against the feeble street light at either end of the alley in the hot night. Each a distinct shadow, a person, yet all the same-thin and without faces. They made no sound or movement, looming like thin birds of prey in the night.
I looked around the alley. Windowless walls on both sides, locked rear doors. No way out except past them. Nothing to help me except three ranks of garbage cans, and two cats that ran silently away as the four shadows began to move toward me.
They came bent forward, watching me warily like hunters approaching some cornered animal. An animal they weren’t going to let escape, yet respected, so advanced carefully.
I didn’t try to talk to them. They hadn’t come to talk, at least not until they had given me their message in a more direct way.
I sidled toward a rank of six garbage cans.
The first attack came from behind me.
One jumped in alone, something in his raised right hand. A darting attack like a snake striking. Maybe he thought I was momentarily not looking behind me. Whatever, it gave me a faint chance. For a moment, he was alone.
It was a tire iron in his hand. I grabbed at his arm, missed, ducked under and in, took a hard blow from the tire iron on my left shoulder, and hit him in the belly.
A scrawny belly, my fist sinking almost to his backbone. He vanished, the tire iron clattering down on the cobblestones.
A shadow behind me.
I kicked over a garbage can, and the shadow sprawled and rattled among the cans.
Something like a club smashed against my nose and cheek. I tasted blood.
My hand closed on a thin, bony wrist. My face was close against a pale, hard-breathing face-a young face, with acne.
Kids!
Street kids. Thin, savage, crazy-eyed, breathing hard and silent as they swarmed over me as deadly as wild animals in any jungle.
I kicked the one I held. He fell away. I had a garbage can cover. I smashed it into a face. A long iron bar cracked my ribs. Something battered my head, my arm. They breathed, grunted, said nothing. They had not come to talk at all. To at least put me into some hospital.
I was bruised and bleeding-one arm against eight arms with weapons. But they were kids. There is a difference between a kid and an adult, even a street kid. It’s called viciousness, the ability to attack totally without flinching. An adult has learned to hold back nothing in a fight. Most kids, if they are sane, sober and not on drugs, will hesitate a hair, flinch unsure, and that was what saved me.
That, and the fact that street kids are all muscle, but the muscles are starved. They are not in good shape or health. Pound for pound, they are weak compared to a well-fed, athletic suburban boy.
They had me, but they flinched. They could grab me, but they couldn’t hold me.
I sank teeth into a face. I kicked bellies and groins. I stamped thin arms on the ground. I hammered them with my garbage can cover. I tangled them among the cans.
I saw a clear space, and ran. Unsure, without stamina, they gave me space and too much time, and I ran for the escape of the street. My street.
I saw them behind me. Two of them. The other two must have taken more from me than they could handle. I didn’t know the two behind me, not exactly. Familiar faces, but I could fit no names to the faces.
I reached my building, locked the vestibule door, made it up the stairs to my five hot but secure rooms. In the room I waited. They didn’t come up. It was my territory.
Shaking, I got to my bathroom. The mirror showed me cuts, blood and bruises. My ribs stabbed. My arm was limp, ached. I washed, daubed Merthiolate. My left eye was blackening, but I didn’t think anything was broken. I sat down in my shabby living room in the hot night, lit a cigarette.
I hadn’t recognized any of them, but I didn’t have to. Street kids, they could have been sent by only one person-Charlie Burgos. A favor for Charlie, or maybe orders. Charlie himself hadn’t been there, he was a leader.’ Besides, I would have recognized him. They had wanted at least to put me into the hospital. Why?
Eugene Marais’s murder? Sure. But I wasn’t really involved in that, was I? Another mistake like Li Marais hiring me to stop Gerd Exner? Or was Charlie Burgos showing off his power for Danielle Marais? I had bothered Danielle.
Maybe. Maybe this, and maybe that, and to hell with it. I hurt, I hadn’t slept much last night, and I didn’t give a damn about Charlie Burgos.
I went to bed.
To hell with Marty.
I went to sleep wondering what Charlie Burgos thought I was doing that I wasn’t. To hell with it. But my mind wouldn’t quit. The human problem-that damned mind of ours.
I awoke to the telephone ringing. It was my answering service. A Viviane Marais had called me about five last night. She wanted to see me.
5
Eugene Marais had lived in Brooklyn, out in Sheepshead Bay.
New York is a city of “villages,” a series of neighborhoods each with its local life and natives. In these villages there are some who are important to the natives, but who are never really natives themselves-the white shopkeepers of Harlem who live in Queens; the black police captains who rule Bedford-Stuyvesant, but live in New Rochelle. Eugene Marais had been a fixture in Chelsea, but he had lived in Sheepshead Bay.
I took the subway. It was a trip into the past. When I was a boy in Chelsea, Sheepshead Bay was where we had gone fishing. An outing, an adventure; the clean air and the sea. Before I lost my arm and wandered far from Chelsea. Still, I remembered, and the smells of fish and sea came to greet me when I left the subway in the hot sun. But the Bay wasn’t the same anymore.
When I was a boy it had been a fishing village-wooden piers, shops and restaurants on pilings over the water, Italian trawlers tied up drying their nets, hordes of gulls wheeling over the fish refuse dropped into the Bay. Now it was just another part of the city, the Belt Parkway knifing through it. Mayor LaGuardia had started the change; banning the trawlers, making the piers concrete, closing the shops over the water, cleaning it all up. A loss, a tragedy, yet the mayor could do nothing else. The city had been growing too fast. A small population can live casually with nature, its pollution swallowed up. A large one can’t. Too many people must regulate how they live with nature, or destroy nature and themselves. So a fishing village was lost.
But not quite. I found Eugene Marais’s house in a quiet old section not far from the water. Narrow old frame houses with porches and high attic windows. Trees and grape arbors. Out of time-as Eugene Marais himself had been, in a way. I went through the small yard of lawn and hydrangea bushes to the front door. Viviane Marais let me in herself.
She was a small, dark woman of fifty, with an energetic walk as she led me into an old-fashioned living room of delicate furniture, china bric-a-brac, and lace-very French. There was nothing old-fashioned about Viviane Marais. She wore a chic black sheath on a full yet firm figure that could handle it. She wore no jewelry, her fine features and erect carriage needing no adornment. Her eyes were dark and quick as she gave me a chair.
“Eugene spoke of you, Mr. Fortune. He liked you. Now I think I want to hire you.”
“I liked him,” I said.
She didn’t sit. She lit a cigarette, French and masculine.
“Do you believe it was robbery, Mr. Fortune?”
“I’m not sure. Yes and no.”
“I am sure, and it is no.”
Small and determined, she began to pace with a dynamism Eugene Marais had lacked. A quiet, slowish man, and a fiery, energetic wife. Complementary? A good marriage?
