Read Online Under Radar by Michael Tolkin - Free Book Online Page A

“Why, Tom, why?”
    This delighted the crowd. A voice from the hill added in mockery, “Why, Tom, why?”
    The people around him also wanted to know. “Why did you push that man, sir?”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Tom said again. It was too complicated. He might have said, “He made my daughter dance. He asked my daughter to dance, and who knows when the degradation of what happened to her will work its way into action? Should I wait thirty years, and if she turns into a junkie, should I track him down and kill him then? You don’t know that she wasn’t ruined by what happened last night.” But he couldn’t say this. It wasn’t the knight in armor on the horse. It was neoprene boots with felt soles. It was the video camera with the thing on the side where you look at the picture. The thing, the little screen, and bad sound. The viewing-screen thing. That’s what it was.
    The crowd’s sound lost its definition. The men guarding Tom opened a breach in their wall around him to let the police through. The men closest to Tom took his hands and pulled on his arms, as though a white man in a bathing suit could be dangerous.
    But I am dangerous, thought Tom. I just killed a man. This thought impressed itself heavily with the advent of the police, dropping Tom to his knees, and the men around him yanked him to his feet. He dropped again, hurting his knees on the rocks in the cold water.
    I’m scared, thought Tom. I am now frightened to death. I have never been so scared of anything in my life. And I am making a fool of myself in front of the policemen. In America, the police would have asked the men holding Tom to let him go. They would have threatened the volunteer guards with nightsticks, but this was not America, Tom knew that, this was a place where a crowd could hold a man and hurt him, pull his arms hard when he falls to his knees, and the police would allow it. Klaxons sounded. Tom liked the two-note call, it reminded him of movies with the French resistance and the alarm made when the gestapo arrives. In movies, the message of the Klaxon is death. In Jamaica, this Klaxon brought an ambulance and a gurney, and the men who rolled Barry Seckler’s enormous body onto a stretcher. They couldn’t expect the stretcher to hold his weight, but it helped. Four men to each side, floating him into deeper water, where they could slip the litter beneath him. Tom would have liked to watch the rest of the effort, but he was taken away to the riverbank.
    â€œWhat is your name?” a policeman asked him.
    â€œTom Levy.”
    â€œAnd where are you from?”
    â€œAmerica.”
    â€œAnd where are you staying in Jamaica?”
    â€œThe Montego House.”
    â€œThese people say that you pushed that man over the falls. I saw the videotape. It looks as though you did. Can you tell me what happened?”
    â€œI’d like to speak to a lawyer.”
    â€œLast night at the Montego House, you had a bad word with this man. Why? What happened last night, Mr. Levy?”
    â€œHe made advances at my daughter.”
    â€œCould you explain what you mean?”
    â€œHe made my daughter dance.”
    â€œDid he touch your daughter?”
    â€œHe made her dance like a whore.”
    ...
    Rosalie stood alone in the water with Perri and Alma. No one was helping them. Somewhere, someone gave relief to Debra Seckler and her two children, but no one there even knew that the killer’s wife watched the arrest of her husband.
    The police pulled Tom to the hillside, where the crowd had flattened the bushes and grasses. His feet slipped, and he fell on his face. He was covered in mud, he was filthy, and the police were filthy, too, and mad about it. Tom saw Rosalie. “Rosalie, Rosalie, I’m sorry.”
    She kept moving with the girls and would not look back, she would not let him turn her into a pillar of salt. Little Alma looked back, and so did Perri. He