Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“Well—” the warden said evasively.

“What’s the goal?” Feldman asked, turning around.

“Order,” the second man said.

“Acquiescence, I’d say,” said the first man.

“Acquiescence?” Feldman said.

“Well, silence,” the first man said.

Feldman nodded. He joined another group. He was afraid he was drunk. The Lord has failed me, he thought miserably. On his own he avoided the servant with the tray, turning his back whenever the man approached. In a while, though, he could no longer remember his reason for wanting to remain sober. What am I afraid of, he asked himself — that I won’t be invited again? He giggled and sought out the fellow with the drinks. “Thanks, gumshoe,” he said, taking another drink from the cop. They were all cops here. It was the Policemen’s Ball. He could smell rectitude. The odor of ordinance was in the air.

Suddenly he felt compassion for his fellow inmates. It was a shame, he thought. They talked about the underworld—“Keep them under,” someone had said — but what about the overworld? They talked about organized crime, but Feldman couldn’t think of two hoods who could stand each other. If one had a gun, sooner or later the other was a dead man. The real organization belonged to the overworld. Did cops shoot each other, horn in on each other’s territory, beat each other’s time? No, the cops had their cop cartels, their FBI’s and state troopers and Policemen’s Benevolent Associations. It was the poor crook who was alone. The crook had no ecumenical sense at all. For one Appalachia Conference, and he could just imagine the screaming and backbiting that must have gone on, there were hundreds of parties like this one. He was consumed by a truth, sudden and overwhelming. He had to share it at once or he would burst. He rushed up to someone. “There isn’t any,” he told him passionately.

“What’s that?”

“There isn’t any. It doesn’t exist.”

“There isn’t any what?”

“There isn’t any Syndicate. There isn’t any Mafia. There isn’t any Cosa Nostra. You can all go home.”

“Try to eat something,” the man said. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked solicitously.

“No,” Feldman said glumly. He found a chair and sat down. They’d probably have to shut him up, now they knew he was on to them. Already the man was conferring with someone; together they were staring at him. It was all a fake. Maybe even evil was a fake. He’d better keep his ears open and his mouth shut. (The thought nauseated him.) He had to focus, concentrate. There were things to learn he could bring back to the boys. He thought fondly of the boys. Good old Bisch. That grand old man Ed Slipper. And Hover — fine, maligned Hover. Sky and Flesh and Walls were the best pals a guy ever had. He thought of his friends asleep on their cots. They might be thieves and murderers, but they were good old boys. He had a duty to the guys to sober up, to tell them what he’d learned: that they were a myth. He imagined a youthful eagerness in his voice as he told them. It was news to make a tenor of a man.

Concentrating, he was astonished at the enormous varieties of cophood there were in the room. In addition to those he had already met, the sheriffs and marshals and constables and private detectives, there were insurance investigators and high officials in the National Guard. There was a man who trained German shepherds and leased them to department stores and warehouses. Another man was in charge of an army of crowd handlers at ball parks and arenas. There was a chief of house detectives for a large hotel chain and a woman who headed up an agency of store detectives. There were polygraph experts and fingerprint men and a police artist who was introduced to Feldman as the Rembrandt of his field. There were prison chaplains and expert witnesses for the prosecution at murder trials.

He felt as if he had been caught in the guts of an enormous machine. As he had noted before, there were no windows, and he rushed instead to the door to get some air. Outside stood the deputy who had brought him to the prison. The man passed him by, smiling. “It’s ten thirty-seven,” he said, waving his wrist with Feldman’s watch on it.

When he was calm enough Feldman went to the buffet table; his new knowledge had made him hungry. He was surprised at the meager character of the food. Perhaps there was something in the make-up of good men that subdued their tastes and deadened their appetites, something surly in their hearts that made them trim their lettuce and chop their food, as though matter had first to be finely diced and its atoms exposed before they would eat it. Feldman almost gagged on the liquescent potatoes and minced loaves of meat and could not even look at the colorless gelatinous molds with their suspended chips of pimento and halved olives and thin, biopsic bits of carrot, like microbes in a culture.

He toured the room, a spy among spies. There was an element of nervousness in their talk, which surprised him. They spoke of men still at large, public enemies who were armed and dangerous, their very vocabularies reminding Feldman of news bulletins that interrupted dance music on the radio in old films. They could have been residents of some storm-threatened outpost on the mainland. But there was smugness too, a basic confidence in their cellars of guns and stacked riot helmets and cases of tear gas. What was Armageddon to these guys?

“All the borders were closed,” one said. “It was the tightest security net in the history of the state. They used three hundred squad cars, for Christ’s sake. They couldn’t have done any more.”

“I know, Chief Parker was telling me,” another said.

“Still,” someone else said, “I see Commissioner Randle’s point. They didn’t take the mountains into account. One call to Lane Field, and they could have had fifty helicopters over that area in twenty minutes. They could have dropped troopers with infrared gun sights. They could have lit up the entire state with flares. It doesn’t make any sense for a manhunt to fail when you can get that kind of cooperation.”

“I’m glad you brought that up about the mountains. We’d improve security a thousand percent if the borders were redefined. Take Wyoming and Montana, for example.”

“Flanders and Labe have a tough one there, all right. I wouldn’t want to be those two lawmen.”

“Well, sure. They’ve got it tough, but it’s not much different for True in Tennessee or Wright in South Carolina, or even Grand and Nobel in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I could give you a dozen examples. The mountainous common borders of those states offer the criminal a million places he can hole up. We’ve simply got to recognize that sooner or later the frontiers have to be moved in this country. The natural border is a thing of the past anyway, since four-wheel drive. Place your state lines far enough away from your mountain ranges — create a twenty-mile belt of flatland around the high country — and when they come down from those hills they fall right into our nets without all this crap about extradition.”

“I don’t know, Jim, it sounds pretty idealistic to me.”

“Hell, Murray, we’ve been doing it in our penitentiaries for years. What’s your yard between your outside walls and your main buildings?”

We’re surrounded, Feldman thought. We’re lost, but we’re surrounded.

He took a cup of coffee with him into an empty room. Even normally he moved around a lot at parties, but tonight he had covered miles. He was looking for a place to hole up, but what he really wanted was to go back to his cell, to be with those who knew him. I’m Feldman, he thought; my book is in the library. He longed to be with anyone who had read his book, who knew about his life. What was this party all about, anyway?