All morning in the office he tried to keep his attention on the figures and notes in front of him but last night kept getting in the way. Why hadn’t he called the police? Well, he hadn’t really seen the kid’s face, he probably wouldn’t know it if he saw him again; and anyhow judging by experience the cops wouldn’t accomplish a damned thing and he’d only have to waste hours telling the story half a dozen times, signing statements, looking through mug-shots. A waste of my time and theirs.

But that wasn’t really it; those were rationalizations and he knew that much.

Rationalizations for what?

He still didn’t have the answer when Dundee came in and took him to lunch at the Pen and Pencil.

“Christ, you’re eating like you haven’t seen a square meal in a month.”

“Just getting my appetite back,” Paul said.

“Well, that’s a good thing. Or maybe it isn’t. You’ve lost some weight—it looks good on you. Wish I could. I’ve spent the last two years on cottage cheese lunches and no potatoes. Haven’t dropped a pound. You’re lucky—you’re just about ready to have your clothes taken in.”

He hadn’t even noticed.

Dundee said, “I guess this Amercon deal’s put you back on your feed, hey? That’s a good break, getting that thing tossed your way. I kind of envy you.”

It made him feel guilty because by now he ought to be on top of the case, he ought to have every figure and fact on the tip of his tongue; he felt like a schoolboy who’d daydreamed his way through his homework.

That afternoon he made a great effort to buckle down to it. But when he left the office he realized how little of it had penetrated. His mind was too crowded to admit digits and decimals; they simply didn’t matter enough any more.

Now damn it, straighten up. It’s your job you’re risking.

He had a hamburger in Squire’s coffee shop on the corner and afterward he still felt hungry but he didn’t order dessert. He kept remembering Dundee’s compliments. He walked home and weighed himself and discovered he was down to 175 for the first time in ten years. The skin hung a little loose on his face and belly but he could feel his ribs. He decided to join a health club and start doing daily workouts in a gym—there was one in the Shelton Hotel a few blocks up from the office, three or four of the accountants went there every day. You’ve got to be in shape.

In shape for what?

He thumbed through the Post and his eyes paused on an ad for a karate school and that put everything together; he said aloud, “You’re nuts,” and threw the newspaper across the room. But ten minutes later he found he was thinking about going back to that same bar on Broadway and he was now alert enough to realize why: it wasn’t the bar he was thinking of, it was the walk home.

It brought him bolt upright in the chair. He wanted that kid to try it again.

He got up and began to pace back and forth through the apartment. “Now take—take it easy. For God’s sake don’t get carried away.”

He had started talking to himself sometime in the past week or two; he realized he was going to have to watch that or one day he’d catch himself doing it on the street. At least he began to feel he understood the people you saw doing it on the sidewalks—walking along by themselves having loud animated arguments with imaginary companions, complete with gestures and positive emphatic answers to questions no one in earshot had asked. You passed them all the time and you edged away from them and refused to meet their eyes. But now he was beginning to know them.

“Easy,” he muttered again. He knew he was getting as filled up with inflated bravado as that kid had been last night. One accidental victory and he had become as smug as an armed guard in a prison for the blind.

You were lucky. That kid was scared. Most of them aren’t scared. Most of them are killers. And he remembered the rage that had flooded his tissues, overcoming every inhibition: if he’d pulled that on a veteran street mugger he’d have been dead now, or in an emergency ward bleeding from sixteen slices.

He’d had twenty-four hours of euphoria; it was time to be realistic. It wasn’t his courage that had saved him; it wasn’t even the poor weapon, the roll of quarters; it was luck, the kid’s fear. Maybe it had been the kid’s first attempt.

But what if it had been a hardened thug? Or a pack of them?

His toe caught the discarded Post and he bent to pick it up and take it to the wastebasket. The ad for the karate school returned to mind, and the resolve to take up gym workouts. That’s no answer, he thought. It took years to develop hand-to-hand skills; he’d heard enough cocktail party chitchat to know that much. Two, three years and you might be good enough to earn yourself a black belt or whatever they called it. But what good was that against a killer with a gun, or six kids with knives?

He turned on the TV and sat down to watch it. One of the local unaffiliated channels; a rerun of a horse-opera series the networks had canceled years ago. Cowboys picking on sodbusters and a drifting hero standing up for the farmers against the gun-slingers. He watched it for an hour. It was easy to see why Westerns were always popular and he was amazed he hadn’t understood it before. It was human history. As far back as you wanted to go, there were always men who tilled the soil and there were always men on horseback who wanted to exploit them and take everything away from them, and the hero of every myth was the hero who defended the farmers against the raiders on horseback, and the constant contradiction was that the hero himself was always a man on horseback. The bad guys might be Romans or Huns or Mongols or cattlemen, it was always the same, and the good guy was always a reformed Roman or Hun or Mongol or cattleman; either that or a farmer who learned to fight like a Hun. Organize the farmers into imitation Huns and beat the real Huns at their own game.

There had never been a successful TV series about a Gandhi; there were only cowboys and private eyes. Robin Hood was a gunslinger in a white hat and the Sheriff of Nottingham was a gunslinger in a black hat and there was no difference between ways of fighting, it was only a question of who fought best. And most of the time the theme was the same: you had to be willing to stand and fight for your own or the gunslingers on horseback would take it away from you.

You had to be willing to fight. That was what the hero always taught the sodbusters.

We have been teaching ourselves that lesson for thousands of years and we haven’t learned it yet.

He was beginning to learn it. It was what made him want to return to the dark street and find the scared kid with the knife.

I feel like a fight. So help me I feel like a fight.

But you had to use your head. Your guts said one thing, your head said another, and your guts usually won; but still you had to use your head, and the head made it crystal clear it wasn’t enough to let blind rage sweep over you—because next time it wouldn’t be a scared kid, next time it would be a hoodlum with a gun, and lunatic rage was no match for a gun. The only match for a gun was a gun of your own.

12

Jack handed him the drink. “Prosit.”

He carried it to the couch and sat. “You think she’s really feeling better then.”

“Dr. Metz said he was encouraged.”

“They’re not going to use insulin shock?”

“He wants to hold off a little while and see if she comes out of it by herself.” Jack pulled a chair out and sat down with elbows on the dining table. A pack of cards sat neatly squared on the table; he had probably worn them out playing solitaire. He looked haggard. “I guess there’s nothing else to do. Just wait and see. Christ, but it doesn’t get any easier, Pop.”