How embarrassing.
Mugged like Patsy from Peoria, Stallworth would say.
Dalton looked at the two men, both now moving to block him in, and deep inside his brain a scaled green thing turned over in the primeval muck of his subconscious and opened one slitted yellow eye. He backed deeper inside the covered archway and got his shoulders up against the damp stone walls. The two men stepped into a shaft of moonlight under the Moorish arch. The silent one raised his long thin blade, turning it in the moon glow.
“You speak English, marigold?” said the other. “Give us cigarettes. I smell them on you. Give.”
In the moonlight coming over the big man’s shoulder Dalton could see the side of his face. Little beads of sweat glittered on an unshaven and sunken cheek. His eyes were two black holes and he had his right hand in the pocket of a puffy down jacket. Both men were wearing jeans and heavy boots. Shit-kicker boots, Stallworth would have called them. Jack liked those hard-boiled forties names.
Dalton looked briefly to his left and saw piles of clothes and backpacks stacked up under the arch, and several shadowy figures slouching against the Doges’ walls. Tiny red sparks glowed in the darkness, and grass smoke rose up and curled in the shaft of moonlight, along with more of that tinny nasal whining that passes for pop music in the modern world.
Dalton’s self-contained silence was either puzzling or irritating the two men in front of him. They still hadn’t quite decided what to do with him. Ordinarily he would have tried to talk his way out of something like this, because choosing the other method of dealing with this sort of thing always made his life more complicated, and he wasn’t in the mood for that.
Actually, he was in an uncharacteristically peaceful place, and he liked being there. He liked being there so much that he found himself getting angry with these two assholes for breaking his mood. It had been a fine mood. And now, just like that, it was gone.
“No,” said Dalton, his anger rising up. “I don’t speak English. And I don’t smoke. So how about you two just fuck right off?”
“Hey, Milan! Don’t let the faggot punk you out,” said a girl, her voice slurred and languorous. “Make him give us some cigarettes.”
“You are faggot?” asked Milan, in a tone of polite inquiry.
Dalton was wondering what to do with these two guys. They weren’t kids, that was certain; Milan was perhaps in his mid-twenties. His partner was in the shadows but he looked big and solid enough to be a grown man. Dalton had a vision of the kind of lives these two were leading as clearly as if it were a film being shown on the inside of his skulclass="underline" they stole, they beat people, they screwed the girls. They lived like hyenas. How many people had they terrified in just this way? How many young gay men had they kicked to a bloody ruin just for fun? These two were like stones—
No, like turds. Huge hairy balls of steaming fresh dung, dropped by the careless frigate bird of fate into the sparkling pool of life, and whenever they hurt someone, the ripples of everlasting grief would run outward to infinity.
Dalton, sighing, knew these men for what they were. This is what they did. They had done this all last year and for all the years before that. They would do this sort of thing next year, and the year after that. If Dalton let them.
Stallworth’s voice replayed in his mind. No trouble, Micah.
“Answer, boy,” said Milan, his temper flaring. “You are faggot?”
“We prefer gay,” drawled Dalton. “This your toy boy?”
Milan glanced at the other man and snorted.
“Hey, Gavro. Queer boy here, I think he like you.”
As far as Dalton could make it out, Gavro told Milan, in idiomatic Serbo-Croatian, to engage in reciprocal oral congress with a ruminant quadruped of the goat persuasion, by their standards such an Oscar Wildean quip that Milan put his head back to let out a braying hoot. Dalton took this opportunity to kick Milan solidly in the nuts in the approved manner, which requires you to visualize your upper arch — not the tip of your shoe (which hurts like hell, by the way) but the flat of the upper arch, the way dropkickers do, to visualize your foot passing completely through the recipient’s crotch to an imaginary point a foot above and beyond it. This follow-through method allows the full kinetic energy of the kicker’s blow to be passed efficiently to the meatier parts of the kickee’s crotch, with truly gratifying — at least to the impartial observer — results.
In this particular case Milan rose upward off the ground a couple of feet and balanced for a moment like an Olympic gymnast on Dalton’s outstretched leg while he emitted a kind of teakettle squeal through his clenched teeth before tumbling off Dalton’s foot and forming himself into the skewered-shrimp position that one traditionally assumes after one has been forcefully booted in the nuts.
Gavro, unfazed, came in silent and fast with his knife in a sweeping throat-level sideways slash from left to right that would have opened up Dalton’s neck like the lid of a Pez dispenser if Dalton had not stepped inside the arc of the attack, catching Gavro’s knife arm with his left hand while using the butt of his right hand and the full force of his body from the toes up to deliver a sharp rising blow to Gavro’s upper lip and nose that, if executed properly, shatters the bone and cartilage of the nose with sufficient force to drive the whole detached mass of bone chips, splinters, and cartilage right through the nares and pharynx and deep into the brain. The blow is designed to be fatal, and Dalton meant it to be fatal.
Gavro went reeling backward, his limp body hitting the Doge’s cobblestones like a burlap sack full of fresh guts. Dalton stepped lightly around Gavro’s limp body, stooping to pick up the weapon Gavro had been carrying, which turned out to be a very expensive Serbian switchblade with a wonderfully carved ivory hilt, which he slipped into the pocket of his trench coat. He walked over and stared down at Milan’s white sweating face and his wide blinking eyes gleaming in the moonlight, fully aware of the profound silence that was coming from the huddled masses under the cloister. He crouched down beside Milan and asked Milan in a kind of whispering purr what his favorite show tune was.
Milan, distracted by some pressing internal issues, stared up at him. Dalton asked the question again, this time in his best Alan Rickman drawclass="underline" “What’s your favorite show tune, Milan? We marigolds just love show tunes. Come on, bunnykins. Won’t you tell me yours?”
“Fuck… you… faggot.”
“‘Fuck You, Faggot’? Don’t know it. Now I really like ‘People.’ You know, from Hello, Dolly? Barbra sings it. It goes something like this.”
Dalton straightened up, set himself.
“People” — he slammed a vicious boot into Milan’s sagging belly — “People who need people.” With each people Milan got another brutal kick in the guts, Dalton moving around the man writhing on the ground like a dancer, singing the chorus aloud, puffing hard with each blow, “are the luckiest people in the world—”
“Hey, man,” a slightly strangled male voice called from out of the darkened cloister. “Leave ’im alone, okay? He’s fuckin’ done!”
Dalton stopped, looked down at Milan, who was curled up in a ball and chuffing like a cow about to calve. Tears were running down his cheeks and his mouth was full of blood.
“Are you ‘fuckin’ done,’ Milan? Or do you have a comment?”