At the end of the corridor, down below, out in the street, the false Ben-Saïd then drops his arm, which Was indicating to the two men in uniform the subway station (neither policeman moreover has actually looked in this direction), while the real Ben-Saïd is meanwhile still riding, in his yellow imitation-camel’s hair overcoat, on an express line which crosses Brooklyn, the only other passenger in his car being a blond adolescent whose black imitation-leather jacket has a W embroidered on one pocket.
The boy has sprawled out indecorously, his legs wide apart and resting only on the tips of his heels on the stained floor, his body leaning back on the wooden bench facing the one on which Ben-Saïd is sitting. But Ben-Saïd is next to the window, whereas the young hoodlum is on the outer side of his bench, having therefore beside him, within reach of his left arm, the little connecting door to the next car, toward the front of the train. In order to attract the attention of this wealthy-looking passenger who seems lost in thought, W puts one hand on the handle behind his shoulder and works it up and down several times, so that the end of the latch slides up each time and falls back into its horizontal position with a heavy click like that of a well-oiled rifle bolt. Ben-Saïd betrays signs of a discreet annoyance (a kind of very faint nervous twitch which periodically convulses the corners of his mouth and his cheek); finally he looks up toward the door, but merely gives a quick, furtive glance at it, moreover a useless one for it was easy enough to guess the origin of the noise And then he stares down again at the yellow material of his overcoat which is carefully pulled over his knees.
Behind him, at the other end of the car, behind the glass of the other connecting door—in other words, actually, behind two identical and parallel panes of glass, separated by about a yard and belonging to the two corresponding doors of the two adjoining cars linked by a narrow iron platform provided with an iron railing (over which I could easily lean out, as I climb down, in order to glimpse once again the crowd gathered in the street below …)—Laura, who is watching the scene and beginning to grow impatient, not understanding why things are not moving faster, makes signs to her accomplice, who is about fifteen yards away. But young W, who cannot readily make out the gestures of his leader or, with all the more reason, her expressions, does not manage to grasp their meaning; since he is afraid of awakening Ben-Saïd’s suspicions—although the latter once again keeps his eyes lowered, staring at his thighs, preoccupied by his struggle not to yield to the twitching around his mouth—the youth does not want to risk the slightest communication, even if it were with only one eye, with the girl who, supposing that her signals have not even been seen, indicates her irritation by increasingly nervous gestures, though these are still as difficult to interpret with a view to any action she would thereby be ordering him to perform.
At this moment the subway train stops in an empty station, and Laura sees the man in the yellow overcoat leap up. Even faster, W has raised his left leg to a horizontal position, knee stiff, and has set the heel on the edge of the opposite bench, which blocks Ben-Saïd’s way. The three double doors of the car then open simultaneously, operated by the driver at the head of the train, employing a decrepit and noisy remote-control system. But there is no one on the platform, nor does anyone seem to be getting out of the train, in any case out of the cars in the immediate proximity. Ben-Saïd, having vainly tried to shove aside the young hoodlum’s leg, decides to use another method, less dignified but more effective: to get past it by climbing over it.
He has scarcely had time to make the necessary movement with one foot than the boy, who had thrust one hand into an inside pocket of his jacket, has pulled it out again holding an object which the passenger can immediately identify as a closed knife, with all the more certainty, moreover, in that it does not remain closed for long: the boy having operated the switchblade mechanism with an expert finger, a shiny, pointed, well-sharpened blade springs out of the ivory handle and comes to rest, threateningly, close to the yellow coat with a click which suggests, more distinctly, the one produced a few seconds earlier by the latch of the little glass door. “Idiot,” Laura mutters to herself and concerning not Ben-Saïd but young W who, according to the plans agreed upon, should be using an altogether different system of enticement in order to convince his vis-à-vis to remain in the car with him.
Ben-Saïd hesitates, looks at the knife, the open door to the empty platform, then sidelong at the boy’s face in an attempt to assess his determination, stupidity, and criminality, however combined. Unfortunately the young face does not reflect the slightest emotion or disposition of mind or intention of any kind. The double doors slide shut with a long groan, then slam closed, and Ben-Saïd can do nothing but sit down again. As if no murderous intention nor desire to intimidate had ever occurred to him, the boy casually raises his still extended left leg and sets his foot on the floor again, then begins picking his teeth with the point of his knife, a sight so difficult to endure that Ben-Saïd prefers to stare down once again at the synthetic fibers of his overcoat which he carefully rearranges around his knees.
With the same care and the same deliberation, W closes his knife and restores it to the inside pocket of his leather jacket. Then he puts his left hand, close against his shoulder, on the brass handle of the little door between the cars, works the latch and lets it fall back into place with a rifle-like click which makes Ben-Saïd give a start. The passenger stands up and, amazed by the sudden ease of the enterprise, reaches the central corridor in one stride in order to head for the rear of the car. He has just time to notice, at the end, behind the rectangular pane of the little door facing him, Laura’s slender, lively figure which immediately stops gesticulating and vanishes to one side, on the metal platform onto which she has stepped during the stop in the empty station.
The train, moving fast again, through a curving tunnel, is now shaken with such sudden jerks that Ben-Saïd must hold onto the nickel-plated vertical bars provided for that purpose. He soon finds himself obliged to sit down, projected by a still more violent jolt onto one of the benches, facing forward as previously but this time in the middle of the car. He wonders if the delicate adolescent girl who was doubtless about to change cars, pursued perhaps by some pervert whose preliminary outrages she has already had to endure, if the delicate adolescent girl with torn underclothes is not going to be thrown now onto the track by one of the jolts, which must be particularly powerful on the narrow jointed platform separating the cars.
The pervert in question, romantically nicknamed “The Subway Vampire” by passengers of the line, is moreover well known to the police who keep the file of his crimes up to date: he has already raped then murdered (or, in some cases, murdered then raped) twelve girls between the ages of thirteen and fourteen since the beginning of the school year, and always by particularly horrible methods, of which the material details figure in the report with a good deal of objectivity and a wealth of specific detail. It would even be quite impossible for normal investigators to reconstruct in this way the series of brutalities suffered by the victims, given what little is generally left of their bodies, if the report were not supplied by the criminal himself. The procedure has, in fact, been judged to be more convenient for everyone, since in any case the man’s identity was clearly established, with his names, nicknames, given names, various addresses, acknowledged professions, and schedule.
If he has not been arrested long since, tried and sentenced to death in the electric chair, it is because he belongs to the regular staff of the municipal information service: he is, specifically, the chief informant belonging to a terrorist organization, in which he holds the chair of sexual criminology of a kind of revolutionary night school. His favorite victims are, for this reason, the daughters of Wall Street bankers who are a little too reluctant to hand over their voluntary assessments, demanded each month by the group’s treasurer. Statistics concerning the accidental mortality among girls of this age group show that such a tolerance in the functioning of the city police is ultimately much
less mortal than deaths by drowning, camping in the Adirondacks, vacations in Europe, having to cross more than three streets to reach school, and ten other activities which it would be out of the question to forbid. The only mysterious point in the case remains the presence in the subway, at this hour, of children who are in principle very closely watched and who have at their disposal all the limousines, with or without chauffeurs, they could desire to get from place to place.
Thus the blond girl who has just been killed was the niece and sole heiress of an influential figure previously mentioned: the man who lives on Park Avenue, between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Streets, in an apartment decorated to look like that of an avant-garde millionaire. I have already told the story, to wit, of the lovely auburn-haired adventuress sent to him first as a lure, in order to effect the collection of his assessment by more humanitarian methods.
“You have just said that the adolescent girl had stepped onto the metal platform between the two cars, during the subway stop in the previous station. She was therefore, at the moment Ben-Saïd stood up, not being pursued by the sex fiend whose existence you are obviously making up on the spot …”
“Yes she was. She was being pursued and even worse, as I’ll explain right now. But the boy in the black jacket, indicated by the letter W in the report, couldn’t know that. He thought that the girl’s violent gestures, at first made inside the next car, against the little pane of glass, then in the space separating the two cars, constituted indications she was giving him at a distance for carrying out his job. However, these arm and head movements were so rapid and confused that he could not manage to figure out what they meant. Actually, they consisted of a chaotic mixture of calls for help and desperate struggles against the aggressor. The boy had also not noticed, because of the distance and the two intervening panes of glass, as well as because of the very dim light in the area between the cars, that the girl’s clothes were torn and covered with blood from the waist to the knees, and that there was also fresh blood spread all over her neck and her right hand.”
“What had happened to the other boy during all this while?”
“What other boy?”
“The one indicated in the report by the letter M.”
“M didn’t go with them that night. He had stayed at home to watch an educational documentary about Equatorial Africa on television.”
“You say that the victim screamed. Yet neither Ben-Saïd nor W heard any scream or any sound of a struggle.”
“Of course they didn’t! The racket of that old subway express train is much too loud, especially on the curves. But that whole part has been recorded on the tape heard by J. Robertson in the uncle’s apartment, as I have already indicated.”
“That tape, if my recollection serves, included no noise of wheels nor groaning metal, only the sounds of a struggle—material torn, panting breath, moans—and the great final scream when the victim was thrown out onto the track, left foot tied to a cord attached to the railing on the platform.”
“It must have been because that tape was edited. Or else there was some special magnetic device which doesn’t record sounds produced by metals.”
“The first time, you mentioned, between the struggle and the final scream, moans of an altogether different nature, which you were glad to suggest referred to pleasure. How could a girl so young participate in that fashion in a particularly brutal violation and in knife wounds inflicted on her own body?”
“They weren’t the victim’s sighs, of course, but those of the murderer. And if you need any further proof in this matter, there are as usual the pieces of evidence gathered at the night’s end by the transport workers: the large patches of blood on the floor and the walls of the car, the various filthy fragments, recovered under a bench, of the schoolgirl’s black dress and white underwear, and finally the thin hemp cord whose origin is certainly the same (one of the three strands composing it is noticeably thicker than the other two in consequence of a systematic defect in the manufacture) as those the murderer has always used to tie up his victims in various ways before, during, or after the operation.”
As for the murderer, he is none other than M himself, of course, as his initial indicates. He merely wore a hoodlum’s mask over his own face. Laura suspected as much right away, luckily for her, alerted by the excessively composed voice of the pseudo-youth, which had permitted her to notice the ill-fitting edge of the plastic film, under the right ear. It was to examine this detail at closer range that she pretended to embrace the boy, as has been said. And to ridicule him, she murmured later on, as she ran away, “Don’t forget to set fire to it, Mark-Anthony!”
The latter is now standing, then, behind the rectangular pane of glass at the end of the car whose little door he does not succeed in opening, since Laura has taken the precaution of removing the inside latch before seeking refuge on the connecting platform. He is, after all, she tells herself, too violent and too stupid. He came very close, this time, to hurting her seriously. She examines, turning it over so that she can see all sides, her right hand which is covered with blood: there is enough light to see that the wound is superficial. Then she ventures another look into the other car: the man in the yellow coat is sitting down again, now; he is watching W who has just stood up in his turn and is moving toward him, not with the determined expression of a delinquent boy who wants to terrorize a timid bourgeois, or of a person who happens to meet an old friend, or simply of the solitary passenger who has decided to join his sole traveling companion, but on the contrary with all kinds of halts, detours, and roundabout movements from one end of the car to the other, as though attracted by the huge panes of glass behind which pass, at a speed all the greater occasionally, the closer they are, the vaulted walls of the subway tunnel, blackish surfaces where the lights of the train reveal in passing the sudden recesses, the niches constructed here and there for possible pedestrians, the signs and figures lacking any apparent meaning which doubtless appear here for the exclusive use of the conductors or of conspirators, the three endless cables which run in festoons about a yard from the ground. Sometimes the boy, seized by a sudden impulse as though some sudden interest had summoned him elsewhere, abruptly abandons his hesitant manner and his vague expression to hurry a little farther ahead, that is, a little closer to Ben-Saïd. But this may be only the effect of an unexpected jerk of the car, which has caused him to miscalculate his equilibrium.
The train, meanwhile, has passed through several local stations without slowing down, revealing only an occasional passenger sprawling on a bench, waiting for the arrival of a bus connection. It now comes to a halt in a larger station, though one as little frequented. Ben-Saïd, who has recognized the name of the stop, “Johnson-Junction,” quickly stands up in order to get off, walking over in front of the central doorway where he waits for the complete immobilization of the train and the automatic opening of the sliding doors. The young hoodlum is then very close to him, and comes still closer in order to be standing, himself, in the immediate proximity of the exit; but he turns his back, obliquely, as though to be inspecting the mechanism of the sliding doors, without seeming to be concerned with his neighbor.
Oddly, once the train has come to a stop, the doors of the car remain shut, whereas the characteristic noise of their normal functioning has been heard from one end of the train to the other, and already the passengers emerging from the neighboring cars are passing on the platform, in front of Ben-Saïd. The latter vainly tries to pull the brass handles apart. Then he runs to the other two doors, one after the other, without any more success: all three are jammed shut. On the platform, behind the first doorway, there is a man in a white coat who, trying to get into the car, also tries to work the outside handles. He exchanges gestures of helplessness with Ben-Saïd; then he says something—perhaps five or six words—but no sound passes through the thick glass, and at the same time the man points authoritatively at the central door, where the boy, for his part, shows no impatience. Before Ben-Saïd has bee
n able to grasp the meaning of his technical advice, the passenger in the white coat, who has gray hair, gives up with a shrug of his shoulders and walks toward the next car toward the head of the train, its doors being wide open, in the normal position. He has just time to get in and immediately the dry click of the automatic closing echoes through the entire station, while the train moves ahead.
Ben-Saïd looks again at what the stranger in the doctor’s coat seemed to be pointing at; he then notices that W is calmly withdrawing the blade of his knife which he had stuck into a slit in the safety mechanism to the upper left of the central door. It is the point of that knife blade which must have jammed the mechanism in the entire car, the boy carefully holding his knife by its ivory handle in order not to be electrocuted.
Ben-Saïd suddenly feels exhausted. He returns to the seat he was occupying at the beginning of the scene, at the front of the car. The boy, too, returns to his seat on the opposite bench, on the same side as the little door connecting the cars, and resumes his apparently unconscious toying with the brass latch, his shoulder letting it return to its closed position each time he shoves it upward.
Laura, who despairs of seeing the situation advance any further, since her clumsy accomplice pretends he does not even see the signals of impatience she has been making to him for the last quarter of an hour or even more, decides to intervene. She puts her hand on the brass latch … but just at this moment she sees behind the rectangular pane of glass above this, at the other end of the car, the very pale face of a gray-haired man in a dazzlingly white coat who stands motionless in the same way on the other connecting platform. He seems about sixty and is observing with surgical attentiveness the boy’s hand resting, a couple of inches from him, on the inside latch. W cannot suspect that someone is spying on him in the darkness behind his back. As for Ben-Saïd, he keeps his eyes fixed on his knees.
The narrator has immediately identified the new character who has thus entered the scene, and whose pale face with its drawn features, thin lips, and penetrating yet tired eyes behind their steel-rimmed glasses now presses closer to the little rectangular pane, which also makes it possible to make out the five or six reddish-brown stains, the size of peas, which distinctly speckle the lapel of the coat, as Doctor Morgan, who is returning to his underground office at the Forty-second Street station after having given the injection which has been described. But Ben-Saïd cannot recognize him, since he does not see him, keeping his eyes fixed on his knees, fixed on his knees, fixed … the whole steel carcass of the train begins to creak louder now, fixed on his …
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