by Ed McBain
CAROL: That’s what we need, all right, is a little rain.
ANGELA: I wouldn’t mind it. It’s been hot all day.
CAROL: I wouldn’t neither. It’s what I said, ain’t it?
ANGELA: I thought you were being sarcastic.
CAROL: No. (She pauses, sighs.) Listen, let’s take a walk or something. I’m dying of boredom here on the stoop.
ANGELA: All right, come on. The fellows won’t be back till late, anyway.
CAROL: They haven’t even started yet. It ain’t even dark.
(They rise from the stoop. They are both wearing blue flaring skirts and white sleeveless blouses. Carol is the taller of the two girls, and the older. They are dressed in what might seem good taste were it not for the high pointed thrust of their brassières. They walk, too, with an exaggerated femininity, as if anxious to emphasize their femaleness in what must seem to them a male-dominated society. They pass Second Avenue and continue westward. Some boys on the corner whistle at them, and they tilt their teenage noses to the sky, aloofly but not without a smug female satisfaction. They are pretty girls, and they know it. Carol knows, too, that she is good in bed. She has been told so. Angela is a virgin, but she tries hard to give an impression of vast sexual knowledge. As they approach Third Avenue, it begins to rain. Running, their skirts flapping about their legs, they duck into a doorway and then look up toward Lexington Avenue.)
CAROL: Hey! What’s that? Up the street! Look!
ANGELA (peering westward, where the thunderclouds are banked against the horizon): It’s Tower, ain’t it? Who’s that with him?
CAROL: Batman and Danny. They’re running!
ANGELA: But I thought …
CAROL: Oh God, they’re all full of blood!
(The boys break across Third Avenue in long loping sprints. Behind them is the sound of a police siren. Fear is mingled with the excitement on their faces. Their hands are drenched with blood. Each is still carrying a bloody knife.)
TOWER (spotting the girls): Hey—hey! Hey, c’mere, quick!
CAROL: What is it? What happened?
TOWER: Never mind, the cops are behind us. Take these! Get rid of them! Come on! Come on, take them! (The knives are offered. They ring the girls in dripping steel. Carol is frozen.)
CAROL: What happened?
DANNY: A spic tried to jap us. We stabbed him. Take the knives! Take them!
(Carol does not move. Her eyes wide, she stares at the blood-smeared fists thrust at her. Angela suddenly offers her hand, and the blades are clasped into it, one, two, three, and then the boys are running again, heading for the safety of their own turf. Angela rushes to the nearest stoop, climbing to the top step, which is shielded from the rain. She sits quickly, thrusting the knives under her skirt, pulling the skirt over them, feeling the long thin blades against her naked flesh, thinking she can feel the oozing blood on each separate long blade.)
CAROL: I’m scared. Oh God, I’m scared.
ANGELA: Shhhh, shhhh.
(The rain lashes the long street. A squad car skids across Third Avenue, its siren wailing. Another squad car, ignoring the One Way sign, enters the other end of the block.)
CAROL (whispering): The knife! One of the knives—it’s showing. Pull down your skirt!
ANGELA: Shhh, shhhh. (She reaches beneath her skirt, thrusting the knife deeper beneath her thighs. There is a narcoticized look on her face. The sirens ring in her ears, and then come the terrifying sounds of two explosions, the policemen firing in the air and the rushed babble of many voices, and then Carol again, whispering beside her.)
CAROL: They got ’em. Oh, God, they’re busted. What were they doing over there alone? Angela, they stabbed a guy!
ANGELA: Yes. (Her voice is a whisper now, too.) Yes, oh yes, they stabbed him.
CAROL: What should we do with the knives? Let’s throw them down the sewer. Now. Before the cops get to us.
ANGELA: No. No, I’ll take them home with me.
CAROL: Angela …
ANGELA: I’ll take them home with me.
“We found them here, sir,” Larsen said. “In the girl’s dresser drawer.”
“Why’d you accept the knives, Angela?” Hank asked.
“I don’t know. I was excited. The boys were so excited, I guess I got excited, too. You should have seen their faces. So they offered the knives to me. So—so I took them. All three of them. One after the other. And I hid them. And then I took them home with me and put them in a paper bag and put them in my drawer, at the back of the drawer where my father couldn’t see them. He’d have got mad as hell if he saw the knives. He’d have begun telling me a good girl shouldn’t have taken the knives like that from the three of them. So I hid them from him.”
“Why’d you call the police?”
“Because I later realized I done wrong. I felt terribly guilty. It was wrong what I done, hiding the knives like that. So I called the cops and told them I had them. I felt terribly guilty.”
“You said that Danny told you Morrez had japped them. Is that exactly what he said?”
“Yes.”
“That he’d been japped?”
“No, that a spic had tried to jap them and they stabbed him. That’s what he said. At least, I think so. I was very excited.”
“Have you read anything about this case in the newspapers?”
“Sure, everybody on the block is reading the stories.”
“Then you’re aware, are you not, that the three boys claim Morrez came at them with a knife. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sure. I know it.”
“Is it possible that Danny Di Pace said nothing at all about being japped? Is it possible you only think he said that—after reading the boys’ claims in the newspapers?”
“It’s possible, but I doubt it. I know what I heard. I took his knife, too, didn’t I?”
“Yes. Yes, you did.”
“You know something?” the girl said.
“What?”
“I still got the blood on my skirt. I can’t get the stain out. From when I was sitting on the knives. I still got blood there.”
At the dinner table that night, he looked across at his daughter Jennifer and wondered what kind of girl she’d have been had she lived in Harlem. She was a pretty girl, with her mother’s hazel eyes and fine blond hair, a bosom embarrassingly ripening into womanhood. Her appetite amazed him. She ate rapidly, shoveling food into her mouth with the abandon of a truck driver.
“Slow down, Jennie,” he said. “We’re not expecting a famine.”
“I know, Pop, but Agatha’s expecting me at eight-thirty, and she’s got some creamy new records, and Mom said dinner would be at seven, but you were late. So it’s really your fault I’m gulping my food.”
“Agatha’s creamy new records can wait,” Hank said. “You slow down before you choke.”
“It’s not really Agatha’s records that are causing the speed,” Karin said. “There’ll be some boys there, Hank.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Well, for Pete’s sake, Pop, don’t look as if I’m going into some opium den or something. We’re only going to dance a little.”
“Who are these boys?” Hank asked.
“Some of the kids from the neighborhood. Actually, they’re all bananas except Lonnie Gavin. He’s cool.”
“Well, that at least is reassuring,” Hank said, and he winked at Karin. “Why don’t you bring him to the house sometime?”
“Pop, he’s only been here about eighty times already.”
“And where was I?”
“Oh, preparing a brief or giving some witness the rubber hose, I guess.”
“I don’t think that’s very funny, Jennie,” Karin said. “Your father doesn’t beat his witnesses.”
“I know. That was just a euphemism.”
“And I suggest you brush up on your figures of speech, which are more incriminating than your original statements,” Hank said.
“Hyperbole?” Jennie asked.
>
“That’s more like it.”
“We’ve got a creep teaching English,” Jennie said. “It’s a wonder I learn anything. They ought to shoot him up with the next Vanguard.”
She seized her napkin, wiped her mouth, shoved her chair back, and kissed Karin briefly.
“May I please be excused?” she said as she rushed from the dining room. He could see her applying lipstick to her mouth, standing in front of the hall mirror. Then, unself-consciously, she tugged at her brassière, waved back at her parents, and slammed out of the house.
“How about that?” Hank said.
Karin shrugged.
“I’m worried,” Hank said.
“Why?”
“She’s a woman.”
“She’s a girl.”
“She’s a woman, Karin. She applies lipstick like an expert, and she adjusts her bra as if she’s been wearing one all her life. Are you sure it’s all right for her to go over to this Agatha’s house to dance? With boys?”
“I’d be more worried if she were dancing with girls.”
“Honey, don’t get glib.”
“I’m not. For the information of the district attorney, his daughter began to blossom at the age of twelve. She’s been wearing lipstick and bra for almost two years now. She has, I believe, been kissed.”
“By whom?” Hank said, his brow creasing.
“Oh, my God. By many boys, I’m sure.”
“I don’t think that’s wise, Karin.”
“How do you suggest we prevent it?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He paused. “But it doesn’t seem right to me that a thirteen-year-old girl should go around necking with everybody in the neighborhood.”
“Jennie’s almost fourteen and I’m sure she chooses the boys she wants to kiss.”
“And where does she go from there?”
“Hank!”
“I’m serious. I’d better have a talk with that girl.”
“And what will you tell her?”
“Well …”
With a calm smile on her mouth, Karin said, “Will you tell her to keep her legs crossed?”
“In essence, yes.”
“And will that keep them crossed?”
“It seems to me she should know …”
“She knows, Hank.”
“You don’t seem very concerned,” he said.
“I’m not. Jennie’s a sensible girl, and I think she’d only be embarrassed if you gave her a lecture. I think it might be more important if you—” She stopped suddenly.
“If I what?”
“If you came home earlier more often. If you saw the boys who are dating her. If you took an interest in her, and in them.”
“I didn’t even know she was dating. Isn’t she too young to be dating?”
“Biologically, she’s as old as I am.”
“And apparently following in your footsteps,” Hank said, and was immediately sorry afterward.
“Enter the Slut of Berlin,” Karin said dryly.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s quite all right. There’s just one thing, Hank. I wish you’d someday have the guts to believe it was you I fell in love with—and not an American chocolate bar.”
“I do believe that.”
“Do you? Then why do you constantly refer to my ‘lurid’ past? To hear you tell it, I was the chief prostitute in a red-light district which stretched for miles.”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” Hank said.
“Well, I would. Once and for all, I would like to talk about it.”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“There’s a lot to say. And it’s better to say it than to hint at it. Does it trouble you greatly that I went to bed with one other man before I met you?”
He did not answer.
“Hank, I’m talking to you.”
“Yes, goddamnit, it troubles me greatly. It annoys the hell out of me that I was introduced to you by the bombardier of my ship—and that he knew you a lot longer and possibly a lot better than I ever did.”
“He was very kind,” Karin said softly.
“I don’t want to hear about his goddamn virtues. What’d he do, bring you nylons?”
“Yes. But so did you.”
“And did you tell him the same things you told me?”
“I told him I loved him. And I did.”
“Great,” Hank said.
“Perhaps you’d have preferred me to go to bed with a man I despised?”
“I’d have preferred you not to have gone to bed with anyone!”
“Not even you?”
“You married me!” Hank hurled.
“Yes. Because I loved you from the first moment I met you. That is why I married you. That is why I asked Peter never to see me again. Because I loved you.”
“But you loved Pete first.”
“Yes. And didn’t you love someone first?”
“I didn’t go to bed with her!”
“And perhaps she didn’t live in wartime Germany!” Karin snapped.
“No, she didn’t. And you did, and don’t try to tell me that every German girl was fair prey for every American soldier.”
“I can speak for no German girl but myself,” Karin said. “I was hungry. And scared. Damnit, I was scared. Have you ever been scared?”
“I’ve been scared all my life,” he said.
A silence fell over the table. They sat watching each other with slightly dazed expressions on their faces, as if recognizing for the first time that they really did not know each other.
He pushed back his chair. “I’m going for a walk,” he said.
“All right. Be careful, please.”
He went out of the house, and the words “Be careful, please” echoed in his mind because these were the words she’d said to him each time he left her, years ago, to return to the base. He could still remember driving the jeep through the streets of a bombed-out Berlin awakening to face the silent dawn. Those had been good times, and this had been a stupid argument and oh, damnit, what the hell was the matter with him anyway?
He began walking up the street, a well-ordered street with old trees and carefully landscaped plots and meticulous lawns and great white houses with neatly painted shutters, a miniature suburb set in the heart of the city. A city of contrasts, New York, changing in the sudden space of two blocks from the worst slum to the most aristocratic neighborhood. Even here in Inwood, if you walked east for several blocks you came upon a neighborhood succumbing to the shoddiness of time.
He turned and began walking west, toward the river.
Why had he fought with Karin?
And what had he meant when he’d said to her, “I’ve been scared all my life”? The words had leaped from his lips involuntarily, as if wrenched from a secret inner person of whom he had no knowledge.
Scared, yes, at the controls of a bomber with flak bursting silently around the ship. Scared when they were hit over the Channel once and had to ditch, scared when the Messerschmitt dived and strafed the water and he could see the line of slugs ripping up a narrow path as the plane dived and gained altitude and then dived again at the floating crew members.
But all his life? Scared all his life?
He walked onto the path between the bushes at the end of the street, heading for the big rock which overlooked the railroad tracks and the Hudson. He and Karin walked here often on summer nights. Here you could sit and look at the lights of Palisades Amusement Park across the river downtown, the strung necklace of the George Washington Bridge, the moving lights of the water craft. And here, too, you could listen to the water lapping gently against the smaller rocks below, and there seemed to be in this spot a serenity which had somehow passed by the rest of the city, the rest of the world.
He found the rock in the darkness and climbed to its top. He lighted a cigarette then and looked out over the water. He sat smoking for a long while, listening to the sounds of the insects, hearing below him the lapping sound
s of the river. Then he started back for the house.
The two boys were standing under the street lamp at the end of the block. They were standing quite still, apparently talking to each other harmlessly, but he felt his heart lurch into his throat at the sight of them. He did not know who they were; he was sure they were not any of the neighborhood boys.
He clenched his fists.
His own house was a half block beyond the lamppost. He would have to pass the boys if he wanted to get home.
He felt the way he’d felt over Bremen with a full cargo of bombs.
He did not break his stride. He continued walking with his fists clenched at his sides, closer to the two husky teen-agers who stood idling by the street lamp.
When he passed them, the taller of the two looked up and said, “Why, good evening, Mr. Bell.”
He said, “Good evening,” and continued walking. He could feel the boys’ eyes on his back. When he reached the front door of his house, he was trembling. He sat on the front steps and groped for the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. His hands shaking, he lighted one and blew out a hasty stream of smoke. Then he looked down the street toward the lamppost. The boys were gone. But the trembling would not leave him. He held his left hand in front of him, watched the spasmodic jerking of his fingers until, in self-condemning anger, he bunched the fingers into a tight fist and slammed the fist down onto his knee.
I’m not afraid, he told himself, and the words had a familiar ring. He squeezed his eyes shut and again he told himself, “I’m not afraid,” aloud this time, and the words echoed on the silent street, but the trembling would not stop.
I’m not afraid.
I’m not afraid.
It had been one of those suffocatingly hot August days that capture the city and refuse to let go of it. People moved about the streets with great effort. The black asphalt had begun to run so that crossing the street became a sticky task. At noon, with the sun directly overhead, there was no shade in the concrete canyon of the city block. The tar glistened blackly, and the sidewalks gleamed whitely with a hard flat glare in the merciless sunlight.
Hank Belani was twelve years old, a gangling awkward youth on the edge of adolescence, a boy whose image of himself was rapidly becoming lost, obscured by the changes of rapid growth. It was for this reason—though he could not have explained his motivation if he’d tried—that he wore the lock. He had bought the lock in the five-and-ten on Third Avenue. He had paid a quarter for it. The lock had no practical value whatever. It was a miniature chromium-and-black ornament meant for decoration alone and not seriously intended as a safeguard for anything. It had come complete with two tiny keys. He wore the lock on the belt loop of his trousers, the loop to the right of his fly. Religiously, he unlocked it whenever he changed his trousers, shifting it from one trouser loop to the other, locking it again, and then putting the miniature key into the top drawer of his dresser, alongside the spare key. The lock was, for Hank Belani, a trademark. It was doubtful that anyone but Hank even knew of its existence. It had certainly attracted no attention until that day in August. The important thing, of course, was that Hank knew it was there, and for him it was a trademark.