A Matter of Conviction

“If I have to,” Hank answered honestly.

The old man nodded again, and his eyes held Hank’s, and he said, “Will they shoot at you, Enrico?”

“Yes.”

His hands tightened on Hank’s shoulders. With great difficulty he said, “Then you will shoot back.” He nodded. “You will shoot back,” he continued, nodding. He lifted his glasses and brushed at his eyes. “Caro mio,” he said gruffly, “take care of yourself. Come back safe.”

He went to see Mary that night. She was nineteen years old now, a woman with the slender curves of a girl. They walked along the East River Drive with the lights of the three-year-old bridge spanning the dark waters uptown, and he kissed her and said, “Will you wait for me, Mary?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m young, Hank. You’ll be gone a long time. I don’t know.”

“Wait for me, Mary. Wait for me.”

None of them had waited for him. He received Mary’s letter the next year. His grandfather died six months later. They would not allow him to go home for the funeral. He’d always been sorry that the white-haired man with the weak eyes and the gentle hands had never met Karin. He knew intuitively that the pair would have formed their own axis, with none of the sinister qualities of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s.

The ferry hit the dock pilings. The captain pulled her in smoothly and easily. The dock lowered to meet the deck of the boat, and then the guardrails were raised, and Hank disembarked and walked rapidly to the building where Danny Di Pace was being held.

The man Hank spoke to was busy answering telephones all the while Hank was there. Three phones rested on his desk, and they rang in frightening succession, so that he barely managed to wedge his conversation between the jangling of the telephones.

“You see how it is,” he said. “A rat race, an absolute rat race. We try to keep up with the boys and girls remanded to us by the Children’s Court, and it’s just like shoveling sand against the tide. It’s too much for us, Mr. Bell. It’s just too much. Do you know what we’d like to do here? Do you know what we could do if we had a staff?” He shook his head dolefully and then glanced abruptly at the phone, as if dreading a further interruption.

“What do you do, exactly, Mr. Walsh?” Hank asked.

“We try to find out what makes these kids tick. We dig. But how much digging can you do when you’re short of shovels?”

“Have you ever had any members of either of these two gangs before, Mr. Walsh?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened?”

“We ran our tests. We always try to find out what it is about a boy’s mentality or his emotional make-up that—”

“Try?” Hank asked.

“Yes, try. We don’t always succeed. For God’s sake, Mr. Bell, we’re swamped with—”

The telephone rang. Walsh lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” he said. “Yes, this is Mr. Walsh. Who? Oh, hello, how are you?” He paused. “Yes, I have a report on him. Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Will you excuse me, Mr. Bell? This won’t take long.” He opened a folder on his desk and began speaking into the phone again. “Hello? Yes, we’ve confirmed that. The father is an alcoholic. No, there’s no question, the report is right here on my— Yes. All right, thank you for calling.” He hung up and then sighed deeply. “Deviant homes. We get more damn kids from deviant homes than I can count on—”

“What do you mean?” Hank asked.

“Well, surely you’re aware of all the research that’s been done,” Walsh said, glancing at Hank in surprise.

“No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

“There’s so much, I hardly know where to begin,” Walsh said, the surprise still on his face. “The Gluecks, for example. Their prediction table was based on four principal factors — discipline by the father, supervision by the mother, affection by both parents for the child, and cohesiveness of the family group. It was computed that, if these factors were unfavorable, the possibilities for delinquency were ninety-eight point one out of a hundred. Now, that’s pretty damned high, don’t you think?”

“If the research were accurate, yes.”

“There’s no reason to believe it wasn’t,” Walsh said. “It certainly comes as no surprise to anyone working in the field that deviant homes produce the vast majority of our delinquents.”

“I still don’t know what you mean by deviant homes.”

“Broken homes, immoral homes, criminal homes, homes where there’s a cultural conflict — such as is evident in the homes of some Puerto Rican gang members. We’ve had many such cases here.”

“Have you had Danny Di Pace here before?”

“No. But Reardon was with us for a while.”

“And what happened?”

“What did we discover about him, do you mean? He seemed to us to be an extremely aggressive boy, with a mother who’s overly permissive and a father who’s overly strict. He’s what we term an ‘acting-out neurotic.’”

“I’m afraid you’re going a little beyond me, Mr. Walsh.”

“I’m simply saying that his delinquent behavior seems to be compounded out of strong resentment to his repressive father and the desire to evoke some emotional response from his mother, whose permissiveness he distrusts.”