The Bait

by Dorothy Uhnak

  The sound was soft and sliding: a hesitant, tentative sound which ceased momentarily so that Christie, living there, the saliva in her mouth not swallowed, waited. She waited for a quick, soft voice of apology: Ferranti regretting the movement of his numbed leg, or Marty, mentioning a cramped foot, followed by Stoney’s angry grunt. But the silence now was completely intensified so that when the sliding sound began again, there was no question of its Origin and Christie felt her body, suddenly alive again, begin to fill with terrible pounding, stabbing sensations.

  She could visualize the sound: the raising of a body over the window sill, the slow and careful easing of a body into the bathtub, the feet hesitating, the hands extended, taking measure of the room, seeking the doorway. Christie moved carefully on the bed, her teeth clamped down at the sound of the bedsprings, and then she realized that she was not the one who had to maintain an absolute silence. She was the one who had to be present, by the movement of bedsprings, by the agonizingly controlled, steady, deep breathing of a sleeper, and she regulated her breath, hearing it fill the room with” a peaceful quiet rhythm, though her lungs felt as if they would explode if she didn’t suddenly fill them with a huge gasp of air.

  The feet were nearly silent, yet Christie could feel the weight of each step as though the feet were encased in lead boots, each step moving nearer, then stopping in the doorway from the bathroom. The absolute silence encompassed her, drew her into the center of a large, inescapable circle of loneliness, and no one existed in the room except Christie Opara and Murray Rogoff. The absolute silence had destroyed Bill Ferranti and Stoner Martin and Marty Ginsburg. Lying rigidly on her side, she was able to pick out the form of the man: huge, hesitant, seeking her, and it was only right that they were alone for she had known all along that she would have to face him out: alone.

  Christie saw Rogoff more surely, more certainly, more clearly in that one split-instant of recognition than she had ever seen anyone before in her lifetime, yet her breath continued in and out, softly and without variation, untouched by the stark, pure stab of terror that raced through every part of her body.

  “Christie, Christie Opara,” the telephone voice called. She heard, as she had not heard in all the nights past when that voice had chanted into her ear, a sound so desolate and empty that all sense of time and place left her and the cold, technical words of a medical report were translated within her brain to the suddenly deformed and frightened boy of sixteen who stood beside her, asking for her help. She felt her hand reach up, felt her fingers make contact with cold and smooth flesh but her gesture had no more reality than a dream.

  The abrupt flooding of the room with yellow light and sound and cries and screams and bursts of explosion took her by surprise as though it had all been unanticipated.

  She heard the voice, simultaneous with the yellow light, “Duck, Christie!” yet she could not have said whose voice it was that had propelled her off the bed. Her body hit the floor, worked its way immediately under the bed. Whose voice had shouted, “Police!” “Christ! He’s got a knife!” “Drop it!”? There was a tangle of voices and sounds, all unfamiliar, crying out at once or in sequence, she couldn’t say, all tangled around the other sounds, louder than she had ever heard, yet no louder than the words or the shriek of agony, some nightmare animal voicing unbearable pain, followed by a heavy thud of something coming to rest beside her own body, to share her refuge.

  Christie was not aware that her face was pressed into the palms of her hands until she felt something—someone—leaning against her elbow; and then, lifting her face, her eyes were engaged directly by the strange staring eyes which held her with an incredible emptiness, hypnotizing her with their unblinking demands, and her body could not respond to the voices which called her name. She tried to kick away some hands that were reaching for her, pulling at her ankles, trying to drag her from the safety of her hiding place. Instinctively, she bent her knees so that the hands could not reach her and then, no longer able to bear those eyes which were filmed over and lifeless, Christie, in a surge of mindless terror, realized that she was trapped: the right side of her body wedged against the metal leg of the bed frame, the left side of her touching his face. Scraping her body against the hard and tearing metal on one side, but more aware of the contact her body made along the entire left side, Christie worked herself free, hands reached for her arms, her shoulders, pulled her to her knees, then roughly to her feet. Her eyes could see sharply now, no longer squinting against the yellow light.

  She stood, looking down, fascinated as the thick blood oozed back along Rogoff’s skull from a wound low in his forehead, working its way languidly like some gelid insect along the naked, yellow obscenity of his hooded head. Surrounding him in fantastically thick, bright puddles were the emanations of his other wounds, and Christie’s left hand, reaching across her mouth, was wet and heavy with slime and she regarded it curiously, not knowing where the blood had come from, for no part of her body felt torn and yet her mouth tasted the thick saltiness of blood and she could see that her shoulder, arm, torso, thigh, calf and sneaker were painted red as though by a wide and careless brush. She stood, waiting to feel the pain of rendered flesh but she felt nothing. Just a terrible, empty calmness.

  The room was filled by unexpected faces: Devereaux and O’Neill, and Stoney and Marty and Ferranti, all out of hiding, all plainly visible in the yellowish light and their voices ordering other faces away from the opened door of the room: a myriad of faces, looking, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, asking, staring, their eyes curiously bright; the Homicide men, standing over Rogoff, their faces professionally hard and interested. Then Casey Reardon, with Tom Dell cutting a path for him through the crowded hallway of unknown faces; stolid men who came, regarded the scene wordlessly, not touching the sprawled dead man, but noting the switchblade knife, opened and bloody in Rogoff’s right hand, the odd smashed glasses against one wall and the plaid cap, crushed beneath his large black leather shoe.

  Christie raised her left arm when Reardon told her to, offering it for his inspection, let him rip the sleeve of her shirt to her shoulder, let him push her along into the bathroom. She watched, fascinated, as the thick red blood thinned to the consistency of watercolor paint while Reardon kept sloshing cold water down the length of her arm. “It isn’t from you, thank God,” she heard him say, but his voice was unfamiliar and his face was unfamiliar and even his eyes, which tried to hold hers but for some reason could not, were unknown.

  A voice, not her own, told him, “I’m all right. I’m all right, just leave me alone!”

  Reardon, his hand on her shoulder, did not react or comment as she pulled free of his touch, but just asked her, “You want anything, Christie? Do you need anything—a drink maybe?”

  Christie stood rigidly straight, her lips pulling back into a tight and meaningless smile, her eyes narrowed on his. Slowly, deliberately, she raised her right arm, extending the untrembling fingers. “I am as steady as a rock, Mr. Reardon,” but curiously, she felt no satisfaction. He left her alone in the bathroom then, and she could not understand her anger or why it was directed at him.

  In what sequence they all arrived, Christie could not determine, but the room was taken over by all of those people who have a part in these things, each moving independently of all the others, intent only upon his particular segment of the event. Christie moved closer into the tight little circle that formed in one corner of the room: the circle consisting of Bill Ferranti, Stoner Martin and Marty Ginsburg. Christie, looking at first one face and then the other, was struck by the similarity: each of them seemed washed in a kind of grayness around the lips, which had gone dry as her own lips had, down the nostrils, along the cheeks. Reardon brought some large, expressionless man over to them and he shook hands with each of them, a hard grasp and a quick release, his tiny granite eyes digging at each of them in turn, his bloodless lips telling them they had done a good job. He was brass, but Christie didn’t know who, just that he was brass: that much anyo
ne could tell.

  The doctor came into the room followed by a hospital attendant. He examined Christie’s arm, glanced at her accusingly when he discovered the blood that covered her did not come from her own veins. She wrenched away from him, not wanting to be touched.

  Marty Ginsburg extended his right arm, letting Stoney remove his shirt. The paleness spread along Marty’s forehead when the doctor swabbed his arm with a large wad of cotton: the blood running down Marty Ginsburg’s clothes was from a long, deep cut which started from a point just inside his right elbow and terminated an inch or so short of his wrist.

  “But I don’t feel nothing,” Marty said in wonder, touching his opened flesh, “I just don’t feel it.”

  “You will,” the doctor said pleasantly, “when the shock wears off, brother, you will.”

  Ferranti knew the blood just under his jaw was from a small deep wound and he held a wet handkerchief against the cut until the doctor finished his temporary bandaging of Marty.

  “At least twenty stiches for that one,” the doctor said, then smiling, “he doesn’t feel it: boy, he will tomorrow. And now, you, what have you got here?” Leaning his head back, the short doctor squinted at Ferranti. “Ah, yes, lucky cut this one. A little to one side and it would have been the jugular vein and then we’d have two for the bag boys.”

  Stoney, uncut, unwounded, stood beside her, watching. His hand clung to her arm and she could feel the hard kneading pressure of his fingers, keeping her in the room, though her eyes would not follow his, would not look, as everyone else was looking, at the large, lifeless hulk of Murray Rogoff.

  The door opened again and Christie turned, seeing the men being admitted, press cards pinned on summer shirts, stuck in hatbands or nonchalantly flashed then put back into a pocket. Reardon backed them into the kitchen alcove, warning them not to touch anything, and their eyes remained on Christie, all their questions directed at her presence in the room, and they grinned, excited by the dark blood down her side. Reardon held them back with a gesture, came to her side.

  “Daily News and Post. They want your picture.” His hand straightened her hair lightly. “Look, you don’t have to.”

  She bit her lip, then pushed it out. “Whatever you say, Mr. Reardon.”

  There was just a smile, not the hard familiar smile, just a smile and his hand pressed hers, leading her to the kitchenette. “Just a couple, fellows, then let her alone; my people have had a rough night.”

  The reporters directed her, told her how to stand, where to look, pointed at Stoney and Marty and Bill, but mostly the photographers wanted to get a good shot of her: of the side with the blood, and their hard professional voices kept positioning her. Christie looked right through them coldly. The lingering circles of bright haze dulled out all the details of the room as the lights popped at her face. They moved away, finished with her now, aiming at Rogoff, whose eyes would not be bothered by the torturous lights.

  A scrawny, wiry boy with a blade sharp nose and almost no lips grasped her arm. “Look, Christie, baby, hop up on the refrigerator, will you, and turn kind of sideways so I can get a good shot of your leg. Let’s cheese it up a little!” She thrust his hand from her, meeting his surprised stare; she pulled her lips back and her voice—her own now, low and harsh—threw the words at him, “Keep your hands off me!”

  The photographer’s face, knowing and shrewd and older than his years, watched her. “Come on, sweetie, don’t give me any of that crap! Your boss said we can take pictures, so just make like a good kid and pose.”

  Christie’s eyes hardened and she whispered fiercely, “Get lost, junior, right now!” He turned his back on her in disgust and began edging closer to the dead body only to be turned away by Devereaux and O’Neill who, as Homicide men, had priority and were protecting the corpse until their superior officers, were finished with their observations.

  She walked down the long hallway, past the people, who pointed and nodded and commented, not seeing them, not hearing them. She felt a strange unreality now: as though the only reality had been back there, in that room, where Rogoff lay dead.

  They all rode in the ambulance and when they arrived at the Emergency Ward, Ferranti couldn’t put any weight on his right ankle and he leaned heavily on Stoney’s arm until the attendant brought a wheelchair: he had twisted his ankle when he had lunged at Rogoff and now the swelling was so extensive that the intern had to cut the sock from his foot.

  Christie waited in the Emergency Reception Room while Marty was being stitched up and Ferranti was being sewed and X-rayed. Stoney made the telephone calls to the wives of both men. She was relieved that they hadn’t asked her to do it: her voice would have sounded so flat and emotionless they would have been sure the injuries were fatal. Christie called Nora, stated the facts tersely, her voice even and calm and Nora hadn’t pressed her, didn’t ask anything except, “Are you all right, Christie?” and she had replied, “Yes.”

  Stoney appeared with two containers of black coffee and she drank the bitter hot liquid, feeling it burn through her without stimulation of any kind. She accepted the cigarette he held out to her. He cupped the match over his own cigarette, regarding it curiously. “Damnedest thing,” he said, “I had a butt dangling in my mouth the whole time, drawing on it like it was lit, and you know, Christie, when it hit the fan, when everything popped, all that time, that cigarette just kept clinging to my mouth like it was part of me.” He smiled without humor. “Casey took it from my mouth when he came into the room. I didn’t even know it was there.” They sat in silence, each caught up in the sequence of events.

  It was past one A.M. when Reardon arrived at the hospital. Assured that none of his people had been sedated yet, he instructed the reluctant supervising nurse to wheel Ferranti into Ginsburg’s room which she agreed to do after a long, hard and revealing study of Reardon’s face.

  Reardon herded Mrs. Ferranti and Mrs. Ginsburg into the hallway, reassured them that their husbands would survive in good shape and reassured the men that their wives would be delivered safe and well to their homes by Tom Dell. He waved an almost child-sized man with a plump, disinterested face into the room along with Stoney and Christie, and wordlessly, the small man found a chair, which he pulled up close to Ginsburg’s bed. Carefully, he opened his little black leather case, pulled a tripod stand from somewhere inside the case, twirled a dial on a long roll of white paper, then, his fingers poised over the keys of his stenotype machine, for the first time he looked up, his eyes inquiringly on Reardon.

  “While it’s fresh in everyone’s mind,” Casey said, “let’s have a run down, beginning with Rogoff’s entrance into the apartment. I want to present this to the Grand Jury as quickly as possible.”

  And then, for the first time, each of them heard how it was; each told his own story and the bits of sound and light and shouting and cries fell into place, the voices now identified, the sudden sounds and words all having been emitted by individual human beings.

  Stoney had called out, “Police officers!”; Marty had spotted the knife, calling out, “Watch it!” as Stoney yelled, “He’s got a knife!” while Ferranti yelled, “Drop it.” It was at Marty that Rogoff lunged and Marty, still not feeling pain, fingered the clean white bandage down the length of his arm. “You’d think with a cut that long—twenty-two stitches—I would have felt something.”

  Ferranti had seized the powerful arm, trying to wrench the knife free from the unrelenting hand and Ferranti had felt his own wound with more surprise than pain.

  “I think I fired first,” Stoney said thoughtfully, turning his eyes to Bill.

  “I think I caught him in the forehead,” Bill said softly, remembering now the startled expression and then the spasmodic twisting of the body.

  “I got two off,” Marty said. “But I’m not sure if I bit him.”

  “I hit him,” Stoney said. “In the chest.”

  Reardon signaled the stenotypist, and expressionless, he rolled up his paper, slid the legs back
into their hiding place, shut his case, snapped the lock, nodded at no one in particular and left the room.

  “Hey, there, Christie,” Stoney said, smiling now, “why the heck did you nearly kick my head off? Don’t go blank on me: I was just trying to get you out from under that bed.”

  Yes; she remembered now. Hands reaching for her, pulling at her. She shrugged and her shoulders felt very heavy. “I don’t know, Stoney; just ... I just had to get out of there face first, I guess.”

  His hand ran across his forehead, searching for a bruise. “Any lumps there, Mr. Reardon? That girl has a wicked karate kick.”

  Reardon was watching her; she knew that. Leaning over Stoney, making his light remarks, he was watching her, as he had been all during the telling of it, but she would not look at him and she didn’t know why: maybe because she didn’t want him to see whatever it was he was looking for.

  Finally, firmly, the supervising nurse came in, stood her ground flatly, crackling with starch and rightful authority. “These men must rest now.” She held up two little paper cups, jiggling them so Casey could hear the pills inside. “I have orders to give each of them a sleeping pill and this one”—her eyes accusingly on Ferranti—“must go back to his assigned room.”

  Casey stood up, grinned, bowed his head slightly at the surprised woman who was fully prepared to do. battle. “Yes ma’am,” he said pleasantly, “you’re in charge.” He winked at the bedded men, his eyes wandering over the square heavy shape of the nurse. “Sleep good, boys, and don’t give the nurse any trouble. They act up in any way, ma’am, you let me know.”

  The nurse ignored him, busily poured water into a tumbler and watched sharply so that Marty couldn’t hide the pill in his cheek. Following Casey, Christie and Stoney both turned for a moment, both looked at their partners in a special way, nodding, wordlessly accepting the responding nods.

  “You guys have anything to eat lately?” Reardon asked them in the hallway.