you think?” O’Brien said.
“Sounds as if it might be him. Who knows? Maybe we’ll have some luck in the delicatessen.”
They did not have any luck in the delicatessen.
The man behind the counter wore bifocals, had been busy all day waiting on Sunday customers, and wouldn’t have known a trombone case from a case of crabs, good day.
Meyer and O’Brien went out onto the sidewalk.
“Where to?”
Meyer shook his head. “Boy,” he said, “this suddenly seems like a very big neighborhood.”
Ben Darcy lay on his back in the bushes.
Dusk was coming on, staining the sky with purple. In the woods, the insects were beginning their night song. The city looked skyward and greeted the impending night with a sigh; this was Sunday and tomorrow was another workday. And in the city, in the imposing steel and concrete structures of Isola, in the teeming streets of Calm’s Point, in the suburban outlands of Riverhead, the beginning of night seemed to bring with it a touch of peace, a restfulness that bordered on weary resignation. Another day was moving into the coolness of the past. The moon would rise, and stars would pepper the skies, and the city would suddenly be ablaze with light.
Ben Darcy seemed to be a part of the peacefulness of dusk. Lying on his back on the ground beneath the big maple that dominated the surrounding area of bushes, he looked like nothing more than a summer sleeper, a dreamer, a sky-watcher, the classic boy with the strand of straw between his teeth. His arms were outstretched. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be asleep, at peace with himself and with the world.
The top of his skull was bleeding.
Stooping down beside him quickly, Carella saw the cut at once, and his fingers moved to it rapidly, parting the hair, feeling the swelling around the gash. The cut was not a deep one or a long one, nor did it bleed profusely. It sat in the exact center of Darcy’s skull, and the area surrounding it had swelled to the size of a walnut. In the growing darkness, Steve Carella sighed audibly. He was tired, very tired. He did not enjoy chasing specters. I should have been a prizefighter, he thought. A good dirty sport where the combat is clearly stated from go, where the rules are set down by an impartial observer, where the arena is circumscribed from the very beginning, where the opponent is plainly visible and plainly identified as the opponent, the only man to beat, the only enemy.
Why the hell would anyone ever choose police work as his profession, he wondered.
We’re dealing with destruction, he thought, and the destruction is always secret and our job is not so much preventing it as it is discovering it after it has happened. We seek out the destroyers, but this doesn’t make us creators because we are involved in a negative task, and creation is never a negative act. Teddy, sitting out there, with a baby inside her, creating with no effort, creating by nature, is accomplishing more than I’ll accomplish in fifty years of police work. Why would anyone ever want to get involved with a son of a bitch who saws through the tie rods of an automobile or kills the neighbor, Birnbaum, or takes a whack at the skull of Darcy? Why would anyone choose as his profession, as the job to which he devotes most of his waking hours, a task that must necessarily bring him into contact with the destroyers?
Why would anyone deliberately involve himself in the murky, involuted motivational processes of the criminal mind, dirty his hands with the crawling specimens of humanity who parade into that squadroom every day of the week, every week of the year?
Why would anyone want to become a street cleaner?
I will tell you some things, Steve, he thought.
I will tell you first that philosophy is unbecoming to a cop who almost flunked Philosophy I in school.
I will tell you secondly that free choice is something that is very rarely offered to human beings. You became a cop because you became a cop, and you couldn’t tell yourself why without spending hours on a head shrinker’s couch, and even then you might not know. And you remain a cop—why?
Because—discounting the obvious knowledge that a man must feed and clothe his wife and his family, discounting any insecurities about facing the world outside the police department, scrounging for a job when I’m no longer a boy, discounting any of