The Lure E-Book

Felice Picano

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Erotik
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Shocking and controversial when first published in 1979, The Lure rocketed Felice Picano to fame with its candid description of New York's gay subculture. Now a classic of gay literature. Noel Cumming's life is about to change irrevocably. After witnessing a brutal murder he is recruited to assist the police by acting as the lure for the elusive killer. That killer has been targeting gay men. Undercover, Noel moves deeper and deeper into the dark side of Manhattan's gay scene. A journey that stirs his own desires, until he forgets that he is only playing a role.

Leseprobe

THE LURE

Felice Picano

This book is dedicated to the memory of Linda Grey

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroduction One:Fixing The Bait12345678910111213 Two:Casting The Line12345678910111213141516171819202122 Three:Hooked12345678910111213141516 Four:The Catch12345678910111213141516 A Note on the AuthorCopyright

Introduction

The Lure had its origin in reality. By the mid 1970s, gay life was so established in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village that when columnist Arthur Bell began reporting on a series of what seemed to be interrelated murders of gay entrepreneurs, many were aghast. The series ran for several issues of The Village Voice, then suddenly ceased.

Some months later, I got up the nerve to ask the older, more established Bell, why he had stopped publishing what seemed to me to be the expose of the year. He replied, ‘I was told that if I did any more, my life would be in danger.’ Bell went on to say he wasn’t brave, wasn’t an investigative reporter, more of a gushing fan and gossip columnist. He’d done the articles only because he’d politicked for more gay coverage in the weekly for so long, that when the story arose, he’d been forced to. He’d never had any intention of finding out who was responsible, never mind putting his life in danger.

There was no such thing as a gay novel in 1977 when I set out to write The Lure. A year later, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance would be published to acclaim and go into multiple printings. At the time, there were certainly homosexual novels around, some quite good, a few best sellers. Two of the most notable, John Rechy’s 1963 City of Night and Christopher Isherwood’s Single Man, published the next year, with stories set only five miles apart in Los Angeles, seemed to inhabit utterly individual, utterly unconnected universes.

I knew there were comprehensive gay communities. I lived in one – Greenwich Village. I regularly visited others: Chicago’s Near North, San Francisco’s Castro Street and Los Angeles’ West Hollywood. Cheesy paperbacks sold in gay area shops detailed this community, tying together chairmen of the board and hustlers, lesbian ad execs and dyke Air Force sergeants, homo bus drivers, teachers, farmers, auto repairman, journalists, white collar workers and truckers. Where was the literature about this community? One of my goals in writing The Lure was to begin to detail a section of the gay community as I knew it; sort of the way Balzac detailed, piece by piece, much of early 19th Century French society.

However, I faced one immediate problem: I didn’t really know the underground, after-hours, club and bar sector of gay Village/Chelsea life I intended to write about. Life, luckily came to my rescue. A friend of mine, Bob Lowe, had gone to work in the CockRing, a new gay bar on Christopher Street. A small bar with a little dance floor, in the next two years it became the public gay hangout in Manhattan.

Because he was gorgeous, smart and friendly, Bob soon became the popular head bartender and soon I was meeting him at 4 a.m. and we’d be off to private clubs or people’s lofts and flats for after-hours parties. As Bob and I circulated New York’s gay underworld, I accumulated data about that world. I soon felt I had a solid enough foundation to write the book. By then, Bob had decided to go to law school, partly because we awoke one morning to horrific news. Hell, a gay bar three blocks away, had been the scene of an early morning armed attack and the execution-murder of four staff members. The manager was hospitalized with a bullet in his brain. We knew all of them and Bob was supposed to have been working with them that night.

It was made to look like a robbery, but when he regained consciousness, the manager intimated to Bob that it was actually a ‘hit’ by some other group of bar owners. Who exactly, was never made that clear. My ex-lover, Bob Herron was head of the nearby Jane Street Block Association at the time of the Hell murders. He told me of the hush-hush New York Police undercover unit assigned to the West Village since the killings Arthur Bell had written about and provided me with info about the undercover unit’s doings.

Shortly afterward, a telephone repairman I used to have occasional ‘matinees’ with, added info about open telephone lines called loops and how the system was utilized by the NYPD and others in less official capacities. I’d also begun seeing a married motorcycle cop, who had a cousin on the force in Manhattan, and they both did snooping for me. It all began to add up. By the time I had a first draft done, I’d approached my publisher to pull strings and find me a contact within the New York City Police Department. He did and I spoke to my unidentified informant three times. He offered nothing; I could ask questions based on data I’d collected, to which he would respond either yes or no. Each phone call lasted five minutes. He said “yes” a lot. I never knew his name, rank or precinct, but I later discovered he was in Internal Affairs, the police group which investigates police. So, I felt my assumptions were pretty accurate.

Along with contemporary novels like Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, The Lure did succeed in bringing gay literature a renown – and income – that eventually helped solidify queer books as a solid ‘niche’ in publishing: and helping open the doors for thousands of volumes that followed. The Lure has been ‘taught’ (whatever that means) in various university Lit. courses. Among adepts of psychological thrillers, it’s still considered one of the handful of top books in the genre, along with Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and William Goldman’s Marathon Man, all of them, I note, written at about the same time. Before The Lure, there were ‘gay mysteries’ – Vidal’s ‘Edgar Box’ series and Joseph Hansen’s ‘Dave Brandsetter’ novels stand out. But after my novel, maybe even because of it, that became an important subgenre with terrific authors like Michael Nava, Katherine Forrest and Stephen Saylor writing notable examples. Although I’ve been asked numerous times to write a sequel to The Lure, I never truly considered it a possibility.

I never wrote another psychological thriller, although I’ve gone on to write in other genres as well as to adapt other genres to my own perverse requirements. The closest I’ve come was in The Book of Lies, an ‘academic mystery thriller’ with droll echoes and infra dig references to the earlier book, a novel that for a variety of reasons could not possibly have been written without The Lure coming first.

What the ultimate value of this reissued novel is, I resign to future readers: they’re the only genuine judges anyway.

Felice Picano, West Hollywood 2019

One

Fixing The Bait

1

March, 1976

The serene icy morning was shattered by a scream.

Noel Cummings swerved his ten-speed bicycle to a stop at the railing and listened. One sneakered foot remained tight in the metal clamp of the bike’s pedal, the other dangled gingerly on the thin concrete abutment.

Nothing.

Despite the frigid wind flapping off the Hudson River, he pulled down the hood of his sweatshirt to hear better.

Still nothing.

The wind whistling through those loose metal flaps of the crumbling warehouses on his right? Perhaps. Or perhaps an early morning driver screeching his tires as he sped around a corner below, on West Street.

He peered over the railing of the elevated West Side Highway, closed to traffic south of Thirty-fourth Street since a nearby section had collapsed almost a year before. Closed to car and truck traffic, that is. Still open to pedestrians; or, more common, to bicyclists like Noel, alone this early March morning at a quarter after six. Below him he could make out the back of a crawling Sanitation Department truck.

It must have been a hallucination, he decided, and put up his hood again.

Looking east, through lines of building walls sheer as cliffs, the night’s blackness had begun to give way to a pale cobalt at the horizon. Dawn soon.

Then the scream repeated. Even with his hood up, he knew it was no hallucination. It was so clear, so close, Noel could make out its direction – to the right, in front of him – and even a few terrified words—

‘No … didn’t mean it.’

A light flickered on in the second-story warehouse window, level with where he stood. With it the scream ended.

Noel shot across the road to the right-hand railing. Light flickered in the third window; like matchlight, or a cigarette lighter guttering in the wind.

Then he heard the man’s voice again, lower, pleading, punctuated by what seemed to be gasps.

Noel leaned far over the metal railing to look in. Debris all over the floor, loose beams hanging half torn from the walls and ceiling. All he could make out were shadowy figures – one shrinking back, two others looming on either side of him. One’s arm was extended; something sharply pointed in his hand jabbed forward again and again, each thrust followed by a gasp, a cry, another ‘No.’

‘Hey! What’s going on in there?’ Noel shouted. ‘Stop that.’

The light flickered off.

Out of the sudden blackness someone shouted, ‘Help me! Please! They’re killing me!’

‘Finish him off,’ someone muttered.

‘Help me!’ the man shouted again. ‘Please!’

Then Noel heard what sounded like stumbling over broken glass. Was the man escaping in the dark?

Noel calculated the distance from the railing to the open window: a good ten feet. Too far to jump. Debris and broken glass to land on if he did. Glass that twinkled and cracked in the reflected streetlight as the shadows moved over it. He had to help him. But how?

‘I’m coming in,’ Noel shouted. He detached the heavy flashlight he carried clamped to his handlebars, flung it into the corner he thought the attackers were in. It smashed against something, thudded to the floor.

‘… getting out of here,’ he heard one voice say.

‘Are you finished?’ another asked.

Broken glass crunched under several pairs of feet. Then the man’s cries, his gasps again.

How could Noel get in there? ‘Leave him alone!’ he yelled.

It was a quarter mile to the nearest exit. He’d have to chance it. They were scared by now. They’d leave.

He shouted once more that he was coming in, then spun around on the Atala Grand Prix and shot off north toward Eighteenth Street, adjusting his gears for the highest speed. In seconds he was moving so fast he almost missed the turnoff. He swerved right, swept over the broken concrete exitway like a ski jumper going off a lift, then down the ramp so suddenly the breath was whipped out of him. Lines of white and gray at the bottom of the ramp caught his eye – wooden police horses, obstacles. He had only an instant to avoid them. He jerked left, felt his right trouser leg brush one, leaned over almost horizontal to the road, regained his balance, then turned sharply and was skimming along West Street, over cobblestones, in and out of the steel pylons that supported the highway. One row of warehouses flashed by. Then the open space opposite Westbeth, telephone labs turned into artists’ housing. The second line of warehouses began, glimmering ominously in the yellow light of the mercury streetlamps.

He swung the Atala to a soundless stop. Now what? He’d expected to see fleeing figures, a car taking off.

Instead the street was empty, the cobblestones gleaming with ice. Jesus! and he’d gone over this road at forty miles an hour. What now? There was a man hurt somewhere upstairs. More than likely the men who attacked him, too. What am I doing here?

He had to go in, find the man, help him. But first park the bike where they would not see it when they came out. The other side of the building.

He spotted one doorway at street level, the door knocked in, hanging on a hinge, so black inside it might be completely enclosed. This can’t lead upstairs, he thought. Too much of a trap anyway. Farther along?

He jumped onto the concrete loading platform. Graffiti scrawled on the outside wall in large wavering letters: Keep Away. Pickpockets Inside.

There were more than pickpockets inside.

One wide garage door was opened just high enough to crawl under. Noel edged over and peered in.

It was lighter inside. Huge. These warehouses had been used for loading and receiving from ships; the piers they were built on extended hundreds of feet out into the river. The far end of this one was sagging, as though crushed by a giant hand. The dark western sky looked lighter against the building’s darker jagged-metal bulwarks. At least he’d be able to make out someone coming at him.

He slipped in and crouched, accustoming his eyes to the gloom. No one. A jumble of fallen beams. The frosty glitter of glass – or was it ice? – everywhere. Good thing he was wearing his Adidas. He’d hear them before they heard him.

A dozen or so feet inside, he saw that the place was even more immense than it seemed at first: two football fields long, he guessed, from the street to the river end. Concrete floors. Safe for walking, except for the glass. This must have been a driveway. An inner loading platform to his right. Beyond it, darkness. To his left what seemed to be another, smaller building within the larger one: a half dozen windows, half that many doors, all the glass smashed out of them of course, all the doors off their hinges. What was that darker double-sized doorway? A stairway. The way up to the hurt man. And to the other men, waiting for him.

This is insane, Noel told himself, then started up. The stairs were remarkably clear of litter and glass, as though much used. At the first landing, he stopped. Anyone might get at him from around the corner. He waited, poised to leap aside or back down the stairs. Not a sound. Could this little corridor be the way to the man?

It wasn’t. The corridor nearly circled the inside building, going three-quarters around, ending in a pile of stacked beams and one ghostly white urinal stinking to high heaven, graffiti chalked on the walls around it, indecipherable in the darkness. But from here, he could look down on the open warehouse floor below. He saw no one.

He made his way back to the stairway, ascended warily, a step at a time, hugging the railing, until his eyes reached floor level. A huge room. Empty. To his left a bare wall some fifty feet away. Much closer on his right a series of doorways: some closed, some open. These must have been warehouse offices.

He sidled to the nearest doorway. He could see the elevated highway out the window, about chest high. It was the right floor. Now where was the man?

It was lighter in the room now: he could see a robin’s-egg blue at the horizon. Couldn’t he wait here a few minutes until dawn?

No. Go on. Go in.

A tiny room opened off this doorway. Some newspapers bunched up in a corner he took at first for a crouching man. On one wall were the stenciled words: Dressing Room.

Why was it so quiet? Where was the man? And the others, where were they? Waiting for him behind any doorway. Their shadows thrusting, deadly. The man’s cries and gasps. Noel had to find him, not let him die. Insane or not, he had to help him.

He crept forward, edging into first one doorway, then another. At each he waited, slid quietly inside, waited again, poised to jump aside, alert for a movement, an attack. He peered into each darkness, made certain no one was in the shadows, checked the outer room again, slipped out, moved to the next.

At the fifth one he saw the flashlight. The dull burnished shine of its cylinder made him shudder. This was the room.

He paused, looked for a long time at the flashlight’s dented side, then slipped into the room and stood still. No one. Just a sign, Smoking Lounge, on the wall opposite the windows. Several discarded doors were thrown into the far corner. The flashlight sat on a pile of debris.

Here I am. Now where the hell are you!

Expecting at any moment to be pounced upon, he retrieved the flashlight, grabbing it as if it were a hot potato, though it felt cold through the lightweight racing gloves he wore. Heavy, substantial: real. What about the rest of it – the man stabbing, the victim’s scream, his pleading? Was that real? There was nothing to prove it. Nothing but the flashlight.

He wondered if the flashlight still worked, and switched it on. Its glare was blinding, and he swung it down.

The circle of light rested on the doors stacked in the corner. The top one was pale green, speckled darker from top to bottom as though someone had begun to paint it and stopped halfway. The dark layer gleamed wet, looked freshly painted.

Cautiously, he touched the door. It was wet, sticky. Christ, it must be blood! He wiped it off on a pants leg and swung the flashlight in a slow, low arc, half dreading to see what it would show him. At the bottom of the pile, he made out some material, and coming closer, one trousered leg that extended out from behind the doors. It, too, gleamed from the knee to the socks, which – once white – were now dyed dark. A wetly brown loafer was twisted half off a foot.

Noel stood back, holding the flashlight on the leg, unable to move.

Then he went to the door and began to move it. As he did, the leg pulled slowly in. What was that sound? Like a small dog whimpering. Noel heard a dry wheezing. The man was still alive! He’d come in time.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ Noel said quietly. ‘It’s me. The guy from the highway. They’re gone now. I threw the flashlight to scare them off. I’ll get you out.’

The wheezing continued, louder now. Noel wedged the flashlight between some loose boards on the right wall, aiming it at the corner to see better. Then, using both hands, he lifted off first one, then another, setting them quietly flat down on the floor.

When the last door was aside, he saw the man.

He lay like refuse thrown in a corner. Both legs were extended, both arms dangled on the floor. His head was fallen forward so that Noel could see only the top of his lank, light hair. He sat in a dark puddle. His sleeves and trouser legs were dappled with dark spreading stains. He’d been stabbed everywhere, over and over.

The man raised his head slightly and Noel heard the sharp intake of breath, the fluttery wheezing, and, barely audible, the muttered words, ‘Didn’t mean it. Didn’t.’

With that, the man’s head fell back all the way against one corner wall. Was it only a trick of the dim light that Noel could not make out a single feature of his face? No, the flashlight shone fully on him. And Noel saw that where the man’s nose and eyes and mouth ought to have been was just a dark wetness that seethed and bubbled and welled up. And he realized why he could not see the man’s face: they had cut it to ribbons.

‘Oh, my God!’ Noel whispered it under his breath, feeling his stomach knot and constrict, feeling his throat begin to contract. ‘Christ, help me.’

The words helped, and he clenched his eyes shut, feeling the flashlight’s dented side, found the button and flicked it off.

Better in the dark. Better not seeing what ought not be seen. He felt a little better already.

He bent down and talked quietly, fast.

‘Listen. You’re hurt very badly. I’ve got to get a doctor. You’re bleeding. I’ve got to get help.’

Noel felt wetness seep under one knee as he talked. He jerked it up and hunkered.

‘They’re gone. They won’t be back. Just stay still. I’ve got a bike. I’ll ride and get help. I’ll only be a few minutes, I promise. Stay still, very still.’

‘Ssszzz,’ Noel heard among the wheezing, then he felt a hand brush against his ankle. It made him shudder.

Then, the hissing sound again: ‘Ssszzz.’

‘I can’t understand you.’

The man held Noel’s ankle in a loose grip. He reached down and took the hand, holding it in his own. It, too, was wet, bleeding.

‘Listen,’ the man managed to say in a sharply asthmatic voice, very low. ‘Go … cross … street.’

‘I’ll get help. Don’t worry.’

‘Cross … street …’ the man repeated slowly, with great effort. ‘Cross … street.’

‘Across the street?’

The fingers tightened in his hand.

‘Across West Street?’

Yes, the fingers replied, tightening again.

‘Directly across?’

‘Yes,’ the man said now.

‘Why? What’s there? Not the police station? That’s on Tenth Street, isn’t it?’

‘Cross … street.’ The man’s fingers tightened once more in Noel’s. He was wheezing badly again, unable to talk.

Noel looked at him. Then, remembering, and afraid he might see his eyes or what remained of them, he looked away, toward the dull gleam of the flashlight he’d hung on the wall.

‘All right. I’ll go across the street. Don’t worry. Just stay still. Don’t move. All right?’

The man’s fingers relaxed, and Noel thought he must have lost consciousness, but the wheezing continued. He laid the man’s hand gently on the soaked trouser leg, and stood up.

He was shaking so badly, he had to hold on to the doorjamb.

‘I’ll be right back,’ he promised, not sure whether the man heard him or not. The room was getting lighter: the sun was about to rise.

Noel half staggered out the doorway, and ran heedlessly down the stairs. Only at the first landing did he come to his senses and remember to be wary. There was no proof the other men had left the building. So he edged along the lower offices, then crawled under the barely open garage door onto West Street.

It was still night below the elevated highway, the cobblestone road lighted yellow.

Across West Street, the man had said. Noel strode across, looking back as he did, to make certain no light went on again in the upper-story window. The man’s whimpering rang in his head. His wheezing breath. No face. He had no face left. Stop it, Noel told himself. Concentrate on getting help.

Opposite the warehouse, on the other side of the highway, were two buildings, neither very likely to contain help. On Noel’s left was a whitewashed warehouse, seven stories high, the windows painted closed black. One black garage door, locked. One doorway, up four steps, locked, too. Deserted.

The other building was red brick aged with layers of soot. Cages covered the high, deeply set, opaque glass windows from the ground floor all the way up to the fifth level, which appeared to be a huge wire mesh tent, like a gymnasium atop a public school. There was one deeply set doorway with a heavy-looking metal door labeled, Danger: Moving Door. Even the bulky, greenish air-conditioning unit was enclosed in a meshwork cage.

Then Noel remembered: this was the Federal House of Detention where men awaiting federal trials in New York City were held. Hadn’t it been closed a while ago? Sure: he’d read about it in the Times four or five months before.

Directly across the street, the man had said. Had he thought he was somewhere else? What was supposed to be here? What would he look like if he lived: his face a mask of scars, or what? Jesus, how the blood had bubbled up.

The door gave a hollow booming response to his knock. Noel held himself ready for it to shoot open. It didn’t. He pounded on it again. And again.

Could the man have been so crazed by pain he’d made a mistake? But no, didn’t shock set in, and with it, drastic reduction of pain? Noel hoped so, for the man’s sake.

Maybe another door. But there was nothing on this side but the caged windows. Around the corner? Nothing here either. Then he saw another sign, this one painted on the wall: Federal Parking. Employees Only. Well, that confirmed what the place was. Or had been. Another doorway, set deep like the one on West Street. Barred over, so he couldn’t even reach in to knock. More brick wall. A corrugated garage door. He knocked there, too, but got no answer. I’m wasting time here. I’d better get the bike and ride to the police station, he thought. Now he had reached the end of the building. One more doorway: the delivery entrance.

A sooty glass slot at eye level revealed a small inside foyer, then another glass door too distant and too dirty to see into. To Noel’s surprise, this outer door opened at his touch, swinging in easily, well counterbalanced despite its weight.

It was a foyer, all right, dark beyond the glass door. Locked, of course. Pure fluke the outer one was open. A dull institutional corridor stretched beyond the glass door. Empty.

He set up a tattoo, knocking with his ringed knuckle. No answer. No running feet. No anxious faces. I’d better go to the police station, now, he told himself and turned to open the outer door.

He was jerked back so fast he stumbled backward, as hands pulled at him. Before he could get to his feet, he was behind the glass door, in the corridor he’d been looking at, and hauled around a corner, into pitch darkness.

They’ll mangle my face, too, he thought, and his hands went up to protect his eyes.

He could feel two or three of them, holding him securely against the wall, breathing.

‘What are you doing here?’ The voice was sharp, cold, toneless.

Noel stiffened. ‘The man …’ he began.

‘What man?’ another voice asked, close to his left ear.

‘Across the street,’ Noel managed to get out. ‘He said to come here for help. He’s hurt.’

‘What man?’

‘I don’t know who he is.’

‘What’s going on here?’ yet another voice asked.

‘He sent you here?’ the first, the cold-voiced man asked Noel.

‘Yes. He’s hurt very badly.’

‘Who’s hurt?’ the newer voice asked.

‘I don’t know. Who’s out tonight?’ The cold voice again.

‘No one. Wait, wasn’t Kansas out?’

‘He was linking tonight,’ the man on Noel’s left said.

‘There?’

‘Where is he?’ the cold-voiced man asked Noel, pushing him roughly against the wall.

‘Across the street. In the abandoned warehouse. Second story up. Fifth doorway on the right when you get up the stairs. I was riding by and …’

‘We’d better take a look,’ the cold-voiced man said, interrupting Noel’s explanation. Then, with another push against the wall, he asked Noel to repeat his directions.

As Noel answered, he heard more men arriving in the dark corridor. There were many voices mumbling around him now, talking hurriedly in low tones.

‘I was riding by on the elevated highway,’ Noel tried to explain again. He was interrupted by another hand slamming him against the wall.

‘Shut up!’ the man on his right said.

‘Who’s got a bracelet?’ someone else asked.

Noel was seized by the shoulders, spun half around, while someone else grabbed his hands together. He felt something cold, then heard a click. He was handcuffed.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. I didn’t do anything. I was just riding by and saw it.’

‘Dry this one off till we get back,’ the cold-voiced man said. ‘Where’s medical?’

‘Outside already,’ someone answered. ‘Everyone’s out.’

‘Get the Fisherman,’ the cold-voiced man said. ‘And dry this one off.’

‘Come on,’ someone else urged. ‘Let’s go!’

‘But I didn’t do anything,’ Noel protested. The glass door slammed and he was dragged back by the hands, then pushed in another direction so hard he almost fell. As he was getting to his feet, a heavy door slammed shut inches away. In front of him, he could see a tiny barred window.

‘But I didn’t do anything. I was just riding by and saw it happen and went to help him.’

‘Sure, buddy,’ a flat, older voice replied from the other side of the barred window. ‘Haven’t you heard? They closed the highway.’

‘I was on a bike. I was riding a bike. It’s at the warehouse right now!’ he shouted, but he could hear the man’s footsteps receding and a minute later, another sound: a door closing. He was alone.

He inched about in the murky darkness. This must be a cell. Not very large. Damp. Cold. Jesus! Here’s a case study on the inadvisability of helping people in trouble. No wonder no one else did.

He was shivering, and had to use the wall to nudge up his sweatshirt hood. That was marginally better. But his breath still frosted. His eyes were acclimated to the light now, but there wasn’t much to see, just a bare cell with two metal shelves long enough and barely wide enough to hold a man.

This is crazy, he told himself. Crazier than seeing someone being stabbed. But they’d find the man and come back and release him. Realize he was trying to help, then let him go.

After what seemed an interminably long time, he heard noises in the corridor. They were returning. Good. Now they’d let him go. Good thing. He was freezing here.

The cell door opened with a clang, and several men entered.

‘Will he be all right?’ Noel asked.

‘As all right as ground round,’ the cold-voiced man said, and Noel felt himself lifted off his feet and slammed against the wall.

He was held there, shaken, pummeled. Questions came fast and he could hardly get his breath to answer them.

‘Who was with you?’ the cold voice asked.

‘No one. I was alone.’

He was punched in the stomach. ‘Who was with you?’

‘I was riding by on my bike. I was alone.’

‘Let me do the asking,’ someone said, shoving in front of the other man. ‘I was in ’Nam. We had methods.’ With one hand he held Noel’s head back, against the wall, his eyes glittering very close to Noel’s. ‘Now, I’m going to ask you some questions, and for every wrong answer, you’re going to have your head bounced off this wall. You hear?’

‘No, please. I was alone. I was trying to help him,’ Noel begged. ‘I was riding by and saw them attack him.’

‘How did you know who he was?’

‘I didn’t. I don’t.’

‘Hey,’ someone else said, ‘let me ask. I’ll get it out of him.’

Noel felt another punch, hard in his ribs.

‘Let me,’ a new voice said. He was punched again, lower.

They were crowding him, all of them pushing and trying to hit him, shifting positions to get at him. They were going to kill him. Kill him here in this freezing cell.

‘No! Let me ask him!’ The voice came from behind them. Instantly all of them stopped.

‘It’s the Fisherman,’ someone muttered. They all moved away from Noel.

‘That’s right,’ the new voice said. It was authoritative, slightly accented. ‘Now suppose you tell me what all this ruckus in the dark is about?’

‘They got Kansas,’ someone said.

‘What happened?’ the man they called the Fisherman asked.

‘Looks like a dozen meth freaks with a case of broken glass got at him.’

‘Bad?’

‘Dead.’

‘Two,’ Noel offered. ‘There were two of them. I saw.’

‘And you were one of them,’ one man said, punching Noel in the side.

‘Who’s he?’ the Fisherman asked.

‘He came snooping around here. Said Kansas sent him.’

‘Leave him alone. Get some lights on. What is this, a medieval torture chamber? Go on. Back to your posts. All of you. Out.’

Noel felt himself being lifted up against the wall.

‘Don’t hit me,’ he pleaded. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

A light came on in the room, blinding Noel for an instant.

‘Out, I said,’ the Fisherman repeated. ‘All of you. Mack, stay at the door. I want to talk to him.’

Noel was shivering now, sore all over from the assault. The one man remaining in the cell took him gently by the shoulders and sat him down on the metal shelf.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Noel said. ‘I was just trying to help him. Why were they hurting me?’

‘Because they’re angry one of their friends is dead. You’re all they had to vent their feelings on.’

‘But I was trying to help him.’

‘Just rest awhile,’ the man said. Then: ‘You cold?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mack, get a blanket.’

A blanket was brought in. The Fisherman arranged it around Noel’s shoulders, then sat down on the opposite metal shelf.

‘Now relax a bit, young man, then I want you to tell me how you came here.’

‘He told me to get help across the street,’ Noel said.

‘I see,’ he said, sounding unconvinced. ‘Go on. I’m waiting.’

‘I thought this building was closed,’ Noel said.

‘It is. Tell me everything that happened.’

‘I was riding my bike on the elevated highway,’ Noel began, gaining confidence now that he wasn’t shivering anymore.

As he talked, he looked over the man they had called the Fisherman. He was fifty-five or sixty years old. Middle-sized, he seemed solid looking, although with the dark gabardine overcoat and heavy woolen pants tucked into rubber galoshes, it was difficult to ascertain how heavy, how solid he was. He was bareheaded, and his hair was thinning but ungrayed brown, slightly creased all around as though he had been wearing a hat and had taken it off. A square, clean-shaven face, with thickish lips, heavy jowls, slightly reddish skin, as though from drinking, with a large, fleshy aquiline nose. The brow was strong, squarish, the eyebrows thick and bushy. Only his eyes were a soft, doelike brown, betraying the easier treatment Noel had just received at his hands. Altogether an authoritative man: the boss. Noel trusted him, as much as he could trust anyone in this absurd situation. He would not hurt Noel, nor let him be hurt.

‘That’s all he said, to come here?’ the Fisherman asked when Noel was done.

‘He was having trouble breathing,’ Noel said. ‘His voice was very hoarse. I guess it was too hard for him to talk anymore so he squeezed my hand, and I asked if he meant directly across West Street, and he squeezed it to say yes. That’s the only reason I came here, because I promised him. I was going to the police station.’

‘That makes sense. Nothing else? He said nothing else? No names?’

‘No. No names. But when he was being stabbed he pleaded with them to stop, naturally. When I found him, he must have thought I was one of them returning, that’s when he said he didn’t mean it.’

‘He didn’t mean it?’ the Fisherman asked.

‘That’s what he said.’ Noel could hear the broken wheezing again, see the man’s bloody facelessness. This man, the ‘Fisherman,’ inspired confidence, and Noel suddenly blurted out, ‘Perhaps it’s better he died.’

‘Why?’ There was a threat in the word, the first time Noel had felt hostility from his questioner.

‘I just mean he was cut up so badly. His face was … I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. What would he look like if he lived?’

The Fisherman stared gloomily at the floor.

‘Do you think he’d been stabbed in the lungs?’ Noel wondered. ‘Could that be why he wheezed so badly?’

‘More than likely. Was his throat cut?’

‘I don’t know. It was just blood from his forehead on down. They’d stabbed everywhere. Everywhere. They wouldn’t stop,’ Noel said, seeing again those deadly pointed shadows on the wall.

Someone tapped on the cell door and the Fisherman signaled him to come in. It was a tall, youngish man with a heavy beard, in denims and a forest-green ski parka.

‘We found this in the room with Kansas,’ he said, in that same cold voice of the man who had so cruelly interrogated Noel. In the dark, he had seemed much older.

He handed Noel’s flashlight to the Fisherman.

‘That’s mine.’

‘It was wedged into a wall,’ the man reported, ignoring Noel. ‘Just above eye level.’

‘I put it there to see,’ Noel explained. ‘He was behind some doors. I needed both hands to move them.’

‘You see any doors?’ the Fisherman asked.

‘Three of them. On the floor. The light was out when we got there. Not burned out either.’

‘I shut it off,’ Noel said. ‘I couldn’t bear to look at him while I talked to him. I got nauseous.’

‘Yeah,’ the younger man said, ‘either that, or you turned it off after you were sure he was wasted.’

‘He was alive when I left that room!’

‘That’s enough,’ the Fisherman said. ‘Get back over there and go over that place. All of it. I want answers.’ The young man turned, glared at Noel, then walked out. ‘By the way,’ the Fisherman stopped him, ‘is there a bicycle there?’

‘A ten-speed,’ Noel said. ‘Atala Grand Prix.’

‘It’s there.’

‘Bring it here,’ the Fisherman said. ‘Go on. Go. Comb that place.’

When the man had gone, the Fisherman turned to Noel. ‘What were you doing up on the highway?’

‘I ride it every morning. For exercise.’

‘Why so early?’

‘I have early classes. Sometimes nine, today at eight.’

‘Where?’

‘New York University. The Washington Square campus. I teach sociology. Social change in action, inner-city problems. A basic penology course.’

‘So you were riding by as usual and heard a scream?’

‘And saw the light.’

‘I thought you said the flashlight was yours?’

‘It is. I saw flickering light. One of them must have been holding a cigarette lighter or something. I threw the flashlight in to scare them off. I told them I was coming in, too. But I couldn’t jump it.’

The Fisherman listened, then stood up and went to the cell door.

Noel panicked, thinking he would be left there, or the other men called in again. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

‘Why shouldn’t I believe you,’ the man said, not hiding his disgust. ‘It’s the same old story.’

He talked in a low voice to someone outside the cell, then came back with a pad and ballpoint pen. ‘Give me your name, address, and phone number. Also where you work.’

‘I can’t. My hands …’ Noel turned to show them manacled.

The handcuff key was found, and Noel wrote down the required information. ‘Here’s your flashlight, Mr … Cummings, is it?’ he asked, reading the paper.

‘I just wish I had hit one of them when I threw it. That might have been one or two minutes less for them to stab. He might have lived then, mightn’t he?’

‘Why bother thinking about what might have been?’ The Fisherman led Noel out of the cell, through the corridor, and into the little foyer outside the glass door. No one else appeared. ‘I have to apologize for the others. Sometimes they’re like animals,’ he said, taking Noel’s hand and shaking it.

Noel took the hand, shook it, looked into the man’s sad brown eyes, and said he understood. He was halfway out the metal door when he had a thought. ‘Shouldn’t the police be notified?’

‘We are the police,’ the Fisherman said, closing the glass door with a click.

2

The note from the department chairman arrived faster than Noel expected. It was prominent in the cubbyhole that served as his mailbox in the Sociology Department general office when Noel stopped there between classes the following afternoon.

‘Are you sure this is for me?’ he asked Alison, Boyle’s secretary. She lifted her glasses Eve Arden style, and peered at the envelope the note had come in.

‘Put it there myself.’

‘Is he free now?’ Noel asked.

‘Will be shortly. Seat?’

‘No. I’d rather flirt with you.’

‘You mean you’d rather try to extort information from me,’ she said. A tall, slender, vaguely washed out blonde, not unattractively approaching her fifties, Alison had a dizzy and capricious surface that hid a shrewd mind. She knew everything that went on in the department, possibly in the entire school. Noel settled on the edge of the desk and watched her go back to typing.

‘You have to admit this invitation is a little sudden,’ he said. ‘You know as well as I that Boyle and I talk to each other once a term. The conversation is always the same.’

‘This one won’t be,’ she declared, then lowered her voice. ‘Are you in trouble?’

‘What kind of trouble?’

She looked around the office, then, certain that no one was listening, she said, ‘What were the police holding you for? They called here, you know. Spoke to me. They insisted on speaking to him. I tried to stop them …’ She shrugged.

‘Is that all?’ he said, with exaggerated relief.

A day and a half had passed and he was still hearing that anguished wheeze, feeling the hands pounding at him, seeing that dread featureless face. But instead of being depressed he was exhilarated. He’d missed his first class yesterday, but had been electric for the others, pulling ideas out of thin air, making associations and connections that had surprised him and awed the class. Half of them had gathered around his desk long after the period bells had rung, asking questions, offering ideas.

This morning had gone well, too, although he was calming down. Frightening as it had been, it had happened to him. That made it remarkable. That kept him in high spirits. High enough to tease Alison.

‘Promise you won’t breathe a word?’ he said, taking on her conspiratorial tone.

‘I’m not sure I want to hear this.’

‘I deal drugs. Mostly cocaine. But a little heroin, too. The cops raided my place.’ He waited for the appropriate confused/horrified response to register on her face. ‘Luckily the place was clean. Not lucky, really, I was tipped off. There’s this former junkie who runs for me. Actually, he’s still addicted, which is how I get him to work for me, and …’

Boyle’s office door opened. Noel stopped in midsentence and got off Alison’s desk. She turned back to her typing. They heard the voices beyond the door, the department chairman, oily smooth as usual, the excited voice of the young man who exited first, shaking Wilbur Boyle’s hand. Noel had seen his type before – tousled, dirty hair, granny glasses, denims a size too small, a corduroy jacket with worn houndstooth elbow patches – the costume of the career graduate student.

Boyle spotted Noel. ‘Did you get my note, Mr Cummings? Do you have a moment now?’

Not waiting for an answer, he went back into his office.

‘Here goes,’ Noel whispered to Alison and headed after him.

‘You must be Noel Cummings,’ the graduate student said. ‘You wrote that article contra Wilson.’

‘I admit it.’

‘Everyone’s talking about it in Chicago. No kidding. We think it’s a terrific critique!’

‘Thanks,’ Noel said, and would have stayed to find out what else they were saying at the University of Chicago, but Boyle was signaling to him.

‘Nice boy,’ Wilbur Boyle said when they were alone. ‘Very up on things. Might join our staff next year.’

He motioned Noel to sit down, but remained standing himself, looking up at the high windows under the prominent eaves of the old building.

‘When I first took this office, I thought how wonderful it would be, right here in the heart of Manhattan overlooking the park. A roof with eaves to keep off sun and snow. Birds singing. All I notice now is pigeon shit.’

Noel sat down and automatically inspected the bookshelf. A glance told him not a volume had been moved since his last visit at the beginning of the term. He’d heard such prologues before. They always led into a long, convoluted soliloquy of disappointments, hardships, and department problems. To listen to one was to hear all of them. But to break in was a breach of etiquette.

Noel used the time to prepare answers to Boyle.

The chairman got to the point rather suddenly, breaking off in the middle of a platitude to ask, ‘By the way, what is all this about, yesterday morning?’

‘I witnessed a murder.’

The handsome, well-cared-for, middle-aged face stopped for a second as though a plaster mask had received a light hammer tap.

‘No? Really?’

‘Really. I think the victim was a police decoy. I never found out more. He was still alive. He sent me for help. It arrived too late for him. They said they would call to check my story. They even began to beat me up. Their chief stopped them.’

‘Not a nice bunch,’ Boyle said, all sympathy and interest. ‘What happened?’

‘Some men knifed him. In one of the abandoned piers on the Hudson River.’

Boyle winced, but seemed fascinated. ‘And they let you go?’

‘Here I am.’

‘If only you’d told me,’ Boyle said, ‘you needn’t have come to class. I would have found someone else. Or canceled it.’

‘I didn’t mind,’ Noel said. He was enjoying himself now. ‘I thought work would keep my mind off it. It was grisly.’

‘It must have been.’ Those words said, Wilbur Boyle was once more the unworried, slick university administrator, his hair stylishly long, neatly combed, his clothing meticulous, his tone that of an aging politician. Boyle had made his name with one idea in one book twenty years ago. Since then, nothing had panned out, except this job. He’d done his best to glamorize it and himself.

‘What were you doing there? In that area, I mean?’

‘I bicycle every morning, before class.’

‘Sounds invigorating.’ Boyle shuddered. ‘And that’s all?’

‘What else would I be doing in an abandoned pier at that hour?’

‘Then you aren’t the one,’ Boyle said, sighing with obvious disappointment.

‘What one?’

‘No one tells me anything in the department. But I had heard an intriguing rumor that one of the staff was seen at curious hours recently in that area. Getting material. You know, of course, that area is a center of homosexual bars, clubs, haunts of different sorts? I was certain I’d soon be reading a proposal for a ground-breaking study on that milieu seen from within. It’s needed. It sounded good. Very good. I’d hoped that person was you, Noel.’

‘Me?’ Noel had been following Boyle with interest. He hadn’t heard such a rumor nor did he know of the area’s reputation. Boyle’s last words startled him.

‘Vain hope, I see,’ Boyle said, curling his upper lip. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but you do owe the department a thesis, don’t you?’

‘I suppose.’

‘So it wasn’t entirely foolish of me to harbor the thought that this would be the long-awaited work?’

‘But we’ve always discussed my ideas beforehand.’

‘I know. I know. To what end? What was the most recent one? Ah, yes, something about the impact of a drug rehabilitation center suddenly placed in a middle-class neighborhood. What happened to it?’

‘The crime rate rose five hundred percent in four months. A month later it was closed down, reopened in Harlem. It was nothing.’

‘It might have been something. If you had chosen to do it.’

‘As a book?’

‘The Current Ideas imprint needs such books. That’s why I began it. Or have you forgotten?’

How could anyone forget Boyle’s pet project? Noel was reminded of it in some way every week. Boyle was using it to show up the other branches of the University Press: it was becoming an obsession.

‘Would you really print something like that?’ Noel asked, hoping to deflect Boyle onto his favorite topic.

‘Like what? The rehab center? Or the murder?’

‘No. I wasn’t thinking about that.’

‘Maybe you ought to, Noel. No, don’t interrupt. You realize that the social sciences are based on being right on the spot, living it, reporting it. All the great ideas in our field have come from being within a society. Look at Mirella Trent. She worked three months as a guard in a women’s prison for her book. And it turned out to be the best one we’ve done in the series. We need more of that. Not more critiques of someone else’s ideas in another grad school journal.’

When was the last time Boyle had done fieldwork? Noel wondered resentfully. Unless that was what he called all those uptown cocktail parties. He was even more irritated by the department chairman pointing out Mirella’s book as a guide. Everyone knew what a sensational muckraking feminist tract that had been: a best-seller that had pulled the Current Ideas imprint out of a financial hole. Not to mention the decisive blow it had dealt to Noel and Mirella’s on-again, off-again two-year relationship. Boyle couldn’t be ignorant of that, either.

‘May I remind you,’ Boyle was saying now, ‘that when I first took you on here, I had high hopes. I know you’re good in class. Students fight to get into your lectures. But I can no longer guarantee that will be enough to keep you in line for tenure.’ There it was – the threat. Noel had been waiting for it.

‘You saw that young man who came out of my office before. He’s already coauthored one book. He’s bright, eager. Why shouldn’t he work here?’

‘You’ve made your point,’ Noel said, standing.

‘You have to realize my position, Noel. I have to answer to a dean, a board of directors. I’m attacked on all sides.’

‘I know.’ Which he did, from hearing it from Boyle so often. But he didn’t care. All he wanted was to get out of that office.

‘And you know I hate to exert pressure. It’s not my style.’ Of course not, Noel thought. It doesn’t match your mirror-shine shoes or four-thousand-dollar face-lift.

‘Don’t let me go into the board meeting this term-ending with empty hands, Noel. Give me something to show for keeping you.’

‘I will,’ Noel lied: anything to get out.

Boyle seemed surprised, pleased. ‘Good. You must know how I detest these administrative duties,’ he said, suddenly unruffled and friendly again. ‘Why don’t you show me something substantial soon? We’ll meet over lunch. Wouldn’t that be pleasant?’

‘I won’t let you down,’ Noel said at the door. He had to force himself to shake the plump, slick hand.

‘Shit!’ he said as Boyle’s door closed. ‘Shit!’

What was happening to him?

3

He was in a black mood by the time he left the uptown IRT and walked to the apartment he had taken on Madison Avenue after Monica died and the five rooms on Riverside Drive had seemed so vast and empty. This place satisfied him. It was a good-sized studio – with a tiny kitchen and bath off to one side, a sleeping loft built over a small study area. The ceilings were twelve feet high. He had a working fireplace, long walls for built-in closets and bookshelves. There was traffic, loading and unloading outside from seven in the morning until noon, but by afternoon the neighborhood was quiet and most nights it was country silent.

He had let himself into the apartment and dumped his books when the phone rang.

‘Noel? Is that you? This connection is bad. Should I call back?’

‘Mrs Sherman? My side is fine.’

‘Well, I guess this will do then,’ she said, her nasal voice unmistakable. ‘I just wanted to check if you were coming up this weekend.’

The minute she said it – half pleading, half reminding – Noel remembered: today was March third. In two days, Monica would have been twenty-eight. They had always visited her parents for her birthday, and after she died, the Shermans had insisted Noel continue the tradition. How they had loved her! How good they had been to him after it happened, never leveling a hint of reproach for letting their only, their wonderful daughter drown. Of course they had known Noel most of his life, were almost family to him. And usually Noel looked forward to seeing them.

‘I know it’s a long trip, now that we’re so much farther away,’ Mrs Sherman apologized.

‘No problem.’ Brewster was only an hour and a half by train, a pretty ride along the Hudson River. Noel enjoyed being out in open country in cold weather. He hated the city in winter.

She was armed with train schedules, and they agreed to meet by eleven on Saturday morning.

‘Peter is so much looking forward to seeing you,’ she said. ‘He made sure to ask if you were coming. We hardly see you.’

‘I’ll be there,’ Noel said. But the minute he put down the receiver he knew he would do it this year only out of duty. Something was wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was there, gnawing away at him, not the usual flood of memories, but something else, something different.

He put on a record, one of Monica’s favorites – the last Beatles album – and tried to remember her. Nothing happened.

He went to the closet, pulled out a box of photo albums they had collected for years and opened it randomly. The snapshots he peered at had been taken some eight years ago. They were still in college then, living together in a small basement off campus. She’d tried to be a lighter blond that year and had dyed her hair platinum, and cut it quite short. As usual, she had pulled it off. She had looked like a golden retriever, glossy, smooth, tanned, long-legged.

From that album it was easy to get into the others. Noel sat in the curved-back rocking chair he and Monica had bought on the spot one morning after an all-night party, and went through album after album of photographs: a dozen of them, beginning when they were children living next door to each other in Mamaroneck. Many photos through junior high, she always a few inches taller, always a bit more mature – as in that snapshot of them at the Shermans’ lakeside house in Connecticut, Monica staring right out at you, Noel squinting – a slim, curly-haired boy of thirteen. The next album covered high school, when he finally passed her in height and weight, and Monica had grown radiant in her fair beauty, indomitably high-spirited, so securely the most popular girl in school that one could almost overlook the serious, gawky young man who inevitably appeared next to her – Noel, the obligatory chaperon. Monica was always the main attraction, looking seductive at seventeen in her first bikini (Noel to one side, holding a surfboard); or ravishing in a cocktail sheath, strand of pearls and pearl earrings, which he (in white jacket and black tie with tartan cumberbund) had given her for her twentieth birthday; or fresh and cheerful in her short white cheerleader’s skirt with the tight-fitting bodice, her hair long and sun-streaked (Noel half in shadow, wearing basketball shorts and a shirt with the major letter he had gotten that year); Monica smiling, in every conceivable pose and outfit, and always next to her, Noel.

That was how it ought to appear, if photography conveyed truth. It was always Monica for Noel. If not from the day she stepped into his driveway where he was patching a flat tire on his Schwinn and introduced herself as the new neighbor, then from only a month or two after that. She was always first, through high school and college, work and marriage, right up to that afternoon on the lake.

He didn’t have to look at those last snapshots taken the day she died. He recalled that day well enough, even after three years: how much of the margaritas he’d drunk from the Thermos. How she’d awakened him after he declared himself drunk and sleepy. How they’d made love in the little skiff, sloshing around in a half inch of water, their limbs slithery with it. The soft undulation, the sun shimmering on the lake. Her splash afterward as she dove into the water. Her taunts for him to join her. How she had left him alone to nap. Then the vague cries, his slow awakening, and the sudden clear sight of her arm and hand straight out of the water, gripping at air. His frozen terror the instant before he snapped fully awake and dove in. How he had grabbed her crumpled form, slowly sinking downward. How he had dragged her up and into the boat, thrown her over on her stomach, pumped her lungs. How he thought he had succeeded, and got the engine going, shooting back to the dock, praying, cold-faced, with her inert body. How he had listened to the doctor later, watched the old locals shrug, heard that of course cramps were common after intercourse, it happened all the time. And how that night he’d sat in the tiny, freezing cabin with Monica’s corpse and slowly realized that after eighteen years of knowing her, being with her, living for her, everything had changed.

As the years passed, that day alone stood out clearly for Noel – the others became vague, even with the photo albums – the day he had failed to save her life. This recalled, he always felt a catharsis. The ritual finished, the records and the photo albums would be replaced in a back corner of the closet, the ghost relaid.

As it was this early evening. Relieved, he threw himself into two dozen impromptu sit-ups, his stockinged toes wedged under the crossbar of the kitchen table. He followed that with more exercises, showered, had dinner, studied, watched a few hours of TV, and went to sleep early.

Lying in bed, he felt exhausted. Somehow Monica seemed further away than ever before. Now school, his career, Boyle’s ultimatum, clouded her image. Just before he fell asleep, Noel briefly saw that bloody man with no face.

4

Someone’s waiting for you,’ the old man Gerdes, the doorman, said.

Noel lifted the Atala over the threshold and rolled it into the storage closet next to the mailroom.