The House That Jack Built (2 page)

    The first thunderclap had shaken the windows of Khryssa's apartment, and the little blue teddy bear that he had given her had dropped off the mantelpiece.

    All he could do now was jog to Petrossian and hope that Steven had been keeping Ipi Hakayawa happy and that the maitre-d' could fix him up with a dry suit. He would just have to invent some cock-and-bull story about why he was so unpunctual. He couldn't really tell Ipi Hakayawa that he had spent the whole afternoon in bed with his nineteen-year-old mistress. Maybe he could say that his father had died.

    He jogged heavily towards Broadway, his thick brown hair sticking to his scalp like a bathing-cap. He was a big, healthy man, nothing at all like his father (who had actually died more than seven years ago, from lung cancer). He had the kind of square, well-fed face that put people in mind of prosperous farmers or wealthy dynasties of Democratic politicians. There was nothing in the way he looked that suggested an asthma-wracked childhood in a shabby walk-up apartment on Lispenard Street, and a pale, lonely boy in spectacles and a green home-knitted windbreaker, for which he was remorselessly teased.

    As he splashed along 48th Street, he may have been soaked, and out of breath, but he still looked affluent, and that was probably why the curly-haired girl came teetering out of the doorway of K-Plus Drugs and snatched at his arm. 'Help me!'

    'Hey,' he protested, and tried to pull away, but she screamed, 'Help me! You have to help me!'

    He stopped, his shoes squelching. She clung onto his sleeve as if she were drowning, and she practically was. Her face was round and puffy and white, and blood and rainwater were running down her forehead and streaming from her nose. She wore a sodden black-leather blouson and a short black skirt, and she was hobbling on broken shoes. She couldn't have been older than fifteen or sixteen.

    'Help me!' she kept screaming, a thin breathy scream. 'They took my friend! They took my friend! Help me!'

    'Listen, I'll call a cop,' Craig told her. 'You stay there. Do you hear me? Stay there, and I'll call a cop.'

    'You have to help me, they're raping her! Please! You have to help me!'

    Craig took hold of her shoulders. 'Quiet, calm down. Who's raping your friend? Where?'

    The girl turned around and pointed to K-Plus Drugs. It was only now that Craig saw that the store was closed down and derelict, Bankruptcy Sale stickers criss-crossing the grimy, blacked-out window, along with the faded stickers for Pepto-Bismol and Maalox and Vaseline Intensive Care. The door was ajar, but inside it was impenetrably dark.

    Craig let go of the girl and peered without enthusiasm into the doorway. The rain clattered all around him, as loud as a standing ovation. Traffic honked, sirens wailed. The girl looked up at him with blood dripping and beady black eyes like raisins and shivered and muttered, 'Please help me, they're raping her.'

    Craig wiped the rain from his face with the back of his hand. 'How many?' he asked her.

    'Two, that's all. Please help me.'

    He looked back towards Eighth Avenue. Then he looked the other way, towards Broadway. The street was blocked with automobiles, with their windows tightly closed. He splashed across to the nearest taxi and rapped on the driver's window, but the driver emphatically shook his head. He stepped through a deep puddle to the car behind, a blue Buick with a balding shirt-sleeved businessman behind the wheel, and tapped on his window, too, but the businessman locked all his doors and wouldn't even turn to him.

    He knocked on the Buick's window a second time. 'There's a girl being raped in there! Can you hear me? A girl being raped in there! Call the cops, will you, that's all you have to do!'

    The businessman gave a barely-perceptible shake of his head, and edged his car along further.

    Craig stood up straight, dripping and desperate. The girl took hold of his arm again, and screamed, 'Please!' at him. 'Please!'

    'Listen,' he shouted, over the noise of the traffic and the rain, 'is either of them armed? Do they have guns or a knife or anything like that?'

    The girl shook her head. Her face was a sliding mask of glutinous, rain-diluted blood. 'There's just two of them. Please.'

    Craig thought:
what the hell, I'm already late, I'm already soaked. I can handle two of them, for Christ's sake. How fit are they going to be? I doubt if they jog six miles every morning, and work out three times a week at the Bar Association Athletics Club. And right now, I'm sufficiently pissed off to handle anybody.

    He went back to the half-open doorway. He could smell damp, and mould, and urine. He pushed the door wider, and stared into the blackness.

    'Who's there?' he called out. 'If you can hear me, you'd better get the hell out of there, and fast!'

    There was no reply. Only the sound of rain trickling down the walls. Craig's eyes were gradually growing accustomed to the darkness, and he could just distinguish a row of free-standing shelves.

    'What's your friend's name?' he asked the girl.

    'Susan,' the girl replied, blinking at him, almost as if she didn't expect him to believe her.

    'All right, then.' He reached into his pocket and produced a dime. 'You go call for the cops and an ambulance. I'll find your friend for you.'

    The girl started to limp towards Eighth Avenue, wiping her face with a handkerchief. Craig stood and watched her for a moment, but he didn't watch her long enough to see her turn her head and smile.

    He stepped into the darkened drugstore, his shoes crunching on ground glass and grit. 'Susan?' he called. 'Susan- if you can hear me, Susan, all you have to do is call out, or make a noise. Kick your heels on the floor, whatever.'

    He reached the row of shelves and stopped and listened. At first he couldn't hear anything, but then he picked up the faintest tapping.
Trrapp, trrapp, trrapp
, like somebody running their heels from side to side across a bare-boarded floor. His suit dripped onto the floor, a soft, uneven
plip… plop… plip
. He began to think there was nobody here; that the girl with the blood-covered face had been playing a malicious prank. You never knew in New York City, there were so many wackos roaming the streets.

    'Susan?' he called.

    Nearly a whole minute went by, and still no reply. Craig was ready to turn and leave when he heard a muffled mewling sound. It sounded like a cat, but not exactly like a cat. More like a girl with a gag around her mouth.

    He blundered into the darkness at the back of the store. 'Susan? Is that you? If you can hear me, kick your heels on the floor! Go ahead, kick!'

    He took another step forward and his right foot became entangled with a heap of wire shelves and display-racks. He shook them free, but then he trod on several sheets of glass, and they split underneath his shoes with a sharp, crackling noise.

    That was why he didn't hear them when they rushed right up to him and hit him in the stomach.

    He had been hit before - in boxing, in racquetball, in athletics - but never like this. He pitched back onto the wire shelving and shattered glass as if he had been knocked down by a speeding taxi. His head hit the wall with a terrible donking sound and he bit right through his bottom lip. He was so winded that he couldn't breathe, and when he clawed at the floor to try to lift himself up, his left hand was pricked and sliced by razor-sharp fragments of glass.

    But somebody seized his lapels and dragged him up onto his feet. Somebody strong and dark; somebody who smelled of rain and cigarettes and alcohol.

    There was somebody else, too. Somebody standing very close beside him. Far too close to be friendly.

    'What you doin' here, pal?' said the somebody who was standing very close beside him. 'Someone invite you in?'

    Craig wheezed and coughed. His stomach felt as if it were blazing. He never knew a punch could hurt so much.

    'Looking for Susan,' he managed to choke out.

    'Ain't no Susan here, pal. Ain't no muff at all. Just he and me.'

    'It's okay, then. I made a mistake. I'm sorry.'

    'Well, we're glad that you sorry. But sorry ain't enough. Sorry don't pay the man. Sorry don't make nobody feel better 'ceptin' the dude who says it.'

    Craig felt appalling. He began to tremble with ice-cold shocks, as if somebody were emptying buckets of cold water over him, one after another. He felt nauseous, but he couldn't bring anything up. His stomach felt as if it wasn't there any more. Why did he feel so cold?

    'What do you want?' he managed to ask them, in a bubbly voice.

    'Your money, pal. Your credit cards. Your jewellery. Whatever you got.'

    He took a deep breath, tried to say something, and then puked up a mouthful of bile and blood and Khryssa's chicken brioche, half-chewed.

    'Hey pal, you disgustin'. You sick.'

    'Take whatever you want,' he told them.

    'Okay, okay. But don't go hurlin' them chunks on me none.'

    'Take it, just take it.' He spat food from his mouth, and a string of sour-tasting saliva swung from his chin.

    'You one disgustin' dude, you know that? I seen dogs better behaved.'

    He waited, quaking, his eyes downcast, his shoulders hunched, while the young man reached into his coat and took out his wallet. Quick, dirty fingers went through his pockets, lifting his pens, his calculator, his loose change.

    'You goin' to be glad you did this, pal. Not everybody gets the chance to make a donation to the Aktuz.'

    Craig raised his eyes. In the darkness of the derelict drugstore, he could make out very little, only the faint gleam of rainy streetlight on a black cheekbone and a black shoulder; and eyes that glittered like blowflies.

    He turned to look at the boy who was standing beside him, and for a split-second this boy moved across the light and Craig caught a glimpse of a tall, cadaverous youth with deep-sunk eyes and a mouth stretched back in a gin-trap disarray of overlapping teeth. What struck him most of all was the youth's hair, which had been gelled up around his head like a gleaming black crown, and the heavy black frock coat that he was wearing. He looked like an extra from a movie about Mozart, except that he wasn't carrying a silver-topped stick or a violin. He was carrying a hammer.

    God, thought Craig, no wonder that goddamned blow to my stomach hurt me so much.

    'Watch and ring, pal,' the youth told him.

    Craig reluctantly took off his Rolex and his wedding-band. He nearly puked for a second time, but he managed to swallow it back. He didn't want to antagonise his attackers any more than they were antagonised already.

    The boy in the frock coat came very close beside him. 'We leavin' now. I know what's happenin' inside of you' haid, you thinkin', shit, they makin a fool out of me now, but you wait till I follow those boys and find out where they at and whistle for the man. Well, here's news for you. You ain't followin' us none.'

    'I wasn't even going to try,' Craig choked.

    'That's what you say.'

    'Why the hell should I follow you? I'm soaking wet, I'm sick. All I want to do is go home.'

    'That's what you say.'

    'For Christ's sake, you've taken all my money. What more do you want?'

    'I want a guarantee, pal.'

    Before Craig could even ask him what kind of a guarantee he wanted, the other youth seized him ferociously from behind and gripped him tight. Craig tried to wrestle and wriggle free, but the youth in the frock coat slapped his face, left and right, not too hard, but just enough to make his ears sing and his cheeks burst into flame.

    Together they slammed him up against the old drugstore counter.

    'What are you doing? What the hell are you doing? For Christ's sake let me go!'

    But while the first youth kept Craig pressed against the dusty mahogany counter, the youth in the frock coat reached around and unbuckled Craig's belt.

    'Get off me! Don't touch me! What are you doing?'

    He felt his buttons pulled off, his fly wrenched apart. Then a long-fingered black hand reaching into his shorts.

    'Don't touch me! Don't touch me! Don't touch me!'

    But the youth in the frock coat roughly scooped his genitals out of his shorts, and laid them on the counter. Craig's penis shrank in fear, and his scrotum tightened so much that the youth could barely take a grip on his testes.

    'Listen, I'll give you anything you want,' Craig babbled at him. 'I have a BMW 7-series, you can have that if you want to, it's red, you never drove anything like it. I have much more money, I'm really wealthy, I can arrange to pay you ten thousand dollars each. Twenty thousand, if you like.'

    The youth in the frock coat sniffed reflectively. 'Amazin', ain't it, how generous a dude can be when you're holdin' his toolbox.'

    Craig was sweating and trembling and utterly revolted by the way the youth was slowly kneading his penis and his testes between his long, dry fingers. He was rubbing him and pulling him almost absent-mindedly, but this gave his manipulations a terrible intimacy, as if he were a wife playing with her husband.

    'Amazin', how much some dudes would pay for a toolbox. What you would pay, pal?'

    'Anything you want. Now just let me go.'

    But the other youth said, 'I bid twenty dollars for the right-hand ball.'

    'Twenty dollars? Do I hear twenty dollars for the right-hand ball?'

    'Let me go!' Craig roared at him, and tried to wrench himself away. But the youth in the frock coat slapped him again, much harder this time, and then he slammed his hammer down on top of the counter, only inches away from Craig's genitals. Craig felt the hard shock of it travel through the counter and bruise his thighs.