“Hey, you!”
I turned obediently to the policeman’s shout. He shooed away the small clucking crowd of masked women and barefaced men. Coughing from the smoke that the black coupe had thrown out, he asked for my papers. I handed him the essential ones.
He looked at them and then at me. “British Barter? How long will you be in New York?”
Suppressing the urge to say, “For as short a time as possible.” I told him I’d be here for a week or so.
“May need you as a witness,” he explained. “Those kids can’t use smoke on us.
When they do that, we pull them in.”
He seemed to think the smoke was the bad thing. “They tried to kill the lady,” I pointed out.
He shook his head wisely. “They always pretend they’re going to, but actually they just want to snag skirts. I’ve picked up rippers with as many as fifty skirt snags tacked up in their rooms. Of course, sometimes they come a little too close.”
I explained that if I hadn’t yanked her out of the way she’d have been hit by more than hooks. But he interrupted. “If she’d thought it was a real murder attempt, she’d have stayed here.”
I looked around. It was true. She was gone.
“She was fearfully frightened,” I told him.
“Who wouldn’t be? Those kids would have scared old Stalin himself.”
“I mean frightened of more than ‘kids.’ They didn’t look like kids.”
“What did they look like?”
I tried without much success to describe the three faces. A vague impression of viciousness and effeminacy doesn’t mean much.
“Well, I could be wrong,” he said finally. “Do you know the girl? Where she lives?”
“No,” I half lied.
The other policeman hung up his radiophone and ambled toward us, kicking at the tendrils of dissipating smoke. The black cloud no longer hid the dingy facades with their five-year-old radiation flash burns, and I could begin to make out the distant stump of the Empire State Building, thrusting up out of Inferno like a mangled finger.
“They haven’t been picked up so far,” the approaching policeman grumbled. “Left smoke for five blocks, from what Ryan says.”
The first policeman shook his head. “That’s bad,” he observed solemnly.
I was feeling a bit uneasy and ashamed. An Englishman shouldn’t lie, at least not on impulse.
“They sound like nasty customers,” the first policeman continued in the same grim tone. “We’ll need witnesses. Looks as if you may have to stay in New York longer than you expect.”
I got the point. I said, “I forgot to show you all my papers,” and handed him a few others, making sure there was a five-dollar bill in among them.
When he handed them back a bit later, his voice was no longer ominous. My feelings of guilt vanished. To cement our relationship, I chatted with the two of them about their job.
“I suppose the masks give you some trouble,” I observed. “Over in England we’ve been reading about your new crop of masked female bandits.”
“Those things get exaggerated,” the first policeman assured me. “It’s the men masking as women that really mix us up. But, brother, when we nab them, we jump on them with both feet.”
“And you get so you can spot women almost as well as if they had naked faces,”
the second policeman volunteered. “You know, hands and all that.”
“Especially all that,” the first agreed with a chuckle. “Say, is it true that some girls don’t mask over in England?”
“A number of them have picked up the fashion,” ‘I told him. “Only a few, though—the ones who always adopt the latest style, however extreme.”
“They’re usually masked in the British newscasts.”
“I imagine it’s arranged that way out of deference to American taste,” I confessed.
“Actually, not very many do mask.”
The second policeman considered that. “Girls going down the Street bare from the neck up.” It was not clear whether he viewed the prospect with relish or moral distaste. Likely both.
“A few members keep trying to persuade Parliament to enact a law forbidding all masking,” I continued, talking perhaps a bit too much.
The second policeman shook his head. “What an idea. You know, masks are a pretty good thing, brother. Couple of years more and I’m going to make my wife wear hers around the house.”
The first policeman shrugged. “If women were to stop wearing masks, in six weeks you wouldn’t know the difference. You get used to anything, if enough people do or don’t do it.”
I agreed, rather regretfully, and left them. I turned north on Broadway (old Tenth Avenue, I believe) and walked rapidly until I was beyond Inferno. Passing such an area of undecontaminated radioactivity always makes a person queasy. I thanked God there weren’t any such in England, as yet.
The street was almost empty, though I was accosted by a couple of beggars with faces tunneled by H-bomb scars, whether real or of make-up putty I couldn’t tell. A fat woman held out a baby with webbed fingers and toes. I told myself it would have been deformed anyway and that she was only capitalizing on our fear of bomb-induced mutations. Still, I gave her a seven-and-ahalf-cent piece. Her mask made me feel I was paying tribute to an African fetish.
“May all your children be blessed with one head and two eyes, sir.”
“Thanks,” I said, shuddering, and hurried past her.
“. . . There’s only trash behind the mask, so turn your head, stick to your task: Stay away, stay away—from —the—girls!”
This last was the end of an anti-sex song being sung by some religionists half a block from the circle-and- cross insignia of a femalist temple. They reminded me only faintly of our small tribe of British monastics. Above their heads was a jumble of billboards advertising predigested foods, wrestling instruction, radio handies and the like.
I stared at the hysterical slogans with disagreeable fascination. Since the female face and form have been banned on American signs, the very letters of the advertiser’s alphabet have begun to crawl with sex—the fat- bellied, big-breasted capital B, the lascivious double 0. However, I reminded myself, it is chiefly the mask that so strangely accents sex in America.
A British anthropologist has pointed out that, while it took more than five thousand years to shift the chief point of sexual interest from the hips to the breasts, the next transition, to the face, has taken less than fifty years. Comparing the American style with Moslem tradition is not valid; Moslem women are compelled to wear veils, the purpose of which is to make a husband’s property private, while American women have only the compulsion of fashion and use masks to create mystery.
Theory aside, the actual origins of the trend are to be found in the antiradiation clothing of World War III, which led to masked wrestling, now a fantastically popular sport, and that in turn led to the current female fashion. Only a wild style at first, masks quickly became as necessary as brassieres and lipsticks had been earlier in the century.
I finally realized that I was not speculating about masks in general, but about what lay behind one in particular. That’s the devil of the things; you’re never sure whether a girl is heightening loveliness or hiding ugliness. I pictured a cool, pretty face in which fear showed only in widened eyes. Then I remembered her blond hair, rich against the blackness of the satin mask. She’d told me to come at the twenty-second hour—io P.M.
I climbed to my apartment near the British Consulate; the elevator shaft had been shoved out of plumb by an old blast, a nuisance in these tall New York buildings.
Before it occurred to me that I would be going out again, I automatically tore a tab from the film strip under my shirt. I developed it just to be sure. It showed that the total radiation I’d taken that day was still within the safety limit. I’m no phobic about it, as so many people are these days, but there’s no point in taking chances.
I flopped down on the daybed and stared at the silent speaker and the dark screen of the video set. As always, they made me think, somewhat bitterly, of the two great nations of the world. Mutilated by each other, yet still strong, they were crippled giants poisoning the planet with their respective dreams of an impossible equality
