Letting his arm drop to his side, he began to walk carefully along the wall toward the space in which he had left his car, and he had reached the space and almost the car when two men took shape in the darkness and moved toward him. He thought at first that they were merely going to separate and pass on either side and go on, but they stopped abruptly with him between them, and he was forced to stop also by strong hands gripping his arms. He understood then that the positions were accomplished by design and that the two men were in effect the jaws of a sprung trap in which he was caught for a reason not yet clear.
One of the men was a kind of exemplary average. He could have walked all day on a hundred streets without being particularly noticed or remembered at all, and even now, in the dark alley, he was not impressive, except that he was, in his implicit purpose, a threat. The other man was, on the other hand, a monstrous deviation from the average. He was the result of a terrible joke played by a gland on an organism, and if he had walked one street for one-half of one hour, he would have been noticed and remembered reluctantly by everyone he met. His appearance was brutish. Huge head with jutting stony jaw. Enormous hands and feet that swung and shuffled with a suggestion of anthropoid power. The total effect was one of deformity, distortion and disproportion of bones, and there was a name for it, this glandular joke, but Joe couldn’t think of the name or precise cause, only that the soft bones of extremities continued to grow when other bones did not.
“Hello, Lover,” the monstrous man said. “We thought you were never coming. We waited and waited and we thought you were never coming.”
He pronounced the term of endearment lingeringly, fondling it with his tongue as if he were loathe to release it, laughing softly afterward as if it were a joke at least as good as the one that had been played by a gland on him. Average laughed too, a brief burst of air that was more like a snort than an expression of amusement
“Cupid’s a comedian,” he said. “Always with the humor, that’s Cupid. You’ll like him.”
Joe stepped back, trying to release his arms from the hands that held them, but he was not strong, could not hope to prevail or even compete, not even with the unusual strength that is created by the strange chemistry of fear.
“What do you want?” he said.
“You, Lover,” Average said. “Like Cupid told you, we been waiting and waiting.”
“Why? What do you want with me?”
“Well, it seems you been a bad boy. It seems you been keeping company you had no business keeping, and someone figures you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Someone figures you ought to be taught what happens to bad boys who keep the wrong company.”
Cupid lifted his enormous free hand and cupped it beneath Joe’s chin, tipping the head back and looking down into the tilted face with an expression that was a caricature of affection. His voice was an incongruous croon.
“I like you,” he said. “We’re going to be good friends. Lover and Cupid are going to get along fine.”
Average laughed again, the explosive snort, and Joe felt shriveled and incredibly old and sick with shame, knowing now that what he had thought was dead had yet to be killed. Park Avenue ending in an alley. After the North Shore and Connecticut, violence and degradation in some dark corner. Most shameful of all in the evaluation of himself, a fear of physical pain that he had never accorded the anticipation of death. Despite this, aware of what was certainly coming, he felt a desperate and inconsistent urgency to get it over with as quickly as possible.
“All right,” he said. “If you’ve been hired to give me a beating, why don’t you do it?”
“No, Lover.” Average gave Joe’s arm a little squeeze. “We can’t do it that way Not here in the alley. We got a nice place all set up for it. You can see how it is. You been doing someone wrong, and this someone wants to be sure you get what he figures is coming to you. Since he’s paying for it, he’s got a right to be sure. You admit that’s fair? Come along quietly now with Cupid and me. We’ll take you to this nice place where no one’ll bother us, and everything will be fine. You’ll see. Everything fine.”
They walked together down the alley to a side street and got into a waiting sedan, Average behind the wheel, Joe and Cupid in the back seat. Average drove slowly, apparently in no hurry to get to the nice place or anyplace, and after a few minutes he began to whistle cheerfully through his teeth. Cupid leaned back and opened his mouth in the shape of a laugh, but he began to make, instead of the sound of laughter, a very soft crooning sound, oddly musical, that might have been made by a mother to comfort her child. The sedan, under the guidance of Average, turned many corners and traveled on many streets, and after a while Joe no longer had any idea of where they were or might be going, except that the streets were narrow and littered and dark, lighted at long intervals by inadequate lamps at the curb.
Average whistled and Cupid crooned, and the shameful fear of physical pain was a malignancy in Joe’s mind. Watching Cupid from the corners of his eyes with a slyness made acute by growing fear and diminishing time, he began to think positively of escape, how he might accomplish it, and then, all at once, in a slight change of circumstances in his favor, he was acting instinctively without slyness or calculation or any regard for chances or consequences. The sedan slowed for a corner, turning left, and in an instant he was clawing at the handle of the door beside him, in another instant was sprawling headlong into the street. Vaguely conscious of fire in his flesh where it was seared by asphalt, he doubled and rolled and came onto his feet running.
Ahead of him was a high board fence stretched between two shabby buildings, and in the fence a wide gate sagged open on a length of chain. Hardly slackening his speed, he slipped through the opening and ran down an aisle between high piles of scrap iron and steel to another board fence at the rear. He ran along the fence to his right, pounding the boards with his fists in search of a gate, but he reached the juncture of fence and building, and there was no gate. Reversing himself, he ran back along the fence the other way, still pounding the boards, now beginning to sob softly, but still there was no gate. He looked up to the top of the fence, but it seemed incredibly high and impossible to scale, and there was, moreover, no time to try, for Average and Cupid were coming into the yard from the street, and it was imperative to hide from them at once.
Sinking to his hands and knees, he crawled along the building behind the piles of scrap, and after half a minute he found a sanctuary, a small hollow in one of the piles, and he crawled into this and vomited and lay very still, sucking in his breath between clenched teeth and releasing it slowly, a little at a time, to avoid making the slightest noise.
Average and Cupid ran down the aisle to the rear fence. Joe listened to the pounding of their feet and measured the distance between him and them by the sound. He knew very well that now was the time to act, that he should now get up and make a break for the front gate and the street and perhaps someone on the street who would save him, but he couldn’t move, could find nowhere in himself the strength or will to take what was plainly his best chance, and so he continued to lie quietly in his false sanctuary, sucking his breath between his teeth, the sour taste and smell of his own vomit on his tongue and in his nostrils. He could hear Average and Cupid examining the length of the fence. He could hear their footsteps, hear their fists beat upon the wood for evidence of a gate or a loose plank through which he might have gone.
“Maybe he went over the top,” Cupid said.