The Traffic brass, testing the wind, put in a call for more mounted police and radio-patrol cars.
A noose dropped quietly around the entire area at 8 P.M. Between 51st and 57th Streets south to north, and between Seventh and Ninth Avenues east to west, solid lines of police appeared to screen off each intersection. Automobile traffic was detoured. Pedestrians were permitted to penetrate the police lines entering the area, but none were allowed to leave before identifying themselves and answering certain questions.
Throughout the district hundreds of plainclothesmen circulated.
Inside the Hall there were hundreds of others. Among them was one Ellery Queen. On the platform sat the central committee of the combined Citizens’ Action Teams of New York. They were a polyglot group in which no single face stood out; they might have been a jury in a courtroom, and they all wore the intent but self-conscious expressions of jurymen. The Mayor and his official party occupied the seats of honor — “which means,” as the Mayor remarked behind his hand to Dr. Edward Cazalis, “where they can keep an eye on us.” The speaker’s rostrum was flanked with massed American flags. Radio and public address microphones clustered before it. The television people were set up and waiting.
The meeting was opened at 9 P.M. by Jerome K. Frankburner, acting chairman of the evening. Frankburner wore a GI uniform. On the breast of his tunic glittered several decorations, and his sleeve carried an impressive weight of overseas stripes. Above the military figure hung a grim face. He spoke without notes, quietly.
“This is the voice of a New Yorker,” Frankburner began. “It doesn’t matter what my name is or where I live. I’m speaking for hundreds of New York neighborhood groups who have organized to protect our families and our neighbors’ families from a citywide menace. Lots of us fought in the last war and we’re all lawabiding Americans. We represent no self-seeking group. We have no axes to grind. You won’t find any chiselers, racketeers, or Commies among us. We’re Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Liberals, Socialists. We’re Protestants, Catholics, Jews. We’re whites and we’re Negroes. We’re business people, white collar people, laboring people, professional people. We’re second-generation Americans and we’re fourth-generation Americans. We’re New York.
“I’m not going to make a speech. We’re not here to listen to me. All I want to do is ask a few questions.
“Mr. Mayor, people are being murdered right and left by some lunatic. It’s almost four months since the Cat got going and he’s still on the prowl. All right, you can’t catch him or you haven’t been able to yet. Meanwhile what protection do we have? I’m not saying anything against our police. They’re a hardworking bunch like the rest of us. But the people of New York ask you: What have our police done about it?”
A sound went through the Hall and met another from outdoors. It was very little, a distant flutter of thunder, but in the Hall and throughout the surrounding streets police nervously fingered their clubs and tightened ranks and on the platform beside the speaker the Mayor and his Police Commissioner were seen to go a little pale.
“To the last man and woman,” said Frankburner, a ring coming into his voice, “we’re against vigilante law. But we’re asking you, Mr. Mayor, what other recourse we have. My wife or my mother might be feeling that silk cord around her throat tonight, and the police wouldn’t be in on it till it was all over but the funeral arrangements.
“Mr. Mayor, we’ve invited you here tonight to tell is what plans you and the law-enforcement authority have for giving us the protection we feel we haven’t got.
“Ladies and gentlemen. His Honor, the Mayor of New York.”
The Mayor spoke for a long time. He spoke in a sober, neighborly way, exercising his considerable charm and knowledge of the City’s people. He traced the history of the New York Police Department, its growth, its gigantic organization, its complexity. He cited the record of its eighteen thousand men and women in guarding law and maintaining order. He gave some reassuring statistics on homicide arrests and convictions. He went into the legal and social aspects of vigilantism and its threats to democratic institutions, its tendency to degenerate from original high purposes to mob rule and the satisfaction of the worst passions of the lowest elements. He pointed to the dangers — violence begetting violence, leading to military intervention, to martial law, and to the suppression of civil liberties, “the first step on the road to fascism and totalitarianism.”
“And all this,” the Mayor said goodhumoredly, “because temporarily we have failed to locate a single homicidal maniac in the haystack of a city of over seven and one-half millions of people.”
But the Mayor’s speech, for all its ease and sanity and persuasiveness, was not eliciting those little signs and responses by which veteran public speakers gauge the success or failure of their exertions. This audience gave no signs and responses whatever. It simply sat, or stood, listening. A multibreathing, unstirred entity waiting for something... a loosening word.
The Mayor knew it; his voice took on an edge.
His party knew it; they whispered to one another on the platform with exaggerated ease, conscious of the eyes, the television cameras.
Rather abruptly, the Mayor asked the Police Commissioner to give an accounting of the specific measures already taken and “being planned” for the apprehension of the Cat.
As the Commissioner approached the rostrum, Ellery rose in the audience and began to walk down the central aisle toward the press section, scanning the ranks of human heads.
He spotted Jimmy McKell shortly after the Commissioner began to speak.
McKell was twisted about in his seat, glaring at a girl three rows behind him. The girl, pink, was looking at the Commissioner.
Celeste Phillips.
Ellery could not have said what thought, feeling, intuition kept him in the vicinity. Perhaps it was merely the sight of familiar faces.
He dropped to his heels in the aisle at the end of Celeste’s row.
He was uneasy. There was something in the air of Metropol Hall that affected him unpleasantly. He saw that others were in the grip of the same disquiet. A sort of mass auto-intoxication. The crowd breathing its own poisons.
And then he knew what it was.
Fear.
The crowd breathing its own fear. It came out of people in invisible droplets, loaded down the air.
What had seemed patience, passivity, expectancy... nothing but fear.
They were not listening to the voice of the man on the platform.
They were listening to the inner voice of fear.
“THE CAT!”
It came as the Commissioner turned a page of his notes in the silence.
He looked up very quickly.
The Mayor, Dr. Cazalis, half-rose.
Twenty thousand heads turned.
It had been a woman’s scream, pitched to a rare level and held there. It raised the flesh.
A group of men were pushing their way with flailing arms through the standees at the rear of the Hall.
The Commissioner began to say: “Get that woman qui—”
“THE CAT!”
A little eddy of noise began to spin; another; another. A man rose from his seat, a woman, a couple, a group. Craning.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please be seated. Just a hyster—”
“THE CAT!”
“Please!” The Mayor, on the rostrum beside the Commissioner. “Please! Please!”