People were running along the side aisles.
At the rear, a fight was going on.
“THE CAT!”
Somewhere upstairs a man’s voice bellowed. It was choked off, as if he were being throttled.
“Take your seats! Officers!”
Bluecoats materialized all over the auditorium.
The disturbance at the rear was now a yeasty corruption, eating into the main aisle, nibbling at the seats.
“THE CAT!”
A dozen women began to scream.
“HE’S HERE!”
Like a stone, it smashed against the great mirror of the audience and the audience shivered and broke. Little cracks widened magically. Where masses had sat or stood, gaps appeared, grew rapidly, splintered in crazy directions. Men began climbing seats, using their fists. People went down. The police vanished. Trickles of shrieks ran together. Metropol Hall became a great cataract obliterating human sound.
On the platform the Mayor, Frankburner, the Commissioner, were shouting into the public address microphones, jostling one another. Their voices mingled; a faint blend, lost in the uproar.
The aisles were logjammed, people punching, twisting, falling toward the exists.
Overhead a balcony rail snapped; a man fell into the orchestra. People were carried down the balcony staircases. Some slipped, disappeared. At the upstairs fire exits hordes struggled over a living, shrieking carpet.
Suddenly the whole contained mass found vents and shot out into the streets, into-the frozen thousands, in a moment boiling them to frenzy, turning the area about Metropol Hall into a giant frying pan. Its ingredients sizzled over the police lines, melting men, horses, machines, overflowing the intersections and pouring uptown and down, toward Broadway and toward Ninth Avenue — a smoking liquid that burned everything in its path.
Ellery remembered shouting Jimmy McKell’s name as the stampede began, remembered pointing to a petrified Celeste Phillips, trying himself to buck the wall of flesh which pushed him back. He managed to struggle on to a seat, keep his footing there. He saw Jimmy fight his way slowly over three rows, reach the terrified girl, seize her waist. Then they were sucked into the mass and Ellery lost them.
He devoted himself thereafter to keeping off the floor.
A long time afterward he found his father helping the Mayor and the Commissioner direct rescue operations. They had no time for more than a few words. Both were hatless, bleeding, in tatters; all that was left of the Inspector’s jacket was the right sleeve. No, he had not seen McKell or the Phillips girl. Or Dr. Cazalis. His eye kept stealing toward the neat and lengthening line of the dead. Then the Inspector was called away and Ellery plodded back into Metropol Hall to help with the casualties. He was one of an impromptu army: police, firemen, ambulance doctors, Red Cross workers, volunteers from the streets. Sirens kept up their outcry, silencing the moans of the injured.
Other horrors took shape as reports kept pouring in. The mob in fleeing had accidentally broken some shop windows in the side streets between Eighth Avenue and Broadway. Looting had begun, led by hoodlums, loiterers, kid gangs. Bystanders who had tried to interfere had been beaten; shopkeepers had been assaulted and in some instances knifed. For a long time the looting had threatened to get out of hand; there was a furious hour as theaters emptying into Broadway had fed the chaos. Hotels had locked their doors. But the police drove patrol cars into the mobs, mounted patrolmen charged concentrations of rioters, and gradually they were dispersed. Hundreds of stores had sustained broken windows and rifled stocks as far south as 42nd Street. Polyclinic Hospital was bedding the injured in corridors; Red Cross emergency first-aid stations had been set up throughout the Times Square area. Ambulances were speeding into the district from as far north as Fordham Hospital. Lindy’s, Toots Shor’s, Jack Dempsey’s, other restaurants in the vicinity were sending coffee and sandwiches to the relief workers.
At 4:45 A.M. one Evarts Jones, an attorney, handed the following statement to the press:
I am authorized by Jerome K. Frankburner, chairman of tonight’s disastrous meeting, and by the central committee of the so-called CATs of Greater New York City, to announce that all units will be immediately disbanded and organized patrol activities will cease.
Mr. Frankburner and the committee speak for all citizens who joined in this well-meant but ill-advised popular movement when they express their great sorrow and profound regret over what occurred in Metropol Hall last night.
Pressed by reporters for a personal statement, Frankburner shook his head. “I’m too punchy to say anything. What can anybody say? We were dead wrong. The Mayor was dead right.”
At dawn the Cat Riots were quelled and the Four Days were a bloody paragraph in the unwritten almanacs.
Later, the Mayor in silence distributed the statistics of the night’s disorders to the press.
The Dead
Women 19
Men 14
Children 6
TOTAL 39
Seriously Injured
Women 68
Men 34
Children 13
TOTAL 115
Minor Injuries, Fractures, Abrasions, etc.
Women 189
Men 152
Children 10
TOTAL 351
Arrested on Charges of Looting, Unlawful Assemblage, Inciting to Violence, etc.
127 persons (including minors)
Property Damage (estimated)
$4,500,000
The woman whose screams touched off the panic and the rioting that followed, said the Mayor, was trampled to death. Her name was Mrs. Maybelle Legontz, 48, a widow, childless. Her body was identified at 2:38 A.M. by a brother, Stephen Chorumkowski, steamfitter, of 421 West 65th Street. Persons in the audience in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Legontz had testified that to the best of their recollection she had not been attacked or molested by anyone; but the standees had been packed together and an accidental nudge by some bystander may have exploded her nervous fears.
Mrs. Legontz had a medical history of neurasthenia, a condition which first appeared following the death of her husband, a sand-hog, of the “bends.”
There was no possibility that she had been the Cat.
It had been, the Mayor agreed with the reporters, one of the worst outbreaks in New York’s history, perhaps the worst since the draft riots of 1863.
Ellery found himself in the milky darkness seated on one of the benches of Rockefeller Plaza. There was no one else in the Plaza but Prometheus. Ellery’s head was dancy and the chill of the New York morning against the torn places on his hands and face was deliriously personal, keeping him in a rare consciousness.
Prometheus spoke from his watery niche in the sunken court and Ellery took a certain comfort in his company.
“You’re wondering how it all came about,” began the golden giant, “that this beast in human form you call the Cat has been able, through the mere bawling of his name, to drive thousands of men out of their heads and send them like frightened animals to an animal death.
“I’m so old I don’t recall where I originally came from, except that it’s supposed to have been without women — which I find very unconvincing — but I seem to remember that I found it necessary to bring to men the gift of fire. If I really did that, I’m the founder of civilization, so I feel qualified to make certain extended remarks on the late unpleasantness.
“The truth is, what happened last night had nothing to do with the Cat at all.
“The world today reminds me of the very old days, when religions were being born. I mean, modern society resembles primitive society to an amusing degree. There’s the same concentration on democratic government, for example, while certain of your number who claim to be in touch with higher powers push to the top to rule. You make the same virtue out of common names and common bloods, investing both with mystic mumbo jumbo. In sexual affairs, your women are equally overrespected and kept inside a convenient cage of sanctity, while important affairs are arrogated to themselves by your males. You’ve even reverted to food taboos in your worship of diets and vitamins.