The Heckler

Read it forwards or backwards and it says the same thing. A cute party gag, but what happens when you say, “Crime is symbiotic with society,” and then reverse the statement so that it reads, “Society is symbiotic with crime?”

Carella lay in the blackness of his delirium, not knowing he was up against a logician and a mathematician, but intuitively reasoning in mathematical and logical terms. He knew that something more was required of him. He knew that in this vast record of day-by-day crime, this enormous never-ending account of society and the acts committed against it, something more was needed from him as a cop and as a man. He did not know what that something more was, nor indeed whether he could ever make the quantum jump from the cop and man he now was to a cop and man quite different.

Clarity suffused the darkness of his coma.

In the clarity, he knew he would live.

And he knew that someone was in the room with him, and he knew that this person must be told about the Mercantile Trust Company and the Uhrbinger Construction Company and the blueprint he had seen in the Franklin Street apartment.

And so he said, “Merc-uh-nuh,” and he knew he had not formed the word correctly and he could not understand why because everything seemed so perfectly clear within the shell of his dark cocoon.

And so he tried the other word, and he said, “Ubba-nuh coston,” and he knew that was wrong, and he tried again, “Ubba-nuh…ubba…Uhrbinger…Uhrbinger,” and he was sure he had said it that time, and he leaned back into the brilliant clarity and lost consciousness once more.

The person in the room with him was Teddy Carella, his wife.

But Teddy was a deaf mute, and she watched her husband’s lips carefully, and she saw the word “Uhrbinger” form on those lips, but it was not a word in her vocabulary, and so she reasoned that her husband was delirious.

She took his hand and held it in her own, and then she kissed it and put it to her cheek.

The hospital lights went out suddenly.

The bombs Pop had set at Eastern Electric were beginning to go off.

RAFE, LIKE ANYgood surgeon, had checked his earlier results before making his final incision. He had run a Tong Tester over the wires in the box once more, checking the wires which carried the current, nodding as they tallied with the calculations he had made the first time he looked into the box.

“Okay,” he said, apparently to the deaf man who was standing below him, but really to no one in particular, really a thinking out loud. “Those are the ones carrying the juice, all right. I cross-contact those and cut the others, and it’s clear sailing.”

“All right, then do it,” the deaf man said impatiently.

Rafe set about doing it.

He accomplished the cross-contact with speed and efficiency. Then he thrust his hand at the deaf man. “The clippers,” he said.

The deaf man handed them up to him. “What are you going to do?”

“Cut the other wires.”

“Are you sure you’ve done this right?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t think!” the deaf man said sharply. “Yes or no? Is that damn alarm going to go off when you cut those wires?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes or no?”

“No,” Rafe said. “It won’t go off.”

“All right,” the deaf man said. “Cut them.”

Rafe took a deep breath and moved the clippers toward the wires. With a quick, deliberate contraction of his hand, he squeezed the handles of the clippers together and cut the wires.

The alarm did not go off.

AT THE HOUSEin Majesta, Chuck paced the floor nervously while Pop studied the alarm clock sitting on the dresser.

“What time is it?” Chuck asked.

“Five-thirty.”

“They should be out of the bank and on their way by now.”

“Unless something went wrong,” Pop said.

“Yeah,” Chuck answered distractedly, and he began pacing the floor again. “Put on that radio, will you?” he said.

Pop turned it on.

“…raging out of control along a half-mile square of waterfront,” the announcer said. “Every available piece of fire equipment in the city has been rushed to the disaster area in an effort to control the flames before they spread further. The rain is not helping conditions. Slippery streets seem to be working against the men and apparatus. The firemen and police are operating only from the lights of their trucks, an explosion at the Eastern Electric Company having effectively blinded seventy per cent of the area’s streets, homes and businesses. Fortunately, there is still electric power in Union Station where an explosion on track twelve derailed the incoming Chicago train as a bomb went off simultaneously in the waiting room. The fire in the baggage room there was brought under control, but is still smoldering.”

The announcer paused for breath.