Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"They're downstairs. They think I'm CIA. I'm not sure I trust them. I guess that other noise is phony too."

"What other noise? The carousel?"

"What carousel? I mean the roller-coaster."

"What roller-coaster? Larry, that train is not a roller-coaster. Are we waiting for Tommy?"

"He says it's none of his business, because it's not on his chart. He's resting again."

Yossarian found McMahon where he expected to find him, in bed in the cell in back, the television on. Captain Thomas McMahon had more or less moved all his office work and his telephone into the cell with the bed and now spent much of each working day resting. He came in on days off too. His wife had died of emphysema that year, and living alone, he would relate while smoking cigarettes, with a glass ashtray on the arm of the rocker he had found, was not much fun. He had found the rocker in a thrift shop that raised money for cancer relief. His eyes had grown sizable in his narrow face, and the bones seemed gaunt and crude, for he had been losing weight. A year or so earlier, he had lost his breath chasing a youth who had murdered someone in another part of the terminal, and he had not yet got it all back. McMahon now disliked his work but would not retire, for keeping this occupation he loathed, now that he was a widower, was all the fun he had.

"There are more of them now than there are of us," McMahon would reiterate moodily about his criminals. "And that's something you educated wise guys never thought of with that Constitution of yours. What's out there now?" he asked wearily, folding away a tabloid newspaper. He enjoyed following grotesque new crimes. He was bored working on them.

"A drunk on the floor, three druggies in chairs. Two brown, one white."

"I guess I'll have to go look." McMahon uncoiled himself and rose, panting in the effort from what could have been lassitude. He seemed now to Yossarian another good candidate for late-life depression. "You know, we don't arrest every crook we can catch," he repeated, in a repetitious lament. "We don't have the men to process them, we don't have the cells to put them in, we don't have the courts to find them guilty, and we don't have the prisons to keep them in. And that's something a lot of you people complaining all the time about cops and courts don't want to understand, not even that man from Time magazine who had his pocket picked and raised such a racket." McMahon paused for a chuckle. "We had to lock him up, while those thieves who'd robbed him looked on at all of us with smiles."

McMahon smiled too and told about the retired advertising executive from Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine who'd been left without a penny because he had given his change to some panhandlers and had then had his wallet stolen. He had his Social Security number but could not prove it was his. He went out of control when the policemen made no move to arrest any in the slick band of pickpockets. The wallet was already miles away; there would be no evidence. "We're stuck with this lousy legal system of yours that says a person is innocent until we can prove him guilty," said McMahon. "Since when, is what we would like to know! That's what drove him crazy, I think. There were the crooks. Here were the cops. And here was the cold fact that he couldn't do a thing about it. And he had no identification. He couldn't even prove he was him. That's when he panicked and made such a fuss we had to chain him in a wall cuff before he showed some sense and shut up. He saw what we had waiting for him in the cells, where he wouldn't have a chance of competing. Neither would we, or you. Then he could not establish his identity. That's always fun to watch. That always terrifies them. Nobody we telephoned was home. He couldn't even prove his own name. Finally"--McMahon was chuckling now--"he had to give us the name of this friend up in Orange Valley somewhere who turned out to be a big war hero in World War II. A big shot now in the army reserves. A big man in the construction industry too, he told us, and a big contributor to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. He had a name like Berkowitz or Rabinowitz, and he talked strong on the telephone, the way you did the first time you called, Yossarian, except this guy was telling the truth and wasn't sort of full of shit, the way you were. Then this guy Singer had no money to get home. So Larry here gave him a twenty-dollar bill for a taxi, remember? And guess what. The guy paid him back. Right, Larry?"

"He mailed it. Tommy, I think you ought to come."

"I don't want to find out any more about anything. And I don't like those guys. I think they're CIA."

"They think you're CIA."

"I'm going back to your delivery room." McMahon was running out of energy again. "To rest awhile until one of your pregnant kids shows up and gives us one of your babies she wants to throw away. We haven't got any so far."

"You won't let me announce it. We hear about plenty."

"They'd lock us both up. Now, Larry, do this for me--find something down there to cancel that crazy wedding he's scheduled. I'm too old for that kind of stuff."

"They already have something they can't figure out," McBride reported to Yossarian. "An elevator that's down there and won't move, and we can't find out where it comes from."

From the front of the station house there came abruptly the explosive noise of a brawl.

"Oh, shit," groaned McMahon. "How I've grown to hate them all. Even my cops. Your pregnant mothers too."

Two burly young men who were cronies had broken each other's noses and split each other's mouths in an altercation over money robbed from a drug-addicted young black prostitute, a close friend of theirs, with white skin, yellow hair, and AIDS, syphilis, tuberculosis, and new strains of gonorrhea.

"There's another weird thing about these federal intelligence guys," McBride confided, when the two were out of the station. "They don't see anything funny about those signs. It's like they've seen them before."

They cut across the main concourse below the Operations Control Center, and Yossarian remembered he was now on view on one of the five dozen video monitors there, traveling with McBride through the encasing structure. Perhaps Michael was up there again, watching with M2. If he picked his nose someone would see. On another screen, he supposed, might be the redheaded man in the seersucker suit, drinking an Orange Julius, and maybe the scruffy man in the sullied raincoat and blue beret, observed upstairs while observing him.

"They don't seem surprised by anything," grumbled McBride. "All they want to talk about when we plan the wedding is to get themselves invited, their wives too."

The stairwell was practically empty, the floor almost tidy. But the odors were strong, the air fetid with the rancid, mammalian vapors of unwashed bodies and their fecund wastes.

McBride went ahead and tiptoed carefully around the one-legged woman being raped again not far from the large, brown-skinned woman with thickened moles that looked like melanomas, who had taken off her bloomers and her skirt again and was swabbing her backside and armpits with a few damp towels, and Yossarian knew again he had not one thing to talk to her about, except, perhaps, to know if she had ridden to Kenosha on the same plane with him, which was out of the question and entirely possible.

On the last flight of steps sat the skinny blonde woman with a tattered red sweater, still dreamily engaged in sewing

a rip in a dirty white blouse. At the bottom, there was already a fresh human shit on the floor in the corner. McBride said nothing about it. They turned underneath the staircase and proceeded to the battered metal closet with the false back and hidden door. In single file they came again into the tiny vestibule, facing the fire door of military green with the warning that read: EMERGENCY ENTRANCE

KEEP OUT

VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT

"They don't see anything funny in that," sulked McBride. Yossarian opened the massive door with just his fingertip and was once more on the tiny landing near the roof of the tunnel, at the top of the staircase that fell steeply. The thoroughfare below was empty again.