Then the back of a forearm caught me across the bridge of my nose. An elbow slammed into my ribs, knocking the air out of my lungs. I grabbed him tightly and pulled him close to me so he wouldn’t have room to swing. I felt his hands come up around my throat. He began to squeeze.
I tried to kick him in the groin, but I was too close to get any leverage. The pressure tightened. Straining every muscle in my neck in resistance, I tried to force my forearms between his to separate his arms and break the hold.
I couldn’t get through. I tried punching two knuckles into his eyes, but his head was turned away, so it didn’t have much effect.
The fingers of my right hand found his chin and then his mouth. I pushed the first two fingers of my hand inside his lips. My thumb found and pressed against the cartilage of his throat. The pain of that hold is normally unbearable. But despite the intense pain he must have been feeling, he held on to my neck.
My vision began to black out. I heard a roaring in my ears. It took a moment for me to realize that the sound was not inside my head. The gloom began to lighten. The roar grew louder.
Over his shoulder, down the track, I could make out the yellow glare of an oncoming streetcar headlight.
A trolley will do about forty miles an hour when the track is clear and the lights ahead are green for a long way. This one was rocking along at full speed, hurtling down on us like a blind metal leviathan.
He heard the noise at the same time, but he wouldn’t let go. Neither would I.
If we had been standing still in the middle of the track, the conductor would have seen us in time to throw on his brakes. Streetcars are powered by DC current. There’s no other land vehicle that can accelerate so fast in so short a distance — or come to a halt so quickly when the brakes are applied and the current is reversed.
The trouble is, we weren’t standing still. One minute we’d be struggling in the middle of the tracks, and the next second we’d be bouncing off the steel girders or the concrete tunnel walls. No one inside a trolley could have peered into the murk ahead and seen us in time to stop.
He wouldn’t let go of my neck, and I wouldn’t let go of his jaw.
It became a contest to see which of us would let go first, to see how close each of us dared come to the very edge of death!
He gave way first. Because he was facing away from the oncoming trolley, he couldn’t gauge how close it was. The sound was terrifying. He released his grip on my neck and threw himself headlong to one side, off the tracks.
I wasn’t a second behind him, except that I flung myself in the opposite direction into a niche in the wall. As I did so, the bulk of the trolleycar barreled past me, a huge, blind, monstrous thing that could have destroyed us both, mindlessly, in a fraction of a second.
It was gone as fast as it had come. One moment it was a horrible, death-dealing instrument; the next, it was a harmless carriage rolling away from us with its terrible sound fading to merely an irritating racket.
Tired as I was, I forced myself out of the niche toward my attacker. The battle still wasn’t settled. One of us had to die.
Something had gone out of him. He saw me lurching toward him, and he quit. He turned and began to run down the track back to the Arlington station. Hugo gleamed dully at me from the wood of a crosstie where he’d fallen. I stooped, retrieved the knife and straightened up, holding the blade balanced in my fingers.
There’s a way to throw a knife quickly, and another way to throw it powerfully. If a man’s running at you, you throw it quickly because you haven’t much time and there’s a lot of soft, vulnerable surface to hit: his stomach, his throat, his face, his groin. And you don’t have to hit him hard with a sharp blade for the steel to penetrate mortally.
If he’s running away from you, the targets are his back, thighs and legs. The only really vulnerable point is the nape of his neck, which is much too small a target to aim at, especially when you’re in the semi-dark and have to act fast. So you throw for power.
I made the throw, leaning into the pitch as I hurled Hugo through the air. It was perfect — blade over handle with half a turn in the air, point driving forward at the moment of impact with the full force of the throw behind it and with the heaviness of the haft adding its weight to the point of the knife.
It buried itself almost to the hilt, through the cloth of his jacket and shirt into the cartilage of his spine.
He stumbled for a pace or two, his knees bending a little more with each step until he hit the gravel of the trackage and sprawled full onto his face.
I came up to him. Bending, I pulled Hugo loose and turned him over.
He wasn’t quite dead. His eyes looked up into mine, surprise, astonishment, bewilderment on his face. He made an effort to focus on me.
“We... we’ll get... you... get you...” he mumbled. “Too... too many of us... You... you’re trapped, you know... Can’t... no matter what station... get... get you...” and then his voice trailed away.
Swiftly I searched his body until I found what I was looking for. I ran back up the track to the man who’d died beside me. I found what I wanted on him, too. There was no need to search the third man. Two would be enough. Picking up Wilhelmina, I left the bodies there, a gruesome trio to surprise the next trolleys that came down the tracks in either direction. I began to trot toward the next station. It was about a city block away.
Just before I got there, I stopped. If what the dying man had said was true, there’d be more of them waiting for me to come out of the station. I couldn’t stay underground. It wouldn’t be long before the bodies were reported and police would swarm all over the subway line. I had to get out into the open, and I had to do it without my exit being observed.
There was one way to do it. I don’t know which French general said it first, but he was right. Audace! Toujours l’audace! Do the unexpected. Audacity pays off!
I peeled off my jacket, shirt and socks. Hugo’s sharp edge sliced away the legs of my slacks, cutting them at mid-thigh, and then I picked at the rough hem with the point of the blade to fray them even more. Picking up handfulls of dirt from the tunnel floor, I smeared what remained of my slacks until they were thoroughly grimy. I disheveled my hair with both hands. Then I made a headband out of my necktie, looping it around my forehead, Indian style. When I was through, I looked like a barefoot, suntanned, dirty “street person” — and Boston has more than its share of them.
I wrapped Wilhelmina in my jacket and shirt, and tucked the package away in the upper reaches of a steel girder support. I’d be back for the gun later.
In the meantime I had to get out onto the street where I could blend with the crowd. Barefoot, I trotted up the track and cut onto the platform of the Copley Square station at the Dartmouth Street exit. There were a few people on the platform who stared at me. Most of them paid no attention at all. The street people are everywhere in the Back Bay area of Boston, and they’re concentrated around Copley Square. They’ve been known to do crazy things like walking the tunnel.
I went up the first set of stairs and waited at the bend. In a few minutes I heard a trolley screech to a halt on the level below. In a minute a crowd of students and “street people” and hippies surged up the stairs. I melted in with the crowd as we came up onto the street. About the only thing I didn’t have was a guitar, but several of them did. No one looking at the group of us could have picked me out from the others.
Right across the street from the exit was Copley Square. Alone with the rest of the group, I headed across to the plaza.
What’s really unusual about Boston’s Copley Square is that it’s an open-air center where half a dozen subcultures meet and, to a great extent, ignore each other.