Ceremony (17 page)

Hal looked at Hawk. "Hey, man," he said. "Be smart. There's some bread to be made here."

Hawk grinned. Without taking his eyes off Vince he said to me, "Hear that 'Hey, man? This a soul brother -see how he know how to talk to us darkies? He say 'Hey, man' and he say 'bread.' ' Hawk stretched the bread out in a burlesque jive accent.

The diplomat raised his hands. "Hey, no offense. Black, white, makes no difference to me. There's a lot of money involved here. I'm talking about giving you guys apiece of it." Poitras was motionless in all this. Amy had put her canapds aside and taken his left hand. She held it in her lap with both of hers.

I said, "April. You don't have a choice. Go with Susan or we'll take you. Amy, you can go or stay."

Still without looking up, Amy said in a voice as small as her prospects, "Stay." There was something almost touching about the ugly fat man sitting there in his Thom McAn shoes with a little kid holding his hand and refusing to leave. Love? A turkey like that? Someone loved him? I shook my head.

"Go ahead, April," I said. I was beginning to feel tight inside. I'd been in here too long with the bizarre sexuality and the affectless children and the ugly men. There was force in my voice. April nodded.

She said, "Bye, Amy," and walked out the door. Susan went with her.

I said to Poitras, "There is a gentleman of some influence whose name we won't mention. He has offices in the South End and you served him as a supplier of youthful whores."

Poitras said, "I don't know what you're talking about." But there was no bite in his growl now. He was scared.

"Yeah you do. This gentleman has asked me to remind you that no mention be made of his name or his relationship to you. He says that some really dire things will happen to you if he gets involved."

Hawk glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. "Dire?" he said.

“I was dean's list once in school," I said.

“I can tell."

I said to Poitras, "You understand what I told you?" He nodded.

"I got a deal with this gentleman," I said. "So I want to be sure."

"I won't say nothing. I know what'd happen," Poitras said. I could barely hear him. His growl had become a mumble. Amy clutched his hand in both hers, rubbing it with the thumb of her top hand.

I looked around the lab. No phone. There was one in the office below. "Last chance, Amy. I'm going to call the fuzz."

She shook her head. I said to Hawk, "Think you'll be safe here without me?"

"I can always scream," he said.

Through the door to the lab I heard some commotion sounds from downstairs; then I heard Susan's voice.

She yelled, "Spenser," and there was a sound in her yell I'd not heard from her before. She was scared. I headed across the room. Hawk looked at me and then at Poitras and his group.

"Fuck them," he said. "Where they going -to go?"

As I pounded down the stairs he was right behind me. There was no one on the second floor. And as I rounded the landing and headed toward the first I saw Susan in the middle of a crowd of men and girls.

April was separated from her by a man wearing dark glasses. His shirt was open nearly to the waist and there was a bright smear of lipstick across the right side of his mouth.

"She's trying to kidnap me," April was yelling. "She's trying to take me away. Help me."

Susan is never graceless and rarely stupid. She made no attempt to argue. Instead she pushed the man in front of her and took hold of April. The man with the shades objected.

"Who you shoving, baby?" he said, and grabbed Susan by the upper arms.

I was three steps from the bottom when he gasped with pain and doubled forward. His hands slid from Susan's arms.

April yelled, "Help me, please help me."

The crowd closed around Susan and I hit the bottom stair and started to throw bodies out of the way. Someone punched me on the side of the face and I flailed out with an elbow and shoved somebody else's face and I was beside Susan. Somebody tried to bite my upper arm. I lunged my shoulder into them and they stopped.

"Never mind April," I said to Susan. "Get out of here and call McNeely in vice."

A young woman climbed on my back with her hands scratching at my face. I reached up and pulled her face forward with my left hand and when it was in sight I punched it with my right. Across the hall I saw Hawk pick someone up and ram him backward through the stair railing. The uprights splintered and the railing cracked in two. I jammed my way backward toward the front door, keeping Susan beside me. A fist hit my stomach, another hit me above the eye, and I could feel blood begin to flow. I kicked a groin. I smacked a gray mustache. There was a mass of bodies behind me. I spun. I whacked someone with my forearm, banged two heads together, and wedged me and Susan through the gap that formed when the two people fell. We were against the front door. I put my foot against someone's stomach and shoved, buttressing my back against the door. For a moment there was room. I opened the door and shoved Susan out. The door slammed shut behind her from the weight of thrashing people. Some were fighting. Some were trying to get away. Everyone was drunk and stupid and both and crazy with sex and dope and booze and music and heat and crowd. Vince, Hal's slugger, came charging down the stairs with Hal behind him. He tried to hit Hawk with a brass candlestick and missed, and Hawk hit him three times, his hands a mere blur in the maelstrom, and the slugger went down out of sight in the turmoil of men and girls. Someone tried to choke me. I brought my hands up together to break the grip and then chopped to the side of a neck, where it joined a shoulder. I stepped on someone that tried to bite my ankle, I punched someone in front of me. I half turned and drove my elbow into someone behind me. There was no gender anymore. I made no attempt to figure out if I was hitting men or girls. No sexist I. Someone half got me in the groin and I could feel that sick feeling that only men know, but it was a glancing blow and the feeling didn't get bad. Someone spit on me. Someone hit my shoulder with a hard object. I kneed a crotch and banged a nose. We had roiled through the hall and into the sunken living room, going down the three steps as if riding a wave. A small man with a goatee was picked up and thrown against the wall and I was beside Hawk. He moved as if he were dancing, with a kind of joyful and vicious rhythm. The sweat rolled down his face. His bald head gleamed. There was a cut on his cheek and blood mixed pinkish with the sweat. His arms swelled and relaxed inside the sleeves of his gray flannel jacket. As I jostled against him I could hear him still whistling through his teeth his soft private whistle: "Stars and Stripes Forever." A goddamned patriot. Somebody got a good shot into my jaw and my chimes rang for a minute. I hit back, and hit somebody else, and kicked at a kneecap. At my angle I could look into the hall, and as I, put my open hand on someone's yelling face and shoved, I saw Poitras and Amy standing on the stairs halfway down from the second floor, holding hands, looking in, uncertain and scared. I caught a wild roundhouse punch on my forearm and demonstrated a much better way on someone's chin. An ear flashed across my line of vision-I hammered it with the side of my left fist. Don't want to break your hand on a head. I felt slippery with sweat and a little drunk with the fumes and the contact and the way my blood pounded in my head. When I'd seen Susan in the mob there had been an adrenaline spurt enough to launch a space probe. It was carrying me now. Someone jumped at me and I caught it crotch and shirtfront and helped it on past me over my left shoulder. It smashed into two other people and all three went down. Other people stepped on them. Hawk hit two faces simultaneously, one with each hand and I realized he was punching unconsciously in time to his whistle. In a fight things slow down when you are really pumped up, and it all seems like a Sam Peckinpah movie with bodies floating around and blood flowing slowly. I felt loose and warmed up and full of oxygen. I had another cut now, I could taste the blood in my mouth. Not the nose, I thought. The nose had been broken maybe eight times. Maybe this time it would be something else. Somebody waded in toward us with a fireplace poker. He caught Hawk on the shoulder and I grabbed the end and yanked it away from him as Hawk hit him with the dark blur of his quick hands. Hawk had the fastest hands I'd ever seen. He could catch flies even in the summer when they were frisky. A wineglass broke against the wall behind me and I hit an open mouth with two excellent left hooks. I could catch summer flies too, now that I thought of it. The press of the crowd was thinning. I was getting room to maneuver, to pull back and punch full out. Hawk and I had made progress. I drove my heel into an instep and my elbow into a throat. I took a step forward and landed a textbook overhand right and was rocked from behind by someone who hit me on the side of the head with something more than a fist. I turned, ducking as I turned, and saw a furled umbrella upraised and punched in under it and heard a groan and saw it skitter away on the floor as 1 turned back and caught someone's lunge with my open hands at chest level. I shoved him away and he stumbled back and smashed through the French doors. Cold air rushed in and I filled my lungs as I knocked someone's punch off with my right forearm and landed my left on a nose. The nose spurted blood. Better yours than mine.

And then it was over. Hawk and I stood in a small open space with people stumbling, or fallen, gasping for breath and bleeding, in a circle around us. Men and girls with clothing torn, blood-spattered, and sweaty with an occasional splotch of vomit or spit spoiling a shirt, and the cold, clean air streaming in the broken French doors starting to dry the sweat that had even soaked through my jacket. I looked at Hawk. His jacket too was black with sweat across the back. Hawk looked at me and grinned. "You right, Mitchell sure do know how to throw a party."

"Lucky he doesn't have any strong friends," I said. "I might have got my nose broken."

"Who could tell?" Hawk said.

There was a loud pounding at the front door and at the same time four cops pushed through the broken French doors and pointed guns at everyone. McNeely had arrived.

The genie we'd let out of the bottle was a lot bigger than any of us were going to know for a long time. But sitting in Poitras's living room drinking Schlitz beer from a long-necked bottle, I knew my nose was whole. Hawk and I had washed up. And one of the prowl car cops had brought in a first-aid kit and patched us up. The cut inside my mouth would need a couple of stitches. There were a lot of bruises that would swell and discolor. But my nose was hale and intact. I stroked it with pleasure. The prowlie was putting a butterfly closure on a cut in Hawk's eyebrow.

"How's his nose?" I said. "Fine," he said.

"Oh." The cop looked over at me. "You sound disappointed," he said. Hawk said, "He five breaks ahead of me. He hoping I'd catch up."

Four plainclothes vice squad cops were busy hauling out incriminating evidence in cardboard cartons. Poitras was in the kitchen with McNeely and an assistant DA. They were explaining his rights to him. Amy refused to leave him and they had only brought one policewoman, and she was busy, and they didn't know what to do with her. So as they talked in the kitchen she sat beside him in a straight chair and patted his thigh.

The diplomat had vanished and so had the surlylooking man named Mickey that Hawk and I had thrown over the railing when we came in. But Vince was still around. He was just coming around now and he wasn't talking because his jaw was broken. April was gone. The other guests were in ragged clusters trying to get their attire straightened out-the vomit washed off, the blood wiped away. Trying to get their eyes focused and their brains reintegrated. There were three reporters and a news photographer there and the guests were avoiding them and covering their faces.

The policewoman said to the photographer, "Most of these girls are juveniles."

The photographer nodded and concentrated on the men. His strobe made small lightning flashes in the room. The assistant commissioner of education kept a handkerchief over his face and murmured to the vice cop who was taking his name that he was a friend of a city councilman. The cop nodded and asked to see his driver's license. The state rep kept asking to speak with McNeely and being told to sit down. "Lieutenant will get to you when he gets to you."

The state rep told the reporter that he'd be in touch with his editor and the reporter said, "Whyn't you get in touch with yourself." And the photographer snapped his picture.

McNeely came out of the kitchen and gestured one of the detectives in to watch Poitras. Or maybe to watch the assistant DA.

"You know the girl?" he said to me.

"Yes. Name's Amy Gurwitz."

"You know where she lives?"

"Here."

"She told me that. But hasn't she got parents or something?"

"Ask her," I said.

"I did ask her. What the fuck do you think I'm asking you for?"

I shrugged. Beyond him I could see her in the kitchen in her straight chair. She was still patting Poitras's knee. He had his head hanging forward and his shoulders slumped, slouched in the chair so that he was almost shapeless, his stomach covering most of his thighs as he sat. There was nothing left. He was shapeless with defeat.

"Love is a many-splendored thing, McNeely," I said. "She wants to stay with him."

"Don't lecture me about love, cowboy," McNeely said. “I got six kids. Where he's going she can't go."

"How about you haul her down to Charles Street?" I said.

"You know we don't put women in Charles Street," McNeely said. "Besides, she's a kid. Besides, she hasn't done anything that I know of. We got nothing to arrest her for." "She says she lives here?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Why don't you leave her here?"

McNeely spread his hands and looked around at the room with a look that encompassed the whole building. "She's sixteen years old," he said.

"You got a better idea?"

He looked around again. At the litter of bottles and cigarettes, pills, snack food ground into the carpet, people grouped in frightened huddles waiting for the trip to night court. He breathed the smell of booze and dope and sweat and vomit.