A shrug.
You understand. It was hot.
And, like love, the heat can generate a different kind of feeling, a feeling which had the slick paper magazines not defiled the word could be described as togetherness, a knowledge that human beings on this day, on this insufferably hot day, are at least sharing one thing in common. The heat becomes a bond as strong as reinforced concrete. Do you hate the color of my skin? That is interesting, but God it is hot, God we are sweating together. Do you lech for my wife? That is unforgivable, but let's go have a beer together to escape this damned heat, and later we can work it out.
Heat, like love, is no good unless you can talk about it. The adulterer seeks a confidante, the lecher boasts of his conquests in the pool hall, the sixteen-year-old cheerleader spends hours on the telephone describing a football player's kiss you have to talk about love.
Lieutenant Peter Byrnes came out of his office wanting to talk about the heat. He was a compact man with graying hair and steel-blue eyes. He liked to believe that he sweated more than men who were less chunky than he. He liked to believe that the heat had been designed in hell especially for him, sent earthward to plague him. He didn't quite understand why he'd been singled out for such torture, but he did know that he suffered more when it was hot than any man had a right to suffer.
The squadroom was silent. Steve Carella, his shirt sleeves rolled up, was sitting at his desk, reading an FBI report on a suspected burglar. Hot sunlight covered the top of his desk like molasses. Bymes walked to the grilled window and stared out at the street. The cars, the people, all seemed to have been captured in transparent plastic, suspended in time and space, unmoving. Byrnes sighed.
"Hot," he said.
"Mmm," Carella answered.
"Where is everybody?"
"Barker's on the prowl, Hernandez is answering a squeal, and Kling..." Carella shrugged. "He's on a plant, isn't he?"
"That drugstore thing?"
"I think so."
"Yeah," Byrnes said, remembering. "The guy who's passing phony cocaine prescriptions." He shook his head. "He won't turn up. Not in this heat."
"Maybe not," Carella said.
"I always choose the wrong time for my vacation," Byrnes said. "Harriet and I spend months figuring it out. I'm the senior officer around here, so I get first choice. So what happens? I always miss the good weather by a month. It's so hot you can't even think, and then it's time for my vacation, and it starts raining, or it rums gray, or we suddenly get a snowstorm from Canada. It never fails. Every year." He paused for a moment. "Well, every year except one. We went to the Vineyard once. We had good weather." He nodded, remembering.
"Vacations are rough anyway," Carella said.
"Yeah? How so?"
"I don't know. It generally takes me two weeks to unwind, and the minute I start relaxing, it's time to come back to work."
"You going away this year?"
"I don't think so. The kids are too small."
"How old are they, anyway?" Byrnes asked.
"They were a year old in June."
"Boy, time flies," Byrnes said, and fell silent. He thought about the passage of time, thought about his own son, thought how much Carella seemed like a son to him, thought how his squadroom seemed like a family business, a candy store or a grocery store, thought how good it was to have Carella working behind the counter with him.
"Well, talking about the heat never helped it any," Byrnes said, and he sighed again.
"Some day, they're going to invent..." Carella started, and the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver. "Eighty-seventh Squad," he said. "Detective Carella."
The voice on the other end said, "I know where Pepe Miranda iss."
They saw Sixto as he came out of the drugstore. His face looked flushed. It seemed as if he were about to cry. He kept blinking his eyes like a person fighting to hold back tears.
"What's the matter?" Zip asked. He studied Sixto impersonally, not as if he were truly concerned, not as if he really wanted to know what the matter was, but asking the disguised question, "How will your present state affect me?"
"Nothin'," Sixto said.
"You look like somebody hit you with a ball bat."
"No."
"What were you doing in the drugstore?"
"Havin" a Coke. I wass thirsty."
"I thought I told you to keep an eye on Alfie's pad."
"I could see his buildin' from where I wass sittin'," Sixto said.
"We gah dee guns," Papa said, grinning.
"Come on," Zip told them both. "Cooch is rounding up some kids. We got to meet him near the luncheonette."
They walked down the avenue together, Zip in the middle flanked by Sixto and Papa. He felt rather good with the boys on either side of him. He walked with his shoulders back and his head erect, setting the pace, knowing they would keep up with him, and feeling very friendly towards the boys as he walked, feeling a bond with them which he could not have described accurately if he'd tried. There was no logic to the bond because he admitted to himself that he didn't even particularly like either Sixto or Papa. One was a mama's boy and the other was a half-wit. And yet he could not deny the emotional satisfaction of walking down the avenue with these two by his side, like a general with his trusted aides. The bod, he knew, would become stronger once they had washed Alfredo Gomez. The word crossed his mind, washed, and he was instantly face to face with the other word, the stronger word. Kill. He did not flinch from it. Kill. He repeated the word in his mind. Kill. We will kill Alfredo Gomez. Kill.
By the time they reached the luncheonette, the word had no more meaning to him than the word "wash". Cooch was there, waiting for them. Two small boys were with him. Parker, the bull, had taken off, but the sailor was still inside the luncheonette, probably waiting for La Gallina to open, waiting for a Spanish girl. The idea pleased Zip at first He felt a fierce pride in the knowledge that the sailor had come uptown to seek the passion only a Spanish girl could give him. And then the pride turned sour, and he thought darkly that the sailor had no right to be here, no right to be emptying himself into Spanish girls, the way sewers empty into the river. He frowned and cast a black scowl at the sailor's back, and then walked quickly to where Cooch stood with the younger boys.
The first of the boys was wearing dungarees and a white, sweat-stained T shirt. His nose was running, and he constantly wiped at it with the back of his hand, the mucus streaked there like a healed burn. He was eight years old.
The other boy was nine. He wore khaki shorts and a short-sleeved blue sports shirt. An Army sergeant's stripes had been sewn to the left sleeve of the shirt. He moved his feet constantly, as if trying to erase chalk from the sidewalk.
"These the kids?" Zip asked Cooch.
"Yeah," Cooch said.
Zip looked at the one with the snotty nose. "What's your name, kid?"
"Chico."
"And yours?" he said to the other boy.
"Estaban," the boy answered, his feet erasing invisible chalk.
"Did Cooch explain the picture to you?"
"Si," Chico said.
"You and Estaban, one on each side of the church steps. You keep the pieces under your shirts until we get on the scene. Then you give them to us and hang around until we blast. We give you back the pieces when it's all over, and you cut out. You got that?"
"Si, yo comprendo," Chico said.
"Si, si," Estaban echoed, his feet moving nervously. He seemed undecided as to whether he should break into a dance or begin stamping the sidewalk in anger. Nervously, his feet continued moving.