Chapter 1
It was hot one of the hottest nights the city had ever known. The papers said fifty-year old records had been broken and that more heat would follow.
The people suffered. Sullen, angry, they sprawled in the parks and the open places. They snarled at each other, and quick fights erupted in bars. In the more squalid sections, knives flashed suddenly and police sirens whined in answer.
Stifling. Unbearable. But a great night for jackals. If the people of the city had been classified in terms of animals, that was what Sammy would have been. A jackal; a yapping, cowardly scavenger running with other scavengers to make no kills in the city jungle, but to eat the carrion the tigers left behind.
Changed into human terms, this made Sammy a peeper, a night skulker who got his kicks by vicariously sharing the flesh-pleasures of others.
The night of smothering heat was ideally suited for this, and the old warehouse on Archer Street next to the Park Hotel was ideally located.
The warehouse was locked, but Sammy knew where the broken windows were. You went in through a broken window at ground level and worked your way up, checking each floor of the hotel for lighted, unshaded windows.
And you found many examples of interesting amorous invention.
But heat could be both promising and disappointing because on a night like this, you found mostly nakedness, but not much energetic passion in the hotel where the air conditioning had broken down and the guests were panting in their beds.
So Sammy the peeper moved up through the warehouse, going quickly from floor to floor looking for the action. There wasn't much, and Sammy felt betrayed by the mechanical breakdown across the three-foot areaway.
The Park was no two-bit flop house. It faced on Lincoln Street and had not lost prestige because Archer was slum a kind of funnel feeding into the tenements of the lower east side. The Park ignored its Archer Street side.
They got high rates so why the hell couldn't they keep their air-conditioner working?
So Sammy climbed swiftly until he got to the ninth floor.
He stayed there for a long time...
She was a blonde, alone in the room, lying naked on the bed. She'd opened the window to keep from smothering, and her body was detailed in the bold glow of the lamp she'd been trying to read by.
But it was too hot to read, and she'd thrown the magazine aside. She lit a cigarette. A spark touched her naked belly and she grabbed at it. Her legs jerked. She slapped the hot spark angrily.
Sammy watched.
He'd seen many naked girls through the windows of the Park Hotel; decent girls and hookers; ugly girls and beautiful; passionate girls and passive.
But there was something about this one that fired him; something about her slim legs and high-nippled breasts that gave him reckless thoughts.
He murmured, "God!" there in the darkness and felt brave juices rise in his body.
The girl got up and went into the bathroom beyond range of his vision. He waited, feeling lonely. The toilet flushed, she returned, and Sammy now shared an intimacy with her. It made his insides quiver.
The girl threw herself back on the bed, her legs tossed, her arms thrown out in hot exhaustion.
And Sammy could stand it no longer.
But he did not attack. He was a jackal, not a tiger, so he faded back into the warehouse and went down the nine flights to take the word back to the pack ...
There were four in the pack. Their gathering place was the sidewalk in front of the tavern on Archer Street, near the corner of Lincoln. This was close to the beer inside where they went when they had money and offered a garbage box to sprawl on when they were broke.
The other three were waiting when Sammy got there. Gooch eyed him in weary disgust. "You got the price of a beer?"
"Hell, I bought this afternoon."
Lew, the fat one, grunted and wiped his face. "This damn heat's busting me up. I can't take no more."
Frenchy was the handsome jackal. He had a sensitive Latin face and a thin line of mustache he kept touching with the tip of his little finger. He said, "Keep on moaning. It helps."
Sammy, Frenchy, Gooch, and Lew four scavengers in the city-jungle; four useless young men trying to con each other for beers on a hot summer night. They had been born in the Archer Street tenements, but time had not done much for them. Time had not been able to do anything to them but make them grow up physically. Time had not been able to turn them into anything at all, and it seemed to have given up.
Other children from those tenements had been swept forward into various destinies; some into jail; some into prostitution; some into death from violence or drugs or disease. And some had gone out of the slums to live respectable lives and keep Time from despairing of the human race.
But Sammy, Frenchy, Gooch and Lew had stayed where they were, too fearful, too lazy, or too stupid to leave the tenements that had spawned them; sweating and suffering there in the heat that gripped the city by its throat ...
". . .You been up in the warehouse?" This from Gooch of the bobbing Adam's apple.
"Uh-huh. And man, there's something up there!"
"Yeah?"
"A broad."
Frenchy hooted. "I thought you liked goats."
Lew kept wiping his face. "So you saw a broad. Does that get you in an uproar on a night like this?"
"She's got her window open. The air-conditioning must have busted in the Park. She's alone and mother-naked on the bed."
"That hotel's full of stripped broads," Frenchy said. He took out a pen knife and went delicately to work on a fingernail.
"But not like this one."
"Some guy's probably in there already, taking care of her."
"I'd sure like to take care of her," Sammy said. "The damn window wide open."
Frenchy pondered the thing with the air of an expert on such matters. "What do you suppose the broad would be doing while you climbed in the window?"
Gooch laughed. "Sammy could say, 'Hold still, baby. I'll be right with you.' She'd order him a drink and have it ready."
"Wise guy!" Sammy grunted. "A wise, no-guts guy."
Gooch glared. "What're you talking about? You mean go in through the window and take the broad? Are you serious?"
"I just said none of you got the guts."
Frenchy considered, his eyes narrowed. "I wonder if it could be done?"
The night, the heat something was giving them courage, charging them with a recklessness; but they were still far from the point of action.
Lew sat down heavily on the garbage box. "Too damn hot. The broad'd float away in sweat."
"We could look," Frenchy murmured.
"Then we could go on up on the roof," Gooch suggested. "It might be cooler."
They knew they were going, but they did not moved directly toward their objective the areaway between the warehouse and back wall of the Park Hotel. They never did anything positively and directly. This was against their natures. They moved lazily toward the corner of Lincoln and Archer. Crossing the street at this angle, they stopped on the far sidewalk and shuffled around uncertainly before they began drifting slowly back toward the areaway.
As they slipped single file into the narrow darkness, Gooch giggled. He began to sing in a high, nasal pitch his own words to tune of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush:
"We're going upstairs to rape a broad rape a broad rape a broad "
"Shut up, you stupid animal," Frenchy snarled.
"What the hell! There's nobody here."
"Shut up anyhow!"
They crawled in through a familiar broken window and moved unerringly through the darkness toward the stairs.
"Nine floors?" Lew moaned. "Jesus."
"Wait here then."
"Why the hell should I? Just take it easy, that's all."
They reached the ninth floor and moved to the window, and a silence fell.
"She's still there," Sammy whispered.
Frenchy punched him silently in the ribs as they stared, breaking the silence only with their breathing while the night and the trap of the heat made an anger in them that turned into a madness.
But time was needed time for the madness to mount.
The girl lay on her back, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes, looked at the cigarettes on the table beside the bed but changed her mind. Restlessly, she reached down and passed a soothing hand over her thighs where the heat was most irritating.
She turned the gesture into an unconscious caress, and in the shadows of the warehouse Frenchy drew his breath in sharply and pressed Sammy's arm.
The four of them moved quietly back out of earshot of the open window.
"We could do it," Frenchy whispered.
Lew's sweaty bulk smelled in the lifeless air. "But God! If she yells-"
"We can do it. One of us goes in through the window fast. I'll go. She's surprised for just a second. That's all I'll need. Sammy comes in after me. By that time I've got my hand over the broad's mouth. Sammy grabs on. Then Gooch comes and, zingo! We got her!"
"What about me?" Lew asked wistfully. "You come last."
"Not me," Gooch said. "It's crazy. We never done nothin' like this before."
"No? What about the broad you took in the basement on Yarrow Street last year. You were telling us."
Gooch had told them and now he wished that he hadn't; something to say; his contribution to some yakking about sex...
...There was this broad, you guys over in a basement apartment ott Yarrow Street. I just happened to be walking by, and she was coming out of the shower. There was only a screen door so I figured what the hell and walked right in. You should of seen the. look on her puss. She tried to back away, but I didn't let her get set. I pushed her back into the bathroom, and you know, when I left, that broad invited me back sometime.
There had been no girl and no invasion, but the tenants changed so fast in the Yarrow Street dumps that none of the others could prove it.
But Gooch wished now that he hadn't said it.
They whispered there by the far wall of the dark warehouse, and one thing became apparent. It had to be all or none. No surge of reckless passion would send one of them or two or even three off on a reckless adventure. They were chained together by a pattern of years that held them like steel bonds.
"Not me," Lew grunted. "If you guys miss I'm in trouble."
"You want to go first then?" Frenchy asked. "Axe you kidding."
Gooch snickered at this. "There'd be eight cops in the room before Lew got his rear over the sill."
"For God's sake!" Sammy growled harshly. "Are we going to yak here all night?"
From where they were, they could look into the yellow rectangle of light and watch the girl. In lazy restlessness she put her hands under her hips and lifted her body. Holding her legs erect and rigid, she V'd them in an acrobatic exercise that made Sammy double his fists.
"Lord!"
"She gets to you, huh, kid?" Frenchy's tone was half contemptuous, half sympathetic. He considered himself the sex expert of the group; the more experienced one who could patronize the others in this realm.
"She'd get to anybody."
"A natural blonde. You can't hardly find them no more." Frenchy was grinning in the darkness.
Sweat ran down Gooch's belly. He swallowed and made a gulping sound in the darkness.
"She gets Gooch, too," Frenchy said.
"Suppose somebody came?" Gooch asked.
"The door'll be locked," Frenchy said. "So the broad doesn't answer a knock. They won't break the door down. They'll figure she's asleep."
Frenchy took the question as surrender by Gooch. "I'll go first," he said, "then Sammy. Then you come in fast, Gooch. We'll need you."
Perhaps it was the being needed that did it. Perhaps it hit his childish mind and overcame his fear.
"Okay."
"Then we're set," Sammy whispered. "What about me?" Lew whined. "I ain't said I'd go along."
"You'll go," Frenchy said.
And Lew knew he was right. It took less courage to go in than to accept the desertion of the other three ...