A poster flapping in the gritty wind announced the feature attraction of the Bijou Theatre as a Payne-Hutton production for Colossal. No one on Hamilton Street was interested, though. The picture had been released for distribution six years ago.
Heavy boards were nailed over the Bijou's doors. Tin cashier's booth had long ago been demolished by vandal And the citizens of Hamilton Street had grown accustomed to seeing that last poster worn away bit by bit in summer rain and winter snow. The paper relic of the Bijou's decay was now reduced to a few letters of type, the right eye brow of Chester Morris and Richard Arlen's determine jaw.
Inside the Bijou this damp September evening, however, there was another kind of feature attraction, completely hidden from the weary citizens of Hamilton Street.
In the dark ruin of broken seats and ripped-up carpet, a seventeen-year-old girl named Rita Danilov was getting ready to take on eight boys one at a time.
Getting ready?
Hell, she was ready.
Her head buzzed with the beer she'd consumed after the boys picked her up outside Olivetti's Variety Store. She kicked off her sneaks. She could hardly wait to get free of the binding constriction of her ultra-tight, dark blue toreadors.
Wriggling and mewing like an animal in heat, Rita Danilov unfastened the zipper. She rolled her palms down her hips, pushing at the toreadors to slip them over her voluptuous, softly-gleaming hips.
The eight boys waited nervously, hypnotized by the show taking place amid the litter of beer cans, rotted popcorn and moldy gum in the wide aisle near the decrepit stage. The faces of the boys-none was over eighteen-shone in the gloom as white blurs. On the backs of their satin jackets the word Cobras was stitched in white silk.
"Hey, querida!" called a swarthy kid named Pepe. "Gonna show us everything?"
"Everything, sweetie, just everything." Rita's dark hair gleamed with inky hi-lights as she twisted and wiggled from her clothes, moaning a little. "Hunting a place for the gangbang, the boys had discovered the rear door of the Bijou hanging from its hinges. They'd turned on the only unshattered light bulb, far backstage, to provide what little ilumination they required.
Swilling from a beer can an emaciated kid said, "You hot for us, Rita?"
"Oh, baby, baby! You don't know how hot I am for you!"
A slender boy with wavy dark hair and glasses said: "Jeez, guys. I dunno-"
"You dunno what, Jack in the Box?" snarled the emaciated kid.
"Hell, it's just that Rita's Whitey's girl. We shouldn't mess around, Viper."
The emaciated kid, Viper, said with disgust, "Ah, you mother-fryer!"
"Leave J. B. alone!" ordered the swarthy kid, Pepe. "If he don't want to touch her, he don't have to."
Pepe licked his lips, staring at the white blur of Rita's body wriggling in the half-dark.
"Me, I don't want none of you crap-heads messing up my fun. Just shut up and watch the show. Whitey's at the county farm. What Whitey don't know can't hurt him. We're just takin' care of his querida, that's all."
"Oh, God, do I need taking care of!" Rita moaned.
She struggled with the toreadors, pushing them down so her navel came in sight.
"I need so much taking care of, I think I could handle the whole U. S. Army." She giggled. "Why'd you guys feed me all that beer?" Suddenly her eyes blazed. "Well, come on, come on! Take off, somebody!"
Viper swaggered forward, unzipping his jeans.
"Me first, huh, Rita? Blow, you guys."
"Aw, nuts!" said another of the gang. "Can't we watch?"
"I don't care, I don't give a damn!" Rita panted. "Just give me some action!"
Struggling, writhing her plump young hips, she couldn't seem to manage her clothes.. All of a sudden the beer turned her hands to boneless jelly. Deep in her mind she felt disgust, acute disgust-at the cheapness of the ruined theatre, at the fierce demands of her ripe body. Those demands had made her a slave to the sex-urge since she was fourteen.
Rita Danilov couldn't recall how many boys she'd had.
Hundreds?
Maybe a thousand?
She hated herself for it. Yet when she was right in the middle, racing for the wire going a million miles an hour in ecstasy, she loved it, loved it.
Tonight she'd drunk too much. One, two boys-maybe that many would have satisfied her. But eight?
The most Whitey had ever taken her at once was four times. Could she make the scene eight times? Would they hurt her? Rita didn't know. Suddenly she didn't care.
She clawed her flanks to get free of the rubber-tight toreadors and the sheer black silk panties that burned her hips like fire.
Transfixed, the boys watched Rita strip.
Her gleaming thighs came into view, soft, rounded. She dropped the toreadors and panties in a heap. Viper made an obscene gesture. Rita nodded and giggled, her eyes bright in the dim glow of the backstage bulb.
Viper couldn't take his gaze from her breasts as her wng crimson-nailed fingers tucked under the hem of her tight white sweater and pulled it upward.
Upward across a tapered plane of white belly.
Upward to reveal swelling under-cones of a lacy black bra in which the creamed hills of her size thirty-eight breasts bulged excitingly.
Upward so the whole bra was there in the weak light, showing the deep separation between the two cones that jutted to tips puckering and hardening like flashy little stones.
Tearing the sweater over her head, Rita flung it away. She reached behind her back for the hooks of her bra. Her breasts stood out like black mountains. All through her body-so voluptuous, so fully-developed for a girl of seventeen-the jets and quivers of excitement were beginning to tickle and torment. Rita couldn't help herself when she reached this stage.
A hank of lustrous black hair fell across her oval ivory face. Her dark eyes shone with coaly fire as she unhooked the bra. A gasp went up from the gang boys as her breasts burst free.
The ends were angry scarlet, fully aroused for love. Laughing, Rita hurled her bra at Viper. "Hurry up, you big buzzard!"
"Turn around, turn to the left," Pepe breathed. "Show us first."
Obscene cries of encouragement came from the boys, all except the downcast J.B.
Rita moved her right knee, flexed it.
"Like me, boys? Whitey sure did."
"Man, oh man, see that?" one of them whispered. "Rita, that's great, absolutely terrific."
Rita ran her palms up and down her thighs, breathless:
"For Christ's sake! This isn't a museum piece, is it? If you like me so much, somebody hurry up and take care of me."
Choking with excitement, Viper rushed forward: "I'll take care you by God-"
Rita wrapped her arm around his neck. She dragged his head into an open-lipped embrace.
She felt his tongue lash wetly in answer to hers. She suppressed a last sick tremor of guilt as she crushed her hips against his. The coarse cloth of his jeans slid back and forth across the front surfaces of her thighs.
The theatre, when they'd entered furtively, had been damp and cold. Now it was an oven. Rita's breasts mashed the boy's chest as he fought to open his shirt. Her hardening nipples, warm and red as fully-budded flowers, contacted flesh. She wanted to scream with delight.
Her body was master now. All her thoughts focused on the burning urge suffusing her. She helped the boy struggle out of his pants. Her nails dug into his shoulder-flesh so that he cursed with excitement.
The torment, the demand for satiation, had been building in Rita Danilov's young body for days. So what if the other kids watched? Who gave a damn? Not Rita, not panting sweating Rita.
She pulled the boy to a strip of befouled carpet, fell clumsily on her back. Strangely, the bruising fall excited her still further. The boy began to caress her, kissing the slope of her neck, the shadowy declivity between her breasts.
Rita felt as though a dozen fiery ropes were twisted around her thighs. The hard belly of her lover smashed hers, making her gasp.
He twisted her this way, that way. Finally he got a hand under the heaving small of her back, another on her buttocks.
"How long am I going to have to wait for you?" Rita shrilled.
"Oh, God, baby, I'm all ready."
"Then stop talking, you buzzard. Take me, take-ohhh!"
In a frenzy, Rita rolled and twisted under the caress of his whip-taut flesh. The boy's hands worked in her buttocks, worked and worked, pinching, gouging, pulling. Rita began to move with a mounting fervor.
"Come on, man!" She raked his back. "Let's make the scene!"
"Jeez, Rita-"
"Make the scene, man! Make the scene, make the scene! Oh! Oh, that's it!"
"I'll fix you, Rita, I'll give you all you can take-"
"It's not enough. Come on, man, go!"
"How's this? How-does-that-?"
"More, big man, more, more!"
Now Rita really began to get the swing of it, the rhythm and the pulse, like a bongo beat off a juke, rattling faster, faster, convulsing her whole body, lashing her ivory thighs, mashing her breasts under the boy's chest so they felt like thy wanted to gouge holes in him.
"Faster, honey!" she screamed. "Rita's on the way now! Rita's making it!"
With a convulsive shudder the boy groaned: "Oh! Ohhhh my God."
Aghast, Rita threw her head back. She stared into his pale face.
"It that all? Oh you puny louse, is that the best you can do?"
"Rita, I couldn't help it! You got me so worked up-" With a sharp cry she slashed her nails down his chest, drawing blood.
"Then get away from me!" Get away so a man can do the job!"
Through blurred eyes she saw Viper's face recede into the dark, but the hammer-hammer driving her wild there didn't recede. It intensified. She rolled against one of the damaged seats and struck her head to bring pain to keep from screaming and wanting so badly.
"Who's next?" Her voice was ragged. "Goddam it, somebody hurry up. I'm dying, dying."
"Stand aside, you mother-frying muchachos," came the bragging voice of the kid called Pepe. He shoved the goggle-eyed group aside. "Let a South American stud take care of the pretty mare. Querida, here comes a man."
Pepe hit her with such demolishing force she had to scream .They slid a full three feet down the filthy aisle from the impact. Pepe had no finesse, only brutal strength. But a moment later Rita's hurt became pure heaven.
Pepe cursed fluently in a Latin tongue. Rita couldn't understand him in the heat and excitement.
The liquid-fire knot in her loins grew tighter, tighter still. It inflamed her to the peak of passion that always threatened to tear her apart the instant before her appetites found satisfaction in the spasm-fury....
"Here you are, here you are! I been hunting all over."
A loud clatter, as of heavy shoes rattling on the dilapidated stage.
A sudden jerk and twist of Pepe's body.
Rita opened her eyes, beating her fists on the stained rug.
"Madre de Dios!" Pepe's face was a blur above her. "Whitey!"
"So this is what you do behind my back?"
Rita knew she should recognize the new voice. Should recognize its meaning. Pepe apparently did. He ripped free of the embrace with such force that Rita cried out. She seized his foot, sobbing now, trying to hold him:
"Lover, lover, what's wrong?"
Words died in her trembling throat. Above her, a slanting giant to her clouded vision, stood a flashy, good-looking guy, wide-shouldered, about twenty. He had pale straw hair and china-blue eyes and a hard, humorless smile.
Pepe scrabbled for his clothes, frantically thrust his legs into his jeans. He mumbled and sweated. The towering figure ran his eyes over the naked girl exposed in every intimate detail on the floor. Slipping his hands into the pockets of a crudely-tailored twill jacket, he advanced on the Cobras.
"All right, you creeps. How many touched her?"
"Jeez, Whitey, we thought you-" someone began.
The straw-haired boy laughed, a deep, chilling sound.
"Thought Whitey Noonan would stay cooped up on that frying correction farm just for stealing three lousy hubcaps?" Whitey spat. "Hell, fellas. I had to come back to look out for my gang, didn't I?"
A sudden crash as Whitey kicked over a half-rotted theatre chair.
"But you been lookin' out for yourselves, haven't you? With Rita!"
"Whitey, she practically begged-" began Viper.
"Shut up! Rita's a broad. Broads can't help it if they start to itch and gotta have help to stop the itch."
Dimly Rita heard the shuffle of his feet. Then a sibilant gasp of fright and a whick of steel.
"I don't blame Rita. She's got this thing-" He laughed. "She's just got to have it. Man, it's automatic with her. She can't stop."
The spectacled kid, J.B., spoke up:
"Whitey, what if the law catches up?"
"You worry about you, Jack in the Box. I'll take care of Whitey. Now. Who touched her besides the grease-ball? I never did like you much, Pepe. I let you into this bunch against my better judgement. Come on, you mother-fryers! Speak up! I want the name of every so-called friend who made it with my girl. And fast."
Tormented with the desire still knotting her loins, wishing she could stop the frantic throb in her big scarlet nipples, Rita lay on her side panting, watching. Whitey, drably dressed, menaced his underlings with an eight-inch hollow-ground switch. He moved the switch in a small, suggestive circle, waiting for an answer.
J.B. cleared his throat and took a tentative step:
"Nobody touched her, Whitey, except Pepe and-"
Viper cut him off with a glare whose threat was clear:
"Yeah, that's right. Nobody but Pepe."
"I want the truth!" Whitey snarled. "Or I'll whack them off all of you."
"That's the truth!" a voice whined. The others assented.
Pepe moved backwards, away from the switch.
"No, no I wasn't the only-Whitey! Whitey, believe me! I wasn't the only one!"
He collided with the rail of the orchestra pit. The rotted wood cracked. Pepe crashed to the pit floor, screaming.
Whitey jumped after him. An agonized howl ripped the cavern of the theatre.
After a series of thrashing noises Whitey Noonan climbed from the pit. He wiped the switch clean of red by sticking it in the woolly pile of a seat.
Then the swaggering Cobra leader dropped his clothes and gave Rita the release she craved.
At last the theatre lay dark again.
One by one, shadows slipped off into the slum night.
CHAPTER TWO
On official maps of the city, the eight short blocks between the fashionable urban re-development apartments on Freeson Parkway and the interstate bridge with the festering city dump below, carried the name of Hamilton Street.
To the city's social agencies; to the newsmen unlucky enough to be assigned the territory; to the police of the local precinct, the thoroughfare was known by another, more fitting name: Hell's Half Mile.
Of the dozen running sores that were the slum areas of the great city, Hell's Half Mile was the very worst, dripping a yellow pus of sexuality and sickness, dope and degeneracy, rape and riot, almost around the clock.
Hell's Half Mile was Brick Fontaine's new home.
He saw it for the first time two nights after the murder in the abandoned Bijou theatre. He'd just alighted from the city bus on Freeson Parkway. The weather had turned warm, prior to the first frost. Stars twinkled high above the tenements. The tang of autumn mingled with odors of spaghetti sauce and corn fritters, molasses and cabbage, plus less appetizing aromas wafting from the riverside dump.
For a long moment, suitcase held in one hand, suit jacket slung over his shoulder with the other, Brick Fontaine wondered whether he'd made the worst damn mistake of his life.
There it sprawled. Eight blocks of closely-packed apartments, stores and seamy life. Life of every color and nationality and language: Puerto Rican, Negro, Croatian, German, Jewish, Irish, many more, the hopeless of all the ethnic groups whose more fortunate members had persevered with guts or talent or luck to less noxious neighborhoods.
In the early evening nearly everyone was on the street; they either sat on stoops, sat on the curbstones or played so animatedly in the street itself that a car couldn't have passed had it tried. Brick Fontaine's goal lay at the street's opposite end, almost at the river.
Well, he'd certainly get a first-hand look. Ripping off his black knit tie, stuffing it in his pocket so as not to be conspicuous, he began to walk.
He walked tall, with the heavy grace of a two-hundred-pound athlete. His sandy hair lent him a placid look, but there was nothing placid about the cleat scars on his cheeks, or his crumpled right ear. Because he walked with powerful precision he was not accosted, only stared at curiously. No one recognized him. Sunday afternoon television cameras seldom dwelled on a pro quarterback except through a long lens. Few knew the players' exact facial features.
In the first block, just past Meyerbaum's Strictly Kosher Meat Market, Brick glanced down an alley. He saw a girl and a boy performing an act Brick could not quite believe. They were laughing. That is, the boy was, puffing on a brown cigarette laughing to beat hell. The girl was too busy to laugh.
Neither one was over twelve.
In the second block Brick saw three youths and a girl baiting an old Chinese with a broken whiskey bottle that still contained a few drops. In that same block too, Esposito's Dry Cleaners was closed for repairs. Esposito or one of his assistants was reglazing a shattered front window. Brick heard the man curse in Italian, shaking his head as though the vandalism had been far from accidental.
When he was into the third block Brick had no more illusions about the simplicity of the task he'd tackled. Even fewer when a Latin-looking kid in a pair of ragged shorts ran up to tug his sleeve.
The kid was so emaciated Brick could count his ribs. Under the greenish shine of a bar neon, he looked positively corpse-like as he pestered Brick.
"Hey, senor, like a nice girl? Wanna have some fun with my cousin Rosa? Very nice piece for a big man like you. She squeal, know all the tricks. Only five bucks."
Brick glowered, controlling his temper. "How old are you?"
"Ten, senor." The kid grinned ingenuously. "Old enough to know what you like-"
"And your cousin Rosa? How old is she?"
Thinking he'd made a sale, the youth grinned ear to ear.
"Why, she's fourteen, senor. With nice little breasts about this big." He doubled his fist.
"Don't worry, Rosa ain't no virgin. Her brother fix that when she was eleven."
Brick's first impulse was to smash the little monster's face. Then he remembered, with considerable pain, that it wasn't always the fault of the kids.
Couldn't he recall that from experience?
With a weary sigh he dug into his pocket and pulled out a half dollar. He flipped it. The kid tried to catch it, missed, and it clanged and rolled along the pavement. From out of nowhere half a dozen other boys appeared. Before the Latin kid emerged with his precious money, a fat little boy in filthy overalls was screaming in the gutter clutching his groin and crying tears into the blood on his cheek where he'd been kicked in the scuffle.
Shaking his head, Brick hurried on.
Three other youths, slightly older than the Latin kid, were filching copies of the evening newspaper from a wire rack in front of a business establishment whose sign read Olivetti's Variety Store. Brick stopped to watch.
The kids spotted him but went right on stuffing papers into a canvas bag. When they'd almost reached the last copy, a white-haired old man wearing an apron and brandishing a broom rushed out of the store.
"Spawn of the sewers, leave the papers alone!"
"Shall we let the old jerk have it where he lives?" one kid asked another.
Brick stepped forward.
"You heard him. Put down the papers."
"Ah, go fry yourself, you big bag of-"
The kid gulped, seeing Brick's height.
"One day, one day!" The old man brandished his broom ferociously, menacing the youths. "One day when we get the vigilance committee going in this neighborhood, us decent people, we'll show that soft Captain Wadsewski down at the station house what ought to be done with punks like you. We'll wring every drop of blood from your filthy little bodies, you parasites, you criminals!"
"Stick it up and blow it out again," said a kid.
But with Brick standing there, having put down his suitcase and laid his jacket atop it, the trio was not especially interested in violence. Interlarding their farewell with colorful obscenities, they returned the papers, managing to dump them all over the street before they ran off. An elderly couple, the man wearing a black skullcap, shuffled past. They didn't look around, too frightened to show they'd seen.
Brick went to assist Olivetti with the papers. The first copy he picked up was snatched from his hands. Olivetti frowned suspiciously.
"We don't need no uptown swells to clean up our mess, mister. We'll do it ourselves one of these days, thanks anyway."
Angered, Brick was about to reply when he remembered he had to live among the people of Hamilton Street for many months to some. Little point in angering them now.
He'd certainly started off badly, though. Picking up his bag and coat, he moved along, wondering about the vigilance committee the store owner had mentioned. Then he wondered about Captain Wadsewski-must be the officer in charge of the precinct.
Nearly half way to his goal at the street's end, Brick passed another lighted store. Danilov's Produce Market. His interest was caught by an extremely shapely dark-haired young girl at the counter. A call from an alley mouth made him turn.
To make certain there'd be no mistake, Brick took a step into the fetid alley. Back in the shadows he heard a girl's voice plaintive:
"Hey, you. Yeah, you, mister. I hurt myself. Help me."
Wary of a possible mugging trap, .Brick put down his bag and boat and advanced another couple of steps into the murky, fly-ridden passage. At first he couldn't make out the speaker who'd appealed for help. Then she stepped away from the brick wall, outlined against the distant flare of a mercury lamp on the interstate bridge approach.
An exclamation of surprise rose in Brick's throat. Had that young voice come from the body whose contours were stencilled provocatively black against the faraway gleam?
He saw cheap sequin-winking slippers, ultra-tight jeans clinging to fleshy calves and thighs. The jeans were so tight Brick could clearly see the cleft between her buttocks, the rolled edge of her panties against the fabric, even a gorge where the jean material stretched over her little belly.
Above the jean belt studded with cheap glass jewels, she wore a thin sleeveless white blouse. It was cut so low Brick had a plain view down between her breasts, remarkably firm breasts in spite of their medium size.
There was a flash of copper-colored hair as the girl waggled toward him. She reeked of dime-store perfume.
When her face became visible, Brick got a jolt. It was a fifteen-year-old's face, heavily lipsticked, rather gaunt, with a false smile and prematurely wise brown eyes.
"Mister, I tripped and hurt my leg. Give me a hand-ohhh!"
The act was so transparent Brick Fontaine wanted to laugh. The girl's body collided with his, wiggling as she pretended to support herself and her injured leg. The firm pressure of her breast rubbing and rubbing against his shirt instantly began to work upon his male instincts.
She managed to insinuate one fleshy thigh between his own. Brick made an effort to push her away. He found himself up against the wall.
The girl had the vixenish strength of an animal, a street animal. She pretended to experience another leg ' pain.
"Gimme your hand, mister. It hurts bad. Maybe if you rub it."
"Listen, honey," Brick began. "Don't con me-"
She'd already gripped his hand and moved it.
Only it wasn't her leg that wanted rubbing.
Brick still would have laughed at the comicality of the situation as she twisted back and forth and made it impossible for him to release himself. He was prevented from laughing by a rapacious shine in her eyes as she tugged his belt.
"Come on, mister, why not? I'm awful good. Only two bucks. My name's Mae, Mae Lazar. My old man's out of work and my old lady's in Public Hospital. Can't you give me a break? I'll be real good to you. I can take you back to my place I-hey!"
Mae's lipsticked face lit up. Her hands probed.
"Hey!...."
"Damn it, this is absurd," Brick said. "I'm twenty-nine years old and you're nothing but a child-"
Angrily she jerked away. She pulled the hem of her blouse from her belt and showed him her breasts.
She grabbed his hand and cupped it around her right breast. The big, adult nipple worked elastically up and down his palm. It was tender, nubby-
With alarm Brick realized he had to break this up before-
"Does that feel like a kid, mister? You just let me show you! You just try me for five seconds and you'll find out how much of a kid I am."
Mae worked his hand harder, kneading it back and forth over the firm mound of breast. Brick was disgusted, loathed his own manly power, the innate streak of maleness that operates in the species sometimes against a man's will. He was supposed to help kids like this, not stand in an alley and play with a teenage tart who was out to make a buck.
But Mae Lazar had apparently had long practice.
She knew what to do to a man. She pressed herself against him, her breasts hot through her blouse. Mae dragged Brick's head into a kiss, a lipsticked kiss in which her mouth fell open and the professional probe of her tongue slipped between his teeth.
She arched her body against Brick's, moving furiously this way and that. Brick pulled back. The girl clung like a parasite, tickling his lips with her tongue, whispering:
"I can tell you'd be terrific. So big and strong. I'll bet you could really make me hash. Come on, why don't you try? It won't take me a sec to slip off these jeans and then we can do it right here."
"Get the hell away from me! Put on your clothes and take off."
Without warning Mae's anger blazed:
"What are you, a mother-frying fairy? You figure I'm not good enough for you, huh? You get all you want uptown, is that it? Well, mister, just what would happen if I ripped this blouse to pieces, and my panties too, and told the cops you came along and tried to feel me up, and then when I wouldn't let you, you said you'd rape hell out of me?...."
Brick's temper snapped. He backhanded her, jolting her against the wall.
"I said clear out!"
Contrary to his expectations, Mae didn't scream, only touched her cheek where he'd struck. A queer, perverted excitement flickered on her face.
"I could go for you big if you'd hit me again like that, mister. I'd let you have it for nothing if-"
A stab of white light cut down the alley. Behind it was a beefy figure with a round head. Heavy shoes slapped.
Mae Lazar darted away, lips peeling over her teeth as she crouched, legs spread wide, the skin-tight jeans concealing nothing.
"Oh, hell!" said the voice wearily. "You hookin' again, Mae?"
"Sergeant Kreeg, you're a bag of dog manure!" Mae hissed, dancing just out of range.
Kreeg flashed his light in Brick's face.
"Who are you, fella?"
"Just the latest customer," Brick responded with cynicism. "Mae's latest customer for the sake of mom, pop and six helpless puppies."
The beefy man switched the beam to Mae again.
"Still peddlin' that line, Mae? Mister, this little broad doesn't have any parents. She's nothing but a miserable little tart who should have been locked up long-hey! Stop!"
In the cone of light, Mae Lazar whirled and ran up the alley.
Kreeg dragged a police .38 from a stained shoulder holster. Brick reacted instantly, snatching the gun away.
Mae's footfalls died in the distance. Kregg grabbed the weapon back, his tiny eyes thoroughly unpleasant.
"Who the hell do you think you are, interfering with the law? I got a good notion to haul you to the precinct. Come out to the street. I want to see some identification."
"Now hang on!" Brick began, bristling. "I don't see why-"
"Because I'm the only plainclothesman on this whole infernal Goddam eight blocks, that's why!"
Kreeg dragged Brick toward the sidewalk. "Crap, if it wasn't for me there'd be riots day and night. Captain Wadsewski thinks all these chicken punks need help." He reached into Brick's back pocket, dragged out his wallet and flipped it open, saying in a saccharine voice. "Treat 'em sweet. Pat their syph-ridden behinds. Sugar-tit 'em along. Well, I'm the one who has to pound up and down Hamilton keeping 'em in-line. I say crap! One day, when we organize our citizen's committee and go right over that stupid captain's head-"
The plainclothesman stopped, reading Brick's military discharge card.
"Fontaine! The pro ball player? Quarterback for the Stags?"
Brick snatched back the wallet. "That's right."
"The guy who's going to run the Peabody Settlement? The new guy?"
"Right again." Brick, fully annoyed, hefted his bag. "Anything else?"
Suddenly Kreeg thrust his .38 out of sight and began to laugh.
"Oh, you poor simple son of a bitch! I read about you in the paper. Giving up the ball team, that insurance job. You're going to try to run that joint? Do you know what happened to the last two bleeding hearts who came down here?"
"I know," Brick replied tightly. "One died in a mysterious accident and one's up in Wheelerville in the mental hospital. I-"
Brick stopped, angered. There was a painful memory of Chip. Chip who had driven him like fate to Hamilton Street.
"I'll be damned if I know why I have to explain to you."
"Yeah?" Kreeg no longer laughed. "You're another hand-patter, like Captain Wadsewski. Well, you'll find out. Just don't cross me, buddy. I've had six years in this stretch of hell. When I say jump, these kids do it or else. Bounce your basketball and see how far it gets you with 'em, but stay out of my way, that's all I'm telling you."
"Ah, go-"
It wasn't worth it. Brick picked up his bag. As he walked off Kreeg began laughing anew.
Brick didn't respond, didn't dignify him with even so much as a backward glance. He walked rapidly toward the street's end, past Danilov's Produce Market, noticing again the attractive girl inside.
Kreeg couldn't bear the insult of being ignored. He hurried to catch up. Brick paid little attention as the detective talked rapidly:
"Listen, Fontaine, you don't believe me. This street's a sewer. See that theatre over there? The Bijou? A kid was found knifed to death in the orchestra pit yesterday. Part of a gang called the Cobras. You'll meet 'em soon enough. They're all over. That Lazar broad hangs around with 'em sometimes. Their leader just escaped from the county farm. We haven't caught him yet, but we will. Listen, take my advice. Go back uptown and get a new contract from the Stags. This isn't tea and cakes down here, this is the end of the earth, the toilet of the universe, the worst frying-"
Walking rapidly, Brick outdistanced him. Then he wondered whether the receding voice indeed told the truth.
Whether he was the world's prime fool. He thought of his brother Chip. Chip who was dead.
He left Kreeg raging impotently and kept walking.
CHAPTER THREE
Was there no help for her torment? During the past two days Rita Danilov walked a thin edge of self-denial, denying the existence of the physical torment she was helpless to understand or control. Now, with evening coming on, the Hamilton Street neons beginning to bleed a mixture of scarlet and green onto the seamy pavement, the tiny interior of Danilov's Produce Market was unbearably stifling.
The familiar tang of cheese in the delicatessen case mingled with the crisp scent of lettuce and other produce. In the store-room at the back, near the stairway that led up to the flat where Rita Danilov had been born, she heard her father's heavy tread, and the cracking of thin slats as he opened a fresh crate of oranges.
No customers were in the market. Few ever came after sundown. Yet Simon Danilov, an old-fashioned man, stubbornly insisted upon keeping the doors open until ten, flying in the face of the softness ,the laziness he saw creeping like rot down Hamilton Street. Who worked a decent fifteen hour day any more? Only Danilov.
Danilov was a stranger to his daughter, a bald, corpulent stranger unable to pronounce English except in a bumbling, accented way. Rita didn't really hate him. Her mother Flora had run off with a salesman from a large biscuit company who called on the store. Simon discovered him in the back room on Flora Danilov's fattishly attractive body. Flora fled Hamilton Street when Rita was only twelve.
Since then, Rita had grown apart from her father, during those critical years when her smooth young chest was beginning to bud with the suggestion of two pink nipples.
Her hips fleshed out and grew firm. The mystery of pubescence lent her body the first shoots of that dark mystery Rita was soon to learn to hate violently as the source of indecently exciting pleasure. She'd had her first boy at thirteen:
Afterward, as in the gangbang at the theatre, the flames in her belly were temporarily quenched, but there was no sensation of pleasure, really. No thrilling emotion akin to what the movies always showed, complete with violins, just before the fadeout demanded by the censors.
Rita had no idea why she had to possess a man so frequently. Once, before she quit high school upon reaching the legal age, Rita had been examined by the school doctor, a young chap with a nervous manner. Stripping for him in the quiet of his office one late winter afternoon-Rita was already on probation for being caught in the locker room after hours with a member of the basketball squad-she'd flushed as he ran his eyes over her white panties and bulging bra.
"Perhaps-uh-Miss Danilov, it's a different kind of help you need. Not medical help, but-I hesitate to say mental, but that's the root of the problem. It's a condition we know too little about. It has many sources. Childhood problems. And-"
The doctor stopped, sweat beading his brow. Rita sat on the examination table. The blinds were drawn. The office was stuffy. Against her white young thighs, the material of her panties began to bind and prickle. She felt the live ends of her nipples rise.
A bitter smile touched her lips.
"The kids on Hamilton call me a nympho. What's that mean? Is that what you're trying to talk about?"
"Nymphomania? Uh-yes, that's the condition which-"
From his hip pocket the doctor dragged out a white handkerchief and mopped his forehead. He had managed to draw near the examination table, so near that his belt buckle was touching Rita's knee. She felt his probing stare between her heavy-hanging breasts and clamped her hands at her sides because she suddenly wanted to kiss him.
Clearing his throat, the young doctor tried to go on:
"Because your problem is clearly one of-uh-a mental nature, I'm going to recommend to the principal that he withdraw the dismissal notice. Of course your father will have to be notified."
A shrug lifted Rita's shoulder, bringing her right breast closer to the doctor's face.
"I don't care if I'm dropped. I'm quitting school next May anyway."
"You are? Don't you think it would be wise to-uh-complete your senior year?"
"Talk to my old man about that," Rita said bitterly. "Listen to him bitch about having a worthless tramp daughter who should be helping him in the market instead of sitting in school filling her head with silly ideas."
Then, because the room was warm and cut off from the world, and because the young doctor seemed a patient, understanding sort, Rita gave release to the torment with which she was all too familiar:
"Don't tell him what happened in the locker room, doc! Please, I beg you, don't! He'll whip me, whip me sure. He thinks I like what I have to do every time I get with a boy."
An almost unhappy look clouded the doctor's brow.
"Don't you?"
Rita's face was half smile, half sorrow.
"Oh, yeah, in a way. It feels good for a minute when one of them-I mean, when it happens. But afterward, it's sort of empty and sad all over again, until the next time. Simon-my old man-says I was born to be a whore but he won't let me. Her eyes looked past the doctor, scarred with memory. "He says he'll beat me to death before he lets that happen."
"If he'd only realize!" the doctor said. "Understand that his behavior might be the very reason-!"
Abruptly he stopped. He tore the stethoscope from his neck and slammed it into the desk drawer. He lifted the blind for a quick peek out at the snow. It mantled the grim pile of Riverfront High with a softening coverlet. Rita watched him, watched a vein in his forehead throb like a red snake.
The torment inside her thighs began to mount. Her pink tongue slipped out between her lips. Little fingers of desire crawled between her knees. A trickle of sweat ran down into her navel.
The doctor said:
"Miss Danilov-put your clothes on and leave. Quickly!"
Rita closed her eyes a moment, hating herself, yet powerless in the grip of the inflamed arousal she was experiencing as a result of the doctor's presence and the quiet, lonely intimacy of the examination room. Rising, she moved toward him.
He saw her coming and started to perspire freely. Rita's legs were cool and white, superbly rounded as they scissored smoothly while she crossed the room, inner surface stroking inner surface, a whisper of flesh that tingled the very depths of her being and made her want the doctor more than she'd ever wanted anyone before.
Standing close, her big breasts touching the starchy stiffness of his white coat, Rita laid the palm of her hand on his hip.
"I can't go, doc. I can't get out of here yet. You got me worked up."
The doctor spun, livid.
"I'm a married man, for God's sake! And what you feel isn't genuine. It's a sickness!"
Her white-clad belly undulated slowly. Rita seized his hand.
"What I feel, doc? Why don't you feel instead?"
"Damn it, you're underage. I'd be arrested for-come here!"
He whipped his arms around her. He bent her backward and arched her tight against him.
Rita felt his palms on her back, below the elastic of her bra, moving in a circle, slipping downward under her panties to close around her plump buttocks. The doctor's mouth was rough, bruising.
For a moment Rita was sickly ashamed of her behavior. But only for a moment.
A rising wildness between her hips made her groan and press closer. Their mouths came together. Rita opened her lips on contact.
The doctor cursed as he kissed her cheek and nuzzled her ear. Rita stroked his body. Her hips shook, as the doctor's fingers struggled with the hooks of her bra.
Rita's hair became disheveled with the kissing and fondling. Her face was smeared with lipstick as she and the doctor clung to one another, hands and mouths exploring. Each kiss, each tickle and probe only heightened the immense desire she felt.
"Take this off," the doctor wheezed. He was having no luck with the bra. "For God's sake-!"
"Rip it off!" Rita bit his neck. "Oh, doc, please rip it quick.
"Christ, I've never met anyone like you. So hot-"
"You're-making me hotter."
The doctor gave a sick laugh: "I don't know what's wrong with me. I shouldn't-but I've got to see you-"
Rita shrieked at him:
"Then rip it off! Rip me naked!"
His hands fastened in the straps of her bra, tore them. Rita felt the glorious freedom of her breasts, big fully-matured breasts that rose from her young body like ivory sculpture, each with a ruby imbedded at the apex.
The doctor worked his palms over her hips. Rita hung on his neck, thighs flung from side to side with excitement.
At the same time he undressed her lower body his mouth quivered over her breasts, prickling, tormenting. Rita found herself pressing those mounding breasts forward, harder and harder, for more exciting kisses. The thrill she'd first craved with fright and trembling as a thirteen-year-old in a back alley off Hamilton Street was repeating its frenzied pattern:
The panties slipped lower.
Their filmy whiteness was stripped from her navel.
Then at last she could kick them away and be naked for the young doctor.
Her body quivered with anticipation. Her breasts shuddered like whipped cream. The doctor rained kisses on her.
"Lover, I'm burning up for you," Rita sobbed. "Lover, come on, get naked."
"In a minute, in a second-"
The doctor ripped at his own clothes.
Somehow Rita slid onto the examination table.
She wrenched her hips up and down, banging her buttocks frantically to still their tormented drive. But the harder she banged, the more livid and intense became her craving. Her hair hung down over the table's end, a coal-black shining, rain. Her hands quested into the air, imploring.
"Doc, don't make me wait, lover. I'm exploding inside. Where are you?"
With a strangled curse the doctor was on her.
"Ohhh! Oooo! You're wonderful! Go! Go like hell!"
"You're so exciting. I never had a woman so exciting-"
"Stop talking and go, go! Go like hell, Doc, go like hell!"
The doctor's hard body lashed her, whipped her, incinerated her with sensation.
"Bitch! Shouldn't be doing-ruin me if-"
"Hurry!"
Rita screamed it, eyes closed, mouth open, screaming to match the flesh-whipping frenzy, the love-plunging rise and fall of locked flesh.
A bomb went off in her belly.
Then another bomb, a whole chain of them after that, crashing, ripping, bursting, smashing.
Fire ran down the hot-wrenching insides of her legs. Fire scalded her back from shoulder to wrenching buttock. Fire boiled out through her breast-cones to the dagger-hard ends under his chest. Fire burned her to pieces with terrible fulfillment.
"I'm there-oh, Doc, I'm all the way there!"....
In semi-darkness, the only illumination filtering into the room that of distant snow-obscured streetlights outside the school, the doctor dressed and led her to the door.
Shame-faced, he guided her through the sour halls to the outer exit. He held the door for her, refusing to meet her eye, fumbling with a cigarette as she stepped into the snow:
"Good night, uh-Miss Danilov. I'm sorry about-"
He swallowed his words and ran back into the darkening building.
Turning up the thin collar of her cheap coat, feeling her body aching from toes to lips, Rita laughed emptily and hurried off through the snow to Hamilton Street.
Three days later Simon Danilov was summoned to Riverfront High to learn of his daughter's activities in the locker room.
Rita had already heard that the doctor had resigned. She'd also resigned herself to the cruel beating Simon would administer when they returned to the flat above the market:
"A whore I got for a daughter," Simon rumbled, unloosing his belt, staring down at her trembling voluptuous white buttocks exposed on the frowsy bedspread. "A whore I got, like her mama. Spreading for any tramp who comes along. You quit that school, Rita, quick as you can. That principal, he says you're a sick kid, got a disease or something. He can't fool me. You don't need no doctors to cure you. All you need is a few good licks with this belt on that cheap body. Once I get you tending the counter full time, once I get you where I can watch you, we won't have no more whoring. The hell with the principal and his screwy notions about how sick you are. I got the way to cure you. Whip that white tail of yours till it bleeds-.'"
Cursing and panting, Simon Danilov laid stroke after stroke on Rita's tender-white buttocks.
After that, Rita Danilov learned how to cope with her father.
She obeyed him. And concealed by all sorts of trickery every occasion-at least four times a week-when she managed to find a man, either in the store or out, who would quench the hell-hot burning below her belly.
Soon after leaving school she drifted into contact with the Cobra gang. They had Hamilton Street for their turf. Rita became, at least unofficially, Whitey Noonan's steady. The deceptions required of Rita were less complicated from then on. Simon thought she was settling down. He no longer questioned her when she slipped out of the market for thirty minutes or an hour.
Once Rita had thought of appealing to Simon for help with her problem. After the beating she did not. Instead, by pretending to play the role of dutiful daughter, she convinced Simon that the problem no longer existed. That miraculously, she had been relieved of her desires.
But tonight, as she watched the good-looking guy with the suitcase and the coat slung over his shoulder pass the lighted storefront, Rita's breasts began to hurt and yearn for caressing under the tight confinement of her sweater. Whitey was in hiding somewhere down near the river dump, Rita wasn't sure of the location.
And she couldn't wait.
"Out for a minute, Pop," she called to the back room, hoping the guy with the suitcase wouldn't escape her. He looked virile, looked really able to satisfy her. "Make it quick! And bring me a loaf pumpernickel from Ginsbach's. Damn bakery man missed us this morning."
Hating herself, yet driven, Rita rushed from the store. She forgot everything-the guilt she'd felt over the death of the boy Pepe; her loyalty to Whitey Noonan; the fears she'd experienced yesterday when that bastard Kregg stopped in to question her about the Cobras. Luckily Simon had been taking his midday nap at the time or he might have pressed her, might have spilled to Kreeg that Rita had gone out for an hour the night before.
Stop thinking! she told herself. Where's the guy?
Where's the guy with the goods?
Down the fetid neon strip of Hamilton Street she glimpsed him swinging along toward the river.
Rita Danilov hurried after him. Her hips worked smoothly as she walked, switching back and forth in a rhythm that made the heat down there all the worse.
CHAPTER FOUR
A gray Bentley parked in front of the building told Brick he was in for trouble. The building itself was a frame structure that sprawled over a half block. The remaining part of the block was occupied by an asphalt playground with a high wire fence about it. The place shocked him with its dilapidation.
Under the streetlights huge scabrous sections of paint were peeling from the siding. The sign over the double doors-Justus J. Peabody Settlement House-hung awry. Even the gymnasium windows, covered with heavy wire grille, had been smashed. Many of the shingles from the roof had disappeared. All four basketball hoops on the playground had been stripped of their netting.
The building sat near the end of Hamilton Street like an old man beset with ills and awaiting death. A crowd of urchins crawled over the empty Bentley at the curb. Brick shooed them away. Calling obscene epithets that surprised even hardened Brick-the oldest of the kids might have been seven-they melted into the night.
Brick stared grimly at the drawn shade of the office window. Yellow light shone mutedly inside that room. Well, he thought, I'll have to face her one time or another, so why not now?
He was in the mood for a depressing interview anyway. He climbed the rickety steps. The steps needed painting, as well as new risers. He made a mental note.
The front door was unlocked. Brick stepped into the darkened hall. It reeked of old gym clothes. Brick wondered what else could happen tonight. The Lazar kid. Kreeg. Now she was here.
Why the hell couldn't he have arrived in daylight?
The other times he'd seen Peabody House, the sun had been out. The place had never struck him as so hopelessly decayed. It was as though the people on Hell's Half Mile were trying to help the building die. The thought depressed him.
Even before Brick Fontaine opened the office door, he smelled her perfume.
The perfume wasn't cheap. It had cost fifty dollars for a four-ounce flacon. Brick knew the price well. He'd bought the flacon last Christmas, after the Stags cinched the conference title.
Brick's hand hesitated on the knob. Couldn't he back away quietly? Walk out, perhaps roam the street until the Bentley drove off? Doing so, he would avoid one more complication in a situation that was complicated enough already.
But being all man, Brick remembered a little about the woman waiting for him. How the hell could I forget? he thought.
With a sharp twist of the ancient knob, he opened the door.
The gray, sad furnishings of the settlement house office absorbed an electric brightness from the shining girl.
Brick put his suitcase down, flung his coat onto a fusty maroon leather couch. The girl perched on one corner of the desk, watching him. Brick knew remorse. To give up this golden creature-.
Even seated, the girl gave an appearance of tallness. Her clothes were chic. She wore a modishly-tailored gray suit and a tiny pillbox hat atop her lustrous yellow hair. The hat's veil was thrown back, a smoky mist. Draped over a battered swivel chair was a coil of fabulous silver fox.
The girl's face was well-modelled, aloof and pale, with deep greenish eyes that regarded Brick with a mixture of amusement and tolerance. All her features combined to say a single word: aristocrat.
A tasteful diamond bracelet gleamed on her wrist as she stubbed her cigarette in a tin tray. She drew her hand back and rested the long scarlet nails on her thigh.
"Hello, Brick. I thought you needed a welcoming committee this first night of the great crusade."
Brick kicked the door shut with his heel, aware of the provocative scent of her perfume.
"Elaine, why the hell did you come here?"
One patrician shoulder lifted in a shrug.
"The Olsens don't quit easily."
"We discussed all that ... We decided it was only sensible to break it off."
"I thought perhaps you'd reconsidered." Elaine Olsen spoke slowly, savoring the spectacle of his embarrassment. "After all, we said goodbye a whole week ago."
Brick lit a cigarette, savagely.
"Damn it Elaine, you're not the only broad in the world. You think you're so damn special. Such a marvelous prize."
Elaine stood up, eyes afire.
"I should slap you for being an utter fool."
With a weary sigh Brick responded. "Elaine, we finished it. Let's not start again. We had enough quarreling when I decided to take this job."
"Are you quite positive you want to end it?" Elaine asked.
With deliberate provocation she unbuttoned the top button of her suit.
All the mental reserve Brick Fontaine had been building crumbled a moment after the stunning blonde girl completed that one simple gesture of unbuttoning. Brick brought his eyes to her lips, then to what lay below. Her body, even though he was thoroughly familiar with it, stirred new interest, with its very concealment in the proper suit.
Elaine smiled, knowing he was powerless to keep from feasting his eyes on the flesh he hadn't touched in quite awhile. She placed her laced fingers in her lap as she sat again on the desk's edge.
Brick studied her a moment. The tallness of her. The impossible ripeness of her full breasts bulging beneath the suit, each one separate and high and full-fleshed.
The suit fabric drew in sharply beneath the curving undersurfaces of the breasts, hugging her trim belly down to where her hips flared out in maddening allure. As she sat with the corner of the desk thrusting like a spear into the latex-tight surface of her right buttock, Brick was able to make out details of her underthings beneath the clinging woolen suit: the exciting ridge of her girdle around her thighs; the tautness of her garters stretching to her nylon-tops. Beneath the hem of her skirt a fluffy froth of petticoat showed. Her nylon-clad calves above the needle-sharp heels had a downy-gold roundness whose embrace Brick knew all too well.
He fumbled awkwardly for words. What a laugh! Brick Fontaine was never at a loss for an off-the-cuff talk at a press luncheon. Still no amount of bitterness or iron will could dampen his ardor for this girl.
She saw it too. She rubbed lightly on her upper right thigh, teasing with insinuating motions. She shifted slightly on the desk. Her calves were wider apart. The hem of her skirt was in view all of the way around, giving a glimpse of white lace that vanished upward to murky shadow.
Laughing at him, yet carrying an emotion in her green eyes that surpassed mere sophisticated cruelty, Elaine undid another button. The graceful gold column of her throat became exposed.
Brick found himself wishing she'd unfasten all-.
"Elaine, don't try that."
"Try what?" she responded coolly. "This wretched little place is stuffy. I'm not one to stand on ceremony. You know that, Brick darling. Miss Elaine Olsen confounds press and public with her shockingly amoral behavior. At least I used to."
She stood up, moved toward him. He wanted to reach out, touch and fondle her gray-hugged breasts. He shoved his cigarette back between his lips instead.
Elaine met his nervous gaze with a merry laugh.
"What? Is this the fabulous Fontaine? The Stags' own thirty-thousand-a-year back? The successful insurance executive who has so many clients he can hardly find a spare moment to write million dollar policies? You're acting like a child, Brick dear. Maybe it's because you know this is stupid." Her red-nailed hand swept the frowzy office. "A waste. A horrid waste."
Brick shook his head. "Hamilton Street needs Pea-body House."
"Then why have the last three men who tried to run it failed?"
"Because they came down here with a lot of damn notions about social uplift! A lot of psychiatric stuff about group dynamics and adjustment and social integration. The kids in this sewer of a neighborhood just need sombeody who gives a damn for them the way they are. Kids interested in basketball and athletics because they've been taught to hate school, hate brains. The directors your father's trustees sent down here were too damned brainy and too damned soft. If I can get one potential teenage killer to develop a liking for sports instead of stealing hubcaps, that'll be accomplishment enough. You wouldn't understand such simple approaches, would you, Elaine?"
A long moment passed. Almost sadly she told him:
"I find your tone offensive, Brick. Especially since we were once planning to be married."
He raked a hand through his hair.
"Yeah, sure. But charity cotillions and running a settlement house don't mix. You told me to choose. I did. So why are you here?"
"I thought that perhaps when you finally came down to Hamilton Street-quit the team, quit the insurance business-and saw how futile it all was-Oh, Brick! Don't think I'm heartless. I know these people need help. It's just that-"
She moved still closer, placing a hand on his shoulder.
"I love you, Brick. Why I should fall in love with a silly football player out of the middle-class suburbs of Pittsburgh, I'll never know. But it happened. And you were making such a go of it in the business you started for the off-season. You threw it all away!"
Brick's face was white with anger.
"Did you forget Chip?"
"No, of course I didn't. But-"
"My own brother! A nice kid from a nice family. Lying dead on a morgue slab after a game of chicken and a smashup. Elaine, the kids he was running with were decent kids, from good homes. And they were just as wild as the ones roaming Hamilton Street. So money isn't the only answer. I can't go back to being fat and happy and the occupant of a very comfortable mink-lined rut. Not until I try this for awhile. Maybe I can never go back, I don't know. But what happened to Chip is happening to these kids, too. When I heard of this opening-"
"Do you realize," Elaine blazed, "that my father and the trustees have nearly abandoned Peabody House? This year's budget appropriation squeaked through by the narrowest of margins. A few more incidents of vandalism down here and the trustees may give up the project completely."
"Meaning you might apply a little pressure?"
"I'm only trying to get you to face facts!" Her lips hovered near, breast-tips almost touching his shirt. "Don't you love me?"
"Elaine, I'd love you even if-hell, that's beside the point."
One red-nailed hand hesitated at the next button.
"That's why I came here, Brick. To make sure, in spite of all the words. There's only one way I know of to make you realize what you're giving up."
Slowly she began to unbutton the next button.
"The Olsens believe in fighting for what they want, Brick. And you're mine. I don't really think you can walk away from me. Or this."
With a twist she opened her jacket and laid bare her slip-clad breasts.
Memories of the passionate fury they'd shared for three years tormented Brick as he stared down at those incredibly ripe mounds, quivering faintly in the cloth-hugging bonds of the delicate bra and lacy slip. Elaine took hold of his hand, guided it to her left breast. She worked his fingers back and forth. He could feel the nub begin to lift, grow firm with passion.
She shifted her stance slightly, bringing her belly against his.
"Let me show you, Brick. Let me show you what you're giving up."
He wanted to run as she dropped the suit jacket from her shoulders and slowly pushed the skirt down over her hips. Yet he loved her-he couldn't dodge the truth of that. Her body was like a shrine, a golden shrine he couldn't draw his gaze away from.
Smiling faintly, Elaine bent down. Her slip hugged her buttocks like a tight skin of rubber. Catching the hem, she pulled the slip over her head and flung it on the floor.
"Can you honestly say you don't want to see more, Brick?"
Her voice was soft, yet firm-edged. She was waging fierce war for what she wanted. Color flushed her cheek. She cupped her palms beneath each breast.
"Brick, I'll use every low trick I know to get you back. If you'll come back I'll never let you regret it. You know how good I am. A marve, you said once. You called me a horizontal Olympic star. Don't you remember that? Or do you need to be reminded?"
Brick's hands knotted in fists.
"Elaine, ow cruel can you be?"
"But I'm not cruel!" she shot back. "I love you. And I want you to love me. Just once more. There."
A finger indicated the leather couch.
"I came here to test you, darling. I know we could be wonderfully happy together. I'm going to undress, Brick. I'm going to undress for you and make you have me on that couch. Then you'll see that this idealism of yours is foolish."
Elaine took hold of the upper edges of her pink girdle, slowly working it down over her hips. Brick was sweating, agonized. God, she was beautiful, the gold-gleaming calves so muscular and soft in nylon, the belly so cool but so capable of fiery fever. She posed before him in her bra and girdle and nylons. Slowly, temptingly, she began to roll down the upper edge of her girdle.
Then her belly was completely nude.
In another moment-
The mere thought started furious drummings in Brick's temples.
Red lips parted slightly; Elaine breathed rapidly; her aroused breast-ends pierced hard against the bra fabric. She hesitated before rolling her girdle further, giving him just a tantalizing glimpse of ivory-and-gilt splendor.
"Tell me, Brick," she said huskily. "Tell me you don't want to see more."
"Elaine, you're cold, merciless-"
"Another inch, perhaps, Brick? If you saw another inch, then could you decide?"
She rolled the girdle still lower.
"Get your clothes on-" he began feebly.
"Would you rather see everything before you decide?"
In one sudden gesture the girdle was around her knees.
Elaine leaped against him. Brick tried to fend her off, his hands on her cool-fleshed shoulders. Then, hating himself, he found his mouth seeking the perfection of hers. His whole body desired her as their mouths met.
She kissed superbly, her tiny pink tongue an instrument of her desire, quaking between his lips as his hands came up to unhook her bra so that he might caress her golden breasts.
Elaine fumbled at his shirt. A moment later the muscular hardness of his chest contacted her nude breasts.
The heat and whisper of her thighs trembled close.
She wriggled her belly, slid it back and forth.
The scent of her hair was in his nostrils as she nuzzled his neck, bit playfully.
The room reeled, swam around Brick. He pushed her to the couch and dropped beside her.
His hands roamed her body, her belly, her buttocks, her breasts, feeling the warming of her flesh as she began to breathe stridently.
"Brick, do you love me? Brick, you must when you do that-"
"God help me, I do love you."
"Then do that again. Do that-oh Brick!"
He bruised her with kisses. Her lips slid over his face with wild ardor.
"Hurt me, Brick! Yes, hurt me like that! My whole body wants to be hurt-"
Disarmed, he felt his own passions responding to the love-play. Suddenly they were both naked on the leather couch, locked, clasped so tightly he thought he'd break her back.
"Brick darling, don't keep me waiting. Come to me!"
"Why did you have to be so damned beautiful? Why?"
"Am I beautiful, Brick, am I? Do I feel beautiful all over?"
"You're-honey and fire. You're beautiful all over." She raked his shoulders with her nails. "Brick-"
"Damn you, Elaine, damn you, damn you!"
"Oh, lover, my sweet Brick, let's go, let's go!"
"Elaine-Elaine-Elaineelajneelaine."
"Oh, Brick, I love you. I love you!...."
Their bodies blended in hurtling fury that drove Brick to violence, made her howl for fulfillment.
In a frenzy they fell from the couch with a jolting crash that coincided with explosion, holocaust, madness, spasm-
Afterward, when Elaine had dressed, she asked simply:
"Brick? Coming?"
Staring at her, loving her totally, he still shook his head.
"I can't."
About to speak, Elaine thought better of it. Deep in her greenish eyes Brick thought he saw anger, a determination that made him apprehensive. She draped the silver fox about her shoulders aloofly, then opened the door. Brick had a last tempting view of those perfect thighs moving rhythmically off into the dark.
He closed the door. Shaken, he sat at the desk, head in his hands. After a moment he lit a cigarette.
He wondered whether the rest of the world would label him insane for throwing over a girl like Elaine in order to bury himself in the slums and try to redeem some of these kids.
But there was Chip, so bright and young-and mangled and dead on a morgue slab.
Brick realized he had no choice. He got up. He saw a white glove on the floor. One of Elaine's, forgotten. He started for the street just as he heard the big Bentley purring away. Too late.
Brick laid the glove on the desk and stared at it a long time. He'd never be able to forget Elaine completely. But perhaps in time he could achieve partial forgetfulness.
The glove on the desk mocked him, told him it wasn't so.
Brick picked up the glove and threw it violently into a corner. Out of despair and a sense of frustration, he dumped his suitcase on the couch. The leather was still warm, burnished to renewed life by the caress of Elaine's nude buttocks. From the depths of the bag he extracted a pint of bourbon.
The bourbon had been brought for those weeks in the future when he would have worked a long, hard day. But tonight it tasted very, very good.
He drank nearly half the pint in great tormented gulps.
CHAPTER FIVE
Under the looming wall of a warehouse, a wall chalked with a score of obscene epithets and invitations, Rita Danilov waited. Her whole body was afire.
Half an hour or more she'd lurked there in the shadows. She had been stopped from entering Peabody House by the sight of an expensive gray foreign auto parked at the curb.
Who was inside with the guy?
Some of those uptown people who sent their representatives to Hamilton Street thinking they were doing the residents a favor? Why the hell didn't whoever was inside hurry? Rita couldn't wait much longer. If she didn't get what she wanted from the big guy-he must be the new settlement house director, she'd realized with a start, watching him go inside-if she didn't get it here, she'd have to hurry to the river dump and somehow locate Whitey, wherever he might be hiding.
Rolling her head from side to side against the brick wall, Rita Danilov thought again of the doctor at high school.
So she was a nympho. So that meant she had to be taken care of several times a week. So she couldn't help it.
She loathed feeling like a degraded beggar, crouching in the fetid dark waiting to find a guy in pants to do what needed to be done. At such times, though, she was incapable of rational thought. She was more like a machine running out of control.
God, if only Simon had been the kind of father to understand and help-
She really didn't like this burning torment that assailed her. But she was at its mercy. And it had been too long since the session on the floor of the Roxy the night Pepe died.
Rita accepted death and knives and gang trouble as part of the pattern of Hamilton Street life. She had been inured to such violence early. But the belly-torment, the thigh-fire-she never became accustomed to that.
Her body stood out in black relief against a dim streetlamp at the alley mouth. Her calves and thighs were tightly sheathed in scarlet slacks. Her sweater, deliberately chosen several sizes too small, brought her breasts into vivid prominence.
Rita was a pretty girl, but tonight the passion stirring her lent her features a certain ugliness. She jammed her buttocks tight against the bricks, bumping them a couple of times to see whether that would help.
It did not. It merely made the urge all the more demanding.
How long was the visitor going to remain behind that lighted blind?
The big guy had looked nice. Rather clean and tough. But not the depraved toughness of the kids in the Cobras. She knew he'd serve her royally if she could only talk him into it. And why should she have much trouble, if he was any kind of a man?
Still, unless the visitor departed soon she knew she'd have to find another man, any man. Quick jets of ecstasy and pain were beginning to shoot up inside her legs. The tighter she pressed her legs together, the worse the spasms became.
A rustle and scrape back in the alley made Rita Danilov turn, take several steps into the darkness. Her soft hands shaped themselves to claws. Who was in the alley? A bum? Kids from another gang from another part of town?
Rita watched, listened. Nothing stirred.
An engine purred to life. Rita turned again, dismissing her suspicions as foolish. With a little exclamation of joy she saw the big gray auto roll away along Hamilton Street. The visitor, whoever it might have been, had departed.
Rita looked both ways to make sure no one like that bastard Kreeg lurked near. Then her sneakers carried her across the street and up to the main door of Pea-body House. Far on the right, the jeweled chain of the interstate bridge cut the night toward the river's opposite shore.
In the hall Rita had to stop again, sliding against the wall. A crack of light showed beneath the door. With trembling hands Rita reached out and twisted the knob.
The mere touch of the hard metal excited her anew. Her dark hair fell into her eyes. She tried to get the knob to turn, but she was shaking so badly her hands would not coordinate. Sobbing, she knocked instead.
The door opened. The big guy stood there, blinking.
Rita leaned against the jamb, breath hissing in and out between her teeth. In her excited state the big guy looked more like a god than ever, older than the punks she usually had. Older and stronger-perfection.
Rita was no longer a girl but a slave, a drunken slave of the impossible yearnings of her belly-flesh. In a vague sort of way she recognized the sharp reek of bourbon floating around the big guy, and another, more subtle scent.
Before the big guy could express surprise at finding a voluptuous teenager at his door, Rita drove herself forward, rubbed herself against him like a female cat, languorously.
"Please, mister, help me."
"Who the hell are-wait a second!"
One of his hard hands lifted her chin. His eyes gleamed with recognition.
"The girl in the grocery store?"
"That's right. I followed you here. Please help me!"
"If you'll come in-cut out this stuff. I mean-"
He blinked, almost stumbled. Rita realized dimly that the big guy had belted a lot of booze in a short time. His eyes were slightly glazed. His words were not clearly enunciated.
He gazed down at her sweatered breasts. They hung forward, large, fully-coned, so heavy on her they felt like rocks, begged to be free of the restrictions of her bra.
"Name's Fontaine," the big guy muttered, bracing himself on the desk with one hand and pinching the bridge of his nose with the other. His face had a strong, friendly look to it, making Rita tingle everywhere at once. "Bad. First night here, Drinking. Didn't expect any business." The big guy had difficulty with the final word, pronouncing it three times before he got it right.
He corked a pint of bourbon and stashed it inside a desk drawer. Keeping his distance while Rita dug her nails into quivering flanks, Fontaine started a cigarette.
"You in trouble or something?" he wanted to know. "What's your name?"
"Rita." She licked her lips. She had to have him. And quick. "Rita Danilov. Are you the new director? Sent down here to help us out?"
"I'll help you if I can," he responded, thickly, almost drunkenly.
Hungrily she eyed him, advancing.
"You can. Oh yes, you sure can."
Fontaine seemed taken aback.
"Could you tell me what's wrong?"
One of Rita's enamelled fingernails pointed.
"This. This is wrong. Help me."
Up shot Fontaine's eyebrows.
"Look, Rita-wait a second. The booze-"
Rita fastened her nails on his bicep.
"You want to help me, mister. Don't you?"
"Sure. That's why I came to Peabody. Hold on, though. Give me a minute."
Fontaine struck both palms against the ancient desk top, wagging his head side to side as if to clear it of whiskey fumes. Rita drew closer. Her breast-ends were a scant inch from the wrinkled white of his shirt, throbbing to their roots.
Fontaine slapped his forehead, clenched his teeth.
"God, I must have swallowed half a pint neat. My head's busting open-"
"Hurry, mister!"
Rita thrust herself against him, legs spread far enough to enable her to clasp his rugged hip between them.
"If you're not just talking, you can help me out.
Digging his arm again, brow shining with sweat, Rita shrilled in his ear:
"Don't you understand, mister? I want you. I've got to have you or I'm going to die inside."
A shocked, pitying expression fought its way onto Fontaine's face. He gripped Rita by her shoulders, watching the unnatural contortions of her pelvis as she writhed in the grip of arousal. Her tight scarlet pants hid nothing, not the stitched hem of her panties, not the tapering lines of her lower belly-nothing. Fontaine said raggedly:
"Rita, listen. I don't know anything about you. Who you are or what's making you act this way. But I can tell you're in trouble. We have a doctor who's supposed to call at the Peabody House once a week. He has a friend uptown who can handle-"
"This is all I need!" Rita screamed, grinding her hips against him.
Tears ran down her cheeks, helpless tears. He tried to comfort her, drew her clumsily into the crook of his arm. Rita's hands moved like mad things on him.
"Why can't you get it straight? I'm going to die inside if you don't take me."
"Rita-"
His face was close, rough, handsome. And confused.
"I'll be damned if I can take advantage-girl, you need help. You need-"
"I need a man!" Rita howled, ripping at his belt. "I need a man right where I live!"
Fontaine started to speak again. Before he could, frantic Rita flung her arms around him, working her body like a machine, kissing him with everything she had, kissing him with her burning breasts and her hot lips and her twisting hips.
Fontaine mumbled words at her, still too dizzy with the hastily-consumed liquor to think clearly. Rita opened her lips as wide as she could. Fontaine tried to break loose from the kiss. The frantic embrace twisted them from side to side. Rita moaned and mewed, bit his lips and dug her nails in his neck.
One last spark of sanity in her mind screamed that the big guy was right, was hideously right. She needed help. Maybe she was insane. Then Fontaine gave a choking oath, a curse, as if her working body had finally reached some hidden wellspring of masculinity. His arm shot around her waist, bending her backwards. His mouth was a furious weapon.
His lips bruised her. His tongue answered hers, hotly, wetly.
Next thing Rita knew, they were both naked on the leather couch.
"Don't fool around too long," Rita begged. "Please don't play around."
Fontaine's face disgusted and purpled with desire at the same time, loomed over her.
"Why did you come here?"
Rita laughed hysterically, wriggling herself into position.
"Want to stop?"
"Damn you-I shouldn't-damn you!"
The aching moment Rita had been anticipating, praying for, was the most stunning, most electrifying, she had ever experienced. Her eyes flew wide in disbelief. She let herself crest on the wave of excitement bursting inside her raging loins. He was marvelous.
So gentle, so tender. Yet so lividly passionate as he gripped her body. One hand beneath her tender curving back, now laved with love-sweat, one hand muscular and stimulation on her thighs, drawing her up, ever up to new intimate togetherness.
Never had a man stimulated her so deeply. Perhaps it was because she'd never been mastered by a man before, only by pimply kids, who couldn't begin to touch the depths of true womanhood within her.
But Fontaine did, Fontaine who cursed as he took her, his mouth reeking of whiskey as he made her whole naked body light up with ecstasy.
Fontaine's teeth clenched as he loved her more stridently second by second. Never before had Rita felt so near to achieving a true end to ever-mounting excitement. With Fontaine, she felt it was possible to be truly fulfilled. She became a mad thing fighting with him against him and through him and around him to seek out that insane fulfillment-'
"Oh mister-mister-mister!...." Rita screamed in unparallelled ecstasy:
For the very first time she felt exaltation. Fontaine drove her to glory, each passing instant brought her closer to paradise, flesh-aching paradise.
She closed her mouth on his shoulder, wishing her teeth were fangs to rip him to shreds. The next instant the miracle began to happen.
Deep in her belly the miracle of unlocking blew up her mind and unleashed a golden flood of warmth that erased too many sordid years behind her, too many befouled memories, leaving only this consuming heaven, this manmmoth upheaval that made her rise from the couch in one last tormented heavenly reach for ecstasy that was suddenly there-
When she fell back, panting and nearly senseless, Rita Danilov was no longer frightened and seeking. She was a woman.
A woman who knew, in spite of the bitterness and the dark past, how it felt, how it really felt to be completely satisfied.
"Thank you. You were wonderful."
Rita spoke the words fervently. Fontaine stood with his back to her as he pulled on his trousers. Rita dressed rapidly, slipping her trembling legs into her panties, hooking her still-warm breasts back into her brassiere. At last Fontaine swung around, about to speak. Instead he yanked open the desk drawer and extracted the pint of bourbon.
Rapidly he finished half of what remained. He continued to stare at her with a tormented, disbelieving expression.
"I'll never forget you, Fontaine," Rita breathed. "Never in all my life."
"Why did you make me do it?"
She stopped his protesting lips with her fingers.
"I couldn't help myself. But for the first time-I swear this is the truth-for the first time it made me feel good."
Fontaine measured his words painfully:
"Do you understand I'm supposed to help kids like you? Not violate every law of decency by taking an under-age girl to bed."
Hurt, Rita asked. "Was it that bad?"
Fontained wiped a hand across his mouth, flashing, guilty.
"No, You're-good."
Tears welled in Rita's eyes. They were tears of gratitude.
She touched his hand, suddenly heartbroken that she had to leave.
"Maybe I'm sick like you say. I guess I am. But for the first time in my life I felt loved, I felt wanted. Is that so awful?"
Shaking his head, Fontaine replied gloomily:
"It was wrong."
Face shining with fresh tears Rita whispered, "If you can somehow help the kids on Hamilton Street half as much as you helped me tonight-"
Impulsively she give him a kiss, cool-lipped now, almost tender. Leaving him standing there with his hard chest still agleam with perspiration, Rita ran into the darkened hall.
His footsteps rapped as he came after her. He called her name. His voice still sounded confused.
A tingling warmth filled Rita as she hurried onto Hamilton Street, not knowing whether she should laugh or cry. Without rhyme or reason, hopelessly and miserably and gloriously too, Rita Danilov was suddenly in love with Fontaine.
A pair of jealous, watchful eyes surveyed Rita Danilov from the alley where Rita herself had hidden.
The eyes had seen almost everything there was to see of filth and depravity. The eyes could translate instantly a scarlet flush on a girl's cheeks as she sped along under the streetlamps, up Hamilton Street away from Peabody House.
The eyes took on a vindictive shine, cat-like, ugly.
After a final drag on a crinkly brown cigarette that made her head cloudy-light and her strength the strength of ten, Mae Lazar slipped out of the shadows and followed Rita down the street.
CHAPTER SIX
The dirt-fouled pavement seemed a regal carpet under Rita Danilov's feet. As she hurried back toward the market the garish neons and squalid tenements took on a night-muted loveliness, a mistiness, that she had never noticed before.
Again and again she dwelled on Fontaine's features. His cleanly-chiseled grown-man's face. His virility.
Of course she'd taken advantage of him. No doubt of it. But her reward had been eminently worth it. He had transformed a mechanical act into something beautiful, something far more satisfying than mere temporary relief.
She found herself almost wishing Fontaine had not touched her at all. Because how could she be content with any of the gang kids now that she had experienced a man's caresses?
Fontaine was a good man, a decent man. She might never get a chance to have him again. But he'd blessed her with a priceless treasure and she loved him for it. She found herself praying fervently that his work at the Peabody House would succeed. She re-lived every trembling moment of their time together as she hurried along, every intimate caress-"Hey, Rita! Wait a sec."
Rita turned, surprised to see Mae Lazar appear under a streetlamp's glow.
Rita lit a cigarette, apprehensive. Mae was no friend. Mae had always been a dangerous rival for Whitey's affections. Mae was wholly a child of the streets, lacking even a tyrannical father like Simon Danilov to shield her slightly from the harsh realities of Hell's Half Mile.
As Mae approached gaudily dressed in a sweater and toreadors, she linked her arm with Rita's. The girls started in the direction of the produce market. This section of Hamilton Street was comprised chiefly of tenements. Most of the inhabitants had returned indoors. Against the brittle, falsely-warm sound of Mae's voice came a crackle of shouts and a thud of hoofs from a television.
"Where you been, Rita?"
"Oh, just walking," Rita returned carefully. "Just out walking."
Mae laughed, bumping her hip against Rita's in a knowing way.
"Don't kid me. Your cheeks are all red. You've had yourself a man."
Rita thought better of it. Why dignify the disgusting little bitch with an answer?
"What do you care, Mae? Let go of my arm. I'm late at the store and Pop will raise hell."
Mae laughed.
"What do you think he'll do when he finds out it was the new director of the welfare joint giving it to you?"
Eyes black with anger, Rita spun around. "What did you, say?"
Mae's painted lips peeled back from her teeth.
"I guess you heard me okay."
Rila was contemptuous:
"What were you doing, Mae? Watching?"
"I saw you come out smiling. You only smile that way when you just had a man."
Mae's eyes grew crafty. "Wonder how Whitey will like-"
"Stop wondering so much, Mae, and take off. It's my business."
"The crap it is!" Mae spat, pushing Rita roughly..
The two girls stood near the mouth of an alley. The nearest streetlamp was a good half of a block away.
"I saw that big stud tonight when he walked from the bus, Rita. I tried to get him to take me but he wouldn't. So I decided to see what luck I'd have at the House. I'm warning you, Rita. You've already got Whitey-"
"Makes you jealous, does it?" Rita was defiant, unwilling to be backed down. "Maybe he wouldn't touch you because you're such a whore, Mae, always peddling yourself for money-"
Like an enraged cat, Mae hissed:
"I'm going to get that big stud at the House for myself! Leave him be! Leave him be or I swear to Christ I'll hurt you bad."
Frightened suddenly, but angry too, Rita turned her back on Mae and laughed.
Mae leaped like an alley cat, driving Rita forward into the shadows, ripping at her clothes, trying to ruin her sweater.
"Leave him alone!" Mae shrieked. "Leave him alone or I'll kill you!"
"The hell you will!" Rita slapped her. "The hell!" Mae's face was livid. "I'll tear you to pieces!"
She attacked, kicking and biting and gouging. Rita slapped her again. Mae slapped back. Mae aimed a kick between Rita's legs. Rita caught Mae's toreador pants and ripped from the waist. Mae responded by pulling Rita's hair and scratching her cheeks and shredding her sweater with a savagery that left the garment in tatters.
Rita stumbled, tried to catch herself. She slipped in a patch of grease, landing on her ripe buttocks. Mae leaped atop her, fumbling for the belt of Rita's pants, trying to rip her belly bare as she wedged a knee into Rita's groin to hold her down.
"I'll kill you, Rita! I'll ruin you so nobody can ever have you again!"
Rita threw her off. As Mae scrabbled on her back, hurling epithet after filthy epithet, Rita got both hands on Mae's clothes and ripped her breasts naked.
Mae howled and stumbled up the alley, nursing the outraged nipple between her palms. Rita straightened, panting. She smoothed her hair as best she could. Her face ghastly in its fury, Mae called:
"You'll be sorry you hurt me, Rita."
"I wish I'd bitten it all the way off!" Rita snarled back.
For the better part of two minutes the girls confronted one another, trading every conceivable vile epithet of the street. Finally, flushed with victory, Rita saw that she was safe from further attack, had beaten Mae at her own no-holds-barred game. Finding the strength to laugh at the defeated girl, Rita turned and strolled off down Hamilton Street, refusing to even respond to Mae's continuing obscene tirade:
"Fix you! Fix you good, you dirty louse-" Gradually Mae's voice was lost in the dark.
Too late, she tried to stay her hand on the front knob of the market.
Absorbed in thoughts of Fontaine, Rita had started into the store without realizing no lights glowed inside. Had it gotten that late? She'd promised Pop to return in a very few moments, with bread. If she'd been wise, she would have surveyed the darkened store and gone around to the rear stairway. Even as she realized with alarm that she'd remained away much too long, the light in the rear room blinked on.
In another moment Simon Danilov, burly and swag-bellied, wearing only stained trousers and a grimy undershirt, unlatched the front door.
He dragged Rita inside. He latched the door again and pulled down the cracked shade. His face in the dim light from the back his face was mottled. He surveyed Rita's face and her disarrayed clothing.
One of his sausage-fingered hands tore the belt from his trousers.
Rita raised her hands as he shoved her toward the back room. "No, poppa! Poppa, I met some kids I know down at Olivetti's and forgot what time-"
"Forgot, hell! It's way past Olivetti's closing time too."
Caught in the lie, Rita tried to stammer another excuse. Danilov interrupted:
"Been out letting more of them filthy street boys in your pants, huh?"
"Poppa, I told you that was over. I don't do it any-"
Simon's hand levered her arm cruelly.
"Undress! I wanna see you."
"You shouldn't be looking at me, poppa. I'm a grown woman now. I'm-"
"Shut up. Take off them panties!"
Danilov thrust her through the curtain into the back room. Hoping to placate him, Rita peeled off her toreadors and stood exposed through the sheerness of her panties. Danilov's eyes slipped to her navel, then downward.
"All the way," he grunted. "Show me everything. Then I tell what you been doing, hanging around with the kids at Olivetti's or getting yourself dirtied inside."
Helplessly Rita pressed her palms on herself for protection.
"Poppa, I won't-"
"Strip for your father!" Danilov cried, ripping the front of her panties away.
Rita fought him, vainly. In spite of his age and his tendency to fat, a tremendous amount of strength remained in his thick arms. Danilov forced her to the floor. With one meaty hand he ripped away the last shred of pantie fabric.
Rita lay sobbing with the white silk in shreds around her knees. Danilov jammed his elbow between her thighs and subjected her to a thorough, cruel investigation. Then, licking his lips, eyes shining oddly as he caressed the palm of his hand with the curled belt, he stood up.
"Turn over and show me your butt," he said. "I'm gonna whip you for playing whore with a dirty man:
"Poppa, I swear it was an accident. I didn't mean-Poppa!"
Danilov kicked her, doubled her over so that her twin white buttocks lay exposed, everything lay exposed as she bent over, trying to rub the hurt from her belly.
Danilov smelled of sweat as he raised the belt and brought it whistling down. The leather cut and stung her right cheek. Rita tried to twitch away from him across the wooden floor. Danilov placed a heel on her right hip and gave her another stroke.
Rita moaned. A thin welt of blood oozed to the tender surface of her left cheek. Twisting her head around, she watched with horror as Danilov raised the belt, licking his lips.
God protect her-Danilov was enjoying himself!
Lash after lash after lash struck her buttocks until there was not an inch betwen her waist and the backs of her knees that had not tasted the flicking abuse of his belt, the belt he wielded faster and faster as sickness twisted him, made him grunt and finally, at the last, smile as he laid on the final stroke.
He dropped the belt, huge greasy rings of sweat showing under his armpits where the perspiration had soaked his undershirt. Half-conscious, Rita touched the base of her spine, probed her buttocks and brought her fingers back to her face. Through tears of pain and degradation she saw the moist blood gleaming on the tips of those fingers.
In an excited voice Danilov said:
"Sleep down here with the crates, bitch. Tomorrow you get back to your proper place, upstairs. But tonight-sleep in the dirt where you belong."
Resting her head on her arm, Rita heard him clump up the rear stairs. The crash of the flat door closed with a crash. A terrified sob of relief tore out between her lips. Why hadn't she realized it before? Poppa was a maniac-far worse than she'd ever been in her worst periods of craving. She was lucky he hadn't raped her.
As an antidote for her terror, Rita closed her eyes and thought of her brief bliss with Fontaine.
The heavenly passion of him; The cool and blessed balm of his hands stirring on her flanks, caressing, toying with her breasts, making her limpid with desire.
How good it had been, she thought. How terrific, after the unpleasantness of her years growing up on Hamilton Street.
In the dazed torment of her mind, Rita tried to create Fontaine in her mine's eye:
The two of them lying together, body to body, caressing.
Her breasts upthrust and eager for his lips, those same lips that roamed her flesh intimately. Kissing and kissing and kissing.
The masterfulness of him, the proudness as he threw himself into the frantic union. Rita could practically feel the excitement tearing her apart. In her imagination she rose to ecstasy again, swaying this way and that way, backwards, forwards....
Lying on the floor of the market's back room, Rita whimpered softly and touched herself, experiencing again an echo of a delicious tingle. But the slopes of her white buttocks were so full of hurt that the dream receded, became no more than a ghostly vision of male and female bodies on a couch, impossible to remember as they became dimmer-dimmer-
Tottering to her feet, she pulled a wisp of pantie fabric over the bruised tenderness of herself. She took a look at the storeroom.
The rickety orange crates.
The browned, fallen lettuce leaves.
A half-dozen grimy chicken feathers in one corner.
And the belt Simon Danilov had dropped, evilly black and stained with her own blood.
Rita laughed, emptily.
Love Fontaine? Love the big guy! Have him love her? What a cheap little fool she was. There was nothing for her but cruelty and hopeless despair.
Holding her clothes together as best she could, facing reality again, Rita moved with stealthy quiet through the storeroom, doing what she had realized she must.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Below the lanes of the interstate bridge, aswarm even at this hour of the night with headlights and taillights in senseless profusion, stretched a mile and a half of smoldering wasteland.
It was to this waste beneath the great bridge that legions of city dump trucks brought the affluvium of humanity twelve hours a day. To be burned in great heaps that glower orange even after dark. Or to be plowed under by the bulldozers locked up now in a wire compound just off the asphalt ramp leading down from the end of Hamilton Street.
On this burning, smoky waste could be found practically any discarded article: books and old combs, complete suits of men's clothing and discarded furniture, orange peels and contraceptives, torn tote tickets and used sanitary napkins, the whole disgusting dung of man's daily life. Because of the noxious smell, all but the highly-paid sanitary department employees avoided the wastestrewn shore, including Captain Wadsewski's precinct detectives on the hunt for an escaped correction farm inmate.
Which is precisely the reason Whitey Noonan played cat-and-mouse under the concrete pillars of the great bridge until the detectives had made their one and only brief visit to the dump, then driven away holding their noses.
Whitey Noonan hid out among the bridge pillars during the day when the dozers clanked over the dump. He returned at night-at night he came alive-to a small watchman's shack at the end of the dump beneath the bridge. The city could not pay a watchman enough money to stay long on the job in this sinkhole. Watchmen came and went. Right now none was on duty. Nor had any been for three days. Whitey and the Cobras could therefore live it up safely in the shack.
J. B., the scrawny kid with glasses, threw some old papers into the shack's iron stove.
"Lay off, you mother-fryer. Hot enough in here now," Whitey spoke laconically, reclining on the watchman's cot which he had appropriated for his own. Naked save for a pair of jeans, he tilted up a gallon jug of muscatel that was by now half empty. Wine dribbled down his thin, muscular chest. He ignored it, snapping his fingers.
"Who got a reef?"
Viper shuffled forward between the other gang members lying in assorted semi-drunken poses on the dirt floor. Their faces shone white and unhealthy in the light of two portable battery lanterns Viper had thoughtfully lifted from the variety store on Hamilton. Whitey scratched himself as Viper passed the reef and lit it for the leader.
Whitey lay back, smoking reflectively.
"I can't stand this mother-frying hole."
"It ought to be safe to go out in a day or so, Whitey," offered J. B.
"Yeah," another of the kids said. "I ain't seen Kreeg around much lately."
"Someday I'm going to wrap that cop's ding-dong around his neck," said Whitey.
Amused guffaws greeted his remark. Whitey looked pleased. Then he scowled at J. B. Behind his big glasses, the kid was nervous, apprehensive. Whitey raised himself on an elbow, anger darkening his spoiled features.
"What's the matter with you, worm? Don't you think it's funny, huhh?"
J. B. cocked his head.
"I'm listening, Whitey."
"You better be listening!"
Whitey leaped up, dragging out his knife.
"Sometimes, Jack in the Box, I think you're too frying yellow to belong-"
"Shut up for Christ's sake!" whined J. B. "I hear somebody in the dump."
Whitey blinked drunkenly as the words registered. Galvanized into action, he aimed a cruel kick at the groin of one of the reclining Cobras.
"On your feet crap-heads. Din't you hear J. B.?"
At once the half dozen gang kids came alive. In a twinkling weapons appeared out of nowhere-switch knives, a zip gun, a length of tire chain. Viper quickly extinguished both battery lanterns.
Whitey took his switch in his fist and strode to the shack door, inching it open. Limned against one of the smoldering orange rubbish fires, a figure walked unsteadily toward the shack. Whitey's eyebrows puckered.
"Could it be a fuzz this time of night? They don't usually-"
Behind him, Viper sniggered.
"Relax. Cops don't have boobs."
"Sha' you say?"
Whitey looked again. As the figure approached, stepping with false daintiness over a pile of moldering cabbage acrawl with maggots, Whitey chuckled deep in his throat. He retracted the blade of his switch and stepped outside.
"Hlyah, Kid. Kind of off the track down here, ain't you?"
"That any way to talk when I come to see you about something important?"
"Yeah? Well, I'll forgive you this time, even though I did tell you to keep clear of the place until things cooled. Come on in, Mae. Like we got a jug."
Giggling, Mae Lazar slipped past him. Her sweater brushed his naked arm so that he could feel the end of her nipple against his flesh. As she switched by, Whitey reached down and delivered a lewd caress. Mae backed up suddenly, wiggling for all she was worth.
"Hey, Hey, man, that's wonderful. Like kiss me quick, somebody."
Several of the gang boys laughed coarsely. Whitey goosed Mae's tight-clad buttocks so that she leaped into the shack, straight into the arms of Viper, who gave her a long kiss. Two of the boys watched interestedly as Mae rubbed her breasts against Viper. Whitey kicked the door shut. Someone relit the battery lanterns. Feigning anger, Whitey pulled the couple apart.
"None o' that, none o' that until Whitey gets his. Gona come across, Mae?"
"Well for Christ's sake, not without a drink!"
Mae giggled and snatched up the jug of muscatel. She tilted it back, clasping her moist red lips around the mouth, drinking with a sucking gurgle. J. B., seated on his haunches in a corner, morosely puffed on a reef.
Whitey had half a mind to reprimand J. B. for never taking part in gang activities. But then J. B. seldom did. J. B. was a loner, with funny ideas that Whitey had to slap out of his head once in a while. Still J. B. was smarter than the rest of them. J. B. had graduated from high school and had been valuable in the past mapping strategy for rumbles. Whitey idly decided to let him alone.
He took the jug from Mae's hands and bent to kiss her. Mae opened her mouth all the way again and they tasted tongues for a while. Then Whitey inserted his hand under Mae's sweater. He was excited by the delicious little pucker of her nipples just beginning to show through the fabric. Suddenly Whitey noticed Mae's cheek. It was badly scratched.
"What happened?" he wanted to know, helping himself to wine. "That fryin' Kreeg?"
Mae shook her head, eyes hard.
"Not Kreeg, Whitey. Rita."
Whitey looked angry. "Listen! She's a nice kitten. You shut up about her!"
Mae stuck out her tongue....
"Okay, big man. But what would you say if I told you she was putting out for another guy?"
Whitey pulled out his switch, flicked the point into the open.
"I'll cut you to ribbons for telling a lie like that, Mae."
"I'm not lying!" screeched the voluptuous little redhead, writhing away. "She went to Peabody House tonight. When she came out she was all flushed and hot. Don't you think I can tell when a girl's just been with a man, for Cripesake?" she finished defiantly.
Whitey looked puzzled.
"Peabody House? Ain't the joint closed?"
"They got a new director. A big fryer too. A stud."
Viper nodded laconically.
"Fontaine. Brick Fontaine."
Astonishment showed on Whitey's face.
"The back for the Stags? No crap?"
"No crap," Viper returned. "It was in the papers while you was-uh-out of town."
Shaking his head, Whitey murmured, "And I thought he played pretty good ball. I never figured him for a Christer."
"He's not," Mae said, helping herself to an additional jolt of the fast-dwindling muscatel. "I tell you he made it with Rita tonight! Of course," she added with prissy contempt, "not that it's very hard. Anybody can do it, anybody at all."
"Shut your frying mouth!" Whitey exploded.
Mae jeered: "You just go see if I'm right!"
"By God I will!"
Whitey snatched up his sweaty t-shirt, slipped it over his head.
"Viper, you and J. B. and Spivvy come on with me." Mae blocked his march to the door. "Hey, wait! What about me? I came all the way down here to do you a favor, Whitey. I thought you guys'd be nice to me. Like man, I kinda haven't had any kicks in a couple of days."
Through the haze of wine Whitey surveyed her-the plump wiggling buttocks; the tight sweater with the surprisingly-developed breasts thrusting their nubs against the fabric. He laughed, rather harshly.
"Sure, doll. Sure, I guess we can take care of your little problem. How about that, guys? Think we can take care of Mae?"
The boys, except for the morose J. B., muttered that they guessed they could.
Chuckling, Whitey began to snap his fingers in rhythm. "Rita can wait. I don't blame her much for passing it around. But she knows what I do to guys she messes with. I don't run the Cobras because I let everybody grab my girl any time they want."
Whitey swallowed more muscatel, draining the jug and tossing it into the dirt.
"Tomorrow's time enough. Right now Mae's here. I can see Mae's ready."
Snapping his fingers faster, Whitey nodded to Viper, who at once took up the snapping rhythm. Soon all the boys were snapping their fingers in unison.
Rolling her eyes around in feigned excitement, Mae began to bump and grind.
Viper dragged a wooden table into the center of the shack. He set both the battery lanterns to illuminate the table's surface. Then he jabbed his thumb at Mae's twitching buttocks. "If you gonna put on a show, doll, get up there and do it right."
Giggling, Mae accepted a hand up. She kicked off her sneaks and stared down at the boys circled around her, all snapping their fingers. Mae slid her palms down her thighs, lewdly.
In a bad imitation of a stripper she thrust her left hand to the nape of her neck, pushed her red hair to the top of her head and took a wide stance. She ran her hands up and down the inner sides of her thighs. She began to mew and moan. Whitey stared at her grinding hips. Sweat popped on his upper lip. He snapped his fingers faster.
"Pick up the beat!" he said hoarsely. "Come on Mae, go, go!"
"Yeah!" Viper was bug-eyed. "Sock it! Let it go! Get wild!"
With a squeal Mae ripped her sweater over her head. She unhooked her bra and flung it in Whitey's face. He clenched it in his fist, watching the writhing body in the twin lantern beams.
Her breasts bobbed and shook and jiggled as she gyrated. She squeezed them between her fingers, now revealing the tender-firm pink nipples, now concealing them.
She lowered one hand to the zipper of her toreadors.
She zipped it up and down in rhythm to the snapping fingers. She licked her lips, her smile gone as excitement claimed her.
A silver bead of sweat ran down to her right nipple and glistened on the red surface. Mae's hips wrenched back and forth, back and forth as she worked the toreadors down over her hips.
Finally she discarded them, leaving only her wispy panties.
Bending backward like a stripper, Mae ground her hips around and around, feet braced wide apart, running her fingers through her hair and moaning. Even J. B. had perked up, was watching the proceedings with nervous, unhealthy enjoyment.
Mae moved her hands faster and faster, socked her hips back and forth, almost slamming them into Whitey's face with each forward snap. One of the boys cursed excitedly as Mae slid her fingernails under her panties and slipped them off.
Viper caught them when she threw them. She bent her knees more and more, rotating her hips. Then she pirouetted suddenly, showing them her buttocks, shaking-white.
The buttocks moved in circles as she ground ferociously, both hands raking her red hair. The finger-snapping beat increased tempo again. Mae faced the boys again, biting her lips, eyes round as she squeezed her big breasts in her hands, stimulating them so the nipples stood up firm.
Her muscular legs twitched and writhed, her white hips going in a dizzy circle, around and around and around, back and forth, back and forth-
"Jeez!"
Whitey Noonan reached for his belt. "Jeez, Mae-!"
All of a sudden Mae missed a step, pitching forward from the table. She was caught just in time by Viper and an astonished J. B. They couldn't hold her. She fell to the dirt floor, moaning and rolling onto her back, glassy-eyed. She spread her arms, shrieked: "Goddam it-somebody!"
Whitey ripped off his jeans and threw them at Viper. "Mae, Mae doll! This is Whitey's going to grab you. Right now-"
"That's it! Come on-make the scene!" Over his shoulder Whitey hissed: "Pick up the beat!" Faster snapped the fingers. Mae squealed.
She kicked her legs high into the beam of the battery lanterns.
Whitey groaned, he and Mae rolled from side to side. Mae howled with depraved ardor:
"Come on, man! Make the scene!...."
Even J. B. was on his feet. His round kid's eyes were horrified behind the big spectacles. But he was unable to keep from watching.
Whitey stumbled across the shack, wiping sweat from his body with his t-shirt.
Mae cried out for more.
One after another, all except J. B., the others had their turn with her.
Toward sunset next day, a reddish sunset that brought with it a chilly autumn nip, Simon Danilov opened the rear door of his storeroom.
His arms were laden with orange crates which he intended to deposit in a rubbish pile down the alley. The crates suddenly ended up in a heap at his feet. Danilov himself was backed against the wall, lips twitching with fright.
Like shades, specters, half a dozen punks had slithered out of the murk of the twilight alley. The biggest, the white-faced blond Danilov knew as Noonan, jammed a knee in Danilov's groin. A ferociously long sharp steel blade caught red fire from the distant setting sun.
Danilov closed his eyes. He prayed in the tongue of the old country as the knife-tip pricked his throat.
"Where is she, jerk?" Whithey asked. "Where's the kid?"
"Rita? I dunno, I dunno. You fellas leave me alone, I ain't done nothing."
"Just hid your little kitten, that's all, man."
Whitey seized the back of Danilov's head, gave it a snap that drove the switch point deep enough into the the flesh to draw blood.
"Hear me good, you old jerk? I want to find Rita. Where did she go?"
"God as my witness!" Danilov whined fearfully. "I couldn't say! I woke up this morning-no Rita. She's run off. That's the truth. We had a fight last night. A bad mix-up."
Now Danilov was eager to save his own hide. His rheum-choked eyes shone with fright.
"I beat her. I beat her a lot. This morning she was gone, no note, no nothing. Listen, Mr. Noonan-"
Viper shuffled forward, rattling a length of tire chain.
"Whitey, I think he's levelling."
For a long moment, puzzled and frustrated, Whitey stared into the suety face. Disgustedly he retracted the knife blade.
"Yeah, I think so too. If you tell Wadsewski about us coming to see you, Danilov, you'll end up little hunks of meat in the garbage can, understand?"
Danilov shook his head to show he did. Whitey lit a smoke and stared into the sunset. "Where the hell'd she go, I wonder? Damn it. I want to teach that broad a lesson."
A shrill whistle from the cross-alley diverted him. One of the Cobras ran up excitedly:
"Kreeg and a beat cop just went by on Hamilton!"
"Scatter!" Whitey shouted, running. "We'll find her later!"
A moment after that, Simon Danilov rubbed his throat and wondered if it had been a nightmare. The Cobras had melted away. Only a little blood on his palm showed that the vicious boys were not figments of his mind.
With uncertain step and trembling hand Danilov picked up the shattered remains of the orange crates. He shivered. The sunset was blood-red, chilly.
He too wondered what had happened to his daughter. She had disappeared. Run off, most probably.
Danilov felt a new convulsion of fright twitch his backbone. He wasn't certain he wanted to find Rita now. Especially not with that vicious boy Noonan hunting her.
No, thought Simon Danilov, picking up splintered orange crate wood, better Rita should fend for herself with that rat pack on her heels.
What did he owe her?
Nothing.
She only brought him misery, heartache, evil thoughts God would one day punish him for harboring.
Wherever his whore daughter had run, she could take care of herself.
She'd get no help from him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The morning of the day Whitey and the other Cobras cornered old man Danilov in the alley, Brick Fontaine woke up with a hollow head and a heavy guilt.
Rolling over on the couch, he held his temples between his hands and tried to suppress the clanguorous ringing in his ears. His mouth tasted as though he'd swallowed a jar of brass polish. But worse than these physical afflictions was Brick's suddenly clear memory of what had occurred on this same couch the night before.
He remembered all too vividly the Danilov girl's eager, tender body. A body that writhed as though possessed by devils.
God, Brick thought, crawling off the couch and stumbling down the hall to the shower. What a great social worker you are! First night on the job and you jump a teenager. What other evil deeds have you in mind? How about a couple of crimes against nature; Fontaine old kid? What's a little depravity among friends?
Brick tottered beneath the rusty shower, turned on the squeaking taps and drowned his fretting beneath a boiling spray of water.
Had it really been his fault?
Now come on, Fontaine. Don't try to excuse yourself.
But he had to admit that once the Danilov girl took off all her clothes, she was quite a trick. She'd given him one of the best times he'd ever known with a girl. Almost as good as the loving he'd shared with Elaine.
Still, he knew he'd done wrong.
No matter how he rationalized it-bitterness and frustration over losing the girl he loved, the undue influence of the bourbon he'd so foolishly drunk-guilt was inescapable. By the time he stepped from the shower cabinet, he was done with self-pity and resolved to make up for the sin of commission of last night. He also intended to forestall a sin of ommission by seeing what he could do to help the Danilov girl, really help her. She was so obviously sick that she required the care of a competent psychiatrist.
In a smaller room adjoining the office, a room full of cobwebs and musty smells, Brick discovered a pound can of faintly dank but still brewable coffee, a hot plate and a tin percolater.
Three acid-black cups later, Brick was ready to tour the settlement house.
The gym floor was in passable condition, needing only a wax job. Most of the doors had been stolen-ripped bodily-from the lockers in the dressing room. The club room blackboards were all smashed, as well as most of the rickety wooden furniture. Stepping outside-a light autumnal morning mist had some of the leprous ugliness of Hamilton Street, thank God-Brick roamed along the outer walls. The siding was badly in need of a coat of paint before winter. Well, he hadn't planned to open the doors for another week or two. Might as well start with the paint.
He located a ladder in a storeroom, brought it out to the steps and straightened the sign over the door.
Climbing down, he reflected that he had ample work ahead of him. The trustees of the estate which supported the Justus J. Peabody House were wavering about further long-term financing of the project. Needless to say, Brick had been damned lucky to pry nominal living expenses from the committee. Hiring painters was out of the question. He'd simply have to do the job himself. But maybe physical exercise would eradicate some of his lingering shame over Rita.
Brick returned to the office to pick up his coat. On the desk he noticed a piece of note paper written in a girl's light slanted hand.
Mr Fontaine, the words ran, I'm anxious to meet you although I know you won't re-open the house right away. I'll keep my eye out for your arrival and stop by to see whether there's anything I can do to help during the clean-up process.
The signature, bringing a puzzled frown to Brick's brow, was Carol A.
Carol A.?
At length he remembered. The trustees-Elaine's father Artemus Olsen, in fact-had mentioned a girl named Ambrosio, a teenager whose parents ran a delicatessen on Hamilton Street. The Ambrosio girl had volunteered her services to the previous director as an after-school secretary and bookkeeper, without salary.
As he set off down Hamilton on the first of his two errands Brick reflected that the inhabitants of Hell's Half Mile, like most people, couldn't be entirely bad or entirely hopeless if the world included a few Carol A.'s. Even the hostile, suspicious stares Brick received from passers-by could not dim this thought.
At Danilov's Produce Market, however, he ran up against his real opposition.
The balding, sloppy man Brick assumed to be Danilov himself waved his hands up and down and kept repeating, "No here, no here!" when Brick inquired for Rita after introducing himself.
The more Brick questioned Danilov, the more agitated the fattish man became, repeating, "No here, no here!" monotonously. Then he lapsed into some Middle European tongue Brick didn't understand.
Danilov's eyes flickered with suspicion. The old hog-bellied fool was playing with Brick, pretending he spoke no English, when all around the store were cardboard price placards lettered in a man's heavy hand.
"Damn-I mean, listen Danilov. I have to see your daughter. The name's Fontaine."
"No here, Goddam, no here!" Danilov shouted.
Brick was on the point of grabbing his shirt and roughing the obstinate old man a little when he suddenly realized that Danilov might be telling the truth. There was a sick, uncertain glaze to the rhuemy eyes that convinced him. Sighing, Brick turned and slammed out of the store.
Was Rita really gone? If she'd run off as a result of last night-
No, probably the old guy was simply suspicious, lying to conceal Rita's whereabouts. She'll learn I was asking for her, to find out who Fontaine is, and then she'll come to the settlement house.
She has to! I've got to help her!
Yet all his mental certainty was sheer invention. He wasn't at all sure Rita Danilov had not been irreparably hurt by his drunken behavior.
Monoghan's Hardware and Plumbing Supply proved to be another excellent symbol of the hostility Brick was going to encounter in the neighborhood. Monoghan himself, a sandpaper-voiced little man, totalled up Brick's purchases-several gallons of exterior paint, scrapers and brushes, bought with his own money-and snorted as he handed over the bill.
"Waste of valuable money! Kids around here don't need no help except help that'll land them six feet under. Bunch of wolves! I tell you, mister, one of these days we won't have any more juvenile problems on this street, because when the decent people get mad enough-"
Monoghan snickered.
"-there won't be any more juveniles."
A scowl puckered Brick's brow.
"Are you talking about that vigilance committee I heard about?"
Monoghan gazed at the ceiling. "I ain't saying what I'm talking about."
"Maintaining law and order is the job of the police."
"Is it, now? Go tell that to Captain Wadsewski, him with his fancy college ideas about treating these bastard kids with gloves on. Appears to me you're the same type.
"Who's behind your committee? That cop, Kreeg?" Monoghan's lips were thin.
"The bill, mister. Eighteen dollars ninety-two cents."
Disgusted, Brick paid without further questions and lugged the heavy paint cans back to the settlement house.
There he set to work scraping and priming the wall adjacent to the playground. He was still at it, finishing the prime coat at the north corner near the downspout, having missed lunch entirely, when he grew conscious of a young auburn-haired girl standing at the foot of the ladder, smiling.
With a start Brick realized the sun had gone down. The streetlamps were shining. He wiped his hands on a turpentine-soaked rag and jumped off the third rung.
"Hello, Mr. Fontaine." The girl was young, clean-scrubbed, had a fresh, unspoiled smile. She extended her hand. "Carol Ambrosio."
"How do you do? I saw your note."
"Welcome to Hamilton Street." She said it with what might have been a wry smile. "Sorry I couldn't be here after school but we had a Future Teachers meeting."
Brick gave a weary chuckle.
"You mean there's actually one kid on Hamilton Street who thinks about going to school past the legal quitting age?"
A frown creased Carol's pretty brow.
"Mr. Fontaine, don't sound so glum so soon. Regardless of what they say, the people down here need this place. I practically live for the hours I can spend here. When you sleep six in one room, any breath of fresh air-"
She stopped, smiled again.
"Will you have any work for me this week?" Brick shook his head.
"The painting should keep me busy at least through next Monday. Why don't you come by on Tuesday if you can? By then I ought to be ready to look over the books and any correspondence that's piled up. I plan to open shop a week from Friday."
Carol nodded, auburn curls gleaming in the dim street-lamp gleam.
"Anything you say. I'm pretty good at baking. What if I made an apple pie on Saturday? I hear you're living at the house, so you probably don't get much good food."
"A pie would be swell, Carol," returned Brick, touched. "Thanks very much."
Carol waved as she walked away.
"See you sometime Saturday, then."
After she had vanished into the shadows beyond the playground fence, Brick rapidly set about completing the prime coat. His earlier impressions of Hamilton Street were at least moderately reversed by discovering a young girl as nice as Carol Ambrosio.
Watch it, Fontaine! he thought, slapping the brush back and forth to lay on the paint. You re getting those dirty ideas again, you child-molester.
But he'd lost some of the remorse he felt earlier. What was done, was done. The only sensible course open now was to forget past errors and take a positive step. Like asking someone besides Danilov-maybe even Captain Wadsewski at the precinct-about the whereabouts of Rita.
Whistling, Brick hurried to complete the painting, perched on the ladder in the gathering dark with his back to the playground. He didn't see the half dozen shadow-shapes linger briefly beyond the fence, then fade into the dark down Hamilton, in the same direction Carol Ambrosio had taken on her way home.
Carol Ambrosio, sixteen, had a tender, white young body.
A body she was proud of.
A body she kept clean and sweet with daily bathings, in the dim hope that one day she could escape Hell's Half Mile, perhaps even earn a scholarship to City College and there meet a clean, decent boy to whom she could surrender her body for those mysterious, beautiful acts the movies and television only hinted about.
Hurrying along the dim street between Peabody House and the spangled arch of the interstate bridge in the distance, Carol thought with a guilty flush that Mr. Fontaine was a handsome man. Far handsomer than the previous directors.
A funny tingle ran down the inner surfaces of her legs as her flesh brushed while she walked. Under her thin blouse the clean, white-soft little mounds of her maturing breasts prickled.
Mustn't think such things, she chided herself, turning up her coat collar against the evening chill. It was hard not to, though, with all the filthy talk among the kids born and raised on Hell's Half Mile. Her school companions always tried to tarnish her dream of a brighter, cleaner life in another place. Perhaps in a tiny house in the suburbs, all neat and modern and sparkling, a house of the kind she'd seen in colorful magazines in the school library when she stayed late to write an extra-credit English paper.
Inside the house-one of Carol's hands stole to her cheek, ashamed of the heated flush she felt there-there would be a clean, intelligent boy with a good job who, in the darkened privacy of their bedroom, would undress her gently, tenderly, peeling away first this garment, then the next, with utter tenderness and respect, finally taking her in his arms to make a love-baby inside her body-
"Hey there, pussycat. Where you goin' so fast?"
Carol stopped, startled by the youth who had sidled out of a warehouse bay and now blocked her path along the sidewalk. She recognized the familiar silken Cobra monogram over the breast pocket in his jacket. Many times she'd seen the enblem in class, in spite of what the principal said about gang jackets worn on school premises.
The tough facing her was thin. He had long, unshorn hair that gleamed with oil. Carol felt a cold knot draw tight somewhere in her lower belly. Stuffing her hands into her coat pockets and lowering her gaze, she stepped in to the gutter to walk around him.
Cat-quick, the boy grabbed her arm.
"Not so fast! I got friends for you to meet!"
"Let go!"
"Don't let her mess around, Viper!" grated a harsh voice.
Carol twisted. A blond boy slipped from the gloom, grinning.
"Knock her block off if she acts up."
Before Carol could scream, Viper did just that.
Sprawling, Carol Ambrosio found herself far back in the warehouse bay a moment later, her skirt hiked around her thighs, her head hurting from the crack it had received as she fell. Under her skirt a patch of silky-white pantie material gleamed.
Carol's coat had fallen open. The thin blouse she wore was exposed, dangerously exposed, she thought in sudden panic. The blouse was sheer enough for her bra to be plainly visible. The double points of her sharp little breasts rose and fell stridently.
Four of five more youths appeared in the bay entrance. Carol stared at the blond boy.
"Whitey Noonan!" she gasped. "Now I remember! I saw it in the papers! You ran away from-"
Carol's lips turned icy. Words froze in her throat. She reached down in terror to pull the skirt over her kness. Whitey chuckled low, stepped down hard between her legs.
His tennis shoe rested on her painfully, the toe hurting.
"Don't hide it, sugar puss. We all want a look. We all want to take a good look at the little kitten hanging around with the jerk at Peabody."
Whitey's voice had a hard edge as he took his foot away, squatted beside Carol and ran his hand up and down the inside of her thigh. He picked at the hem of her panties as she lay immobilized with fright.
"I got nothing against you personally, honey," Whitey told her. "I mean, nothing yet."
Coarse laughter from the boys.
"This Fontaine jerk, he's been messing with my girl. I can't find her and I got a little score to settle with him. I figure me'n the others could sort of settle it with you."
Whitey ripped her panties aside. Carol tried to draw away. Instantly another boy knelt at her head and gripped her shoulders.
Whitey's hand worked at the tie of Carol's blouse.
"I think we ought to have a look first."
"My God, you wouldn't do that to me!" Carol began.
"The hell I wouldn't!" Whitey laughed.
He ripped her blouse down to her belly. Her slip hung in tatters. The two perfect-white cones of her brassiere gleaned in the dim light.
His hands were hard, twisting her breast this way and that. Carol tried feebly to escape his examination.
Whitey sat on her thighs while the second kid, the one addressed as Viper, pressed her shoulders to the hard concrete of the truck bay floor with one hand. His other slid across her mouth.
Carol tried to sink her teeth into the flesh, Viper laughed. His grip was all male strength, even making it impossible for her to move her jaws.
A random gleam from a streetlamp flashed on the spectacles of one of the boys.
"Whitey, I don't like this-!"
"Shut up!"
Mechanically Whitey worked Carol's bra strap over her shoulder.
"So you don't like it, huh? Well, J. B., that's just tough crappo, buddy."
His face a blurred white smear, the kid known as J. B. sidled forward, made a protesting gesture.
"If you want to scrag Fontaine, that's one thing. But this kid didn't do nothing-"
"She works for him, doesn't she?" Whitey spat. She helps him! Ain't that right?"
"Damn it, Whitey, I still say it's chicken to hurt her instead of going after-"
J. B. swallowed, a loud, gulping noise as Whitey left off his play with Carol's brassiere. Whitey scowled at the pale-lipped boy who was nervously fingering the bridge of his glasses.
"What did you say, J. B.? Did you say I was chicken!"
Again a noisy swallow.
"I didn't-nothin', Whitey. Forget it."
"You don't want to have her, you don't have to. But keep your crapping mouth shut!"
"I don't want to have her, Whitey," J. B. echoed in a limp tone.
"Ah, you chicken-crapper!" Whitey chuckled. "When you gonna grow up? Get your butt out to the sidewalk, then. Keep your eye peeled. If anybody comes, whistle."
"Yeah, okay, Whitey," J. B. mumbled. "But Jesus, don't hurt her too much-"
"Get going!" Whitey hissed. "Before I carve you up!"
Still protesting, J. B. shuffled to the entrance of the bay. Whitey returned his attention to Carol.
She lay under his forcing knee with her bra half stripped away, her right breast thrusting out, the wrinkled tip chilly in the night air.
This wasn't happening, Carol told herself as she saw his black figure tower over her, saw him drop the jeans and shorts to his knees and then kneel again.
Tightly, tightly, Carol clamped her legs together, pressed the knees against one another so ferociously they began to ache. Whitey's breath, stale with cigarettes, clouded around her, a sick miasma.
Again Carol attempted to bite the hand pressed to her mouth. Viper released her shoulder and delivered a blow to her ear that stunned her.
With a wrench Whitey tore her thighs apart.
"Baby, you're a little doll. I'm going to like this."
Somehow Carol knew she had to fight, knew she had to summon every last reserve of strength before it happened. Her head began to twist from side to side.
"Hold her, Viper, Goddam it!"
Whitey's body pressed her fiercely. Carol managed to sink her teeth into Viper's thumb and make him curse with pain at the very instant Whitey levered her legs open and-ohh!
Viper recoiled, stumbling backward, sucking his thumb.
Whitey's hand flew up to her throat, clamped there. All around, the gang boys crouched to watch, nightmare figures, shadowy carrion birds.
Oh, God in heaven, Oh God in heaven! He was hurling her!
Whitey's face loomed over her breast as his mouth nuzzled cruelly at the soft valley between the jutting mounds, bare now that he had pulled her bra all the way to her navel. His fingers gripped her throat so that she couldn't scream, could only twist her head a little, wishing the pain would stop.
Whitey smashed her against the concrete. Pain dimmed her eyes, pain and the increasing pressure of of his fingers as he tried to silence her, tried to still the abortive rattling in her throat.
The pain of inside her was nothing compared to the pain of his fingers on her neck.
Didn't he realize he was chocking her?
Didn't he understand in his crazed passion that she could no longer breathe?
That it was dark-?
Whitey stoop up, wiping his forehead.
"Your turn, Viper."
Moving to her side, Viper gasped.
"Whitey-"
His head swung around, eyes frantic.
"Whitey-you choked her too hard."
Whitey kicked Viper out of the way, knelt over the girl's abused body, slapping her cheeks. J. B. ran in from the bay entrance.
His eyes were big as moons behind the glasses.
Whitey's palms flicked and cracked on Carol's pale cheeks. At last he stood up, ashen. "Run, you bastards. She's dead."
His voice rose to an outraged shriek:
"Don't stand there-run!"
One after another the Cobras plunged out of the bay into the dark.
Only the emaciated figure of J. B. remained, resting his head against the unloading dock. Unable to look at the white twisted body of the teenage girl lying on the greasy concrete, ghastly and exposed in death, J. B. grew violently sick.
When the convulsion passed, he darted from the bay and glanced both ways along the street. The rest of the Cobras had vanished.
A tug's hoot sounded lonely from the river. Without daring to look behind, J. B. ran across the street, leaped a six-foot-high board fence and vanished like a frightened animal seeking its den.
CHAPTER NINE
Earlier that same day, shortly after two o'clock in the afternoon, Elaine Olsen wakened to feel sunlight slanting through the glass terrace doors to caress her nude body.
Drowsily Elaine lay with her arm crooked across her face. She saw through partially-closed eyes the expensive modern furnishings of her bedroom. The sunlight falling across the terrace to kiss her golden skin was tinged with the reddish haze of afternoon, reflected and refracted by windows of apartment towers that reared above the street in this uptown section.
A dim remorse suffused Elaine mind as she lay thinking of Brick, letting the fumes of the martinis she'd drunk until four in the morning work themselves from her body.
After leaving the settlement last night, Elaine had driven uptown to a fashionable club and spent a lonely evening consuming cocktails one after another, forcing herself to face the reality of having lost Brick. She was tortured by passion and pain as a Latin band filled the suddenly-garish, suddenly-cheap club with rhythmic noise.
As she stretched languorously now, golden-nude upon the expensive sheets, Elaine wriggled her toes. All the gin and vermouth in those drinks-drinking so much was a sign of weakness. Why should she, Elaine Olsen, daughter of one of the richest men in the city, succumb so easily to defeat?
Wasn't there strength left in her to fight for the man she loved?
Didn't she have other resources with which to win Brick back?
His caresses last evening, their shattering, blissful intercourse, proved that he still desired her. It was only this foolish sense of duty to a dead brother that had driven him into the slums and away from two lucrative careers in athletics and business. Damn him, Elaine thought, rising, stretching, he won't escape so easily!
Moving with her golden buttocks shifting from side to side in subtle rhythm, Elaine crossed the bedroom and closed the drapries. Far south in the distance the span of the interstate bridge revealed Brick's approximate whereabouts. Elaine's certainty increased:
Yes, she'd return there again, and still again, because she loved Brick deeply, and intended to live with him the rest of her life. No matter what she had to do, she'd win him back.
Approaching the wall, Elaine touched a button. With a whirr of electric power the closet rolled open, revealing row upon row of costly dresses. For a moment Elaine was assailed by new doubts.
Had Brick only cared about the Olsen money?
No, that couldn't be. Else why had he walked away, down to that hideous Godforsaken street to somehow atone for the callousness of a society that had let a well-bred boy like Chip die in an auto crash, victim of the festering sickness that seemed to grip America these days, loosing the wolf-packs in the street, the cruel boys whose only concern was mindless violence for its own sake?
Then was there any other reason Brick had left her? Perhaps some flaw in herself she'd never suspected before?
Momentarily alarmed, Elaine pulled the full-length mirror from its concealed bracket, swung it so she could see herself fully and honestly and objectively.
A long moment she scrutinized her golden image.
From pink-enamelled toes, full and rounded calves rose up. Her thighs, too, were firm. A little large perhaps, but sensual, almost like a dancer's.
Turning, Elaine critically surveyed the long gold curve of her flawless backbone, a sweeping plane that divided sharply into a pair of creamed-gold buttock-mounds, their undersides full and saucy.
What about the breasts? Could there be a hidden defect?
But there was none her ruthlessly appraising eye could detect. She lifted one immaculate golden cone and then the other, studying their rich protrusions. They were large without being pendulous, possessing a firm life of their own. The aureoles, a darker, more creamy-gold hue than the flesh itself, were as big as half-dollar pieces, while the nipple-ends, umber nubs, stood proud and spongy-firm at each high, pointed cone apex.
The lower surfaces of her breasts curved back to her body in provocative half-circles. From there her tapering belly dove down to gilt majesty.
Elaine stroked her body a moment, facing it honestly and seeing, without excuse or wishful thinking, a perfect love-device, a receptacle and a tool of passion that would have brought her-and Brick too-enduring happiness.
Reaching for underthings in a costly fruitwood bureau recessed in the mammoth closet, Elaine remembered their last time together, the night of the dance on Meyer Jannings' yacht in the river, Labor Day weekend.
After that night the quarrels had started with a vengeance, but that evening there had been gaiety and searing passion, and complete, utter intimacy for Elaine and Brock, the kind of intimacy she knew she must recapture no matter what the cost.
Her lovely features hardened a little as she thought it again: no matter what the cost.
Meyer Jannings was her father's partner in the investment banking firm. He could afford a diesel yacht, not to mention the finest of catered meals, the most expensive liquor and even a Ricardo Temple society orchestra to play from under paper lanterns decorating the yacht's stern as it cruised toward the three-mile limit with its cargo of bankers and brokers and bankers and brokers' wives. Among the polished, expensive crowd, Brick had been the only throwback, the only man who lived by his body's strength.
But already his liason with Elaine was opening profitable doors, assisting him in building a lucrative insurance business to round out the off season when the pro team didn't play.
For Elaine, that last night before the quarrels began, the rest of the people on the yacht hadn't existed. There was only Brick, Brick holding her in his arms as they tangoed, oblivious to the other dancers, to the swirl of music and the chatter of sophisticated voices.
Suddenly, as the moon rose over the river and the whiskey sours they'd laughingly consumed at cocktail time worked their warm magic in Elaine's veins, she found herself pressing intimately against Brick while they danced. His cheek was warm against hers. Their thighs caressed. Elaine's belly hovered very near Brick's, their hips moving to the beat of the Latin rhythm.
Arm around Brick's neck, Elaine whispered:
"What are you after, you ungainly ape, that brings you into such glittering company?"
"The Olsen dough," he laughed.
His hand was firm at the small of her back, stirring little squiggles of excitement in her buttocks as his fingers toyed with the silk of her cocktail dress.
I'm just a vicious, unprincipled bum from Pittsburgh out to make a pile."
Elaine threw back her head and gazed teasingly into his eyes.
"Brick, you fool-!"
"Don't call me a fool. Especially since I'm going to be your husband by Christmas."
"But I love you, silly. And-" Elaine suppressed a giggle. "-confidentially, I almost wish we didn't have to be so damned proper. Oh, I want to make nice legal babies, Brick. But damn it, you make me feel so much a woman whenever we go to bed. I suppose it's because we're not married and probably wickedly wrong for having each other so often."
Very seriously, Brick looked at her and said:
"Honey, even if you locked on iron armor plate and told me I couldn't take you to bed until we were both forty, I'd still marry you. I'd marry you if you wore a gunny sack and sold apples in the subway. That's because I love you like absolutely crazy."
Pleased by his sentiments, Elaine kissed him as they danced. Under her skirt the whisper of her nylons excited her, sent impossibly warm jets of stirring passion rippling through her body. Their lips lingered together a little longer than necessary. Heedless of what the guests might say, Elaine probed Brick's mouth with the tip of her tongue, felt the tip of his respond.
She buried her head on his shoulder, the weight of his muscled chest inflaming each of her breasts in turn.
"Oh, Brick, I love you. I'm going to make a scene, darling. I'm going to get very warm and so something indecent right here on deck unless-"
Brick's sudden seizure of the small of her back told Elaine, thrillingly, that he was responding. She clutched him feverishly while they swayed with the music.
His voice, low and earnest, buzzed in her ear, the breath tickling and teasing:
"You're the most beautiful woman in the world, Elaine. The dearest-"
"Where can we go, Brick? Oh please, darling, take me somewhere. I can hardly stand being this close and not being able to love you."
A chuckle from Brick:
"I'm afraid Jannings didn't lend me a plan of the staterooms."
Tearing herself from the contact of his body with effort, Elaine seized his hand and led him through the crowd. The inebriated guests hardly gave them a second glance.
"Come on! Brick, we'll find one. We must. Oh, sweetest, I'm all on fire, I want you so badly I can taste it. Brick-stop a second. Kiss me."
Powerfully his mouth met hers, their lips sliding and slipping as they kissed frantically in the shadows near the rail.
Brick's hand stole up between their bodies, teasing her breasts, toying with them, one after another.
Then he held her with both arms locked around her steaming body, breast to chest, belly quivering against belly, thigh tight and pressing with vibrant force against thigh. The Ricard Temple band jingled a noisy foxtrot somewhere. The diesel motor of the yacht throbbed, echoing the stir and pulse Elaine felt inside her flesh as Brick seized her hand and pulled her along, matching her eagerness now.
Near the bow Brick fumbled at a stateroom door, found it unlocked and led Elaine inside with a relieved sigh.
They kissed even more violently. Elaine panted: "Brick, make me all nude for you, nude as I can be.
Then make love-wild love, darling!"
Breathlessly her hands roved his clothing, urgent in her desire to be free of clothes and loving with all her strength.
Brick's fingers were capable in the dark, tantalizing her flesh even as he helped her free of her dress, one by one peeled the smoky nylons from her thighs, then assisted her out of her slip and unfastened her bra.
Elaine's panties burned like silken bonds as Brick's naked body crushed her spine against the rough cotton coverlet on the lower bunk. Elaine's palms, moist with the perspiration of desire, slipped up and down his back rapidly as he kissed her neck, her belly, showered kisses everywhere, his lips growing more demanding and his flesh also.
"Brick--I want to be so nude for you-"
"I want you nude, Elaine. Oh, God, yes, I love you so much-
Then she was nude, shadowy-nude in the dark, flesh afire with her love for him, flesh craving him over every aroused inch as they tussled and nuzzled and kissed.
Finally unable to stave off the hunger, they let the pulse beat of love consume them.
"I love you Elaine, I truly love you."
"Only love me now, Brick, love me now!"
"Elaine-Elaine!"
Yes, darling, yes my lover, yes Brick!" she screamed, on a rising note of seared passion.
Frenzy gripped them both, frenzy of love-locked leg and bent back, and frenzy of near-completion and shattering finish.
They thundered together up to the heights of fulfillment-
Shuddered there on a peak of ecstasy-
Then fell back down with her cry of completion murmuring at last to sibilant contentment in the dark.
A dismayed frown creased Elaine Olsen's patrician brow as she tried to recapture that moment, standing before the mirror in the shadow and gleam of the drape-shrouded bedroom.
No recapturing was sufficient. No tingle of memory stirring her gold loins would serve.
She stepped into her transparent panties and smoothed them with her palm over the tender curve of her belly. Her mind was cold as she considered the various strate-gems she could employ to recapture Brick. She must have him whole, to share his passion day after day, year after year. But perhaps, unless she acted with alacrity, he might slip away, forget the tingling pleasure their bodies had given each other.
Even last night, having him on the couch at the settlement house, the climax had not been as sensational, as awe-inspiring as when there were no ill feelings between them.
Her body would not win him, though, Elaine decided. She snugged up her nylons and fastened them to her garter belt. The real obstacle was the settlement house itself. If it were gone-
Twenty minutes later Elaine drove the Bentley from the garage of the apartment tower.
Another twenty minutes after that, she had interrupted an important conference at her father's investment banking house and was seated in Aretmus Olsen's private office, talking softly but earnestly. In each syllable was the sound of the tigress fighting for her mate.
CHAPTER TEN
High overhead on the interstate bridge, traffic hummed.
The trash fires in the river dump gleamed and guttered, suffusing the bank with clouds of acrid smoke. The thick clouds made Rita Danilov cough, wracked her lungs deeply as she pulled her cheap cloth coat around her shoulders and lifted her wristwatch so she could see the gleaming numerals on the dial of her six-dollar watch.
A quarter past ten already.
A quarter past ten at night. The lights of the apartment houses across the river were golden-bright. They looked comfortable, secure.
Rita fumbled in her coat for the crumpled cigarette pack, recalled she'd finished the last half an hour ago. She flung the wadded paper away into the night.
A hideous scree-scree made her start. Pink feral eyes gleamed a few feet away. Rita's hand flashed out, found a rusty can on the bottom of the big overturned, machinery packing crate in which she'd crouched for protection against the biting autumnal wind. Savagely she threw the can. It bounced and clanked against broken glass. The pink eyes vanished. The swollen, hairy rat skipped off across a trash mound, screeing.
That thin, piping sound somehow turned Rita's blood watery and made her cry.
Abruptly she wished she were back in the frowsy, dismal flat above the market. So warm it would be there this evening.
A moment later she reached to her buttocks fingering the half-healed weals Danilov's belt had left on her flesh. The weals were painfully tender even yet.
Rita must stick by the decision she'd made in the chilly hours before dawn yesterday: She must escape her brutal, emotionless father forever. She'd crept upstairs to find her coat and her coin purse and run from Hamilton Street.
She'd roamed the uptown streets during the daylight hours, trying to forget Simon Danilov and Whitey Noonan, especially trying to forget the man Fontaine and how he'd been so tender and exciting at the same time. He'd taught her to know love, when always before copulation had been merely an animal act.
Quickly Rita supressed memories of Fontaine's flesh upon her. Cold as she was, cold to the marrow as she wished for food and warmth, the thought of Fontaine was enough to bring a quickening tremor to her legs. Enough to heat her breasts under her coat.
All day Rita Danilov had wandered through the city, until the stupidity of her own rash act caught up with her and drew her inexorably back to Hamilton Street.
All the money in her coin purse was gone, squandered on lunch and supper at cheap restaurants. When she'd run away in the morning she'd felt she was escaping the source of her trouble-the street and its degrading life. As the hours wore by and she tramped past faceless, uncaring crowds, realization of the truth ate away her new confidence.
What could she do, a seventeen-year-old girl that everyone said was sick in mind and body? How could she support herself?
She had no education to speak of. Had never liked school. She carried only the clothes she wore upon her back. Yet Fontaine had made it impossible for her to continue in her old life, made it impossible by opening, if only for an instant, gates onto a world of tenderness and love which other, more fortunate women must somehow, somewhere enjoy.
Fontaine and her father's cruel beating had finished forever her subserviance to the life on Hamilton Street. For a few blessed hours roaming the city, she'd felt free.
But as dim perception of her true state broke through the haze of false confidence, Rita found herself wearily dragging her body back to Hell's Half Mile.
A whipped animal, she'd wandered to the dump, even though she was aware that Whitey might be lurking somewhere about. What did she care? Better that Whitey find and kill her. Of what use was her life anyway?
What chance did she have with her flesh always craving lewd satisfaction and mindless thrills?
Rita Danilov realized she couldn't go back to her father and the market and Whitey's vile touch. But at the same time, neither did she have the resources to escape completely.
What if she went uptown again? How could she live? By whoring?
Boys said whores were well-paid. The uptown ones had sleek apartments and perfumed bodies. Maybe before she'd met Fontaine that would have been an acceptable out. It was no longer.
Confused, trapped between unacceptable alternatives, Rita Danilov wandered lost between heaven and hell, knowing not in educated words but only in the form of a vague hurt, that the best place for her, the only place, was in the filth and wretchedness of the dump-A smoking purgatory of garbage, a wasteland: a dead end.
Rubbing her hands together, Rita watched the rippling lights cast by a harbor patrol tug chuffing past beneath the bridge. The befouled water danced and gleamed. And suddenly, with heart-breaking simplicity, the answer was there, the complete escape.
Feet flying, Rita Danilov ran down the sloping shore of the dump toward the water.
A laugh of pain and triumph tore from her lips as she reached the edge.
She began to cry, face pressed into her palms.
Oh God-oh blessed God! Why didn't she have the strength to do it?
But she knew she hadn't.
At that instant Rita heard the sound of someone walking in the dump behind her.
Terrified, thinking only that Whitey had returned, Rita spun on her heels and searched the dark for a sign of the interloper. Drifting fumes and .smoke made her eyes smart. Half-crouched, breath hissing rapidly over her gleaming-wet lips, Rita tried to make out the direction of the noise. She took a few steps to the right, then to the left. Under her brassiere her heart slugged ferociously.
As she waited, uncertain in which direction to run, a figure materialized from the blowing smoke, thin and drooping. She recognized the dark jacket, dug her knuckles into her teeth, but to suppress a scream. One of the Cobras-
The boy's head lifted. Distant lights from the apartments on the opposite shore flashed and winked on big spectacles.
"J. B.! Don't yell! Please, for sweet Christ's sake, don't call Whitey over here!"
The emaciated boy peered in hangdog fashion through the blowing fumes.
"Whitey? I left him an hour ago. He's not around here."
All at once Rita could tell that J. B. told the truth. His expression was so doleful, so sick and unhappy, that he couldn't possibly be lying.
Eager for human companionship, Rita rushed to his side. She seized his arm. J. B. recoiled instantly, sobbing:
"Don't touch me! I ought to die. That's what I ought to do, for letting them-"
Rita whispered, "Letting who, J. B.?"
The immense spectacles flashed as the boy raised his head.
"You know Carol Ambrosio? The nice kid who worked part time at Peabody?" At Rita's anxious nod he rushed on, "Whitey's out for you, Rita. Out to fix you. Mae Lazar told him you were in Peabody last night, shacking with that guy Fontaine-"
"That filthy little bitch!"
"She got Whitey all worked up. Only-" Almost against his will, J. B. showed his defiance: "I told Whitey it was chicken to go after broads when the guy he really should have gotten, out in the open, was Fontaine. Fontaine scares Whitey, I can tell. Anyway, Carol went to Peabody this evening to see if she could help out. On her way back the gang-"
J. B.'s lips were colorless. His voice dropped to a ghastly whisper.
"Rita, I tried to stop 'em. They were gonna gang-bang her. But Whitey was the only one who got her. She fought him so hard he took hold of her throat-Rita, I'm scared. Kreeg will be down on us sure. I had to run away. It made me so sick I puked not three feet from that poor kid's body. Whitey raped her and-and choked her to death while he had her!"
The terrified boy, the boy who'd never really belonged with the older toughs of the Cobras, flung himself against Rita like an infant seeking its mother.
Rita put her arms around him. She led him slowly to the overturned packing case and drew him down inside, craddling his head on her sweater between her breasts. J. B. sobbed a long time. The convulsive crying jerked him from end to end. Suddenly Rita grew conscious of J. B.'s body against her, his head heavy between the sweatered ends of her breasts.
One of his hands had come to rest on the belly of her slacks.
Indecent fiery tremors started on the insides of Rita's legs.
Spasmodically her long nails dug into J. B.'s jacket. Not now! Now, when the whole world was crumbling into disaster-
But her loins burned with heat, she was beyond help. "J. B.?"
Rita lifted his chin.
"J. B., you're safe with me. Nobody will find you in here if Whitey's on the street. J. B.-honey-I'll be nice to you. Be nice to me back, will you?"
Ferociously Rita clamped her thighs together.
J. B. goggled.
"Rita, what's wrong?"
Before he could say more Rita hurled her mouth on his, a mouth out of control, a mouth whose lips fell open hungrily, wetly.
J. B. struggled. Rita managed to insert her tongue between his lips. In another moment his breathing grew strident. Rita ran her hands over his neck, holding his knee in place while her hips jerked.
"Gotta, J. B. lover. You know how it is with me. You just gotta or I'll die."
"No, Rita, let me go!"
He pulled away, lost his balance and tumbled into the far corner of the huge case. Rita leaped up. and tore away her coat.
She ripped off her sweater and threw herself on him like an animal.
"I can't help myself. I've got to have you!"
J. B. backed away again, bruising Rita's bra-clad breasts as he arose. The buckle of his belt brought pain to her nipples, pain that only increased the demanding agony making her a mad creature.
Hair falling wildly about her shoulders, hands white and restless, she backed J. B. into a corner and threw her arms around his knees.
"J. B., I won't let you out of here until you take care of me. Oh my God, don't you understand? I'm not doing this because I want to do it. It's only that when I start-when something starts me-I have to have a man. J. B., show me you're a man! Please, honey, show me!"
J. B. stumbled past her body. Rita grasped his leg and held on. He cursed in panic, struggling to reach the other side of the overturned case, and freedom. Rita held fast, her hands everywhere up and down his leg.
Lifting his foot, J. B. shook it hard. Rita tumbled away, cracking her head painfully. She saw J. B. limned against the back-drop of the interstate bridge. Rita humped toward him, bit her lips madly, screamed in the dark:
"Don't go, J. B.! Don't leave me to die! Honey, take me! YOU'VE GOT TO TAKE ME!"
"My God!" sobbed J. B., "How sick you are."
"Stop saying that! I'm not sick just because I need you-
Crack!
Crack, crack and crack!
Rita's head rolled to the side, terrifically jolted as J. B. backhanded her again and again and again.
The smack of her head on the splintery wood of the case beat some of the passion out of her quivering body. Dazed, Rita sat up and stared helplessly. J. B. was livid:
"The street's gonna explode tonight, Rita! Whitey's wild, out of his head, Rita, a girl got raped to death an hour ago! And all you want is a man!"
J. B.'s voice rose higher, nearly to a soprano pitch: "Kill yourself, Rita. Go drown yourself in that river and ask God to save your soul for being so filthy sick!"
Staring at him, his wasted, terrified face, Rita Danilov dropped all the way down to the deepest emotional hell.
The fires in her body went down. She began to cry. About to flee, J. B. was halted by the frenzy of those sobs.
He leaned on the packing case wall, getting his own breath, running a hand through his stringy hair and shaking his head from side to side in wonderment.
All at once Rita understood, completely and fully, what a rotten, depraved creature she'd become. She couldn't cover her heaving breasts quickly enough with the sweater. She climbed to her feet and stumbled toward J. B.
"Don't touch me!" J. B. wheezed. "Don't lay a hand on me, you crazy broad!"
"Bring help for me, J. B. I need help."
"What kind of help?" he sneered weakly. "All you want is-"
"No!" Rita's scream was knife-kneen, insistent. "I'm asking you, J. B., begging you-get Fontaine. Go to Peabody House and bring Fontaine here. He'll help us both. He'll take me to a doctor. And he'll know what to do about the dead girl. Can you do it, J. B.? We won't be safe, either of us, unless we have help."
"The Cobras are all over the street," J. B. said uncertainly.
"Do you want to die, J. B.?"
"I'm just scared, Rita. Scared of what's happening tonight."
"Then go to Peabody!" she repeated tonelessly. "Bring Fontaine before it's too late."
"If Whitey sees me-" J. B. swallowed hard. "Okay. Wait here."
His feet hammered the molding sod of the dump as he raced away. Rita sank down with her hands knotted between her thighs.
Ah, J. B. was right, so right. She was sick. She needed assistance before madness, or death, or both, claimed her.
Had J. B. said he'd bring help only to escape her? Rita couldn't think about that. She had to believe in J. B.'s decency, a decency she'd almost destroyed.
Grinding her fists into her groin to put out the fires still blazing there, Rita cried steadily and rhythmically and prayed for J. B. Would he have the courage to dodge through the terrible streets to find the only man who could help her now?"
As she knew at last that she must be helped-or die.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Which way to the bar?" Brick asked the superstitious desk clerk. "To your left and down that corridor, sir."
"Thanks."
Brick crossed the bustling lobby of the garishly modern motor lodge. The place was one of several glorified motels that had sprung up on a tract near the river freeway to catch tourists just entering the city via the interstate bridge. The motor lodge was ten blocks from Hamilton Street. Brick had walked the entire distance after receiving the phone call in the office of Peabody House shortly after nine-thirty.
Disturbed by the late evening message, Brick hurried down the hallway between the lodge's managerial offices toward double glass doors. Beyond them, murky reddish radiance from recessed brackets sprayed the bar with weird lights.
With customary lack of ceremony, Brick struck the butt of his palm against the door's push-plate and bowled into the lounge. Three salesmen occupied a corner booth, poring over a profusion of graphs and bar charts. Up a short stairway Brick saw the majority of evening cocktail drinkers now seated at dinner in the lodge dining room. Besides the bartender, who was acidly reading a J. X. Williams novel, the only other person in the bar was a woman. Elaine Olsen.
The girl had a cool smile on her lips and a martini at her elbow.
Brick felt his temples tighten as he threaded between the cocktail tables the way he'd once made broken-field runs on Sunday afternoons before a hundred thousand cheering fans. Angry, he stopped in front of Elaine, trying not to see how desirable she was.
Her rounded hips were clad in a dress of clinging satin that also sheathed her breasts with iridescent radiance. The dress bodice was scooped daringly low; Elaine wore no brassiere tonight, the deep cleft between her golden-perfumed breasts was plainly visible.
She sat with legs crossed. The hem of" the cocktail dress didn't do a full job of concealment. Brick shifted his ground. He didn't want to glimpse those sensual thighs, or the startling contrast of the tops of her nylons and the gold flesh just above.
"Of all the damn despicable tricks-" Brick began.
The barman drifted in their direction. Elaine slid a slim platinum case along the bar.
"Have a cigarette, darling. Then have a drink. Let's be civilized, shall we?"
The barman's interruption controlled Brick's urge to swear.
"What'll it be, mister?"
"Bourbon. Make it a double, no ice."
"Yes, sir. Coming right up."
"The least you can do is show a little politeness and sit down, Brick."
"After you suckered me with that phony telephone call-?"
"Why not?" replied Elaine in a chilly fashion. "I wanted to see you once more. I knew that my voice wouldn't bring you away from that precious settlement house of yours. But I thought that if I had our man Thompson call-with a message that Artemus Olsen, representing the Peabody House trustees, wished to talk to you privately tonight-you'd come hopping. And so you have."
Brick snagged a smoke from the platinum case. He had it halfway to his lips before he decided he wanted nothing of hers. Or at least he must make her think so.
Elaine continued to regard him with sly merriment. Sullenly Brick sat down and stared at the bar.
The barman arrived with the bourbon. Brick drank half at a single swallow. Recalling what similar indulgence had done to him the previous night, he put the glass aside hastily and swung around on the stool. About to speak, he was arrested by the sight of Elaine leaning forward as if to engage in conversation. The deliberate movement exposed the upper surfaces of her breasts, including a tiny fragment of the big red aureole at the end of each. Her breathing was rapid. It made the breast-ends push in and out with an excitement all their own.
"What am I supposed to do now?" inquired Brick. "Gaze dreamily at the merchandise and spend a few minutes reminding myself that it's not mine any more."
"Don't say that!"
Her hand reached out involuntarily to touch his where it rested on his trousers just above his knee. The light scrape of her nails electrified him against his will. Elaine's lips trembled faintly, redder than fresh blood as she told him:
"Brick, I'm not trying to hurt you. Can't you understand that everything I do, I do because I love you?"
"Including demanding that I quit the Peabody job?"
"Even that. It's nothing but foolish idealism-"
"Idealism hell! It's as real as Chip's body lying mangled on that morgue slab."
"Please, Brick! Lower your voice."
"The hell I'll lower my voice! You drag me here like a pet animal with a ring through its nose and then expect me to sit here and like it!"
Leaning forward again an almost-desperate note in her voice. Elaine said huskily:
"But don't you, darling? Don't you really?" Brick shook his head tiredly. He was angry with himself for letting his gaze be drawn again and again to those impossibly rich creamy breasts dancing and quivering within inches of his hands. And her strong, passionately muscular thighs, over which the fabric of the dress stretched so tightly that the long stretched ridges of her garters stood out in high relief.
"Hell of a choice you give me, Elaine. But I made it quite a while ago. You simply haven't realized it yet." Elaine seemed puzzled. "Realized what?"
"That a man can't sell himself for sex."
Flushing, Elaine looked over her shoulder in embarrassment. The barman was deep in his book. The three salesmen had gone into the dining room.
"Is that all I mean to you, Brick? Were all the things you said when we were alone together-as close as a man and a woman can get-merely lies to make me feel good while you had me?"
"Of course not!" Brick was angered anew by her obstinacy, her refusal to understand. "I still feel the same about you-I mean," he amended, "I did until you arranged this particular subterfuge. But we come from different worlds. In yours, you can't understand any piece of goods that doesn't have a price tag. You figure I should have one. Maybe I do. Maybe in any other circumstance I'd sell myself to you and like it-like knowing that what I was getting in return was there...." he pointed.
"You're insufferable! Vulgar and disgusting and-"
"And telling you the truth for once!" he exploded. "Face up to yourself, Elaine! Have you ever gotten anything-wanted anything-your old man's bank account couldn't wrap up the instant you crooked your finger? Well, you should have come to that morgue with me and seen Chip laid out dead. Would your goddam checkbook have done any good? I'm asking you, Elaine.
Could you go down to Hamilton Street and buy decency for the kids who live there? My folks had money enough to care for both Chip and me. He still went wild. Money didn't buy him away from the desire to run loose like an animal. Don't ask me how I escaped. I guess I was lucky.
But the kids on Hamilton don't even have money to fall back on. Money won't begin to pay for what it takes to give them a chance to breathe something besides gutter air the rest of their lives. Friendship-honesty-trust-understanding on their own level-that's why I'm down there. And you can't buy me back like a pack of cigarettes."
Elaine began in low tones, glanced at him pointedly over the rim of her martini glass.
"Suppose I told you that you were finished on Hamilton Street because Peabody House might be too. You know how the trustees feel about the project. My father is one of the-"
Brick leaped off the stool and flung a bill on the bar.
Elaine stood up too, breast ends shoving out in high relief.
"Where are you going?"
"Out. I'm not the kind you can blackmail."
With a ferocious stride, shuddering so angrily that he was afraid he'd turn on her and brush her lovely face with his knuckles, Brick slammed through the glass doors of the lounge. Immediately on his left was a fire door to the parking lot. Brick shouldered this aside and plunged into the cool night air, sucking great gulps of it to relieve his furious anger.
The parking lot was a dark waste, illuminated only here and there by dim automobile parking lights and a single lamp on an iron stanchion, far on the other side at the lot entrance. Behind him Brick heard the fire door clang. High heels rat-rat-tatting.
He walked more rapidly, dodging betwen the parked vehicles. He heard Elaine cry out:
"Brick-wait a minute! Don't run. There's nothing to run to. Peabody is done for!"
Not believing, Brick Fontaine turned. Elaine approached, breathing rapidly. Her thighs made a whispering, a rustling as her nylons rubbed together.
"Here's the Bentley, Brick. Just in the next lane. Come have a cigarette."
Turning, Elaine hurried off between an Imperial and a Cadillac. Her buttocks swayed with provocative, saucy precision as she approached her car and held the door, Brick shook his head. Elaine shrugged, sat on the cushions and smiled up at him.
"Oh, I know you'll be angry, Brick. But you'll get over it."
"Get over what?" Brick's voice was thick, hushed. "Damn you, tell me-"
Elaine studiously concentrated on lighting her cigarette.
"Today I had a chat with my father at his office. He's a very understanding man, my father, being a widower with only one daughter. When I told him I thought the Justus J. Peabody Settlement House had a very shaky record of success, he agreed. When I told him I wanted him to close it as a personal favor to me-he agreed to to that also. The motion to close will be put before the trustees when they meet next week.
You see, Brick, for a long time the other trustees have been in favor of abandoning the project and using the trust funds to start a community health clinic in another location. Administration of the Peabody estate is entirely in their hands.
They'd have closed Peabody this summer if it hadn't been for your interest in it. My father raised his voice against the entire board when you applied for the job as director, just because you were also interested in me. I didn't mind your interest. Then. I thought it might kind of a hobby for you, a diverting charity. But when it consumed you-ate you up like a disease-"
Elaine paused, smiling.
"Brick, I hope you understand."
Brick's teeth were clenched:
"You closed it? Just like that?"
"Just like that, darling. In father's office, this very afternoon. So now you needn't trouble yourself with guilt. There's no excuse for feeling you've shirked your duty. The public statement will announce that Peabody House is suspending operations due to a lack of interest on the part of residents of the neighborhood it has served in the past."
Crushing out her cigarette beneath her spiked pump. Elaine stood up quickly. She flung her arms around Brick's neck, caressing him with her long sloping thighs, with the girdled fever of her belly, with the tip-trembling heat of her breasts. Her mouth moved reply, wetly, near his ashen lips:
"Brick, Brick! The decision is out of your hands now. Come home with me. Come home with me and see if you really care about Peabody any longer. Let's go to bed, Brick. Patch up this quarrel the way we used to, darling-"
When she grasped his hand, she saw his white-furious face.
"Why are you looking at me so queerly, Brick?"
"I'm going to fix you for this, Elaine. I'm going to fix you the way you've needed fixing for a long time."
"Brick, what are you doing with my dress? Brick-leave me alone!"
Elaine struggled, caught in Brick's grip. He opened the rear door of the Bentley and flung her inside. Her skirt flew up over her thighs, exposing the black elastic tightness of her garters. The dim light of the parking lot hinted at silken whiteness somewhere high between her nylons.
Brick slammed the Bentley's front door. Then he entered the tonneau, feeling savage, wanting to maim, hurt, injure.
"Don't Brick! Don't stare at me like that, Brick. What are you-!"
"I'm going to rape you," he said. "Rape you until you scream for mercy. We'll see whether you can buy your way out of this too!"
She flailed them, hammered his face with her fists. He was far too powerful for her.
Fastening both hands on the low-cut top of her cocktail dress, Brick ripped her hard from neck to navel. He whipped his hands wide so that the lacy froth of her slip peeled from each breast quivering with fright. Elaine howled in pain.
"Don't-Brick-" she shrieked, fending him off. "Don't-!"
He saw her through a raw red curtain of fury, desiring only to hear her scream now, to hear shrieks of penitence as he tore her body to bits, proved to her finally and for always that there were some things she could not have merely because she asked.
At the moment she wanted him to stop, stop tormenting her. A harsh laugh twisted Brick's lips as he wrestled her to the floor of the tonneau, shredding her dress with his powerful hands, tearing her skirt apart, demolishing the lacy purity of her slip.
Finally he exposed the sheerly-clinging white panties which she tried to protect with her hands.
Mercilessly Brick forced those hands apart. He pulled downward on her panties. She let out a scream. He clipped her on the jaw.
Her head lolled. Brick crouched over her, triumphing in her exposed nudity. He laughed in her face.
"Okay, Elaine. Okay bitch. Write me a check and see if you can stop me!"
"I love you, Brick, I love you, don't you see that I-aiieeeeee!"
He delighted in bringing her pain, delighted in watching her bite her lips as she flung her head from side to side, moaned, beat at his flanks impotently.
Then, horribly, Brick Fontaine's flesh betrayed him: he began to want her.
He could tell she wanted him also.
Her laughter rang dizzily inside the car:
"Oh darling, I've won. I've won!"
He was outraged, sick at his defeat. Her cries of pleasure stoked his fury all the higher, lashed him to assault her even more forcefully. They crashed around in the tonneau, bodies bruised by jolting against the seats and the floorboards.
But the more savage his attack, the more aroused she became.
She helped him, assisted him with love-caresses. Finally it was not Brick Fontaine hurting a woman but Brick Fontaine loving a woman who was blind-hot with a delirious urge for climax.
"Oh, my angel! My sweet man! My lover, my lover! You can't get away now!"
Her laughter, her shrieks and moans of passion mocked him. With a strangled sob he whipped his arms around her and tried to squeeze the breath from her hot body as the cataclysm claimed them both.
In the last seconds, Brick knew how completely he had been betrayed.
He drew away from the nude girl panting on the tonneau floor. He shoved his shirt into his trousers, realizing she'd turned the tables. Despite everything-despite his curses, her treachery, his will to maim-he loved her.
Brick lurched from the Bentley and ran into the night. Far behind, a tinkling sound, rang feminine laughter.
That was Elaine; Elaine the vindictive; the demanding; the all-too-human, all-too-frail woman whom-God save his soul-he still loved helplessly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Like a fish on the end of a line, J.B. dangled between Whitey's hands. Kicking his sneaks in the air, the frail kid danced on nothing. He was suspended a foot from the asphalt of the Peabody House playground by the blond gang leader.
Whitey's grip threatened to choke the very life from J.B.
Already J. B.'s cheeks were turning an unpleasant purple. In the thick dark under the wall Brick Fontaine had painted only that afternoon, the other Cobras laughed softly at the spectacle of their unfortunate comrade doing a ludicrous dance on empty air.
Out of the inky dark came a shriek female voice:
"Leave him be, Whitey. Don't kill the little crud before we can have some fun."
"Okay, Mae."
Giving J.B. a last savage shake that made his sneaks fly back and forth, Whitey nodded and released his hold.
J.B. tumbled to the pavement, yowling. Viper darted in and delivered a kick to the side of J.B.'s skull, cracking but not shuttering the right lens of his glasses. J. B. tottered up, pulled off his glasses and stared at them with tiny watering eyes. An expression of abject misery and terror twisted his emaciated features.
Whitey unshipped his switch, extended the sharp steel with a whick and passed it lightly across J.B.'s throat. The knife drew blood in a single hair-thin black line.
"Ready for the quiz again, gutless?" Whitey said. "Let's take it from the top? What are you doing here?"
"I told you, Whitey," J.B. whined, putting on his glasses and blinking through the starred cracks in the right lens. "I was just going home across the playground."
"He's crapping you, Whitey," offered Viper. "We all know his pop is a bellboy at that hotel uptown, three to midnight shift. Nobody's home at his place yet."
"I was tired, that's all," J.B. said fearfully. "Jeez, can't a fella be tired?"
"Like maybe the stuff with the Ambrosio fluff drained out all your guts?" asked Whitey.
"Naw, I was just sick to my stummick, Whitey. Lemme go on home."
"Let you miss the big performance? Not on your life, Jack in the Box."
J.B. rubbed his nose apprehensively. "Whitey, what's going on?"
Out of the dark came Mae Lazar's brittle laugh again: "You'll find out, chicken."
"Shut that broad up!" J.B. exclaimed feebly. "She's got no right-"
"Hell she hasn't," remarked Whitey. "She's got more guts than you, buddy. I'm beginning to be damn sorry we let a fink like you into the Cobras. You got no guts for scragging a pretty broad like that Ambrosio kid.
"My God, don't say that!" J. B. cried. "You killed that poor kid."
Whitey was supremely unconcerned: "So what? Didn't she have it coming? Hanging around with the motherfryer who runs this place? Or did, until-"
Whitey glanced at his watch.
"-about fifteen minutes from now."
Raucous laughter split the air. J.B. blinked failing to understand the gang leader's meaning. He asked.
"What happened to Fontaine? He inside?"
"Awful interested in the Christers these days, ain't you J.B.?" questioned Viper.
"Jeez. I was just wondering. What's the harm in-?"
"Viper's got a point, man," Whitey cut him off. "A very large point. As a matter-of-fact-not that's it's any of your mother-frying business, of course-the Christer took off a while ago. All the better for us. We figure to give him a real warm homecoming."
More muffled laughter. It was stilled when Whitey's hand flew out to grasp J.B.'s collar.
"Question is, J.B., you got any right to wear that Cobra jacket or had we oughta take it off of you? You a man, or what? If you're a man, maybe it's time you prove it to the fellas. What do you say, Cobras? Should he prove it?"
Viper's voice led the pack in response:
"Yeah, Whitey, damn right."
Whitey snapped his fingers.
"Mae. Come over here and help J.B. prove he's a man."
Slipping from the shadows, her face hard and cruel in spite of the titter of mirth spewing from her heavily made-up lips, Mae Lazar joined the group. At the back of the knot of boys a voice warned':
"Whitey, we shouldn't fool around here too long-"
The switchblade gleamed menacingly.
"Want to argue about it, Spivvy?"
"Naw." The voice was cowed low. "Just a suggestion."
"Well, my suggestion is that we help J.B. prove he's got guts. Go on, Mae. Help him."
Tittering, Mae Lazar stepped nearer the unfortunate J.B. She began to massage his pelvis with her hips. J.B.'s only response was fidgety, frightened look up and down the shadowed playground.
Mae let out an obscene oath and stepped back.
Whitey scratched his head.
"Maybe J.B. only gets excited when he sees the real goods."
In the half-dark, Mae's young eyes were ageless and lewd.
"Want me to show him, Whitey?" she purred.
"Show him what you got, Mae," Whitey agreed. "Show him and see whether it does anything for the little chicken-crapper."
Mae Lazar posed and postured in front of the miserable J.B. She toyed with the hem of her sweater, lifting it an inch on one side, an inch on the other, J.B. tried to back off. Two of the gang boys slipped behind him and prevented him.
Mae bounced and wiggled, making her breasts dance inside her sweater. She pulled up the knitted garment again to display the undersides of the cups of her bra.
"Come on, come on, J.B.! I got nice soft knockers. Whitey likes them a lot.
Mae wrestled the sweater over her red hair and dropped it on the asphalt:
"You'll insult Whitey if you can't get a kick out of me, man. Besides, if you just stand there, no action, no nothing, you'll look like a big zero in front of the fellas. I know, I know. You need the real thing. Well, here they are, J.B. Right here in front of your mother-loving eyes."
Obscenely Mae Lazar cupped palms beneath the white-clad young breasts and waggled them at the hapless J.B. By this time J.B. was bathed in soggy perspiration. He was also nearly hysterical.
Mae advanced on him, wielding her breasts like weapons.
"Like to give them a little kiss, man?" J.B. flailed at his guards. "Leave me alone!"
"Chicken-crapper!" Whitey exclaimed.
He grabbed J. B.'s shoulder, holding so hard that J. B. was forced to his knees.
"Mae tells you to do something, you do it. If you belong to the Cobras, man, you treat this broad with respect."
Now Mae was kneading her breasts furiously. She wagged them under J.B.'s nose, crowding the fleshy-spongy ends closed and closer to his lips, giggling hysterically.
J.B. opened his mouth to cry out. Mae leaped forward. J.B. gagged and spat, tumbling backward, head over heels.
Whitey cursed:
"Lousy mother-frying craphead! Guys-scrag him!"
Not one to delay when his leader gave orders, Viper darted in and stomped on J.B.'s gut. The other gang boys crowded around, eager for a turn.
They rained kicks and blows on J.B. Mae slipped into her sweater, watching the beating with bright, hard eyes:
"Give it to him, you guys. Kill the fryer! He hurt me.
In a moment Whitey had joined the fray. He towered laughingly over his small victim. He lifted his right heel and drove it down on J.B.'s testicles.
Writhing in agony, J.B. beat his fists on the asphalt. His spectacles fell off. Viper crushed them with one stamp. A kind of animal enthusiasm generated spontaneously in the group. They fell on J.B.'s body like a pack of dogs, kicking and gouging and pummeling until his screams lor mercy made Whitey pull them off.
"Leave him be now. Damn it, I said leave him be! We don't want to kill him so he can forget all about us."
Face pale to a point resembling sexual excitement, Viper scrabbled in the shadows near the base of the newly-painted wall. His hands came up full of oily newspapers and rags Whitey and the others had collected from the refuse cans of Peabody House itself.
"Can we start the action, Whitey?"
Whitey shrugged.
"Why the hell not?"
Rapidly the Cobras spread newspapers and rags along the base of the freshly-painted wall. Panting with excitement, Viper ran up to Whitey a few moments later:
"All set, big man. You be the first. Give it the touch, man, the Whitey Noonan Touch."
"Pleasure," Whitey laughed.
He swaggered to the wall, a wooden match poised under his thumbnail. Even Mae was transfixed by the sight of Whitey marching like an emperor to that fuse-like ribbon of paper and waste rags stretching along the building's foundation. Suddenly dim words burbled in the dark.
Whitey spun on the others, his eyes narrowing: "What'd he say?"
Whitey's near scream was wild with anger. He ran to J.B., began slapping his face rapidly. Tears streamed down J.B.'s cheeks as Whitey slapped him and shook him like a mouse in a cat's teeth.
"What do you know about Rita, little man? You better tell me or I'll turn the Cobras loose again. Hear me J. B.?"
Whitey cracked J.B.'s head on the asphalt two or three times.
"Want more? Want to go the whole route straight to the big dark? What about Rita?"
"Yes you should, if you want to go on breathing." Whitey shook him again, ferociously. "One more question, mother-fryer. Where is she? Where's Rita?"
J.B.'s purblind eyes were sick with misery and fright.
"Won't-kill me?"
"I'll kill you if you don't tell!" howled Whitey. He jabbed the switch point against J. B.'s undernourished chest. "I'll cut your guts out for the garbage men to pick up if you don't spill fast."
"The dump," J.B. panted. "God forgive me-the dump by the river. Hiding from you, Whitey. Begged me to get Fontaine-God help me-"
J.B.'s breath whooshed out of his mouth suddenly as Whitey dropped him. The others, including Mae and Viper, retreated a step, fuly aware of the emotions running rampant on Whitey's cheaply handsome young face. For a long, strained moment the gang leader stared down at the pitiful half-man, half-child twitching at his feet.
Whitey folded his blade, shoved it into his pocket: "God can't help you, J.B. And Rita neither, once I got to her."
Spinning, Whitey raked a wooden match on the asphalt and flung it into the papers.
With a burst and puff flames shot upward, igniting the oily rags in little explosions that fanned out clouds of hot air and made even Whitey flinch.
Taking a last look at the rising curtain of orange-yellow fire, Whitey ordered:
"Any guy who doesn't come with me to the dump to finish Rita is out of the Cobras."
Then, lithe as a jungle animal, fast as a runner coming off the blocks, Whitey Noonan bolted across the playground, leaped high, caught the top of the wire fence and dropped to the other side.
In a body his gang followed him, leaving the wall of Peabody House to burn, to spread flaming holocaust to the dry, ancient shingles on the roof, to the plasterboard walls inside. With a frantic cry-"Hey ,you bastards, I don't wanna miss the kicks!" Mae Lazar ran after Whitey and the boys.
But Mae wasn't nearly as agile as the young gang toughs. She was therefore forced to go considerably out of her way, to the gate at the far end of the playground. Running hard, she pursued Whitey and the Cobras a little more than half a block. Then she gave up in disgust.
Mae hesitated, torn between the desire to watch Whitey handle that dirty little twist Rita and the desire to watch the settlement house go up in flames. The latter attraction won out.
She paused at the corner across from the playground, wary lest she be linked to the fire by the crowd already gathering. In the distance the siren of a fire truck keened.
Mae clung to the outside of the steel-link fence, a laugh twisting her painted mouth as she watched the flames envelop Peabody House. By the time the engines and hooks-and-ladders arrived, it would be too damned late, just too wonderfully God damned late.
Supressing a chuckle, Mae noticed a stocky uniformed man in the forefront of the rapidly-gathering crowd of watchers. The fire had even drawn out Captain Wasewski.
Higher danced the flames, still higher.
They brightened the sky as the whole of the settlement building erupted like so much kindling. Glittering red and chrome fire units wheeled into the street. Hoses uncoiled. Jetting water shot high over the holocaust. Too late, too late, Mae thought, giggling and pressing her belly and breasts against the fence, getting real kicks, real thrills out of watching the fire.
She was far from the crowd. They'd think her just another neighborhood resident drawn to the scene of the conflagration. Hard little face glowing with unholy glee, Mae shifted position so that her nipples pressed just right against the steel wire. She clutched the fence with her hands high over her head, like a monkey.
The hot glare of the fire scorched her cheeks. With a laugh, an exclamation of surprise, Mae thrust her upper thighs tight aaginst the wire.
She watched the burning pyre of Peabody fail to respond to the arching white columns of spray. Harder Mae ground her breasts against the wire, harder and harder. A man and woman passed, hurrying to watch the blaze, not even noticing Mae.
She'd never tried getting kicks from a fire before, but it was working.
In the harsh glare of the burning building, the depraved child of the streets made the scene, clinging to the fence, never noticing that, among all the watchers, J.B. was not one of them.
Six blocks without eyes, J.B., thought frantically. Could he make it?
The fire behind cast a vague pinkish glow over featureless oval faces swimming past the wretched boy. Mouths, eyes, noses were mere dots on the pale pink ovals.
J.B.'s body ached all over, hurt like hell in a hundred places. Yet he forced himself to move down Hamilton Street, now stumbling, now crawling in the gutter, ignored by the inhabitants running the other way to watch Peabody House burn.
At last, after seemingly endless miles of featureless agony, J.B. felt rough stone beneath his fingers. Stone he thought he recognized as the cement balustrade of the precinct house.
A man-shape blurred by. J.B. clutched it desperately.
"Mister, mister, I lost my glasses! I gotta find a cop. Are you-?"
"Lay off, you little crud." The figure slipped past. "Mister, listen! The Cobras-"
All at once the shadow-figure halted, turned back, seized J.B.'s shoulders.
"What about the Cobras?"
"They're going to kill a girl-Rita Danilov-down by the river dump. Tell Captain Wadsewski. Christ-" J.B.'s voice broke. "Somebody's got to help her, mister. Tell the Captain!"
Powerful hands flung off his grip.
"Sure, kid. Sure, right away."
The shadow-shape receded, hurrying down Hamilton Street. J.B. sank to the steps, everything blurred, pink and black and white and meaningless, and cried until he fainted.
Detective Sergeant Kreeg, within six feet of Captain Wadsewski, did not relay to the precinct Chief the information he'd received from the weepy-eyed punk on the station steps.
No, thought Kreeg, years of frustration under the domination of men with fancy theories rising like sour vomit in his throat, No, Captain Wadsewski's plenty busy with the fire. I can handle that Cobra bunch and their whore too.
Quickly Kreeg slipped through the crowd. He talked to a man here, a man there. Olivetti, Monoghan, Esposito, others who lived too long under the intimidating shadow of Cobra domination. Carefully, so as not to arouse suspicions, certain men who together just happened to form a citizens vigilance committee returned to their tenements or their stores, leaving their wives and children to watch the blaze.
Half an hour later, armed with knives and meat cleavers and ball bats and automobile jacks, the mob slipped down a side street, thirty strong, Detective Sergeant Kreeg at their head.
His meaty face shone redly.
His .38 shone blue.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rita Danilov knew J.B. had failed her. Fontaine would never come. Shivering inside the open-ended packing case, watching the lonely yellow lights in the apartments across the river, the girl began to cry again quietly.
What a fool she'd been to think she mattered to Fontaine. The big guy had only taken her because she'd forced him. Practically raped him. What a laugh! What a stupid, dirty, joke, this deluding herself into believing Fontaine's tenderness had been anything more than his normal way of having a woman.
Rita had blown it up into some grand passion, some big affair. She was a wretched little fool. Wasn't j.B.'s prolonged absence proof? She could lie here all night thinking sweet pretty dreams about big Fontaine and he'd never come to find help for her.
Hell, that was a disgusting joke too. No doctor could help her, except perhaps as the school doctor had helped her, by flinging her on her back and letting her have it.
Disillusioned, mind filled with half-formed thoughts she didn't quite understand, Rita faced up to reality: the reality that Fontaine didn't give a damn whether she lived or died.
Right this minute he was probably laughing himself sick over J.B.'s pitiful appeal. What? he'd say. Go with you to the dump to help that little nympho? That dumb broad who never even finished high school? She's sick in the head, don't you know that? Nobody can help her, nobody except a sex maniac maybe, a guy ready to go every minute-
Like a cruel, serrated knife disemboweling her, Rita felt the love-urge in her loins.
She attempted to fight it:
My God not again! Don't let it start when Fontaine won't come, when there's no one to have me-
She lay in the corner of the wooden case, fingers beginning to tremble uncontrollably. Without volition she found her hands stealing to her sweater. Suddenly she was gnashing her teeth and moaning, rolling her buttocks over the floor of the case.
Distantly, voices called and clamored. She paid scant attention, thinking them illusions, creatures of her heated mind.
In the smoke-blowing dark her face was pale, tortured, unholy, her lipstick framing a mechanical smile as she caressed her rounded thighs. The night had turned chilly, but Rita couldn't tell it. She was sweating, sweating with the need for fulfillment.
Stop! Rita screamed at herself in a frightful moment of sanity. Stop before something unspeakable happens-."
It was already too late.
It had been too late long before she took her first boy on Hamilton Street. It had been too late long before the school doctor had her or Fontaine had her or any of the rest. Why not surrender to debasement? Why not meet the devil face to face? No hell was too low, no act too degraded once she gave herself completely to the mania she'd foolishly tried to fight so long.
Useless to fight it now. The burning in her calves, the beating in her hips-the hot jets of desire wrenching her pelvis side to side transformed her to a mindless thing.
The voices, louder, had a false, unnatural ring. Like voices of nightmare goblins chittering in an evil .dream.
This was no dream. This was reality. The inflamed reality of her most personal being that find relief-any way.
Over here, Whitey! Over this way."
"Over here, Whitey! Over this way."
"What is it, Viper?"
Rita ought to recognize the voices. She couldn't quite.
"What is it, man, you hear something?"
"Somebody's moanin', Whitey. Hurry up. Sounds like they're hurt-? Whitey?
Wasn't that a name Rita knew? Who was Whitey?
Where had she known Whitey before?
Impossible to think. Impossible to make the slightest sense when all that mattered was tearing away her panties, bringing her body into the air for blessed relief-
"Comin' from inside that big case. Wait a sec, I'll look and-holy God!"
Rita's eyes opened slightly. They were so misted with passion that the spindly silhouette standing out against the lights of the interstate bridge had fuzzy edges, no clarity. It hung in front of her like an ebony scarecrow, looking down in amazement.
Other figures bulked behind it suddenly, jostling for a peek. Finally a shape taller than all of them shouldered the black forms out of the way and crouched near her as she rolled and bit her lips and rubbed her palms wildly this way and that over the surging, heaving softness of her belly.
"Hey, pussycat, you hear me?"
"Jeezamighty, Viper, looka that!" another boy gasped. "Ain't that something?"
"She's nuts," replied a voice that must have belonged to Viper, whoever he was. "I always said the little twist was nuts and now she's nipped all the way."
"Pretty worked up, aren't you, Rita?" came the harsh tones of the crouching boy, the one whose male reek Rita scented through quivering nostrils. A soft thud. The kid dropped to his knees, rested his hand on her naked stomach.
He slid his fingers up to the pulsing fabric of her brassiere.
"Yeah, you're really goin' to town. Well, you better stop. Whitey's got a score to settle."
Rita's voice was a mad buzz in her own ears: "Whoever you are-listen-take off your clothes-"
"Whoever I am, huh?"
The kneeling kid rose up, shuddering-angry. "I'm Whitey, pussycat, Whitey Noonan. The guy you cheated on by flopping for that jerk Fontaine. Damn it, say something! Don't just lie there squealing-"
The last word came out a guttural bark, timed to the crash of his heavy shoe against her left breast.
As if a veil had been torn aside by the pain, Rita recognized him. Temporarily the madness of her body simmered lower. She lay on her elbows, gulping and gasping for breath. Whitey stood above her, fists balled. His name, his identity registered.
"Long time finding you, pussycat," Whitey said. "The dump's a hell of a big place. The longer I looked, the madder I got. Because Whitey Noonan's girls don't cheat on him."
He emphasized his words with another kick that tore her vitals with agony.
Curiously, Rita's mind seemed to function on two levels. On one level, the lowest and weakest, there was total horror as she told herself that the end had come. If she wasn't to be killed, she would became the victim of that fever-heat still lashing her on the second, more powerful level of her thinking.
Whitey's hand dove into the pocket of his Cobra jacket. From that hand sprang gleaming steel.
"I'm gonna cut you to tatters, pussycat. I'm gonna peel the skin right off you. Starting here."
His hands probbed her thighs.
Rita grappled for his neck:
"Whitey-Whitey-I don't care-I don't give a damn what you do-only take me! Come on and take me."
Astounded, Whitey stayed the knife-point a fraction of an inch above her belly.
"What?"
"Look at her!" That was Viper, whispering. "God, Whitey-"
"What do you mean why not? I came here to fix her, man."
"Ain't there other ways to fix her?" Viper's hands fluttered pale in the dark, in lewd explanation. Whitey gave a flat chuckle.
"Yeah, Yeah, man! You're a thinker. A real thinker."
The jingle of Whitey's belt buckle told her that everything would be all right now. A dazed smile twitched the corners of her smeared mouth as she kicked her right leg free of her panties, lifting her hips slightly in invitation, her arms thrown wide to welcome him.
A rustle of clothing as Whitey prepared. Then his hands, big and brutal on her flanks and buttocks.
Laughter rocked the walls of the packing case, laughter from the Cobras who crowded in, a tight circle of hot-eyed watchers. The touch of Whitey's hands aroused Rita even further, made her belly boil with the urge for satiation.
"Easy, lover!" she panted, reaching for him with convulsing fingers. "Easy a minute-Whitey?"
An outraged scream, echoed by laughter from the boys.
"Whitey?"
Her hands groped for empty darkness as she howled in pain:
"What are you doing? No, Whitey-no!" In the name of God, don't"
The torment was unendurable, hideous. Her whole body was livid with pain as he worked his cruel will on her. Rita tried to claw away from him, drag herself across the floor of the packing case. She couldn't.
She felt his filthy body violate hers, ripping her to pieces. Then, as the final torment, the capping touch to the monstrous evil engulfing her-she was liking it.
One of the boys called far off:
"Whitey, look at her grin!"
"Grinning, is she? I'll make her scream!"
Lost, lost! Rita thought, drumming her fists on the floor of the packing case in rhythm with Whitey's vicious assaults. Lost, better dead. Bring the dark. Bring death to cover me and wipe out this horror!
"She likes it! Oh my God she likes it, she likes it!" chanted a distant voice.
"Kill her, that's what I'll do, kill her!" Whitey groaned.
All sense and sanity left Rita then, every last trace of human thought, and she offered her body completely to the evil that was coursing through her like a poison. On a last depraved peak of ecstasy she bit her hand all the way to the bone.
Blood tasted warm, faintly salty on her lips. Rita welcomed the relief of sudden blackness creeping across her dead end brain.
"You're next," said Whitey.
Viper started on her. There was no relief after all.
From four blocks away Brick Fontaine saw the hellish glare against the sky.
He heard the wail of the fire sirens, and began to run. Without being certain of how he knew, he was sure the beacon of light over Hamilton Street was Peabody House aflame.
Elaine Olsen's betrayal-the cruel assault upon her--the crumbling of his hopes and plans for redeeming himself for having let Chip die while he pursued his own life-all these slipped away from Brick as his shoes slapped concrete. He ran as he'd never run before, more purposefully than he'd ever run while driving for the goal posts on Sunday afternoons all but forgotten now.
His lungs began to ache with exertion. Sobs of anger tore from his mouth as he rounded a corner, stumbled against a building.
Peabody House was in flames.
Coming from the motor lodge, he'd approached the settlement from the playground side. At first all he was only conscious of the fire, the wall of light reaching to the sky, a sheet of yellow-scarlet whose incredible heat scorched his cheeks even at this distance. Gradually more pieces of the kaleidoscope dropped into place:
The burnished red enamel sides of the fire trucks.
The water-slicked black rubber of the firemen's coats.
The twisted coils of hose.
The jets of foaming spray arching in to the flames. Fruitlessly Peabody House was already consumed, had already vanished in the holocaust.
Dazed, Brick stumbled across the street toward the gate in the steel-mesh fence.
Abruptly he recognized a black figure hanging goblin-like from the fence. Firelight played on red curls. The girl was watching the destruction with depraved glee.
Brick had no time for Mae Lazar. He had to reach the scene of the fire. But as he was slipping through the gate and starting his run across the asphalt playground, her piercing voice struck him:
"Yah, big man! How do you like the bonfire?"
The taunt spun Brick around, sent him racing for the steel fence, His reason was gone. His only desire was the desire to strike back.
At the last instant he slowed his run, struck the fence, realizing as the steel mesh cracked him in the face that he was beside himself. There was an inflexible wall between Brick and the grinning redhead.
Brick clutched the links as she backed off, hissing:
"Pretty nice, huh, Christer?" Her cheeks were sweaty, her hair disarrayed. She was the very picture of sadistic glee. "Teach you to mess around on Hamilton Street!"
"Who did it?" Brick's voice was a death-whisper. "Who started it?"
"Cobras!" the girl screeched. "The Cobras, Christer! To teach you a lesson. You messed around with Whitey Noonan's girl Rita. Imagine that, a big noble Christer touching a little twist off the streets. Well, that fire isn't even half your trouble, Christer. Right now the Cobras are taking care of your girl!"
Brick's face darkened.
"Taking care-?"
Mae screamed as Brick leaped, caught the upper edge of the fence, kicked a leg over and dropped to the pavement on the other side.
Running backwards, Mae stumbled in the gutter. Brick dropped on her, left knee grinding into her belly. Mae's triumph was gone, turned to naked fright.
Brick's hands were strong on her grimy throat.
"Are you talking about the Danilov girl?" he panted.
He lifted her head, smacked it on the pavement.
"Talk, you lousy little bitch. Tell me or I'll kill you!"
"Rita, yeah, yeah, Rita. Let go-!"
Mae choked for breath, cheeks purpling.
Brick had lost control was driven by wildness:
"Where is she? What happened to her?"
"The river dump," Mae bleated. "Down there someplace-Whitey went after her-"
Brick released her and stood up, drawing huge hurting draughts of air into his lungs. In another moment he would have strangled her without remorse. Now the hysterical urge to strike back drained away, replaced by cold fear.
He left Mae massaging her throat and whimpering in the gutter. He walked toward the river, pushing the already destroyed settlement house from his thoughts, pushing out everything save the single fact that a girl who had appealed to him for help was down there in that fetid wasteland, perhaps dying this very instant, because of him.
Brick broke into a run.
The blocks reeled by. Suddenly he jerked up short, dove into the concealing shadows of an alley.
A band of men moved along a cross-street, etched briefly in the circle of radiance cast on the littered pavement. Disbelieving, Brick saw the burly figure of Detective Kreeg at their head. He recognized several of the men as shop owners along Hell's Half Mile. In their hands-good God! Meat cleavers and tire irons.
Kreeg carried a gun that shone blue-hard in the light.
Then the mob passed, slipped out of sight with stealthy silence.
Brick bolted for the cross-street, searched the dark. The mob had vanished. Heading for the north end of the, dump, he figured. And out to kill.
The dump ran for a considerable stretch along the river. The citizen's vigilance committee-Brick had no doubt now about the composition of Kreeg's force-would have to search from north to south.
What if Rita and the gang were somewhere at the north end?
Which way should he go?
Should he rush back to the precinct, try to find Captain Wadsewski, tell him what his underling was doing in his frantic desire to stamp out the pestilence of Hamilton Street for good and all?
Brick thought of Rita, of her sick, imploring face the night she'd begged him for satisfaction in the settlement office. For a moment he was a man torn apart with uncertainty. Then he realized he had no time to seek the help of the police. If Rita had run to the river, it was because of him. It was his responsibility to save her if he could.
He'd gamble, start his own search from the south end near the interstate bridge.
Clambering across the big rocks which separated Hamilton's dead end from the dumps, Brick paused a moment to snatch up a sharp boulder to use as a weapon. He stood atop the rocks, peering into the smoky waste. The reeking clouds from the smoldering-orange refuse piles obscured details.
Blind panic engulfed him. Without thinking, he cupped his hands around his mouth and called softly:
Rita? Rita?"
Rita, Rita, Rita. The echo bounced off the concrete piers of the bridge.
Listening, Brick detected no clamor from the north end of the dump. He leaped down from the rocks into a soggy pile of garbage, called again:
"Rita? Rita Danilov?"
The shouting was a mistake. It brought figures out of the dark.
They fell upon him with fists and stones. Brick fought, wildly, but there were too many.
A crack on the skull with a shard of concrete and he went down.
The Cobras had him.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Brick's first reaction when he awoke was an overwhelming urge to laugh. It seemed beyond the realm of sanity that he should be lying on the dirt floor of what appeared to be a watchman's shack, a couple of gang kids squatting on his shoulders and his trousers and undershorts pulled down below his knees.
It resembled a cartoon, the tired old saw about the worker who sets off for his job minus the lower half of his clothes. Only when a tall blonde kid in a Cobra jacket stepped into Brick's line of vision, a switch cruel and steel-winking in his supple fingers, did Brick's urge to laugh vanish.
The blonde kid glanced down at Brick with contempt. Brick started to speak, found his lips stiffened, cracked. A scaly substance had hardened on his cheeks. Dried blood. His own.
He remembered now the falling, the stumbling, under the onslaught of kicks and blows and pitched rocks. Again he was overcome with the feeling that this was a figment of sleep. He'd wake up in a few moments.
Then he recalled the mob armed with cleavers and chains, led by Sergeant Kreeg. He saw a pitiful figure leaning weakly against the shack's wall, half-lit by the rays of a couple of battery lanterns resting on a rickety table.
The girl's disheveled clothes, matted hair, terrorized face shocked Brick to sense. "Rita-?"
He whispered the name uncertainly. Her eyes were round, vacant.
"Rita, don't you recognize me?"
Abruptly the blond kid raised his foot and stamped on Brick's ankle. Brick writhed, cursed, tried to double his fist to strike back. The kids squatting on his shoulders pinioned his wrists in the dirt.
Whitey stared at him with revenge-glazed eyes.
"When I speak to you, Fontaine, you pay attention. Look at me, not the broad."
"Are you Noonan?"
"Who do you think I am, a social worker maybe?" Whitey stroked the keen edge of the switch on his jeans.
"Yeah, I'm Whitey Noonan. And I been looking high and low for you, Christer. You were next after I fixed Rita. How did you like Rita, by the way? I hope you enjoyed her a lot because she's the last you'll ever get." He surveyed Brick with contempt. "You're quite a stud. We'll see how much of a stud you are when I finish with this knife."
All at once Brick understood what Whitey intended to do.
But he was beyond fear now, concerned only that Rita recognize him. Somehow he had to plumb the depths of those mad eyes, make her realize before it became too late for both of them that somebody cared about her.
Ignoring Whitey's defiant gaze he whispered again: "Rita, listen-"
Her head lifted, vacantly. She stared, brushing a lock of once-lustrous dark hair from her forehead.
"I came to help you, Rita," he said quickly, before Whitey could react. Then he raised his voice: "Rita-look at me!"
Hesitant recognition crept into her eyes. "Oh, God-Fontaine?"
She took a tentative step, sobbing suddenly with relief. Whitey intercepted her, smashed her mouth with his fist, knocked her sprawling against the side of the shack. But she'd recognized Brick, that was all that mattered.
Across the shadowy distance and the criss-crossed beams of the electric lanterns, her white face, although frightened, shone with a strange brightness emotion. The silver track of a tear ran down her cheek.
Brick raised his head.
"Noonan, let her go."
"Not on your life,"
"Kill me, but let her go!"
"Don't, Fontaine, oh, don't. I'm not worth the trouble."
Whitey spun around and pointed with the knife. "Keep quiet."
"There isn't much time, Noonan," Brick warned. Whitey's brow knit, puzzled. "Time? Crap, we got all night."
"That's where you're wrong. Do you know Kreeg, from the precinct?"
"Sure. What's that got to do with anything?"
"He's on his way here. With thirty armed men. Not police. Kreeg's own crowd, Shopkeepers from Hamilton Street. Olivetti and Monoghan and the rest. They headed for the north end of the dump but it can't be long before they'll get here. They're ready for blood, Noonan. Yours. Your gang can't fight them all. There are too many. Goddam it-!"
Brick struggled violently against the kids holding him.
"Get your apes off me and listen! Kreeg won't show you an ounce of mercy-"
Viper stepped into the light, eyes round and rolling. "Whitey, maybe we-" 'Wo advice!"
Whitey backhanded Viper viciously. "I run things, remember?"
"But Jeez, Whitey! That Kreeg's a loony. You know what a wild man-"
Whitey rammed the switch halfway to its hilt in Viper's arm.
The boy looked down in disbelief. Through the tear in his jacket blood seeped suddenly, sticky-black in the electric lantern's glare. Viper's lips writhed in defiance:
"The hell with you, Whitey! I ain't going to have Kreeg tear me apart just because-"
"But he's lying!" Whitey cried, dropping on Brick, seizing the point of Brick's chin between his fingers.
He stabbed Brick's cheek lightly with the switch, his eyes huge as he struggled against his own terror:
"Tell the bunch! Tell them you're a rotten mother-frying liar!"
"Keep your voice down!" Brick said. You'll bring them running straight here."
"But not before I cut you down to size!" Whitey screamed.
He lashed out with the knife.Only Brick's powerful surge of effort, a wrench of his whole lower body, prevented the blade from slicing half his groin away. The kids on his shoulders grunted. One rolled off with a curse. Brick threw his left hip over to take the cut of the knife. The blade sliced in and out again, sending hot blood down his leg.
Whitey was impotent with anger, scrabbling in the dirt, taking aim for the next slash that would emasculate Brick. Up flashed Whitey's arm. The switch hovered high, steely-sharp-At that instant Viper grabbed Whitey's wrist, levered it backward, screamed:
"Listen, Whitey! I hear voices out there!"
Petrified, Whitey began to whimper. He looked from face to face, searching among the assembled members of the Cobras for one spark of courage, one hint of the will to resist.
None showed.
Bleeding, Viper sprawled over the table and began to cry.
Brick heard sounds too, a growling of angry voices. They must have spotted the gleam of the battery lanterns through the cracked slats of the shack.
The one kid still sitting on Brick's shoulder stood up and put his palms over his face. On the faded blue fabric of his jeans a black, wet stain began to widen.
"What do we do? "What do we do?"
Whitey's face was a mask of sweat, his bravado replaced by cornered animal terror.
"The lights! Douse 'em for Christ's sake!"
Whitey stumbled to the rickety table and switched off the battery lanterns. Brick staggered up, unhindered by the Cobras who were too terrified to move.
Out in the dumps the savage rumble grew louder. One voice, Kreeg's, rose above the others: "Spread out, spread out all of you! They're inside that shack. Kill 'em when they come out. Don't give 'em a chance to beg. Remember how they turned the street into a jungle."
Brick jerked up his trousers, lashed the belt tight with one savage motion, unmindful of the warm gush of blood down his left leg. He heard men stumbling over tin cans and litter outside, growling like beasts. Above this came Kreeg's shrill shout:
"Don't give the fryers a chance! Kill 'em-kill 'em!"
Whitey cried gutlessly out of the dark:
"Don't let them take me, Fontaine. Go out and stop 'em! They'll murder us."
Stumbling, Brick crashed across the shack and kicked open the door. Through the lighter rectangle of the opening he saw a cordon of men closed around the front of the shack, their figures black and menacing in the faint light from the bridge.
Olivetti strained forward to see. Brick recognized him. And the cleaver he held.
"Send them back, Kreeg!" Brick called, stepping through the door, supporting himself on the jamb so his left leg wouldn't buckle. "The kids will give up-"
A blocky figure disengaged itself from the rest, lurched forward with a cry of anger:
"Give up? You bet they'll give up-their Goddam blood, that's what they'll give up. I don't know how you got here, 'Fontaine, and I don't give a crap. I want them kids."
His face was sick but demented. His hand trembled as he raised the .38, blue-hard and deadly. He pointed the gun at Brick's chest.
"Move, Fontaine."
Wagging his head from side to side, Brick stood fast. "I won't let you return butchery for butchery, Kreeg."
"Move!" screamed Kreeg. "Move or I'll blow your guts out."
"Then do it, Kreeg. You'll have to shoot me to get them."
"Hey, Kreeg," mumbled a voice in the crowd, perhaps Monoghan, Brick couldn't be sure. "The kids deserve what's comin' to them, sure. But I won't be a party to murderin' him."
"He's with them!" Kreeg protested. "How stupid can you people be? He's trying to protect them! They're vermin. They gotta be destroyed like vermin. Don't let him con you with that pious crap. They take blood, give 'em blood back. They raped the Ambrosio girl, didn't they? Burned down Peabody or I miss my guess. Fontaine's in with them, he's on their side."
"Go back," Brick said, knowing that only a tense hairline separated sense from a brutal massacre.
He wondered whether he could stay on his feet long enough to talk them down. In the shack behind him, Brick heard sounds, frightened wordless syllables from the Cobras. Trying to stand upright, Brick took a step forward. "Damn you, stand back and they'll give up without-"
"I had enough!" Kreeg screamed.
His trigger finger went white.
"No, not him!"
The voice was wild, desperate. A weight struck Brick's spine, hands pushing, shoving. He fell forward off balance just as the maniacal Kreeg pumped out his first shot.
A shattering roar-an orange stab of brilliance in the night. Brick landed on his face in a foul mound of garbage as Kreeg's revolver blasted again, then a third time.
Twisting over, Brick saw Rita.
Rita who had shoved Brick in desperation.
Rita who swayed in the shack's entrance, a shocked, disbelieving look on her beautiful young face.
Both her hands were pressed tight to her belly. Sticky black stuff leaked between them.
Suddenly she was knocked down by Whitey Noonan. With a terrified yell he ran for the river bank. Kreeg pivoted as Rita sank to the earth. Kreeg's next shot blew a wide hole in the middle of Whitey Noonan's back.
The running figure jerked, instinctively fleeing from the death that smashed its flesh from behind. Whitey clawed his way to the top of a refuse heap. Kreeg fired twice more.
Whitey spun around, half his head blown away. He dropped into the river.
On the ground in front of the shack, Rita Danilov moaned.
Knowing a mad rage greater than any emotion that had ever swept him, Brick turned on Kreeg.
The men of the vigilance committee shrank back. Olivetti let go of his weapon and ran off to be sick. Kreeg grinned at Brick. He pointed the muzzle of the .38 at Brick's face.
He jerked the trigger.
A flat series of clicks.
Kreeg flung the .38 away, turned to run. Hardly feeling the wound spill blood down his leg, Brick went after him, caught him around the neck, spun him and smashed his right knee full force into Kreeg's groin.
Kreeg doubled, spitting. Brick brought his fist under Kreeg's jaw and broke it with one punch.
Spread-eagled, Kreeg saw Brick loom over him. Suddenly gripped with cowardice, Kreeg shielded his face with his forearms as Brick crouched across his middle and battered the arms aside with vicious blows.
Kreeg's suet face lay exposed, slick with fright and sweat. Brick smashed it with his right fist, then his left. Blood squirted from Kreeg's nose. Two of his front teeth fell out. Gummy cartillage oozed red from his nostril.
Brick couldn't stop himself. He couldn't hold back the force of his hands as they tore and lacerated, smashed and destroyed, battered Kreeg's features to oblivion. Brick screamed as he hit, screamed in rage, wordlessly, mindlessly.
Hands plucked at his shoulders. Men implored him to stop before he killed Kreeg. Still Brick smashed and hammered, wanting only to destroy the brutal slab of meat on the ground, render it lifeless.
Again he struck, again.
Kreeg twitched with every blow. His face was curtained by blood, a red wet mask.
The voices kept imploring Brick, pleading, making little sense. Then a few words did penetrate: "Fontaine-the girl's almost dead! She wants you-"
Brick's ashen face lifted, puzzled a brief moment.
"The girl? Who-?"
Panic caught him. He stumbled away from Kreeg's near-lifeless body and walked with an uncertain step toward the shack.
His left leg buckled. He fell to his knees.
A yard away, Rita lay on her back, breasts rising and falling fitfully, head turned to the side, cheeks chalky. The front of her sweater was black-sticky with the life leaking out of her.
Brick began to crawl. He had to reach her.
God give him strength to reach her before she died in the filth of this hideous place. He forced words out, addressed to the shadow shapes of the frightened men: "Somebody go to the precinct. Get Wadsewski."
A running man vanished in the dark. Rita tried to move her hand toward Brick. She lacked the strength. The fingers twisted, imploring. Brick's head hung down, dizzy and full of pain.
He dragged his left leg as he crawled. It was a laden weight he was too weak to move. But he had to move it.
He was driven by the pitiful sound of the girl's gasping breath, her wide, death-startled eyes, her terror at feeling what must be an utterly incomprehensible chill steal over her.
Another foot, God, Brick prayed, as he hadn't prayed in many a year.
Another foot, dragging his bleeding body.
Then another.
Only one more foot to go. Her eyes were luminous, childishly afraid because she was a young girl again, a young girl dying, not a sex-crazed creature who couldn't control the diseased impulses of her body.
Brick smelled his own blood, recking-hot. He didn't care whether he lived any longer than the time it took him to hitch his injured body the last few inches.
Supporting himself on hands and knees, unwilling to show weakness even though his body was in torment, he leaned over Rita. Her out-flung hand touched the inside of his braced wrist. With effort she spoke:
"Fontaine, I'm awful scared."
It had been many years since Brick Fontaine had cried. He was crying now:
"Child, child, why did you let him kill you when he should have killed me?"
"Fontaine-you're worth-a lot to-"
"Don't say that!" Brick panted. "After what I did-"
"I never loved-any man before," Rita whispered to him, her words faltering, the breath of her lips chill on his jaw as he leaned near her. "Don't-feel bad-over what happened. I know-I'm just a kid. But at the settlement-for once-it was nice. Not dirty. Not something-like a machine-"
"Help is what you needed," Brick sobbed. "If I'd tried harder-"
A feeble touch of her fingers stopped his words.
"No, Fontaine. Beyond-help. Long-before. But being-gentle-"
Her eyes lighted briefly with a holy wonderment. A fit of coughing wracked her.
"For once-I loved a man-a decent-"
"Rest, Rita," Brick breathed, knowing one more moment of strength from his hurting body so that he could comfort her:
"Rest. We'll get help. A doctor-"
Her laugh was a sad little rattle:
"Doctor-no help. Not even-a long time ago. But
-I wish I'd been-older. I could have loved-so-" She tried to rise up, moaning with the hurt. Brick touched her cheek. Tears dropped from his face onto hers.
Rita's fingers closed around his hand, convulsing: "Fontaine-I love ... Oh! It's cold, awful cold and-" A whistle of breath, very faint, and she was dead. Brick held her face between his hands, trying to beg life back into her body with a wordless prayer. Far away a siren shrilled, rising closer, bringing the help that was no help at all.
Brick slid forward across Rita's cold body and knew nothing more.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The bandages binding brick Fontaine's left leg felt stiff and uncomfortable.
But their constriction, and the numb pain in his flesh that stirred afresh whenever he moved, was nothing compared to the sick dismay he felt when he surveyed the gutted remains of the Justus J. Peabody Settlement House.
Three days had passed since the nightmarish climax of horror down at the river dump.
Brick had wakened in the Sisters of Charity Hospital several blocks away. The knife-slash administered by Whitey Noonan had not been anywhere fatal. So Brick was forced to gather up the threads of his old existence and try to weave them again into a consistent, sensible pattern. Difficult, especially at Rita Danilov's funeral yesterday.
Simon Danilov had virtually refused to acknowledge Brick's presence. He had simply sunk more deeply into himself, staring at his hands in his lap with dull-witted resentment of powers far beyond him as the cleric spoke of the dead girl.
The girl Brick could not bring himself to gaze at in her coffin.
Equally painful had been his interview with Captain Wadsewski.
Not because he'd been unhappy watching Sergeant Kreeg dressed down, stripped of his rank and ordered by the mild-voiced Captain to appear before the police board two weeks hence. What had hurt most was Captain Wadsewski's quiet persuasion. Wadsewski wanted Brick to personally start a fund drive to raise a new Peabody House. The Captain offered what little help he could give. But he felt that Brick, being something of a public figure, would be more effective speaking to the Peabody trustees. Brick had been forced to tell him the facts of life:
Funds for the house had been turned off at the source.
Wadsewski had no answer. He merely stared at his blotter as Brick departed.
Due to the press of other activities, Brick had managed to stay away from the wreckage of the settlement for three days. Then at four this morning he'd wakened in his hotel room uptown. He had no apartment any longer, having vacated it when he made the move to Hamilton Street.
Lying in the half-light of a rainy dawn, Brick knew he must visit the spot once more.
He took an early bus and walked again along Hell's Half Mile. It was a far different journey than it had been only a few days ago. Though now it seemed like years. The hour was slightly past seven. None of the shops was open, although he could hear an occasional raucous voice behind the windows of the tenements.
From one such window, a boy of ten or so made an indecent gesture. Brick was too tired to feel the slightest resentment.
Rain slated down with stinging gray force. He moved along the wire fence, staring at the hopeless rubble. Rita Danilov's dying words had exonerated him from a little of the guilt he'd felt because of her. Nothing could 'exonerate him from his failure to keep the settlement going.
He could have appealed once more to Artemus Olsen, of course. But he felt the appeal would be futile in the light of his behaviour towards Elaine.
Why did I come here? Thought Brick helplessly. To torture myself?
Dragging his left leg slightly, he turned back up Hamilton, away from the charred monument to his failure, hands deep in the pockets of his white raincoat, jaw sunk despondently on his chest.
He heard a hiss of tires behind him. He assumed it was an early delivery truck and did not glance up. An auto slowed at the curb. Brick had a glimpse of white wall tires, a sleek curve of gunmetal-gray fender.
Resentment etched his rough face as he saw Elaine behind the rain-spattered windshield of the Bentley.
He walked rapidly away as she rolled down the window.
"Brick-don't! Not until you take this."
Turning, he saw her gloved hand gripping a long white envelope. She extended it to him. For a moment a renewed ache of longing smote him. He saw the loveliness of her face, pale, the lips only slightly tinted with pink.
He expected to be greeted by haughty resentment when he gazed into her green eyes. But he could discover no trace of it. Against his better judgment he walked back.
Elaine slid across the front seat to make room for him. She wore a navy suit, trimly cut. It hugged tightly to her big and firm breasts, breasts wide spaced and proud and-
Brick suppressed the thought furiously.
When she moved to make room, the navy skirt rose above her knees, exposing round upper thighs, so achingly tender-gold, sheathed now in smoky gray nylon. Her garters were two strips of delicate white rising toward-
Hastily Elaine pulled down her skirt.
"Better get inside, Brick. The rain is heavy."
"Thanks, I don't mind it out here. About that business at the motor lodge-"
Elaine's expression seemed tense, as if she were frightened of him. Or perhaps of herself.
"No need to apologize. I understand. I--liked what you did to me."
"Oh, for God's sake, Elaine! Don't you have any decency?"
In disgust he jabbed a smoke into the corner of his mouth, puffed it savagely. "What are you doing here?"
"I wanted to see you, Brick. I stopped at your apartment but you weren't-"
"I planned to live down here," he said with heavy cynicism. "Remember?"
"Be cruel, Brick. I deserve it. Anyway, since I didn't know where you were-I tried the Sisters of Charity Hospital, but you'd been discharged already-I've been driving here three or four times a day. I felt you'd probably come back, at least for a short visit."
"Want to dig the knife a little deeper, do you?"
Elaine suppressed an exclamation of dismay. One gloved hand pointed to the long white envelope she'd deposited on the seat after Brick refused it.
"Please take that, Brick. I told father I'd deliver it."
"What is it?" Brick sneered. "An official notice from the Peabody trustees saying that the settlement is now defunct? How can you people be so damned cruel?"
"It is a letter," Elaine said, nodding. "From father, yes. It authorizes you to receive architectural and contracting bids to build a new house on the site of the old one."
"Don't joke, Elaine. If this is your idea of a good laugh-"
"For God's sake, Brick! Open it and see."
With unsteady hands he did as she asked.
Unfolding the crinkly bond paper, he noted the engraved letterhead from the investment banking firm of Artemus Olsen. He read with astonished eyes a repetition of the message Elaine had given him.
He folded the letter, inserted it in the envelope, rain beating on his head. Face bleak, he asked her:
"Why?"
Elaine shrugged, avoiding his gaze.
"What I ask for, I usually get. I told you that."
"You're not answering me. Why did you persuade your father to change his mind?"
Now the green depths of her eyes mirrored her pain.
"Call it a sop to my conscience."
A tentative smile slid onto Brick's face.
"Elaine, you surprise me. You-"
The smile vanished. He dropped the envelope through the car window.
"Oh, I get it. The bait. Well, no dice. If there's a new settlement on Hamilton Street, it'll be free and clear. I want to see a house go up in the worst way. But I'll be damned if I'll mortgage my soul to you to get it."
A low sob of remorse escaped her lips.
"How can you be so incredibly thick-headed all the time? Take the letter. There are no strings."
Elaine thrust the envelope back into his hands, slid back under the Bentley's wheel and started the motor.
"I knew what I've done to you, Brick. I'm sorry, though of course I don't expect you to believe me. What you do with this letter is your affair. I'm sailing for Europe on Friday. We're even, Brick. Or as even as we can be considering my behavior. Good bye."
With a quick whirring mesh of automatic gears, Elaine shot the Bentley forward.
Brick couldn't tell whether she was really crying or whether the rain-streaked glass gave the effect. He stared for a tormented moment at the wink of the Bentley's tail lights as Elaine braked at the cross-corner. Then he began to run.
"Elaine-Elaine, wait!"
Almost as if she'd been anticipating his call, praying for it the Bentley swung to the curb with a violent lurch. A window flew up in a tenement. A fat woman with hair in pincurls demanded to know who the hell was making all the racket. Brick paid no attention racing around the Bentley's bonnet opening the far door and slipping inside.
"Drive," he said curtly.
Elaine's face was very pale. She turned at the corner, headed aimlessly in the direction of the interstate bridge, a gray span smudging the rainy sky above Hamilton Street. Brick lifted the envelope.
"There has to be a new house, Elaine."
"I know, Brick. I don't understand quite why. But-"
She turned her head briefly, searching his eyes.
"Perhaps I might learn why if-you'd help me."
"The insurance business-the ball club. They're finished. I have a hell of a lot of work to do down here. By the time it's completed I'll probably be too old to go back to the club. And the insurance racket-well, that doesn't seem very important either now. I won't be an uptown do-gooder who drives here two or three days a week to see how his pet charity is going. I have to live here."
"Still trying to atone for Chip?" Elaine asked, but without rancor.
"Yes. Chip and-"
He stared through the rain-gray windshield.
"-and a girl named Rita Danilov."
"I saw the story in the paper. She died-"
"For me! She got killed so I could go on living. Do you understand why if-there's anything left between us-it'll be on my terms, not yours?"
Elaine drove another half block before she whispered.
"Brick, do you want there to be anything between us after what's happened?"
"I think you know the answer."
Again she turned, face shining.
"Then I accept the terms. Any terms, darling."
Brick's voice was quiet:
"Pull over."
She did.
"Come here, Elaine."
She fell into his arms, head thrown back, eyes misted with tears as he brought his mouth yearningly to the cool, coral-minty fragrance of her lips.
They clung together, kissing gently at first, then more passionately.
Their tongues caressed wildly, as if both were experiencing emotions too long suppressed. Elaine moved closer, the rain on the window glass all but obscuring the deserted side street.
For Brick there was nothing but the girl in his arms, the fragrance of her perfume, the cool temptation of her lips on his ear, his neck, as he kissed the column of her throat.
"When I thought I'd lost you, Brick-I realized only then how much I love you. Whatever you do-wherever you go-just let me be near."
Brick felt a surge of hope as he whispered against the curve of her neck:
"Darling, darling."
"Kiss me again, Brick. Kiss me again, deeply, and hard."
Once more their lips met, lips warming now with the stir of passion.
All the tension and torment of the past days vanished in Brick, as though a special key had been turned in a rusty lock. He slipped his arm around Elaine's waist.
He felt the soft tension of her flesh just above the elastic firmness of her girdle. Her hand guided his (to the buttons of her suit jacket, helped him while he unfastened three.
He ran his fingers under her clothes to clasp and fondle the immaculate gold perfection of her lace-clad breasts.
Elaine's mouth roved his face, his cheek, nipping flesh. She shuddered with pleasure as his hands worked first on one breast, then on the other.
She was crying and laughing all at once:
"Things will be all right. We'll start again, make everything work. If only we're together-"
Brick drew back, gazed fiercely and deeply into her green eyes.
"Elaine, I want you."
"And I want you too, Brick. Oh, yes, sweetest, kiss me. I want you kissing me."
His trembling hands slid to her knee, the whispering firmness of her knee that glided beneath his palm as he fondled her. The two of them swayed back and forth on the car seat, locked in an embrace of overpowering delight.
At last Brick drew away with an embarrassed laugh. He wiped steam from the inner surface of the windshield.
"It would be a hell of a note if we started our marriage with a morals arrest, Elaine."
"Where can we go?" Elaine implored him with love-filled eyes. "We must go somewhere. We're beginning again. I want to seal the bargain-"
She touched his cheek tenderly.
"Take everything I have Brick, as you want it, whenever you want it. But please, darling-I'll never ask for another thing-let's find a place where we can make love."
Dizzy with happiness, Brick kissed her once more. This time their mouths were caverns of excitement, deep and enduring excitement that promised him a magic life, a chance to re-build the dream of Peabody House and still keep Elaine's loveliness for his own.
She moaned as they kissed a last time. Brick got out of the Bentley, ran around to the driver's seat and started the motor. Unable to help themselves in their joy, they kissed again. With her thigh pressed against his, warm and straining with the promise of love to come, Brick engaged the Bentley's gears and drove away through the slanting rain.
Behind, on Hamilton Street, people stirred.
Shrill youthful voices were raised in the street corner argument.
