by Jon Cleary
“No, I’m not. I just think he’ll be sure to hear you - “
They were snarling at each other like two women who had been chained to each other for months. Perhaps all prisoners went through this mood, Lisa thought. The anatomy of captivity was something she had never studied; how many prisoners employed a PR consultant? The sudden wayward thought amused her, relaxed her. She sat back on her heels and looked up at Sylvia.
“Why are we picking at each other? We already have someone else to fight - why fight each other?”
Sylvia hesitated, then nodded. “I’m sorry. What can I do to help?”
“Keep an ear to the door while I try and hammer this buckle in.”
It took four heavy whacks with Lisa’s shoe to push the buckle in under the edge of the board. Being tall, she never wore really high heels; she was doubly fortunate that current fashion dictated solid chunky heels designed to help fashionable women escape from boarded-up rooms. After each hard tap she stopped and looked at Sylvia; the latter, ear pressed to the door, would listen and then nod to go on. Abel, a man not given to much reading, was filling in the hours waiting for Carole by looking at an old movie on television. Pat O’Brien, machine-gun voice punctuated with machine-gun fire, drowned out the sound of the shoe heel whacking against the buckle.
Lisa did not have enough strength in her wrists and forearms to use the buckle as a lever. Sylvia came and stood over her and together they pushed as hard as they could against the makeshift lever. The nails holding the board gave just a little; then the buckle began to bend. Lisa, massaging her hands and wrists, pulled out the buckle and reversed it.
“We’ll have to drag the board out at least half an inch so we can get our fingers under it.”
Sylvia was also massaging her hands. “I don’t think the buckle is going to hold. Bonwit Teller should put steel ones on their suits.”
“That other store - Bergdorf Goodman?-is better for escape kits.”
They were joking out of the hysteria of exhaustion as much as anything else; but also out of the fear that had begun to increase now they had committed themselves. Beyond the bedroom door gangsters or police, someone, went down under a storm of bullets. And on the other side of the boarded-up window the real storm, the other enemy, beat against the shutters, mocking them.
They tried again, pushing hard against the buckle. Suddenly Sylvia’s hands, oily with sweat, slid off Lisa’s; as they did so, her long nails, breaking off, gouged into the back of Lisa’s right hand. Lisa let out a stifled gasp of pain,
let go the buckle and it clattered to the floor. Instantly both women turned towards the door, Lisa holding the back of her hand to her mouth.
But Warner Brothers had come to their rescue: thank God they had made noisy movies in the Thirties. Pat O’Brien yelled at Glenda Farrell and she yelled back: in those days one never heard a pin drop nor a brass buckle, perhaps not even a house brick. Lisa, still sucking her hand, picked up the buckle.
“That’s no good. We’ll have to find something else.”
Sylvia looked at her broken nails, then at Lisa’s blood-streaked hand. “You better put something on that, in case it becomes infected - “
“What, for instance?”
“I don’t know. Anything. Spit, even - “
They were snapping at each other again; frustration was smarting as much as the bloody marks on Lisa’s hand. Lisa got up, began to move angrily about the room, searching -for what? She abruptly pulled up, tried to steady herself. She wanted to weep, but that would only weaken her further; she was not afraid of nor ashamed of tears, but this was not the moment for them. Pain and disappointment had temporarily made her lose her normal coherence of thought; the walls closed in on her, closing her mind. She looked about her, trying to see everything in the room individually and in its turn; she remembered Scobie telling her that it was the way a good detective worked, always dismembering everything. Then, moving towards the furniture, she began to inspect every piece in detail.
She found what she was looking for with the dressing-table: its legs unscrewed, the screw a thick threaded iron bolt. As she took off the leg, Sylvia pushed one of the chairs forward to prop up the dressing-table. The two women looked at each other and nodded, their differences forgotten again. Lisa shoved the bolt end of the leg in beneath the board; there was just enough space to get some purchase. But when they pulled on the leg the board did not budge.
“We need a fulcrum,” said Sylvia. “We’ll get more leverage pushing instead of pulling.”
Lisa glanced at her with amused admiration. “Where did you learn that?”
“It’s a political maxim,” said Sylvia, and smiled at her own reply; she was beginning to feel light-hearted, almost convinced now that they were going to escape “I’ll unscrew one of the other legs - we can use that.”
She pushed the chair in squarely against the dressing-table, took off the other front leg. It was what they needed: held underneath the leg that Lisa pushed against, it gave them enough leverage to raise the end of the board. Lisa felt the board slowly coming away from the window frame; her wrists felt as if they were cracking, but she kept pushing with all her strength. Both of them, concentrating on what they were doing, did not notice the sudden silence in the other room: Pat O’Brien and the machine-guns had been replaced by a soft-sell commercial. The board suddenly gave, lifting off the window frame with a screech of nails. And in the split moment afterwards they did hear the silence out in the living-room, then the sharp scrape of a chair on the floor.
Lisa snatched the curtains together, fell on her bed, held the dressing-table leg against her breast as she hastily pulled the blankets up over her. Sylvia had fallen on her bed, done the same: pale with fear, eyes closed, they looked like women who had finally collapsed from exhaustion. They heard the key being turned in the lock, then the door opened.
Abel stood there looking down at the two women. For the first time he saw them without their glaring back at him. They were good-looking dames, even if one of them was almost old enough to be his mother. He had seen dames like them on Michigan Avenue back home, the well-dressed bitches whose husbands ran Chicago, who never saw the poor neighbourhoods, who preferred to believe ghettos only happened in other countries but never in America. He had
hated those dames he had never known and now he transferred that hatred to the two women lying here asleep.
He stared at them, suddenly excited by his power over them; then his feeling of power made him magnanimous. He’d let them get a good night’s sleep: tomorrow might be their last day. He switched out the light, closed the door and •locked it.
Lisa opened her eyes, saw absolutely nothing in the blackness. She sat up, turned towards Sylvia; but there was only blackness there too. Then her eyes became accustomed to the darkness and she saw the thin sliver of light under the door; but it illuminated nothing, only seemed to deepen the darkness of the rest of the room. Lisa slid off her bed, groped towards Sylvia’s bed, banged her knee against it and once again had to stifle a cry of pain. She fell on Sylvia, felt her way up the latter’s body, whispered in her ear, “We can’t put the light on again. We’ll have to work in the dark.”
“Oh God, is it worth it?”
Lisa shook her, feeling the hopeless listlessness in the body under her hands. “We’ve got to! If we stay here and he finds that loose board in the morning - “
She felt Sylvia’s body stiffen. “We should never have started - “
“But we did Come on - help me-”
She felt her way round Sylvia’s bed and to the window. She dragged back the curtains and groped for the loosened board; one pull on it told her it would come away with no difficulty. She eased it back, careful in the darkness of the long protruding nails. Then she felt Sylvia touch her.
“It may take us hours in the dark - “
“We’ll take it in turns.” She was feeling beneath the second board from the bottom; now the bottom board had been removed there was space
to slide the dressing-table leg in between the board and the inner edge of the frame. “Where’s my shoe? I’m lopsided.”
She found her shoe, put it on and then began to work. It took them an hour to remove enough boards for them to be
able to reach up and snap back the window catch. By that time they had barked knuckles, aching wrists and nerves ready to burst through their skin; when they spoke to each other it was only to snarl abusively. But they were committed now to the same end: escape. There was no turning back.
The sound of the storm penetrated the bedroom more clearly as they removed the boards. But out in the living-room another old movie had begun: Akim Tamiroff was dying this time to Paramount’s machine-guns. Lisa gently eased the window up, drew back her head as the wind whistled in through the slats of the shutters.
“Get your jacket and your handbag. You go out first and hold the shutters so they won’t bang, while I get out.”
“Which way shall we go?”
“To the left, I think. I remember when Abel came back in the truck this afternoon, I heard him drive up from that direction. The road or the street must be that way. Once we’re there we’ll look for the nearest lights.”
Though she had been listening to the sound of the storm for hours, Lisa was shocked at the fury of it when she pushed open the shutters. One of them slammed back at her, almost breaking her wrist; she had to push hard against it to prevent its banging against the window frame. Though she was now looking out of the room she could still see nothing; the whirling roaring darkness suddenly had its own terror for her. But she fought against the erupting fear in her, pushed Sylvia out of the window.
“Good luck! Wait for me - we mustn’t get separated - “
She had already put on her suit jacket. Her handbag was at her feet; she reached down in the darkness and snatched it up; even at that moment it struck her that she must be one of those women whose handbag was an inseparable part of her. She scrambled through the window, hitting her head on the raised glass, slipped on the sill and fell awkwardly into a pool of water and mud, grabbing at Sylvia as she did so. They both fell, Sylvia letting go of the shutters, which at
once slammed back against the side of the house with a crack like gunfire.
Lisa struggled up to her hands and knees, looked up into the lash of the rain. And instantly the darkness was gone; for a moment she thought she had been blown out of her mind. The whole side of the cottage sprang into sharp relief: the glistening, dripping white boards, the banging dark shutters like disembodied wings, the ragged, frantically-dancing bush at the corner. She saw the line of scrubby trees on the other side of the narrow driveway whipping back and forth in the onslaught of the wind, saw the fence that had been blown down; then the car or truck, she couldn’t see which, was almost on top of her, its horn blowing urgently and its headlights blazing at her like white furnaces. She scrambled to her feet, shouting to Sylvia to follow her, and plunged across the driveway and through the trees. She fell over the blown-down fence, hurting her knee, picked herself up and stumbled down the side of the cottage next door.
She kept going, her mind a blank, running with the instinctive urge to escape of a terrified animal. She had forgotten Sylvia; she was alone in the black tumult of the night. She ran into something, cracking her hip against it; grabbed at it and recognized it as a picket fence. She felt her way along it, came to an opening and stumbled through it. Then the ground gave way beneath her and she fell, her mouth wide open in a scream that was nothing in the fury of the storm. She landed heavily on her side, sank into soft mud, felt it close over her face. Oh God, God, don’t let me die!
She rolled over on her back, clawed the mud from her eyes and mouth, felt the rain washing it away. She got painfully back to her feet, trying now to accustom her eyes to the darkness. She looked around for Sylvia but there was no sign of her; which way had she gone, had she managed to get away at all ? Lisa could no longer see the car’s or truck’s headlights; they must have been switched off. But she caught a glimpse of the dancing firefly of a torch and she turned and stumbled away from it, making her way along the
trench or whatever it was she was in, one hand reaching out to the bank on her left. She was crying with fear and pain and exhaustion, but her legs carried her on of their own volition. She slipped and fell again, falling to her right. There was no bank there and, reaching out as she lay on the ground, she felt the mud give way to a hard surface. She must be on a road.
She stood up, stepped blindly on to the concrete surface of the roadway. Turning her face away from the wind and the rain, she could see a little more clearly now. It was not that the darkness had diminished, there now appeared to be varying degrees of it. She could make out no definite shapes, but there seemed to be houses on both sides of the street, all of them darkened; away in the distance, God knew how many miles away, she could see pin-points of light that came and went like cloud-swept stars. Then she saw the closer light, the flickering yellow eye of the torch as Abel came looking for her.
She turned and began to run again, straight into the wild surf of the storm this time. She came to a bend in the roadway, did not know she had reached it till she ran right off the concrete into a dip, fell again, picked herself up and saw the big dark shape ahead of her that must be a house. She stumbled up a slope towards it, lurching across long grass and up on to a wide porch. She fell against a door, beat on it with her fists, her head turned to look back over her shoulder as the yellow beam of the torch came bouncing down the roadway. She was screaming incoherently, hurling her fists against the door; they had smashed through the wire of the screen-door and were thumping on the timbers of the front door. But there was no answer: her pounding was echoing through an empty house.
She ran along the porch, plunged off the unseen end of it into a thick bush that scratched at her like a clutch of claws. As she picked herself up a sudden, extraordinarily strong gust of wind flung her back against the side of the house, cracking her head against the timbers. Dazed, she fell on
her knees again, ready now to surrender to the rain and the mud. The bush hid her from the roadway; the beam from the torch swept across the front of the house, then was gone. But she had not seen her good fortune. Blind with pain and exhaustion she half-lay, half-sat in the mud while the wind tore at her and the rain drove an army of lances at her.
Then in her clouded mind she remembered she had not been alone: she had to find Sylvia. Like an old crippled woman she forced herself up into the storm; driven by the wind, she almost ran down the slope into the roadway again. There was no sign of the torch; Abel might be as lost as herself in the wild black night. She had no idea which way to turn; help could lie in any direction. She stumbled up the road, trying to keep to the hard surface of it; another furious gust of wind hit her, sending her tumbling off into the mud. She picked herself up, looked up and saw the dim shape of a house and a smaller, darker shape beside it. She struggled up a driveway, the rain lashing against her face as if to drive her back. She fell against the smaller shape: it was a car. A car? She leaned against it, fighting for some memory that eluded her. What did the car mean? Then she remembered: they had come out here in a truck ! This house was someone else’s, someone was there only yards away who could help her!
Crying hysterically, she dragged herself up on to the front porch, stumbled along it, fell against the screen door. Somewhere she could hear a familiar sound, wood slamming against wood, but her mind was too confused for memories. She beat against the wire, breaking it, her frantic fists thudding through to pound against the front door. Then the door itself opened and she saw the dim shape in the opening.
She fell back as the man pushed open the screen door and reached down to take hold of her. “Oh, thank God you’re here! I’m-”
“Welcome back, Mrs Malone.”
“We may not be so lucky next time,” said Carole.
“There isn’t gonna be a fucking next time!” Then Abel swallowed his anger as he saw her s
tiffen. “Sorry, baby.”
“I’m not blaming you, honey - “
“Jesus! Blaming me?” The anger sprung up in him again. What was she talking about? Blaming him? “You go off, you stay away half the goddam night, you leave me here like I’m some fucking baby-sitter - !”
She hit him across the mouth with her hand. He raised his own hand to retaliate and she stood in front of him, her eyes cold and hard, daring him to hit her. “Hit me, you bastard, and that’s the end! I don’t need you - “
He slowly lowered his hand, shook his head dazedly at what he had almost done: if he had hit her he would have gone on hitting her until she was dead. His head suddenly began to ache and he slumped down in the chair behind him. “I’m sorry, baby. Don’t let’s fight - “
Still unmoving, she stared at him, wondering what to do with him. She was not ungrateful for what he had done so far; she knew she could not have kidnapped Sylvia Forte without him. But she did not need him from now on and the longer he stayed with her the more difficult it would be to get rid of him when the time came. But if she told him to go now … She had seen the look in his eyes, had recognized the danger sign that she had glimpsed before but had told herself was only her imagination. He was not insane, she was sure of that, but his anger would some day break out of him entirely and he would not be able to control it. She had seen the same look in the eyes of the policeman who had clubbed Roy to death.
She turned away from him, went out to the kitchen and began to make coffee. She took down a cup and saucer, hesitated, then took down three more cups and saucers. It
would be a simple means of letting him know that all four of them in this cottage were bound together, whether he liked it or not.
She felt rather than heard him come to the doorway, but she did not turn. “I’m making coffee.”