Web of the City (16 page)

He was just the thing called the Beast. And he was there. That was all.

Now he had made a definite step. He had done something concrete and had saved Rusty’s life. Why? The boy could not recall ever having done anything to acquire the huge man’s good will and friendship. Why?

The Beast looked down at Rusty and put out his hand. For a moment Rusty had no idea what he wanted, then he realized he was still gripping the switch, underhand. He rubbed a finger along the green plastic of the handle and then closed it reluctantly. The knife clicked as he lifted the lock at the back and he awkwardly handed it to the big man. The Beast shoved the knife into a side pocket of his rumpled, dirt-streaked slacks and turned away with a nod to Rusty.

The Beast walked back into the shadows and slumped down once more, his back edging down the wall till he lay in the angle of the charred walls.

Rusty pursed his lips. There seemed no sense to it. The Beast had never spoken more than three words to him and suddenly he had become Rusty’s protector. The boy was confused, but sensed his advantage now. He took three short steps to the barely stirring body of Candle and hoisted the boy to his feet roughly. He shoved the squat Cougar leader to the wall that was bathed in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp, and systematically brought him to.

The almost-Mongoloid features of the Prez began to flicker out of grogginess and he batted his eyes several times as Rusty shook and slapped him.

The Cougars watched in transfixed helplessness, knowing if they moved the Beast would move; and though fat and filthy, the dummy could crush any one of them easily. They stayed put and watched Rusty work Candle over thoroughly.

“Now, I wanna know,” Rusty said, each word accentuated by a sharp, stinging slap of his palm. Candle’s face was becoming flame red along one cheek, as Rusty tried to drag information from him by the only sure method he knew.

“Talk!”

The hand came out, flashed and cracked briefly against skin. Candle’s head jerked. His eyes opened wide and he twitched as though he wanted to retaliate. From the shadows the red coals of the Beast’s eyes, staring straight at the Prez, kept his hands at his sides, limply.

“Talk!”

Candle jerked his head away and Rusty’s next slap landed against the shoulder. It went that way for ten minutes, as Weezee sat biting her fist, her eyes wide. Violence was loose and there was no telling when it would come her way.

“Who killed my sister?”

No answer. The bond of silence was tight. Candle could no more speak, if he knew anything, than he could throw himself off the Staten Island Ferry. He was tied to silence. Rusty grew furious with frustration. His blows became more violent, and the Cougars knew this was not the fake rah-rah they usually saw in fights and rumbles. This was serious, this was the next thing to slow death. Rusty Santoro was on the edge and he wanted the word. The straight stuff, and they knew he would work each of them over till he got it.

Then their silence was no longer challenged, for the one who had stopped them before spoke from the shadows.

The Beast’s hoarse, unsteady voice came up in the room and he said, “I seen who took ya sister…”

Rusty was holding Candle against the wall with one white-knuckled hand, the other poised for a sidearm whack at the squat boy’s face. The hand never landed. Rusty stepped away slowly, letting his grip loosen on Candle, and the boy slid in a bumbling shuffle, before he fell again and lay panting, angled against the wall.

Rusty turned to the dummy, and there was a strange luster to the boy’s glare. This was what he wanted, this was all of it. This was the beginning of the trail that would end with a dead man in a gutter or hallway or alley, a Santoro-driven knife in his gut. This was it on skates and Rusty wanted it all.

“I seen her come in, an’ then I seen her go out, before you come to th’ dance.” The Beast mumbled scratchily. His voice was like a rusted saw laboring through tough wood. He stumbled over words and many of his sounds were mere suggestion. But the words were the right words.

“ ’N’ then she come back again, y’know, an’ when she left, I was outside lookin’ fer some beer what they might’ve left inna cans they t’rew outside, y’know, an’ I saw’r with a guy inna long coat…”

And then the dummy gave a remarkably lucid description of a camel’s hair coat.

• rusty santoro
  
• mirsky
  
• miss elements
  
• pops santoro
  

Rusty had not been to bed. The week’s sweat had dried on him and he felt filthy inside and out. The memories of the weekend were a jumbled, kaleidoscopic horror. The stand with Candle, the dance and the drag back to the old ways, the rumble and jail overnight—staggeringly terrible in terrible gray and steel—and then Dolores. The terrible wallop in the head of her death, like that, that way, in an alley. Then Moms and the trouble with the Cougars. And the first word about what had happened in the darkness back there, behind Tom-Tom’s malt shop. The word about the man in the camel’s hair coat. It was all too much.

Rusty had gone home and Mrs. Givens had still been there, hunched over in the big armchair, shrouded in darkness, only the black, scuffed tips of her shoes showing from shadow, in the reflected light from a streetlamp outside.

He had sent her away, telling her he would watch. She had asked him nothing, not where he had been, or what he had found out, nothing about Dolores or the word from the street. She merely nodded at his words and left silently, like some velvet-furred animal.

Rusty had sunk down into the armchair and summer night had gone by in remote noise from crosstown, and mugginess. Now with the faint gray wash of dawn slipping down the buildings, he met the day with a desperation and determination to find that man in the camel’s hair coat. Somehow, some way. And kill him.

The past had forged strong chains, not easily broken.

The buses ground past downstairs, and the sounds of the city awakening climbed higher and higher, like a generator warming up. Rusty sat immobile, thinking.

No one in Cougar turf wore a camel’s hair coat. That wasn’t sharp; black leather jackets, chino slacks, stomping boots, Sam Browne belts with razor-sharp buckles, duck-fanny haircuts, but no camel’s hair coats.

That was downtown stuff. Straight down the main line.

Rusty could not quite grasp the sense of that. What was a downtown hooker doing here in Cougar turf and why should someone like that kill his sister? Why should she be raped like that? The answer popped in sickeningly. Dolores had been an attractive girl, that was reason enough.

Rusty had seen enough of the streets to know the score. Sense, there was none. The blood that filled the manholes to the tops came from sick minds and fast action. There was no reason and no end to it, of course, so Dolores was dead, and there was nothing more to say after that. Except the man in the camel’s hair coat would die, naturally. That was the way of it.

But how to go about it?

There were still two problems, or rather, two untied ends, aside from the one final end that would be tied with a knife. What was the camel’s hair coat doing in Cougar turf and why had the gang clammed up so tightly? It had become apparent after a few minutes with them that the Cougars were quiet for a good reason and one a lot stronger than merely “the code.” There was something back there, but Rusty did not know what it was, what it meant, how it tied in. This was far out of his depth. He had no idea where to start, how to begin to find a murderer.

It was a far different thing, this hollow hungry killing need to find the man and punish him. A far different thing than bludgeoning his way through a rumble, or knife-gutting a rock who had offended him. They were in two different classes, and Rusty felt like a fly on flypaper, trapped and helpless.

But there had to be a way. There
had
to be a way because more than God, or Earth, or Life, or any goddamn thing he wanted his hands soaked in the blood of the man who had raped Dolores. Rusty Santoro, seventeen years old, and crying warm inside, sat tensed in the big armchair and swore he would find the man. There was nothing, nothing at all, for him, if that was not done. He sat back and started to figure—hard.

Mrs. Givens came in at eight o’clock and prepared a hot breakfast for Rusty. He slapped his spoon at the thick oatmeal. He toyed with and broke the toast. He ran a finger around the moist, beaded lip of the glass of milk. He did not touch a thing and when Mrs. Givens went into the bedroom to see how Moms was resting, he slipped out the front door.

He carried the big switchblade in his jacket pocket.

School was where he headed, down the street to the subway. But he never made it. Somehow, his feet led him away, far away from the subway and toward the line dividing Cougar turf from Cherokee territory. Rusty had decided something. Somewhere in their silence, in the fact of the Cherokee rumble at the dance, in the whole tangled web of it all, there was a hookup between the Cougars, the Cherokees, Dolores’ death and the man he sought. What it was, he did not know, nor how it was constructed, but there was a dragging in him that led him toward Cherokee turf. There was a hookup and it seemed he would have to knuckle down in enemy turf to find the answer; to find the next bit of path that led to the man in the camel’s hair coat.

He invaded Cherokee turf shortly before nine o’clock Tuesday morning, cold-eyed and searching. It was quiet, gang quiet, with the kids in school, but there was always the subterranean murmur of rumbles. The whispers were there, if you listened closely enough and if you could decipher the animal intensities that gave them meaning. Rusty was looking for a pigeon.

Looking that way, looking that hard, he was bound to succeed. It was like looking for trouble. Look long enough, turn over enough rocks with a rude kick and eventually a trouble came forth. That was the way of it. Seek and you shall find. A pigeon.

Finally, he got the word from a tailor deep in Cherokee turf—a little man with a hare lip who wore a satin-backed vest and who feared for his front window. He gave Rusty the second clue to the track. He directed the boy to a garage it was healthy for citizens to avoid, where the Cherokees spent their evenings shearing down cams, trimming away chrome, souping up their heaps.

Rusty asked the little tailor where a gun could be purchased in Cherokee land. The tailor did not know. He was lying, but Rusty had no stomach for the tactics which would persuade the man to tell him.

He hit for the garage.

It was a gaping hole in a line of apartment buildings. The street was run-down. The houses had once been stately brown-stones, but refugee owners had divided each apartment into dozens of minor one-room closets and had rented them to Puerto Ricans, fresh to New York. It was a dirty, noisy street with cardboard milk cartons crushed flat in the gutters, battered garbage cans on the sidewalks and obscenities chalked on pavements and walls. Laundry hung from windows. The smell was oregano and some sweet, the odor of cigarettes and pine cleanser fighting a losing battle with dirt-caked corners. It was a depressing street. It was all too familiar to Rusty. It was typical.

The garage was open-faced amid these buildings, with a big red sign announcing rates per hour, day and week, and the name
TINY’S GARAGE STORAGE
. Rusty walked up the sloping walk into the dimmer, cooler interior and almost immediately saw the rodent.

He was perhaps five feet seven, with no chin whatsoever and eyes slitted to fine lines. He wore sloppy sports clothes, and his hair was cut in a severe crew-cut, so a bald spot showed at the center of his scalp. But there was more than just a mousiness and furtiveness to him. He looked more like a twitching gray rat than a human being. As he chewed a piece of gum, his aquiline nose twitched, accentuating the resemblance.

“Yeah. What c’n I do ya?” the rodent squeaked as Rusty came in from the street.

Rusty walked toward him, watching the boy as he leaned against the front end of a Buick. The boy seemed loose-jointed and nervous and he grew even more so as Rusty approached without speaking.

“You—uh—you know where I can find some’a the Chero-kees?” Rusty started.

The rodent watched in silence for a minute, then swirled the gum to the other side of his mouth. He plucked at his nose tentatively, then nodded his head. “Yeah. I know where ya c’n find the Cherks. So what? Whaddaya want with ’em?”

Rusty walked slowly, coming abreast of the boy without alarming him. “What’s ya name?” Rusty asked.

The boy stared back as though uncomprehending.

Rusty reached into his pocket. The opening of the knife was sharp in the silence of the garage. “I—I just watch the joint for Tiny Sacher when he goes up fer a sanwich. I—uh—got no connection with them, like ya know…”

“I asked you what was your name,” Rusty repeated.

“Mirsky,” the boy answered slowly, with pain. “M-Mirsky.”

“Well, now, M-Mirsky,” Rusty accented each word with harshness, “how’s about you telling me what you know about the rumble up in Cougar turf Friday night.”

Mirsky slid around the side of the car. His face had turned ashen. His eyes were almost closed in fear. He struggled to deny all knowledge of the fight, the party-crashing.

“Who you, to ask sump’n like that? Huh, who are ya? I don’t know you. You got somethin’ round here? If y’don’t then scram. I got work t’do.” He continued sliding around the dusty surface of the car. His charcoal slacks picked up a thick coat of filth from the movement.

Rusty took a quick step and his hand wound in Mirsky’s jacket lapels.

“The name is Santoro, kid. You know the name?”

Mirsky shook his head violently. His little rat eyes that had been buried deep in the creases of his face were now hanging out, wide and awake with a slippery fear. “I n-never h-heard that name. Whachoo hangin’ onta me for? Lemme go!”

Rusty backed him into the angle of the car and wall.

He held him tightly, twisting the fabric till Mirsky was breathing with difficulty. The boy was shaking terribly. “Please, man, lemme go. L-like I don’t know a thing. I just work here. I ain’t inna Cherks…”