The Lure

by Felice Picano

  Directly across the street, the man had said. Had he thought he was somewhere else? What was supposed to be here? What would he look like if he lived: his face a mask of scars, or what? Jesus, how the blood had bubbled up.

  The door gave a hollow booming response to his knock. Noel held himself ready for it to shoot open. It didn’t. He pounded on it again. And again.

  Could the man have been so crazed by pain he’d made a mistake? But no, didn’t shock set in, and with it, drastic reduction of pain? Noel hoped so, for the man’s sake.

  Maybe another door. But there was nothing on this side but the caged windows. Around the corner? Nothing here either. Then he saw another sign, this one painted on the wall: Federal Parking. Employees Only. Well, that confirmed what the place was. Or had been. Another doorway, set deep like the one on West Street. Barred over, so he couldn’t even reach in to knock. More brick wall. A corrugated garage door. He knocked there, too, but got no answer. I’m wasting time here. I’d better get the bike and ride to the police station, he thought. Now he had reached the end of the building. One more doorway: the delivery entrance.

  A sooty glass slot at eye level revealed a small inside foyer, then another glass door too distant and too dirty to see into. To Noel’s surprise, this outer door opened at his touch, swinging in easily, well counterbalanced despite its weight.

  It was a foyer, all right, dark beyond the glass door. Locked, of course. Pure fluke the outer one was open. A dull institutional corridor stretched beyond the glass door. Empty.

  He set up a tattoo, knocking with his ringed knuckle. No answer. No running feet. No anxious faces. I’d better go to the police station, now, he told himself and turned to open the outer door.

  He was jerked back so fast he stumbled backward, as hands pulled at him. Before he could get to his feet, he was behind the glass door, in the corridor he’d been looking at, and hauled around a corner, into pitch darkness.

  They’ll mangle my face, too, he thought, and his hands went up to protect his eyes.

  He could feel two or three of them, holding him securely against the wall, breathing.

  “What are you doing here?” The voice was sharp, cold, toneless.

  Noel stiffened. “The man…” he began.

  “What man?” another voice asked, close to his left ear.

  “Across the street,” Noel managed to get out. “He said to come here for help. He’s hurt.”

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “What’s going on here?” yet another voice asked.

  “He sent you here?” the first, the cold-voiced man asked Noel.

  “Yes. He’s hurt very badly.”

  “Who’s hurt?” the newer voice asked.

  “I don’t know. Who’s out tonight?” The cold voice again.

  “No one. Wait, wasn’t Kansas out?”

  “He was linking tonight,” the man on Noel’s left said.

  “There?”

  “Where is he?” the cold-voiced man asked Noel, pushing him roughly against the wall.

  “Across the street. In the abandoned warehouse. Second story up. Fifth doorway on the right when you get up the stairs. I was riding by and…”

  “We’d better take a look,” the cold-voiced man said, interrupting Noel’s explanation. Then, with another push against the wall, he asked Noel to repeat his directions.

  As Noel answered, he heard more men arriving in the dark corridor. There were many voices mumbling around him now, talking hurriedly in low tones.

  “I was riding by on the elevated highway,” Noel tried to explain again. He was interrupted by another hand slamming him against the wall.

  “Shut up!” the man on his right said.

  “Who’s got a bracelet?” someone else asked.

  Noel was seized by the shoulders, spun half around, while someone else grabbed his hands together. He felt something cold, then heard a click. He was handcuffed.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “You don’t understand. I didn’t do anything. I was just riding by and saw it.”

  “Dry this one off till we get back,” the cold-voiced man said. “Where’s medical?”

  “Outside already,” someone answered. “Everyone’s out.”

  “Get the Fisherman,” the cold-voiced man said. “And dry this one off.”

  “Come on,” someone else urged. “Let’s go!”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” Noel protested. The glass door slammed and he was dragged back by the hands, then pushed in another direction so hard he almost fell. As he was getting to his feet, a heavy door slammed shut inches away. In front of him, he could see a tiny barred window.

  “But I didn’t do anything. I was just riding by and saw it happen and went to help him.”

  “Sure, buddy,” a flat, older voice replied from the other side of the barred window. “Haven’t you heard? They closed the highway.”

  “I was on a bike. I was riding a bike. It’s at the warehouse right now!” he shouted, but he could hear the man’s footsteps receding and a minute later, another sound: a door closing. He was alone.

  He inched about in the murky darkness. This must be a cell. Not very large. Damp. Cold. Jesus! Here’s a case study on the inadvisability of helping people in trouble. No wonder no one else did.

  He was shivering, and had to use the wall to nudge up his sweatshirt hood. That was marginally better. But his breath still frosted. His eyes were acclimated to the light now, but there wasn’t much to see, just a bare cell with two metal shelves long enough and barely wide enough to hold a man.

  This is crazy, he told himself. Crazier than seeing someone being stabbed. But they’d find the man and come back and release him. Realize he was trying to help, then let him go.

  After what seemed an interminably long time, he heard noises in the corridor. They were returning. Good. Now they’d let him go. Good thing. He was freezing here.

  The cell door opened with a clang, and several men entered.

  “Will he be all right?” Noel asked.

  “As all right as ground round,” the cold-voiced man said, and Noel felt himself lifted off his feet and slammed against the wall.

  He was held there, shaken, pummeled. Questions came fast and he could hardly get his breath to answer them.

  “Who was with you?” the cold voice asked.

  “No one. I was alone.”

  He was punched in the stomach. “Who was with you?”

  “I was riding by on my bike. I was alone.”

  “Let me do the asking,” someone said, shoving in front of the other man. “I was in ’Nam. We had methods.” With one hand he held Noel’s head back, against the wall, his eyes glittering very close to Noel’s. “Now, I’m going to ask you some questions, and for every wrong answer, you’re going to have your head bounced off this wall. You hear?”

  “No, please. I was alone. I was trying to help him,” Noel begged. “I was riding by and saw them attack him.”

  “How did you know who he was?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t.”

  “Hey,” someone else said, “let me ask. I’ll get it out of him.”

  Noel felt another punch, hard in his ribs.

  “Let me,” a new voice said. He was punched again, lower.

  They were crowding him, all of them pushing and trying to hit him, shifting positions to get at him. They were going to kill him. Kill him here in this freezing cell.

  “No! Let me ask him!” The voice came from behind them. Instantly all of them stopped.

  “It’s the Fisherman,” someone muttered. They all moved away from Noel.

  “That’s right,” the new voice said. It was authoritative, slightly accented. “Now suppose you tell me what all this ruckus in the dark is about?”

  “They got Kansas,” someone said.

  “What happened?” the man they called the Fisherman asked.

  “Looks like a dozen meth freaks with a case of broken glass got at hi
m.”

  “Bad?”

  “Dead.”

  “Two,” Noel offered. “There were two of them. I saw.”

  “And you were one of them,” one man said, punching Noel in the side.

  “Who’s he?” the Fisherman asked.

  “He came snooping around here. Said Kansas sent him.”

  “Leave him alone. Get some lights on. What is this, a medieval torture chamber? Go on. Back to your posts. All of you. Out.”

  Noel felt himself being lifted up against the wall.

  “Don’t hit me,” he pleaded. “I didn’t do anything.”

  A light came on in the room, blinding Noel for an instant.

  “Out, I said,” the Fisherman repeated. “All of you. Mack, stay at the door. I want to talk to him.”

  Noel was shivering now, sore all over from the assault. The one man remaining in the cell took him gently by the shoulders and sat him down on the metal shelf.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Noel said. “I was just trying to help him. Why were they hurting me?”

  “Because they’re angry one of their friends is dead. You’re all they had to vent their feelings on.”

  “But I was trying to help him.”

  “Just rest awhile,” the man said. Then: “You cold?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mack, get a blanket.”

  A blanket was brought in. The Fisherman arranged it around Noel’s shoulders, then sat down on the opposite metal shelf.

  “Now relax a bit, young man, then I want you to tell me how you came here.”

  “He told me to get help across the street,” Noel said.

  “I see,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “Go on. I’m waiting.”

  “I thought this building was closed,” Noel said.

  “It is. Tell me everything that happened.”

  “I was riding my bike on the elevated highway,” Noel began, gaining confidence now that he wasn’t shivering anymore.

  As he talked, he looked over the man they had called the Fisherman. He was fifty-five or sixty years old. Middle-sized, he seemed solid looking, although with the dark gabardine overcoat and heavy woolen pants tucked into rubber galoshes, it was difficult to ascertain how heavy, how solid he was. He was bareheaded, and his hair was thinning but ungrayed brown, slightly creased all around as though he had been wearing a hat and had taken it off. A square, clean-shaven face, with thickish lips, heavy jowls, slightly reddish skin, as though from drinking, with a large, fleshy aquiline nose. The brow was strong, squarish, the eyebrows thick and bushy. Only his eyes were a soft, doelike brown, betraying the easier treatment Noel had just received at his hands. Altogether an authoritative man: the boss. Noel trusted him, as much as he could trust anyone in this absurd situation. He would not hurt Noel, nor let him be hurt.

  “That’s all he said, to come here?” the Fisherman asked when Noel was done.

  “He was having trouble breathing,” Noel said. “His voice was very hoarse. I guess it was too hard for him to talk anymore so he squeezed my hand, and I asked if he meant directly across West Street, and he squeezed it to say yes. That’s the only reason I came here, because I promised him. I was going to the police station.”

  “That makes sense. Nothing else? He said nothing else? No names?”

  “No. No names. But when he was being stabbed he pleaded with them to stop, naturally. When I found him, he must have thought I was one of them returning, that’s when he said he didn’t mean it.”

  “He didn’t mean it?” the Fisherman asked.

  “That’s what he said.” Noel could hear the broken wheezing again, see the man’s bloody facelessness. This man, the “Fisherman,” inspired confidence, and Noel suddenly blurted out, “Perhaps it’s better he died.”

  “Why?” There was a threat in the word, the first time Noel had felt hostility from his questioner.

  “I just mean he was cut up so badly. His face was… I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. What would he look like if he lived?”

  The Fisherman stared gloomily at the floor.

  “Do you think he’d been stabbed in the lungs?” Noel wondered. “Could that be why he wheezed so badly?”

  “More than likely. Was his throat cut?”

  “I don’t know. It was just blood from his forehead on down. They’d stabbed everywhere. Everywhere. They wouldn’t stop,” Noel said, seeing again those deadly pointed shadows on the wall.

  Someone tapped on the cell door and the Fisherman signaled him to come in. It was a tall, youngish man with a heavy beard, in denims and a forest-green ski parka.

  “We found this in the room with Kansas,” he said, in that same cold voice of the man who had so cruelly interrogated Noel. In the dark, he had seemed much older.

  He handed Noel’s flashlight to the Fisherman.

  “That’s mine.”

  “It was wedged into a wall,” the man reported, ignoring Noel. “Just above eye level.”

  “I put it there to see,” Noel explained. “He was behind some doors. I needed both hands to move them.”

  “You see any doors?” the Fisherman asked.

  “Three of them. On the floor. The light was out when we got there. Not burned out either.”

  “I shut it off,” Noel said. “I couldn’t bear to look at him while I talked to him. I got nauseous.”

  “Yeah,” the younger man said, “either that, or you turned it off after you were sure he was wasted.”

  “He was alive when I left that room!”

  “That’s enough,” the Fisherman said. “Get back over there and go over that place. All of it. I want answers.” The young man turned, glared at Noel, then walked out. “By the way,” the Fisherman stopped him, “is there a bicycle there?”

  “A ten-speed,” Noel said. “Atala Grand Prix.”

  “It’s there.”

  “Bring it here,” the Fisherman said. “Go on. Go. Comb that place.”

  When the man had gone, the Fisherman turned to Noel. “What were you doing up on the highwayr’

  “I ride it every morning. For exercise.”

  “Why so early?”

  “I have early classes. Sometimes nine, today at eight.”

  “Where?”

  “New York University. The Washington Square campus. I teach sociology. Social change in action, inner-city problems. A basic penology course.”

  “So you were riding by as usual and heard a scream?”

  “And saw the light.”

  “I thought you said the flashlight was yours?”

  “It is. I saw flickering light. One of them must have been holding a cigarette lighter or something. I threw the flashlight in to scare them off. I told them I was coming in, too. But I couldn’t jump it.”

  The Fisherman listened, then stood up and went to the cell door.

  Noel panicked, thinking he would be left there, or the other men called in again. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe you,” the man said, not hiding his disgust. “It’s the same old story.”

  He talked in a low voice to someone outside the cell, then came back with a pad and ballpoint pen. “Give me your name, address, and phone number. Also where you work.”

  “I can’t. My hands…” Noel turned to show them manacled.

  The handcuff key was found, and Noel wrote down the required information. “Here’s your flashlight, Mr.…Cummings, is it?” he asked, reading the paper.

  “I just wish I had hit one of them when I threw it. That might have been one or two minutes less for them to stab. He might have lived then, mightn’t he?”

  “Why bother thinking about what might have been?” The Fisherman led Noel out of the cell, through the corridor, and into the little foyer outside the glass door. No one else appeared. “I have to apologize for the others. Sometimes they’re like animals,” he said, taking Noel’s hand and shaking it.

  Noel took the hand, shook it, looked into the man’s sad brown eyes, and sa
id he understood. He was halfway out the metal door when he had a thought. “Shouldn’t the police be notified?”

  “We are the police,” the Fisherman said, closing the glass door with a click.

  2

  The note from the department chairman arrived faster than Noel expected. It was prominent in the cubbyhole that served as his mailbox in the Sociology Department general office when Noel stopped there between classes the following afternoon.

  “Are you sure this is for me?” he asked Alison, Boyle’s secretary. She lifted her glasses Eve Arden style, and peered at the envelope the note had come in.

  “Put it there myself.”

  “Is he free now?” Noel asked.

  “Will be shortly. Seat?”

  “No. I’d rather flirt with you.”

  “You mean you’d rather try to extort information from me,” she said. A tall, slender, vaguely washed out blonde, not unattractively approaching her fifties, Alison had a dizzy and capricious surface that hid a shrewd mind. She knew everything that went on in the department, possibly in the entire school. Noel settled on the edge of the desk and watched her go back to typing.

  “You have to admit this invitation is a little sudden,” he said. “You know as well as I that Boyle and I talk to each other once a term. The conversation is always the same.”

  “This one won’t be,” she declared, then lowered her voice. “Are you in trouble?”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  She looked around the office, then, certain that no one was listening, she said, “What were the police holding you for? They called here, you know. Spoke to me. They insisted on speaking to him. I tried to stop them…” She shrugged.

  “Is that all?” he said, with exaggerated relief.

  A day and a half had passed and he was still hearing that anguished wheeze, feeling the hands pounding at him, seeing that dread featureless face. But instead of being depressed he was exhilarated. He’d missed his first class yesterday, but had been electric for the others, pulling ideas out of thin air, making associations and connections that had surprised him and awed the class. Half of them had gathered around his desk long after the period bells had rung, asking questions, offering ideas.