in the fact that now Boyd must save the Juggler before Tonnelli’s units could trap and destroy him.

Checking his watch and with the radio an aural spy at his ear, Boyd ran east. .

The Arsenal is situated at Sixty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, south and east of the Mall. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century for the function its name suggests, at various times in its existence it has also been used as a police station and a weather laboratory. Presently this four-story edifice with crenellated towers is the headquarters for Central Park’s recreation and cultural affairs administration. Its rear abuts on a quad formed by the animal and bird houses, the rows of bear caves, and the park’s cafeteria. In the middle of the quad is the seal pond, guarded or decorated on all four corners by the figures of giant stone eagles.