He was screaming, “Hey! Hey! Let her go! Hey!” This was different from his fantasies. In his fantasies, he always fought the bad guys. In real life, he was hoping like crazy that his shouts would scare the bastards away. That would’ve been more than enough heroism to brag about at the office Monday morning.
As it turned out, when he reached the trees, the attackers seemed not to have heard his approach at all. They were both completely immersed in their business. One of them was holding a knife to the terrified girl’s throat while the other straddled her thrashing body, ripping open her overcoat, pushing her skirt up. They both glanced around, startled, as Danny burst onto the scene.
Still running, Danny let fly with a wild, sloppy roundhouse. It cracked the nearest attacker on the cheek and sent him stumbling to his hands and knees. The other one, the guy with the knife, opened his mouth as if he’d seen Jesus come. The girl slipped from his slackened grip and plopped awkwardly to the earth.
Danny wheeled and threw another big punch. He hit the knife-man in the side of the neck. The knife-man fell back and gagged but he held onto his knife and waved it in front of him, fending Danny off. The other attacker, meanwhile, was scrambling angrily to his feet, ready to launch himself at the man who’d hit him. Danny was a strong, healthy twenty-seven-year-old, but he was only average size and he’d never been in any kind of a physical fight before, not even in school. He suddenly realized that these guys not only could kill him, they would kill him, gladly. The first gibberings of the Little Clown of Fear began to make themselves heard in a corner of his mind.
Just at that moment, though, the girl started screaming. It was an unbelievably loud and piercing sound which Danny had only heard before in horror movies and from his little sister. At the first sustained note, both attackers froze in their positions as if caught in a game of Red Light/Green Light. The next thing Danny knew, they were rocketing at top speed into the darkness and the far trees.
A breath flooded out of him and relief flooded through him. In his fantasies, the damsel in distress usually didn’t do much, just waited around for him to rescue her. The bad guys usually ended up sprawled on the earth unconscious or bound hand and foot. But Danny was no idiot: Reality’s reality. He knew a lucky outcome when he saw one. He grabbed the girl by the arm, drew her to her feet, and hustled her out of the park as fast as he could in case the attackers should decide to come back and slaughter them both.
Her name was Mary. She was a pretty tough kid. She had scratches on her face and neck and chest. The buttons had been ripped off her overcoat. Her top was torn, half of her bra was exposed. She was trembling, all right — hell, so was he — but she wasn’t hysterical or anything. She was barely crying.
When they were back on the avenue, under a streetlight, she took stock of herself. She turned away from Danny to readjust her pantyhose discreetly. Belted the overcoat shut to cover the rest of the damage. Then she faced him again. She took a few angry swipes at her swimming eyes, smearing mascara around her cheeks and temples.
“Bastards,” she said, with a bitter laugh. “You were really brave. Thank you.”
“I guess we oughta call the cops,” said Danny.
“Nah. Just help me get home, okay? I’m a little shaky.”
They rode across town in a cab. Mary stared out the window. She made angry sniffling noises, dabbing at her eyes with a Kleenex. She didn’t seem to want to talk.
So Danny sat silently. He went over what had happened in his mind, composing the story he would tell his friends, smoothing the rough edges. As his excitement subsided, he began to feel the effects of the business. His knuckles burned and his throat was hoarse from screaming and a sort of retrospective terror had come over him. All in all, though, he felt pretty good — even the pain felt satisfying. He had lived up to his imagination. He was a hero.
“Here it is,” Mary said.
Danny looked out the window. His lips parted in silent surprise.
They were in one of the best sections of town, right next to the museum. They had stopped in front of an elegant stone townhouse.
Mary turned to him and flashed a weepy smile. “Would you mind coming in with me? My folks are gonna be crazed. They won’t believe what happened. It would really help if you were there to back me up.”
When they came through the door, Danny gaped at what he saw. The front hall was vast. A massive chandelier hung high, high above a marble floor. A fantastically wide staircase swept up to the second story with archaic grace. He could hardly believe the size of it all, the opulence. City real estate being what it was, it must’ve cost millions.
Almost at once, a man and woman in their fifties came hurrying down the stairs toward them: Mary’s parents. They were both wearing bathrobes, hers a floral silk, his cotton, plaid. Danny realized they had seen him and Mary via the security camera above the front door and they were already upset. As she reached the marble floor, the woman opened her arms. Mary rushed into them.
“Oh, Mama!” she said. She started sobbing into her mother’s shoulder.
Mary’s father paused. He seemed to study the two women a moment. Then he glanced over at Danny. He was short — a head shorter than Danny was — but thickly, solidly built. He had silver hair; a rough, stony face. His eyes were black and hard. They glinted in the light.
“Was this you did this?” he asked quietly.
In all his young life, Danny had never felt anything like what he felt then. A watery weakness through his whole body, the taste of copper on his tongue, a spasm of pain in his back, a wild, childlike anxiety that he was about to lose control of his bladder: fear — he had never felt that kind of fear. He couldn’t really tell why he felt it now. Something in the older man’s posture, relaxed, unbristled, calm. Something in the thin line of his mouth, in his flinty eyes.
But Mary, still clinging to her mother’s robe with one hand, swung her tear-stained face around to them. “No, Daddy, no! He fought them. There were two of them. They were gonna rape me. One had a knife. Danny was just passing by. He was so brave.”
Her father continued to stare at Danny another second. Then he nodded, satisfied. A smile twitched at his lips. He gave Danny an approving slap on the shoulder.
Danny sagged. He breathed as if he hadn’t breathed for long minutes. Maybe he hadn’t.
“What was it — n—s?” said the older man.
The hateful word came out that casually, as if he used it all the time. Taken off-guard, Danny hesitated. Once, only last year, he’d told a cabdriver to shut the hell up when he started talking racist garbage like that. But he wasn’t going to tell Mary’s father to shut the hell up. He wasn’t going to protest at all. On top of which, he couldn’t exactly lie about the race of the attackers.
“Well… they were black guys, yeah,” he said finally. Instantly, he felt his evening of courage stained, diminished. He’d been a hero before, but he felt like a coward now. He wished the night had faded away at its high point like a movie scene. Why couldn’t it be like that? Why the hell couldn’t life ever play out like daydreams?
Mary’s father nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Danny, huh? You did a good thing, Danny. I’m grateful. Tunny’ll drive you home.”
Danny’s gaze followed the older man’s gesture. He saw the shadow of another man in a corner of the foyer. The man must’ve come out of the door under the stairs. He was very large: tall, broad shoulders. Standing with his hands folded in front of him — just standing there, waiting. Tunny. What the hell kind of a name was Tunny?
Danny didn’t want to get in a car with the guy. He didn’t want Mary’s father to know where he lived. He didn’t want to be with these people at all anymore. He just wanted to get out of here.
He licked his lips. “Great,” he said. “Great. Thanks.”
Tunny met him in front of the townhouse, driving a black monster of a Lexus, the same kind of luxury sedan his boss at the agency drove. Danny moved to get in the front seat, but only the door to the back was op
en. Tunny sat behind the wheel, waiting, until Danny got in the back.
All through the silent drive downtown, Danny’s mind was working, his imagination working. He hadn’t had a good look at Tunny’s face yet. He tried to catch glimpses of it in the rearview, but he couldn’t see much in the dark of the car. He had a sense of the man’s features as thick, brutal, and sardonic, but he might have been making that up. He was making up all kinds of things, all kinds of scenarios. Maybe Mary’s father was a mob boss or an international criminal or something. Maybe he didn’t want anyone alive to know his daughter had been “dishonored” in the park. Maybe Tunny was driving him out to some swamp across the state line where he’d make him kneel in the mud and put a bullet in the back of his head. Danny resolved he wouldn’t kneel, but he remembered that watery feeling in his muscles when Mary’s father had simply looked at him and, for the first time, he began to understand that you might not always have a choice about such things.
Danny kept his eye on the streets outside, watching to see if they turned off the wrong way — toward some swamp across the state line. They didn’t. Tunny guided the Lexus straight down the avenue, then over to Danny’s apartment building. The Lexus pulled up alongside the row of parked Toyotas and Hondas.
“Thanks for the lift,” said Danny.
“No problem,” Tunny answered in a deep, dull voice. “You made a good friend tonight. I’ll be seeing you.”
When he was standing on the curb, Danny tried again to get a look at the driver’s face. He thought he saw acne-scarred skin, a smirk. He wasn’t sure. Then the Lexus was gone.
At work on Monday, Danny told the story of his daring rescue and showed off his bruised knuckles to his friends. He played down the part about Mary’s father. He made a joke of it. “I wanted to say, ‘Hey, you’re welcome, you racist scumbag.’ ” His friends laughed. Gina praised him for his courage. Ellis obviously envied him and tried to tell some old hero stories about himself. It felt good — especially Gina’s praise. Gina was small and slender with short black hair and cute, impish features. She was smart and ready to work hard with the guys, but she wasn’t afraid to be frivolous and vulnerable and girly either. Danny liked that. Ellis liked it too. It was pretty well understood among them that she was going to choose one or the other of them after a while.
The three were the agency’s hot team right now. Their work on the Wingdale account had made them up-and-coming stars. They were currently putting together a proposal for Paulson’s, the national grocery chain, which was in play after leaving Michaelson & Fine. Bringing them into the agency would be a huge coup. That’s what they’d been working on that Friday night when Danny had walked home by the park.
They were at it again all that week, brainstorming, putting the finishing touches on their pitch. By Thursday, they had it pretty well nailed down. They were in the tenth-floor conference room rehearsing and tweaking the last details when the door opened and Wally Harris poked his head in.
“Brad Spinker landed Paulson’s,” he told them — just like that.
The three charged into Spinker’s office, Danny in the lead.
“I feel like crap about this, guys, really, I swear,” said Spinker. He was tilted back in his chair. He had his feet up on his desk. He didn’t look as if he felt like crap. He looked as if he felt great. “It was a casual thing. Y’know, a party. Paulson started unloading on me. So I was telling him you guys were working on something terrific — I was. But, you know, I threw in a couple of casual suggestions of my own along the way and…” Spinker was wearing a silk burgundy tie and had a burgundy handkerchief in the pocket of his pinstripe suit. His father ran a huge consulting firm. He’d probably gotten him the intro to Paulson.
Danny went into a rage. He didn’t hold back. He started cursing at the son of a bitch right there in his office, pointing his finger at him, calling him names. It started to sound as if he’d actually punch him — which he probably wouldn’t have. But the fury felt like bubbling acid in him and there was no question he would’ve loved to knock Spinker and his burgundy tie right over the back of his chair.
Finally, Ellis got in front of him, between him and Spinker’s desk.
“It’s over,” Ellis kept saying to Danny, holding up his hands as if to push him back. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here. It’s over.”
What could Danny do finally? He let Ellis maneuver him out of the office, still cursing over his shoulder, still calling the smirking Spinker names. Then they were out in the hall and he had nothing but his anger and his disappointment. It was the same for all three of them. They had nothing else left. They went to sit in the coffee shop on the corner where they’d done some of their best work on the proposal. They stared into their coffee concoctions and shook their heads and cursed the unfairness of it. They blamed Avram, their boss, for encouraging the agency’s “cutthroat culture,” and they fantasized about what they’d like to see happen to Spinker. All the while, they felt like losers because that’s what losers did: blame and complain and fantasize and curse the unfairness of things.
But the Japanese have an expression — at least, Danny thought it was the Japanese. They said: Sit by the river long enough, and the body of your enemy will float by. If it was the Japanese, they sure knew a thing or two. Because, one week after Paulson signed on with the agency, Spinker underwent some kind of nuclear head explosion or something. One day, he just didn’t show up for work. Next day, same thing. Then after he was AWOL almost a whole week, he called in — and he was in St. Louis. St. Louis, as in Missouri. When he got put through to Avram, he started babbling about too much pressure and a change of priorities and “a major reevaluation” and this, that, and the other. The bottom line was: He was gone, he’d quit, he was history. Suddenly, the agency had the Paulson’s account and no one to handle it — except they did have someone because Danny, Ellis, and Gina had done nothing but work on Paulson’s before Spinker pulled his double cross. So not only did Avram give them the account, within two weeks they were able to sell Paulson on all the stuff they’d been planning to sell him on in the first place. And because they’d rescued the agency in a crisis, they were even bigger stars than they would’ve been had they simply won the client over from the start.
From cursing in the coffee shop, they went to clinking beer mugs in their favorite bar.
“The gutter to the stars nonstop,” as Ellis put it.
And Danny thought: Life was funny. You could never give up. There was always a chance that something good would happen.
Of course, now they were working practically around the clock, getting the campaign ready to go. It was tiring, but it was fun. Also, Danny and Gina wrote most of the copy, so there were a couple of times when they worked late together, without Ellis. That gave Danny the chance he’d been waiting for.
He was careful about it. He didn’t try anything at the office. Women could be sensitive about these things, Danny told himself sagely. Instead, he waited until they were at his apartment one night, doing a mind-meld over pizza. Gina was at the desk, at his laptop, Danny was leaning in toward the screen over her shoulder. She smelled like roses. The scent seemed to draw him in. After a while, his face was so close to hers, it was nothing to lean just that much closer and let his lips brush not even her cheek but only the soft, soft down on her cheek.
Gina jumped — jumped as if a spark had leapt between them. She twisted in the chair, rolled the chair an inch or two away from him. She gazed up at him with her big, tender brown eyes.
“Oh God. Oh God, Danny,” she said sorrowfully.
Danny felt a terrible heaviness in his chest. “What? No good?” he said. “I thought…”
“No, no, no, it’s not your fault. I should’ve said something. I kept meaning to, it’s just… me and Ellis, we…”
“Oh. Oh jeez…” Danny straightened away from her chair. Threw his hands up like a basketball player pretending he hadn’t committed a foul. “I’m really sorry, Gina.”
“No,
Danny. I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I should’ve said something. I was going to. I just…”
“Sure. Sure. No, that’s okay. It’s, you know, you and Ellis — it’s great. Bad for me, but great for you guys. Really.”
He meant it. He didn’t blame Gina. He didn’t blame Ellis. He liked them both. He was just sad, that’s all. He was surprised how sad he was. And disappointed. And jealous, too — he had to admit that. It wasn’t only that Danny had imagined sleeping with Gina. He imagined sleeping with every cute girl he met. But he had also imagined waking up with her, holding her after the radio alarm started playing, sitting with her on a Sunday morning and talking over coffee while they read the paper. It hurt like hell to think that Ellis would be doing all that instead.
Again, though, the message life sent him was: Never despair. Hang tough. The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings.
For a week or so, he was very depressed about Gina. More depressed than he would’ve expected. At first, he thought it was the ego-blow of losing her to his friendly rival Ellis, which was worse somehow than having some stranger come along and snap her up. Soon, though, he realized it was more than that. It was Gina herself. He told himself that other girls got teary-eyed over baby pictures and made mischievous jokes and were generous with their help and got silly about clothes and movie stars. Plenty of girls were like that. But somehow, none of them added up to the whole Gina package. One morning — one morning when it was very bad — he looked at his half-shaven face in the mirror and whispered the truth to his own image: “You dumb dick. You’re in love with her.” Great time to figure it out.
Then, that very morning, at just about his darkest hour, he went into his office and there was an e-mail waiting for him from his boss. Avram wanted to meet with him before lunch. The way he was feeling — as down in the dumps as he was — his first thought was that he was going to be fired. But that didn’t make sense. And, in fact, when he entered Avram’s office, the roostery little man came out from behind that ten-square-acre desk of his and greeted him with a smile and an outstretched hand.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007 Page 20