And what about Julie? Ferguson asked. Can I see her on Friday?
Julie ain’t here, Mrs. M. said.
Where is she?
Don’t know. Word is she’s on smack, honey. I doubt we’ll be seeing her again.
That’s terrible.
Yeah, it’s terrible, but what can we do about it? There’s another black girl here now. Much prettier than Julie. More flesh on her bones, more personality. Cynthia, that’s her name. Want me to pencil you in?
Black girl — what’s that got to do with it?
I thought you went for black girls.
I go for all girls. I just happened to like Julie.
Well, if you go for all girls, there’s no problem, is there? The stable’s full these days.
Let me think about it, Ferguson said. I’ll call you back.
He hung up the phone, and for the next thirty or forty seconds he repeated the word terrible to himself thirty or forty times, struggling not to imagine Julie’s limp body as she nodded out somewhere in a drugged-up haze, hoping Mrs. M.’s information was wrong and that Julie wasn’t working there anymore because she had graduated from City College with honors in philosophy and was studying for her doctorate at Harvard, and then his eyes teared up for a moment as an image formed in his mind: Julie lying dead on a bare mattress, naked and stiff in a dingy room at the Auberge Saint Hell.
A week later, he was ready to give it a shot with Cynthia or anyone else at Mrs. M.’s establishment who had two arms, two legs, and something that resembled a woman’s body. Unfortunately, he had spent the last of his birthday money on a record-buying spree at Sam Goody’s and had to resort to less than savory means of acquiring the money, so on a warm Friday afternoon in early October, one day before his rescheduled appointment to take the SATs, he donned his thief’s gear of woolen overcoat and multipocketed winter jacket and entered a bookstore across from the Columbia campus called Book World, which sounded so much like the burned-down business that had once been Home World that at first he hesitated to go in, but in he went despite his qualms, and as he stood by the paperback fiction section along the southern wall of the store, slipping novels by Dickens and Dostoyevsky into his pockets, he felt a hand come crashing down on his shoulder from behind, and then a voice was roaring in his ear, I’ve got you, fucker — don’t move!, and just like that Ferguson’s book-stealing operation came to a sorry, idiotic end, for what person in his right mind would wear a woolen overcoat on a day when the temperature was sixty-two degrees outside?
They slammed down hard on him and gave him the works. The book-stealing epidemic that had spread across the city was driving many booksellers to the verge of ruin, and the law needed to make an example of someone, and since the owner of Book World was fed up and enraged by what had been happening to his business, he called the cops and told them he wanted to press charges. Never mind that there were only two slender books in Ferguson’s pockets—Oliver Twist and Notes from Underground—the boy was a thief and had to be punished. The stunned and mortified Ferguson was therefore handcuffed, arrested, and driven in a squad car to the local precinct house, where he was booked, fingerprinted, and photographed from three angles as he held up a little board with his name on it. Then they put him in a holding cell with a pimp, a drug dealer, and a man who had stabbed his wife, and for the next three hours Ferguson sat there waiting for one of the cops to come back and fetch him so he could be arraigned before a judge. That judge, Samuel J. Wasserman, had the authority to dismiss the charges and send Ferguson home, but he didn’t do that because he too felt that someone needed to be made an example of, and what better candidate than Ferguson, a snot-nosed rich boy from a so-called progressive private school who had broken the law for no reason other than the pure sport of it? The gavel came down. The trial was scheduled for the second week in November, and Ferguson was released without bail — on condition that he remain in the custody of his parents.
His parents. They had been called, and they were both standing in the courtroom when Wasserman set the date for the trial. His mother cried, emitting no sounds as she slowly shook her head back and forth, as if not yet able to absorb what he had done. Gil didn’t cry, but he too was shaking his head back and forth, and from the expression in his eyes, Ferguson gathered that he wanted to smack him.
Books, Gil said, as the three of them stood at the curb waiting for a taxi, what in the world were you thinking? I give you books, don’t I? I give you all the books you could possibly want. Why the hell did you have to steal them?
Ferguson couldn’t tell him about Mrs. M. and the apartment on West Eighty-second Street, couldn’t tell him about the money he was hoping to raise because he wanted to fuck a whore, couldn’t tell him about the seven times he had fucked a vanished junkie whore named Julie or about the other books he had stolen in the past, so he lied and said: It’s about this thing that’s going on with some of my friends — stealing books as a test of courage. It’s a kind of competition.
Some friends, Gil said. Some competition.
They all climbed into the backseat of the cab, and suddenly Ferguson felt everything go limp inside him, as if there were no bones left under his skin. He leaned his head against his mother’s shoulder and started to cry.
I need you to love me, Ma, he said. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t love me.
I love you, Archie, his mother said. I’ll always love you. I just don’t understand you anymore.
IN ALL THE confusion, he had forgotten about the SATs he was supposed to take in the morning — and so had his mother and Gil. Not that it mattered much, he said to himself as the days wore on, for the truth was that the idea of college had lost its attraction to him, and given how much he had always disliked school, the prospect of not going to school beyond this year was something to be taken into careful consideration.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, when word got out about Ferguson’s run-in with the authorities, the Riverside Academy took it upon itself to suspend him for a month, an action permitted under the by-laws of the code governing student conduct. He would have to keep up with his homework during that time or else risk being expelled when he returned, the headmaster said, and he would also have to find a job. What job? Ferguson asked. Bagging groceries at the Gristedes on Columbus Avenue, the headmaster said. Why there? Ferguson asked. Because one of our parents owns it, the headmaster said, and he’s willing to let you work there during your suspension. Will they pay me? Ferguson asked. Yes, they’ll pay you, the headmaster said, but you can’t keep the money. It all has to go to charity. We were thinking the American Booksellers Association might be a worthy recipient. How does that strike you?
I’m all for it, Mr. Briggs. I think it’s an excellent idea.
THE PRESIDING JUDGE at the November trial, Rufus P. Nolan, found Ferguson guilty as charged and sentenced him to six months in a juvenile detention facility. The harshness of the verdict hung in the air for three or four seconds (seconds as long as hours, as years) and then the judge added: Sentence suspended.
Ferguson’s legal representative, a young criminal lawyer named Desmond Katz, asked that the stain of the verdict be expunged from his client’s record, but Nolan refused. He had shown remarkable leniency in suspending the sentence, he said, and the good counselor should refrain from pushing his luck. The crime revolted him. As a son of privilege, Ferguson seemed to think he was above the law and that stealing books was nothing more than a lark, whereas his wanton disrespect of private property and cruel indifference to the rights of others showed a callousness of spirit that needed to be dealt with harshly in order to ensure that his criminal tendencies would be nipped in the bud. As a first offender, he deserved another chance. But he also deserved to have this mark on his record — to make him think twice before he ever considered pulling another stunt like this one again.