Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [95]
Whitman now had the good sense to ask for ideas from the police officers in the room. An old sergeant with many years on the street, a veteran of Hell’s Kitchen and the Tenderloin, said The crucial thing, sir, is to get this Coalhouse Walker engaged in conversation. With an armed maniac, talking calms him down. You get him talking and keep him talking and then you have a wedge into the situation. Whitman, who was not without courage, took a megaphone and stepped into the street and shouted to Coalhouse that he wanted to speak with him. He waved his straw hat. If there’s a problem, he cried, we can solve it together. He repeated such sentiments for several minutes. Then for a moment the small window adjacent to the front entrance opened. A cylindrical object came flying into the street. Whitman flinched and the men in the house behind him dropped to the floor. To everyone’s astonishment there was no explosion. Whitman retreated to the brownstone and only after several minutes did someone using binoculars make the object out as a silver tankard with a lid. An officer ran into the street, picked up the tankard and sprinted back up the brownstone stairs. The object, now dented, was a medieval drinking stein of silver with a hunting scene in relief. The curator asked to see it and advised that it was from the seventeenth century and had belonged to Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. I’m really pleased to hear that, Whitman said. The curator then raised the lid and found inside a piece of paper with a telephone number that he recognized as his own.
The District Attorney himself took the telephone. He sat on the edge of a table and held the speaker in his left hand and the receiver attached by a cord in his right. Hello, Mr. Walker, he said heartily, this is District Attorney Whitman. He was stunned by the calm businesslike tone of the black man. My demands are the same, said the voice on the phone. I want my car returned in just the condition it was when my way was blocked. You cannot bring back my Sarah, but I want for her life the life of Fire Chief Conklin. Coalhouse, Whitman said, you know that I as an officer of the court could never give over to you for sentencing outside the law a man who has not had due process. That puts me in an untenable position. What I can promise is to investigate the case and see what statutes apply, if any. But I can’t do anything for you until you’re out of there. Coalhouse Walker seemed not to have heard. I will give you twenty-four hours, he said, and then I will blow up this place and everything in it. And he rang off. Hello, Whitman said. Hello? He ordered the operator to get the number again. There was no answer.
Whitman next sent off a telegram to Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish in Newport. He hoped she read the newspapers. His eyes, which tended to bulge when he was exercised, were now quite prominent. His face was florid. He removed his jacket and unbuttoned his vest. He asked one of the patrolmen to find him some whiskey. He knew that Red Emma Goldman, the anarchist, was in New York. He ordered her arrested. He stared out the window of the brownstone. The day was overcast and unnaturally dark. The air was close and a fine rain made the streets glisten. The lights of the city were on. The compact white Grecian palace across the street shone in the rain. It looked very peaceful. At this moment Whitman came to the realization that the deference shown by Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo and everyone else in the Police Department had tricked him into identifying himself with a politically dangerous situation. He had on one hand to guard the interests of Morgan, whose various Simon Pure reform committees of wealthy Republican Protestants had funded his investigations of corruption in the Democratic Catholic Police Department. He had on the other hand to preserve his own reputation as a tough D.A. who dealt handily with the criminal classes. For that nothing would do but the speediest unhorsing of the colored man. A glass of whiskey was brought to him. Just