Then the darkness came, went away briefly and came back again. When it lost itself in the dawn of agony there were hands brushing the dirt from my face and the smell of flowers from the softness that was a woman who held me and said, “You poor kid, you poor kid.”
My eyes opened and looked at her. It was like something you dream about because she was the kind of woman you always stare at, knowing you can’t have. She was beautiful, with yellow hair that tumbled down her neck like a torch that lit up her whole body. Her name was Helen Troy and I wanted to say, “Hello, Helen,” but couldn’t get the words out of my mouth.
Know her? Sure, everybody knew her. She was Renzo’s feature attraction at his Hideaway Club and her picture was all over town. But I never thought I’d get to have my head in her lap.
There were feet coming up the path that turned into one of the men from the stop at the gate and Helen said, “Give me a hand, Finney. Something happened to the kid.”
The guy she called Finney stood there with his hands on his hips shaking his head. “Something’ll happen to you if you don’t leave him be. The boss gives orders.”
She tightened up all over, her fingers biting into my shoulder. It hurt but I didn’t care a bit. “Renzo? The pig!” She spat it out with a hiss. She turned her head slowly and looked at me. “Did he do this, kid?”
I nodded. It was all I could do.
“Finney,” she said, “go get my car. I’m taking the kid to a doctor.”
“Helen, I’m telling you…”
“Suppose I told the cops…no, not the cops, the feds in this town that you have holes in your arms?”
I thought Finney was going to smack her. He reached down with his hand back but he stopped. When a dame looks at you that way you don’t do anything except what she tells you to.
“I’ll get the car,” he said.
She got me on my feet and I had to lean on her to stay there. She was just as big as I was. Stronger at the moment. Faces as bad off as mine weren’t new to her, so she smiled and I tried to smile back and we started off down the path.
***
We said it was a fight and the doctor did what he had to do. He laid on the tape and told me to rest a week then come back. I saw my face in his mirror, shuddered and turned away. No matter what I did I hurt all over and when I thought of Renzo all I could think of was that I hoped somebody would kill him. I hoped they’d kill him while I watched and I hoped it would take a long, long time for him to die.
Helen got me out to the car, closed the door after me and slid in behind the wheel. I told her where I lived and she drove up to the house. The garbage cans had been spilled all over the sidewalk and it stank.
She looked at me curiously. “Here?”
“That’s right,” I told her. “Thanks for everything.”
Then she saw the sign on the door. It read, ROOMS. “Your family live here too?”
“I don’t have a family. It’s a rooming house.”
For a second I saw her teeth, white and even, as she pulled her mouth tight. “I can’t leave you here. Somebody has to look after you.”
“Lady, if…”
“Ease off, kid. What did you say your name was?”
“Joe.”
“Okay, Joe. Let me do things my way. I’m not much good for anything but every once in awhile I come in handy for something decent.”
“Gee, lady…”
“Helen.”
“Well, you’re the nicest person I’ve ever known.”
I said she was beautiful. She had the beauty of the flashiest tramp you could find. That kind of beauty. She was like the dames in the big shows who are always tall and sleepy looking and who you’d always look at but wouldn’t marry or take home to your folks. That’s the kind of beauty she had. But for a long couple of seconds she seemed to grow a new kind of beauty that was entirely different and she smiled at me.
“Joe…” and her voice was warm and husky, “that’s the nicest thing said in the nicest way I’ve heard in a very long time.”
My mouth still hurt too much to smile back so did it with my eyes. Then something happened to her face. It got all strange and curious, a little bit puzzled and she leaned forward and could smell the flowers again as that impossible something happened when she barely touched her mouth to mine before drawing back with that searching movement of her eyes.
“You’re a funny kid, Joe.”
She shoved the car into gear and let it roll away from the curb. I tried to sit upright, my hand on the door latch. “Look, got to get out.”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“Then where…”
“You’re going back to my place. Damn it, Renzo did this to you and I feel partly responsible.”
“That’s all right. You only work for him.”
“It doesn’t matter. You can’t stay there.”
“You’re going to get in trouble, Helen.”
She turned and flashed me a smile. “I’m always in trouble.”
“Not with him.”
“I can handle that guy.”
She must have felt the shudder that went through me.
“You’d be surprised how I can handle that fat slob,” she said. Then added in an undertone I wasn’t supposed to hear, “Sometimes.”
It was a place that belonged to her like flowers belong in a rock garden. It was the top floor of an apartment hotel where the wheels all stayed in the best part of town with a private lawn twelve stories up where you could look out over the city and watch the lights wink back at you.
She made me take all my clothes off and while soaked in a warm bath full of suds she scrounged up a decent suit that was a size too big, but still the cleanest thing I had worn in long while. I put it on and came out in the living room feeling good and sat down in the big chair while she brought in tea.
Helen of Troy, I thought. So this is what she looked like. Somebody it would take a million bucks and a million years to get close to…and here I was with nothing in no time at all.
“Feel better, Joe?”
“A little.”
“Want to talk? You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“There’s not much to say. He worked me over.”
“How old are you, Joe?”
I didn’t want to go too high. “Twenty-one,” I said.
There it was again, that same curious expression. I was glad of the bandages across my face so she couldn’t be sure if I was lying or not.
I said, “How old are you?” and grinned at her.
“Almost thirty, Joe. That’s pretty old, isn’t it?”
“Not so old.”
She sipped at the tea in her hand. “How did you happen to cross Renzo?”
It hurt to think about it. “Tonight,” I said, “it had just gotten dark. A guy asked me if I’d run a message to somebody for five bucks and I said I would. It was for Mr. Renzo and he told me to take it to the Hideaway Club.
“At first the guy at the gate wouldn’t let me in, then he called down that other one, Johnny. He took me in, all right.”
“Yes?”
“Renzo started giving it to me.”
“Remember what the message said?”
Remember? I’d never forget it. I’d hope from now until I died that the guy who wrote it did everything he said he’d do.
“Somebody called Vetter said he’d kill Renzo,” I told her.
Her smile was distant, hard. “He’ll have to be a pretty tough guy,” she said. What she said next was almost under her breath and she was staring into the night when she said it. “A guy like that I could go for.”
“What?”
“Nothing, Joe.” The hardness left her smile until she was a soft thing. “What else happened?”
Inside my chest my heart beat so fast it felt like it was going to smash my ribs loose. “I…heard them say…I would have to finger the man for them.”