Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

“Jing... jing... jing.”

I was flamingly erect in the tick of an instant.

“Oh, mon Dieu,” Dominique whispered.

Whispered those words in that rumbling sleeping compartment, on that train hurtling through the night, speeding us southward and away from all possible harm, lurching through the darkness, causing us to lose our balance so that we fell still locked in embrace onto the bed that was Dominique’s, holding her tight in my arms, kissing her forehead and her cheeks and her nose and her lips and her neck and her shoulders and her breasts as she whispered over and over again, “Oh, mon Dieu, oh, mon Dieu, oh mon Dieu.”

We brought to the act of love a steamy clumsiness composed of legs and arms and hips and noses and chins in constant collision. The train, the track, seemed maliciously intent on hurling us out of bed and out of embrace. We jostled and jiggled on that thin mattress, juggling passion, sweating in each other’s arms as we struggled to maintain purchase. “Ow!” she said as my elbow poked her in the ribs. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and then “Ooops!” because I was sliding out of her. She adjusted her hips, lifting them, deeply enclosing me again but almost knocking me off her in the bargain because the train in that very instant decided to run over an imperfection on the track which together with the motion of her ascending hips sent me soaring ceilingward. The only thing that kept me in her and on her was the cunning interlocking design of our separate parts.

We learned quickly enough.

Although, in retrospect, the train did all the work and we were merely willing accomplices.

Up and down the train went, rocketing through the night, in and out of tunnels the train went, rocketing through the night, side to side the train rocked, rattling through the night, up and down, in and out, side to side, the train thrust against the night, tottering the darkness with a single searing eye, scattering all before it helter-skelter. Helpless in the grip of this relentless fucking machine, we screamed at last aloud and together, waking the hall porter in the corridor, who screamed himself as though he’d heard shrieks of bloody murder.

And then we lay enfolded in each other’s arms and talked. We scarcely knew each other, except intimately, and had never really talked seriously. So now we talked about things, that were enormously important to us. Like our favorite colors. Or our favorite times of the year. Or our favorite ice-cream flavors. Or our favorite songs and movies. Our dreams. Our ambitions.

I told her I loved her.

I told her I would do anything in the world for her.

“Would you kill someone for me?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said at once.

She nodded.

“I knew you were watching me undress,” she said. “I knew you were looking at my reflection in the window. I found that very exciting.”

“So did I.”

“And getting bounced all around while you were inside me, that was very exciting too.”

“Yes.”

“I wish you were inside me now,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Bouncing around inside me.”

“Yes.”

“That big thing inside me again,” she said, and leaned over me and kissed me on the mouth.

Vinnie had bad news when I called home that Saturday.

On Friday afternoon, while Dominique and I were on the train heading south, two men accosted my grandmother as she came out of her Fourteenth Street shop.

“In the car, Grandma,” the skinny one said.

He was the one with the crazy eyes.

That’s the way my grandmother later described him to Vinnie.

“He had crazy eyes,” she said. “And a knife.”

The fat one was behind the wheel of the car. My grandmother described the car as a two-door blue Jewett coach. All three of them sat up front. The fat one driving, my grandmother in the middle, and the skinny one on her right. What the skinny one did, he put the knife under her chin and told her if You-Know-Who did not come back to face the music, the next time he would be looking in at her tonsils, did she catch his drift?

My grandmother caught his drift, all right.

They let her out of the car on Avenue B and East Fourth Street, right near the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church. She ran in terror all the way home. Vinnie grabbed a baseball bat and went looking for Fat and Skinny in the streets. He could not find them, nor did he see a single Jewett coach anywhere in the entire 9th Precinct.

“So what do you think?” he asked me on the phone.

“I think I’ll have to kill him,” I said.

“Who?”

“Legs Diamond.”

There was a long silence.

“Vinnie,” I said, “did you hear me?”

“I heard you,” he said. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Richie.”

The wires between us crackled; we were a long way away from each other.

“Vinnie,” I said, “I can’t hide from this man forever.”

“He’ll grow tired of hounding you,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so. He has a lot of people who can do the hounding for him. It’s no trouble at all for him, really.”

“Richie, listen to me.”

“Yes, Vinnie, I’m listening.”

“What do you want from life, Richie?”

“I want to marry Dominique,” I said. “And I want to have children with her.”

“Ah,” he said.

“And I want to live in a house with a white picket fence around it.”

“Yes,” he said. “And that’s why you mustn’t kill this man.”

“No,” I said, “that’s why I must kill this man. Because otherwise...”

“Richie, it’s not easy to kill someone.”

“I’ve seen a lot of people killing a lot of people, Vinnie. It looked easy to me.”

“In a war, yes. But unless you’re in a war, it’s not so easy to kill someone. Have you ever killed anyone, Richie?”

“No.”

“In a war, it’s easy,” he said. “Everyone is shooting at everyone else, so if your bullet doesn’t happen to kill anyone, it doesn’t matter. Someone else’s bullet will. But killing somebody in a war isn’t murder, Richie. That’s the first thing a soldier learns; killing someone in a war isn’t murder. Because when everyone is killing someone, then no one is killing anyone .”

“Well...”

“Don’t ‘well’ me, just listen to me. Killing Legs Diamond will be murder. Are you ready to do murder, Richie?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I love Dominique. And if I don’t kill him, he’ll hurt her.”

“Look... let me ask around, okay?” Vinnie said.

“Ask around?”

“Here and there. Meanwhile, don’t do anything foolish.”

“Vinnie?” I said. “I know where he is. It’s in all the newspapers.”

I heard a sigh on the other end of the line.

“He’s in Troy, New York. They’re putting him on trial for kidnapping some kid up there.”

“Richie...”

“I think I’d better go up to Troy, Vinnie.”

“No, Richie,” he said. “Don’t.”

There was another long silence on the line.

“I didn’t think it would end this way, Vinnie,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to end this way.”

“I thought...”

“What did you think, Richie?”

“I never thought it would get down to killing him. Running from him was one thing, but killing him...”

“It doesn’t have to get down to that,” Vinnie said.

“It does,” I said. “It does.”

Five hours and thirty-one minutes after the jury began deliberating the case, Legs Diamond was found innocent of all charges against him.

When he and his entourage came out of the courthouse that night, Dominique and I were waiting in a car parked across the street. We were both dressed identically. Long black men’s overcoats, black gloves, pearl-gray fedoras.