Into The Night (18 page)

Something inside her told her that if he wasn't the one she was looking for, he came closer to being it than anyone else she'd come across yet.

"Yeah?" he said clippedly.

"Do you want to contribute to the multiple sclerosis fund?"

"Why don't they get up a fund for me sometime?" he said dourly. "I could use one too."

"Well--" she faltered. "That's not the point. The point is--"

He reached out and opened the grillwork door. "Do you want to come in and tell me about it?"

It was an invitation that even a seventeen-year-old novice would have backed away from in mistrust. It wasn't even put forward artfully or adroitly. It made no promises of immunity, not even false ones meant to be broken. She even saw him glance past her shoulder, as if to see whether there was anyone else around out there.

And yet somehow the very baldness of his technique had the reverse effect of not driving her away, of arousing her interest. This was the very sort of man that might have inspired a wife to want him dead. Maybe something like this had happened to Starr. To others, that is to say, while he was married to Starr and she had to stand by looking on. He had every earmark of the professional rapist.

"You're Mr. Herrick?"

"Mr. Herrick, right."

"We keep lists of the people we call on back at our headquarters, Mr. Herrick. I have you down for my last call of the day," she said pointedly. "So if I don't report back afterward--"

"What makes you think you won't report back afterward?"

"Nothing--so far."

They eyed one another steadily for a moment, each one trying to dominate. Then his eyes lost, and slid edgewise. They came right back again, but hers had had their victory. With that, she stepped past him and turned into the basement hallway. Without looking around she knew that he had put out his hand to reclose the iron gate. "Would you mind leaving that open," she said, "while I'm in here?"

He gave a sniff of laughter. "You won't have to leave in that much of a hurry."

The room was about what she'd expected it to be. A sagging cot against the wall, which he slept on. A couple of wood-backed chairs, of unsure stability. A table with a smoldering cigarette gnawing its way into its rim to join the dozens of other indented burns that ringed it around. A gas ring hooked to ajet and parked on a shelf. A number of copper beer cans in two positions, upright and prone. Meaning full and empty. A calendar on the wall, but it was the wrong year and the last leaf had never been torn off: December 1960. Yesterday's newspaper and the day before yesterday's newspaper, neither of them yet thrown out. Last month's magazine (-For Men Only-), ditto. On the wall opposite the calendar, a photograph of a soldier in a flowerpot helmet, with a girl leaning her head against his shoulder.

Not much else.

Lives, she realized, are lived in such rooms. Some lives.

There was one other thing, though, of undetermined connotation, which caught her eye. There was a standpipe over in one corner, running through from floor to ceiling. Alongside it was a small steam radiator with a flat piece of tin nailed over it. On this lay a monkey wrench. She noticed a curious thing about the standpipe, which she couldn't identify at first. It seemed to have a metal ring or "collar" encircling it at one point, and from this hung a short chain, at the end of which there was another ring or band. But this one was open at one end, and was not encircling the standpipe but was hanging down flat alongside it.

Suddenly it dawned on her what the complicated design was. It was a pair of handcuffs, fastened by one cuff to the pipe. And the other one, the open one, what was that for? Something made her go a little cold inside.

"How much do you want me to give?" he said, putting his hand to the baggy pocket of a moldy sweater hanging from a nail. This one was a coat-sweater with sleeves, but they had big holes at the elbows that seemed to peel outward.

"Give whatever you feel you can afford," she said. Then, because it was a good opportunity, she rang the question in. "Are you married?"

"Not this minute."

It was beginning to shape up more and more, she told herself.

He handed her over a five-dollar bill. "Here," he said grudgingly, and repeated the ancient wisecrack: "Don't say I never gave you anything."

"But are you sure you can spare this?" She couldn't resist glancing around a second time at the squalid room.

He caught her doing it. "Don't let it worry you," he said. "Money's one thing I've got plenty of. Enough to get by on, anyway. I draw a Veterans' Disability Pension."

"Oh," she said, and looked at him. He seemed untouched.

"I was wounded in the war. Kara something-or-other, I think it was called. It was an island."

"Tarawa," she said impatiently. "You were there but you don't know the name. We learned about it in high school."

"We were dying, not studying geography," he rebuked her mildly. "I can still see it, though," he went on plaintively. "Just a little patch of hell stuck out there in the ocean. Never knew why the Japs wanted it, or why we wanted to take it away from them. I can get sick thinking of all the boys who died for islands that were never any use to anybody, and never will be." His eyes challenged her. "A lot of boys died," he said.

"I know."

"And they were the lucky ones," he said. "Do you know that too?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there's worse things than dying, but I don't expect you to believe that."

She thought of Starr, dying, and of herself, with a leftover life to live. "I believe it," she said softly.

He didn't seem to have heard her. "Tarawa," he said. "Guys left their arms there. Or their legs. Or came away blind or deaf or with their brains scrambled. They were lucky too. Not as lucky as the dead ones, but luckier than some."

"How can you say that?"

"Because I wasn't so lucky."

She stared at him. "You've got your arms and your legs," she said. "And your hearing and your eyesight. What makes you the unluckiest man at Tarawa?"

"Do you know the difference between a bull and an ox?"

"Not exactly. An ox is bigger, isn't it? And stronger, I guess."

He laughed sourly. "You must be a city girl," he said. "A farm girl would have the picture by now. How about a ram and a wether? A rooster and a capon?"

"I--"

"Or a stallion and a gelding. How about that?"

"You don't mean--"

"Don't I? We were on patrol. From out of nowhere, ajap threw a grenade at us. My buddy dove for it to throw it back. It went off in his hand and killed him. The lucky bastard."

"And--"

"And I got to keep my arms and my legs and my sight and my hearing. All I lost was what makes a man a man."

"My God," she breathed.

"When I came back, my wife walked out on me. I didn't blame her. She would've stood by me in anything else, if I was on crutches, if I was blind. She was a good wife. But she was entitled to a husband."

She looked over at the picture on the wall. The soldier in his helmet, the girl looking up worshipfully from his shoulder. It couldn't have been Starr, then. Tarawa had been in 1944. But maybe Starr had come along afterward, unsuspecting. Who knows what this terrible tourniquet had turned into later on?

"At first it wasn't so bad for a little while. I went out on dates like I had before I got married. Plenty of dates. Plenty of girls. Some wanted to marry. Some were ready to settle for less. But there always comes a time in an evening when the two of you are alone by yourselves. I used to tell all kinds of lies to cover myself up." He laughed mirthlessly. "I even told one girl I was contagious."

"What'd she say?"

"She told me she didn't mind, not to let it stop me, because she was contagious herself."

He went over to the vicinity of the washbasin and picked up a flat brown-glass bottle from somewhere near it, she didn't quite see where. "I don't suppose I can offer you a drink?" he said uncertainly.

"That might only lead to trouble."

"Trouble?"

"Trouble for me. And trouble for me spells trouble for you too," she told him coolly. "You know that, don't you?"

Even his answer was the perfect answer--for her line of inquiry. "I ought to by now," he said with a heavy sigh.

He tipped the bottle up, pulled the cork with his teeth, held it fast there, let some liquor run into his mouth alongside of it, then reinserted the cork, still with his teeth only. She'd never seen that done before.

"It started in gradually, the bad part of it. I found myself starting to hit them, to get a little rough, to throw them around and swing at them. One or two even stood for it, but not too long. Most ran away. Then the stray slaps and knocks became regular beatings. I beat one girl up very badly one night. I had to throw cold water on her before she came around. I put some money in her hand, all I had on me, and kissed her and beat it away. She never preferred charges against me, but she used to duck out of sight if she saw me on the street after that."

She gave him a look of antipathy. "You hated them because of what had happened to you. Is that why you roughed them up?"

"No, no. You've got it turned around. I only did it because I loved them. I couldn't show them I loved them like other guys can. And you have to show it, you have to express it, it has to come out, it can't be kept back. I could only show it by violence at the end of my hands. Those were my caresses. It was the only way I could find my peace and satisfaction. I had no other way of going through to the end."

This is the one, she told herself inexorably. He's the one--knew Starr.

"But I knew it wouldn't stop there. I knew sooner or later I was going to kill one of them."

"And have you?"

His answer was bloodcurdling in its simplicity. "Not yet."

"Why don't you have yourself placed under treatment before that? Before that happens?"

"There -is- no treatment for this. Maybe you didn't understand me right. This isn't something mental, that a headshrinker can work on. I went through all those tests in the beginning, and they found me normal. This is a physical dismemberment. As physical as a busted arm would be. Only, a busted arm can be put back in business again. This can't.

"What year is this?" he asked at a tangent.

"Sixty-one."

"That don't mean my memory's failing," he defended himself. "It's just that I lose track every now and then. I was nineteen when I was on Tarawa. That means I'm still only thirty-six today. At thirty-six you still get restless every week or so. You wouldn't know it, but you do."

She lowered her head, strangely touched for a moment.

"You want to go out for a stroll, be a part of the world again, the world you once knew. You see other fellows with their girls. You want a girl too. Nothing dirty about it, unhealthy about it. It's as normal, as natural, as that. But that's when the trouble comes in."

He poked his thumb over his shoulder. "Do you see that pipe back there?"

"I noticed it when I first came in."

"I've set up a system. You know, like a fire-protection system. The superintendent of this building is a Norwegian, his name is J ansen, husky as an ox. He has the apartment right over this one. He used to live down here in the basement, but when I came in he turned this one over to me and moved upstairs. You see, he likes me. His son and I were buddies in the war. Well, one night we were having a few beers around the corner, and I told him about it: how I was afraid I was going to end up in serious trouble if things kept on going the way they were; maybe even do away with someone altogether.

"So we rigged up this signal between us. When I start getting restless, and know that I'm about to go out and roam around, I hit that pipe a wallop with that monkey wrench over there, and he comes down here and keeps me from going. Sits down and plays cards with me, and we have a few drinks, and when I start to get sleepy he locks the door from the outside and goes back upstairs. Next day I'm all over it."

"What're the handcuffs for?" she asked batedly.

"Once in a while I won't listen to reason."

He started to light a cigarette, then interrupted the act, flame before lips, to tell her: "So if I start to crowd you too much, remember to pick up that monkey wrench there and hit the steam pipe with it with all your might."

"That won't be necessary," she said a little tautly, "because I'm leaving now."

She got up from the rickety chair she'd seated herself on (without noticing) a long while before, turned her back on him, went over to the door, and turned the knob.

The knob turned willingly enough, but the door wouldn't open.

"What'd you do, lock this?" she said sharply. "Don't try anything like that! You'd better open it, if you know what's--"

Her last glimpse of him had had him standing on the opposite side of the table from her, a considerable distance, hands rounded toward chin, matchlight streaking his face like yellow crayon. Suddenly, before she even had time to turn her head and finish the denunciation facing him, she felt his arm go around her waist. Then the other one crossed over her shoulder, interlacing with the first. His face pressed hard against hers from over the opposite shoulder. She could feel the tough, often-shaved skin, stiff as cardboard, and he planted a trail of kisses down her cheek until he found her mouth.

Fear didn't come at first, only anger and outrage did. But when she found she couldn't move, not even enough to squirm or struggle, that the embrace was like iron, like steel, almost traumatic in its intensity, then fear did come, in a cold, sick rush, like nausea of the mind. She kept cautioning herself: Don't panic, don't lose your head, that's the worst thing you could do. And then: Go limp, let yourself go limp, and his instinctive reaction may be to relax the embrace.

She let her knees dip, and though the rest of her body was held too compressed to slide down after them, she let him carry her full weight, and it worked. His arms slackened in reflex, and she was able to duck down under them and up again on the outside.

He was too close to the door, had it boxed in, so she fled back again the other way, behind the large round center table where he'd originally been himself.