Chapter 12
Like a fish on the end of a line, J.B. dangled between Whitey's hands. Kicking his sneaks in the air, the frail kid danced on nothing. He was suspended a foot from the asphalt of the Peabody House playground by the blond gang leader.
Whitey's grip threatened to choke the very life from J.B.
Already J. B.'s cheeks were turning an unpleasant purple. In the thick dark under the wall Brick Fontaine had painted only that afternoon, the other Cobras laughed softly at the spectacle of their unfortunate comrade doing a ludicrous dance on empty air.
Out of the inky dark came a shriek female voice:
"Leave him be, Whitey. Don't kill the little crud before we can have some fun."
"Okay, Mae."
Giving J.B. a last savage shake that made his sneaks fly back and forth, Whitey nodded and released his hold.
J.B. tumbled to the pavement, yowling. Viper darted in and delivered a kick to the side of J.B.'s skull, cracking but not shuttering the right lens of his glasses. J. B. tottered up, pulled off his glasses and stared at them with tiny watering eyes. An expression of abject misery and terror twisted his emaciated features.
Whitey unshipped his switch, extended the sharp steel with a whick and passed it lightly across J.B.'s throat. The knife drew blood in a single hair-thin black line.
"Ready for the quiz again, gutless?" Whitey said. "Let's take it from the top? What are you doing here?"
"I told you, Whitey," J.B. whined, putting on his glasses and blinking through the starred cracks in the right lens. "I was just going home across the playground."
"He's crapping you, Whitey," offered Viper. "We all know his pop is a bellboy at that hotel uptown, three to midnight shift. Nobody's home at his place yet."
"I was tired, that's all," J.B. said fearfully. "Jeez, can't a fella be tired?"
"Like maybe the stuff with the Ambrosio fluff drained out all your guts?" asked Whitey.
"Naw, I was just sick to my stummick, Whitey. Lemme go on home."
"Let you miss the big performance? Not on your life, Jack in the Box."
J.B. rubbed his nose apprehensively. "Whitey, what's going on?"
Out of the dark came Mae Lazar's brittle laugh again: "You'll find out, chicken."
"Shut that broad up!" J.B. exclaimed feebly. "She's got no right-"
"Hell she hasn't," remarked Whitey. "She's got more guts than you, buddy. I'm beginning to be damn sorry we let a fink like you into the Cobras. You got no guts for scragging a pretty broad like that Ambrosio kid.
"My God, don't say that!" J. B. cried. "You killed that poor kid."
Whitey was supremely unconcerned: "So what? Didn't she have it coming? Hanging around with the motherfryer who runs this place? Or did, until-"
Whitey glanced at his watch.
"-about fifteen minutes from now."
Raucous laughter split the air. J.B. blinked failing to understand the gang leader's meaning. He asked.
"What happened to Fontaine? He inside?"
"Awful interested in the Christers these days, ain't you J.B.?" questioned Viper.
"Jeez. I was just wondering. What's the harm in-?"
"Viper's got a point, man," Whitey cut him off. "A very large point. As a matter-of-fact-not that's it's any of your mother-frying business, of course-the Christer took off a while ago. All the better for us. We figure to give him a real warm homecoming."
More muffled laughter. It was stilled when Whitey's hand flew out to grasp J.B.'s collar.
"Question is, J.B., you got any right to wear that Cobra jacket or had we oughta take it off of you? You a man, or what? If you're a man, maybe it's time you prove it to the fellas. What do you say, Cobras? Should he prove it?"
Viper's voice led the pack in response:
"Yeah, Whitey, damn right."
Whitey snapped his fingers.
"Mae. Come over here and help J.B. prove he's a man."
Slipping from the shadows, her face hard and cruel in spite of the titter of mirth spewing from her heavily made-up lips, Mae Lazar joined the group. At the back of the knot of boys a voice warned':
"Whitey, we shouldn't fool around here too long-"
The switchblade gleamed menacingly.
"Want to argue about it, Spivvy?"
"Naw." The voice was cowed low. "Just a suggestion."
"Well, my suggestion is that we help J.B. prove he's got guts. Go on, Mae. Help him."
Tittering, Mae Lazar stepped nearer the unfortunate J.B. She began to massage his pelvis with her hips. J.B.'s only response was fidgety, frightened look up and down the shadowed playground.
Mae let out an obscene oath and stepped back.
Whitey scratched his head.
"Maybe J.B. only gets excited when he sees the real goods."
In the half-dark, Mae's young eyes were ageless and lewd.
"Want me to show him, Whitey?" she purred.
"Show him what you got, Mae," Whitey agreed. "Show him and see whether it does anything for the little chicken-crapper."
Mae Lazar posed and postured in front of the miserable J.B. She toyed with the hem of her sweater, lifting it an inch on one side, an inch on the other, J.B. tried to back off. Two of the gang boys slipped behind him and prevented him.
Mae bounced and wiggled, making her breasts dance inside her sweater. She pulled up the knitted garment again to display the undersides of the cups of her bra.
"Come on, come on, J.B.! I got nice soft knockers. Whitey likes them a lot.
Mae wrestled the sweater over her red hair and dropped it on the asphalt:
"You'll insult Whitey if you can't get a kick out of me, man. Besides, if you just stand there, no action, no nothing, you'll look like a big zero in front of the fellas. I know, I know. You need the real thing. Well, here they are, J.B. Right here in front of your mother-loving eyes."
Obscenely Mae Lazar cupped palms beneath the white-clad young breasts and waggled them at the hapless J.B. By this time J.B. was bathed in soggy perspiration. He was also nearly hysterical.
Mae advanced on him, wielding her breasts like weapons.
"Like to give them a little kiss, man?" J.B. flailed at his guards. "Leave me alone!"
"Chicken-crapper!" Whitey exclaimed.
He grabbed J. B.'s shoulder, holding so hard that J. B. was forced to his knees.
"Mae tells you to do something, you do it. If you belong to the Cobras, man, you treat this broad with respect."
Now Mae was kneading her breasts furiously. She wagged them under J.B.'s nose, crowding the fleshy-spongy ends closed and closer to his lips, giggling hysterically.
J.B. opened his mouth to cry out. Mae leaped forward. J.B. gagged and spat, tumbling backward, head over heels.
Whitey cursed:
"Lousy mother-frying craphead! Guys-scrag him!"
Not one to delay when his leader gave orders, Viper darted in and stomped on J.B.'s gut. The other gang boys crowded around, eager for a turn.
They rained kicks and blows on J.B. Mae slipped into her sweater, watching the beating with bright, hard eyes:
"Give it to him, you guys. Kill the fryer! He hurt me.
In a moment Whitey had joined the fray. He towered laughingly over his small victim. He lifted his right heel and drove it down on J.B.'s testicles.
Writhing in agony, J.B. beat his fists on the asphalt. His spectacles fell off. Viper crushed them with one stamp. A kind of animal enthusiasm generated spontaneously in the group. They fell on J.B.'s body like a pack of dogs, kicking and gouging and pummeling until his screams lor mercy made Whitey pull them off.
"Leave him be now. Damn it, I said leave him be! We don't want to kill him so he can forget all about us."
Face pale to a point resembling sexual excitement, Viper scrabbled in the shadows near the base of the newly-painted wall. His hands came up full of oily newspapers and rags Whitey and the others had collected from the refuse cans of Peabody House itself.
"Can we start the action, Whitey?"
Whitey shrugged.
"Why the hell not?"
Rapidly the Cobras spread newspapers and rags along the base of the freshly-painted wall. Panting with excitement, Viper ran up to Whitey a few moments later:
"All set, big man. You be the first. Give it the touch, man, the Whitey Noonan Touch."
"Pleasure," Whitey laughed.
He swaggered to the wall, a wooden match poised under his thumbnail. Even Mae was transfixed by the sight of Whitey marching like an emperor to that fuse-like ribbon of paper and waste rags stretching along the building's foundation. Suddenly dim words burbled in the dark.
Whitey spun on the others, his eyes narrowing: "What'd he say?"
"I heard him," Viper spoke eagerly. "He said, 'I'm sorry Rita.' "
Whitey's near scream was wild with anger. He ran to J.B., began slapping his face rapidly. Tears streamed down J.B.'s cheeks as Whitey slapped him and shook him like a mouse in a cat's teeth.
"What do you know about Rita, little man? You better tell me or I'll turn the Cobras loose again. Hear me J. B.?"
Whitey cracked J.B.'s head on the asphalt two or three times.
"Want more? Want to go the whole route straight to the big dark? What about Rita?"
"Sent me," J.B. babbled through cracked, bleeding lips. "Shouldn't tell-sent me-"
Whitey's eyes went wild.
"She sent you here? Is that why you were hanging around?"
"Sent me-get Fontaine," J.B. sobbed. "Shouldn't tell-"
"Yes you should, if you want to go on breathing." Whitey shook him again, ferociously. "One more question, mother-fryer. Where is she? Where's Rita?"
J.B.'s purblind eyes were sick with misery and fright.
"Won't-kill me?"
"I'll kill you if you don't tell!" howled Whitey. He jabbed the switch point against J. B.'s undernourished chest. "I'll cut your guts out for the garbage men to pick up if you don't spill fast."
"The dump," J.B. panted. "God forgive me-the dump by the river. Hiding from you, Whitey. Begged me to get Fontaine-God help me-"
J.B.'s breath whooshed out of his mouth suddenly as Whitey dropped him. The others, including Mae and Viper, retreated a step, fuly aware of the emotions running rampant on Whitey's cheaply handsome young face. For a long, strained moment the gang leader stared down at the pitiful half-man, half-child twitching at his feet.
Whitey folded his blade, shoved it into his pocket: "God can't help you, J.B. And Rita neither, once I got to her."
Spinning, Whitey raked a wooden match on the asphalt and flung it into the papers.
With a burst and puff flames shot upward, igniting the oily rags in little explosions that fanned out clouds of hot air and made even Whitey flinch.
Taking a last look at the rising curtain of orange-yellow fire, Whitey ordered:
"Any guy who doesn't come with me to the dump to finish Rita is out of the Cobras."
Then, lithe as a jungle animal, fast as a runner coming off the blocks, Whitey Noonan bolted across the playground, leaped high, caught the top of the wire fence and dropped to the other side.
In a body his gang followed him, leaving the wall of Peabody House to burn, to spread flaming holocaust to the dry, ancient shingles on the roof, to the plasterboard walls inside. With a frantic cry-"Hey ,you bastards, I don't wanna miss the kicks!" Mae Lazar ran after Whitey and the boys.
But Mae wasn't nearly as agile as the young gang toughs. She was therefore forced to go considerably out of her way, to the gate at the far end of the playground. Running hard, she pursued Whitey and the Cobras a little more than half a block. Then she gave up in disgust.
Mae hesitated, torn between the desire to watch Whitey handle that dirty little twist Rita and the desire to watch the settlement house go up in flames. The latter attraction won out.
She paused at the corner across from the playground, wary lest she be linked to the fire by the crowd already gathering. In the distance the siren of a fire truck keened.
Mae clung to the outside of the steel-link fence, a laugh twisting her painted mouth as she watched the flames envelop Peabody House. By the time the engines and hooks-and-ladders arrived, it would be too damned late, just too wonderfully God damned late.
Supressing a chuckle, Mae noticed a stocky uniformed man in the forefront of the rapidly-gathering crowd of watchers. The fire had even drawn out Captain Wasewski.
Higher danced the flames, still higher.
They brightened the sky as the whole of the settlement building erupted like so much kindling. Glittering red and chrome fire units wheeled into the street. Hoses uncoiled. Jetting water shot high over the holocaust. Too late, too late, Mae thought, giggling and pressing her belly and breasts against the fence, getting real kicks, real thrills out of watching the fire.
She was far from the crowd. They'd think her just another neighborhood resident drawn to the scene of the conflagration. Hard little face glowing with unholy glee, Mae shifted position so that her nipples pressed just right against the steel wire. She clutched the fence with her hands high over her head, like a monkey.
The hot glare of the fire scorched her cheeks. With a laugh, an exclamation of surprise, Mae thrust her upper thighs tight aaginst the wire.
She watched the burning pyre of Peabody fail to respond to the arching white columns of spray. Harder Mae ground her breasts against the wire, harder and harder. A man and woman passed, hurrying to watch the blaze, not even noticing Mae.
She'd never tried getting kicks from a fire before, but it was working.
In the harsh glare of the burning building, the depraved child of the streets made the scene, clinging to the fence, never noticing that, among all the watchers, J.B. was not one of them.
Six blocks without eyes, J.B., thought frantically. Could he make it?
The fire behind cast a vague pinkish glow over featureless oval faces swimming past the wretched boy. Mouths, eyes, noses were mere dots on the pale pink ovals.
J.B.'s body ached all over, hurt like hell in a hundred places. Yet he forced himself to move down Hamilton Street, now stumbling, now crawling in the gutter, ignored by the inhabitants running the other way to watch Peabody House burn.
At last, after seemingly endless miles of featureless agony, J.B. felt rough stone beneath his fingers. Stone he thought he recognized as the cement balustrade of the precinct house.
A man-shape blurred by. J.B. clutched it desperately.
"Mister, mister, I lost my glasses! I gotta find a cop. Are you-?"
"Lay off, you little crud." The figure slipped past. "Mister, listen! The Cobras-"
All at once the shadow-figure halted, turned back, seized J.B.'s shoulders.
"What about the Cobras?"
"They're going to kill a girl-Rita Danilov-down by the river dump. Tell Captain Wadsewski. Christ-" J.B.'s voice broke. "Somebody's got to help her, mister. Tell the Captain!"
Powerful hands flung off his grip.
"Sure, kid. Sure, right away."
The shadow-shape receded, hurrying down Hamilton Street. J.B. sank to the steps, everything blurred, pink and black and white and meaningless, and cried until he fainted.
Detective Sergeant Kreeg, within six feet of Captain Wadsewski, did not relay to the precinct Chief the information he'd received from the weepy-eyed punk on the station steps.
No, thought Kreeg, years of frustration under the domination of men with fancy theories rising like sour vomit in his throat, No, Captain Wadsewski's plenty busy with the fire. I can handle that Cobra bunch and their whore too.
Quickly Kreeg slipped through the crowd. He talked to a man here, a man there. Olivetti, Monoghan, Esposito, others who lived too long under the intimidating shadow of Cobra domination. Carefully, so as not to arouse suspicions, certain men who together just happened to form a citizens vigilance committee returned to their tenements or their stores, leaving their wives and children to watch the blaze.
Half an hour later, armed with knives and meat cleavers and ball bats and automobile jacks, the mob slipped down a side street, thirty strong, Detective Sergeant Kreeg at their head.
His meaty face shone redly.
His .38 shone blue.