Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 114
he approached the squad room he heard a radio. “Inmates have
demanded an injunction against physical and administrative
reprisals and a general amnesty,” he heard. Then the radio was cut.
They had either heard him or timed his arrival. Four officers were
sitting around a radio in the squad room. There were two quarts
of whiskey on the desk. The looks they gave him were blank and
hateful. Marshack—he had small eyes and a shaven skull—gave
him two pieces of paper. Farragut went down the hall to his office
and slammed shut the glass-and-chicken-wire door. As soon as his
door was closed he heard the radio again. “Sufficient force is
available to recapture the institution at any time. The question is
whether the lives of twenty-eight innocent men is a weighty
enough ransom to purchase amnesty for nearly two thousand
convicted criminals. In the morning…” Farragut looked up and
saw Marshack’s shadow on the glass door. He slammed open a
desk drawer, ripped out a ditto sheet and put it as noisily as
possible into the machine. He watched the shadow of Marshack
slide down the glass to where he could, crouched, see through the
keyhole. Farragut shook the papers vigorously and read the
messages, written in pencil in a child’s scrawl. “All personnel is to
show top strength in all gatherings. No strength, no gatherings.”
That was the first. The second read: “Louisa Pierce Spingarn, in
memory of her beloved son Peter, has arranged for interested
inmates to be photographed in full color beside a decorated
Christmas tree and to have said photographs…” Marshack opened
the door and stood there, the executioner, the power of endings.
“What is this, Sergeant?” Farragut asked. “What is this thing about
a Christmas tree?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Marshack. “She’s a fucking dogooder,
I guess. They cause all the trouble. Efficiency is all that
matters and when you don’t get efficiency you get shit.”
“I know,” said Farragut, “but what’s this all about a Christmas
tree?”