The Wapshot Chronicle - John Cheever [138]
When Badger boarded the train he had no idea of how he would dispose of the jewelry. He may have thought of prying some of the stones out of their settings and selling them. The train was a local—the last—taking back to the city people who had been visiting friends and relations. They all seemed tired; some of them were drunk; and, sweating and sleeping fitfully in the overheated coach, they seemed, to Badger, to share a great commonality of intimacy and weariness. Most of the men had taken off their hats but their hair was matted with the pressure of hat brims. The women wore their finery but they wore it awry and their curls had begun to come undone. Many of them slept with their heads on the shoulders of their men, and the smells—and the looseness of most of the faces he saw—made Badger feel as if the coach was some enormous bed or cradle in which they all lay together in a state of unusual innocence. They shared the discomforts of the coach, they shared a destination and for all their shabbiness and fatigue they seemed to Badger to share some beauty of mind and purpose, and looking at the dyed red head of the woman in front of him he attributed to her the ability to find, a shade below the level of consciousness, an imagery of beauty and grandeur like those great, ruined palladia that rose in Badgers head.
He loved them all—Badger loved them all—and what he had done he had done for them, for they failed only in their inability to help one another and by stealing Justina’s jewelry he had done something to diminish this failure. The red-headed woman in the seat in front moved him with love, with amorousness and with pity, and she touched her curls so often and with such simple vanity that he guessed her hair had just been dyed and this in turn touched him as Badger would have been touched to see a sweet child picking the petals off a daisy. Suddenly the red-headed woman straightened up and asked in a thick voice, “Wassa time, wassa time?” The people in front of her to whom the question was addressed did not stir and Badger leaned forward and said that it was a little before midnight. “Thank you, thank you,” she said with great warmth. “You’re a genemun after my own heart.” She gestured toward the others. “Won’t even tell me what time is because they think I’m drunk. Had a liddle accident.” She pointed to some broken glass and a puddle on the floor where she seemed to have dropped a pint bottle. “Jess because I had a liddle accident and spilled my good whisky none of these sonofbitches will tell me time. You’re a genemun, you’re a genemun and if I didn’t have a little accident and spill my whisky give you a drink.” Then the motion of Badger’s cradle overtook her and she fell asleep.
Mrs. Enderby had given the alarm twenty minutes after the theft and two plain-clothes men and an agent from the insurance company were waiting for Badger when he got off the train in Grand Central. Wearing tails, and carrying a paper bag that seemed to be full of hardware, he was not hard to spot. They followed him, thinking that he might lead them to a ring. He walked jubilantly up Park Avenue to Saint Bartholomew’s and tried the doors, which were locked. Then he crossed Park Avenue, crossed Madison and walked up Fifth to Saint Patrick’s, where the doors were still open and where many charwomen were mopping the floors. He went way forward to the central altar, knelt and said his Lamb of God. Then—the rail was down and he was too enthralled to think of being conspicuous—he walked across the deep chancel and emptied his paper bag on the altar. The plain-clothes men picked him up as he left the cathedral.
It was not one o’clock when the police department called Clear Haven to tell Justina that they had her jewelry. She checked the police list against a typewritten list that had been pasted to the top of her jewel box. “One diamond bracelet, two diamond and onyx bracelets, one diamond and emerald bracelet,” etc. She tried the policeman’s patience when she asked him to count the pearls