Something grabbed the back of my neck and slammed the top of my head into the metal wall of mailboxes and I felt less pain than I ought to have felt and the light dimmed almost to black, but only almost.
Something hit me hard in the stomach and the air vanished from my lungs. Whatever siren had begun to sound was silenced with the vanished air.
With all the fighting instincts of a pill bug, I fell onto my side and curled into ball and felt the pain swarm through my body.
A foot stepped onto my face and ground it into the hard tile floor before lifting and slamming onto my hip. Before I could raise my head to get a glimpse behind me, a hand pressed itself onto the side of my face, pushing so hard upon my nose I couldn’t move my head either way. The breadth of my vision now encompassed only the line where the floor met the wall and two splayed fingers spreading across my face.
“You are trespassing,” came a near indecipherable hiss in my ear. “Trespassing on property where you don’t belong.”
I tried to say something but the hand pressed harder on my face and my nose bent further sideways and a different voice said, “Don’t speak until you are asked a question.”
My eye closest to the floor began to burn. One of the fingers had a ring on it, I could see that, golden and thick.
“Who are you working for?” said the first voice, the whisper so soft I could barely make it out.
I tried to say something but the hand on my face gurgled the sound.
“Answer the question,” said the second voice.
“I can’t.”
“Oh yes, you can,” hissed the first voice. “Most assuredly. You’ve stepped into our territory now. The past is off limits to you. It belongs to us, you are not welcome here. Our possession of it is open, hostile, exclusive, continuous, adverse, do you understand? The signs are up, the fence is electrified, the dogs are loose and they are hungry. One more step inside and you won’t survive.”
“Someone’s coming,” said the second voice.
“Why do you care about what happened twenty years ago?”
The hand pressed down harder, my eye burned fiercer. “Answer the question,” barked the second voice.
“Who are you working for?”
“We have to get out of here. Someone is coming.”
“Who?”
“Now.”
“Tell him we will find him,” came the first voice, the speaker so close now I felt his breath on my ear. “And if you persist we will deal with you like we deal with all trespassers. This is your requisite warning. There won’t be another.”
The hand pressed harder on my face, the foot lifted from my hip and stomped hard onto the side of my stomach.
I contracted my body into an even tighter curl and stifled my groans and felt my stomach heave as footsteps poured out of the vestibule and I was left alone with the pain and the nausea and the spill of my mail all about me.
Chapter 28
I WAS STILL on the vestibule floor when the Good Samaritans arrived. A man and a woman, they put their hands on me and raised me to a sitting position and inquired with calm voices as to my well-being.
“I’ve been better,” I said.
They told me I was bleeding from my head.
“At least no place important,” I said.
They asked me where I lived and I told them I lived in that very building and they offered to help me up the stairs so I could call the police and I told them I didn’t need any help but they insisted, like Good Samaritans will. I thanked them and let them scoop up my mail and let them hold on to my arms as I struggled to my feet and let them steady me as we climbed up the stairs to my apartment.
I dropped my jacket onto the floor and loosened my tie and stumbled into the bathroom to take a look at myself. The hair above my forehead was matted with blood, a trickle had slid down my temple, smeared into my right eye, dropped onto my white shirt. I rolled up my shirtsleeves, washed my face and hair clean. The water swirling down the drain was a sweet rosy pink.
When I came back to the living room the Good Samaritans were still there. They bade me sit upon the couch and I sat. The woman offered me a towel filled with ice cubes from my freezer and I took it and placed it upon the wound on the top of my head.
“Dude, let us look at the cut,” said the man, his voice hoarse and hearty.
I lifted the ice as the woman stepped toward me. She leaned into me, separated my hair with her fingers, bent forward to peer closely at the wound. She smelled of vanilla and spice, her gauzy shirt brushed my cheek.
“Nothing too serious,” she said. “You’ll live. What happened?”
“Just a mugging. They wanted my wallet. The money I didn’t mind, but I’m partial to the photograph on my license. It makes me look dangerously deranged, which is helpful in my racket. Did you see them?”
“Only from behind,” said the man. “They were running away. Two dudes. One older, the other taller.”
“Do you want us to call the police for you, Victor?” said the woman.
My chin lifted, my eyes opened wide. “How do you know my name?”
“From your mail,” said the man, quickly.
“How did you happen to be at my apartment building?”
“We were just walking,” said the man.
“We’re only trying to help,” said the woman. “Do you want us to call the police and report what happened?”
Through the fear and pain and sudden paranoia that had enveloped me, I peered more carefully at the two Samaritans standing in my apartment. The man was stocky, bearded, dressed for a motorcycle rally with a T-shirt, boots, denim vest. He wore a ponytail and was as hyperactive as a teenager, but the gray in his beard and lines around his pale blue eyes put him in his forties.
The woman was tall and thin, with long straight hair and bell-bottom jeans. She was older than me, but not by much. To get a sense of the state of my condition you need only know that just then was the first time I noticed how startlingly beautiful she was, with a narrow face and big brown Asian eyes that held a lovely sadness. It was a strange sight, the two of them, the woman, who could have been a model, and the motorcycle man, utter strangers, dressed as if the eighties and nineties had never happened, standing in my apartment, standing over me as I slumped on the couch, and it sent my already jagged nerves into a jig.
I looked at them for a moment longer and tried to think things through and failed. My head ached, my ribs hurt, I still felt pressure on my nose, yet even as I struggled through the pain to make sense of everything that had happened that night, one thing became clear, one thing shone with absolute certainty.
“No,” I said, finally. “Don’t call the police. It was just a spoiled mugging. They got nothing, so there’s nothing the police can do. But thank you for helping. I don’t know how long I would have lay there if you hadn’t come along.”
“We were glad we could help,” said the woman. “Do you want something to drink?”
“Yeah, sure. That would be great. There are beers in the fridge. Why don’t you take out three?”
“Dude,” said the man.
His name was Lonnie. Her name was Chelsea. He fixed motorcycles in a small shop he owned in Queens Village. She worked in an insurance office. They were just old friends, out for a walk, and I liked them, I liked them both. Lonnie was jittery and funny and his eyes were bright. Chelsea was like an ocean of calm, sitting lovely and straight in her chair, her long legs together, her hands in her lap. When I told them I was a lawyer they groaned good-naturedly, but she started asking me questions about her landlord. And then, watching them carefully, and without mentioning any names, I told them about what happened to Joey Cheaps and about the deposition of Derek Manley and about the crime that was committed twenty years ago. I told it well, used my jury skills to keep it dramatic, stretched it out, watched the reactions. Lonnie leaned forward as I did the telling, his knee bouncing. Chelsea kept glancing at Lonnie.