Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

“I seen her come in, an’ then I seen her go out, before you come to th’ dance.” The Beast mumbled scratchily. His voice was like a rusted saw laboring through tough wood. He stumbled over words and many of his sounds were mere suggestion. But the words were the right words.

“ ’N’ then she come back again, y’know, an’ when she left, I was outside lookin’ fer some beer what they might’ve left inna cans they t’rew outside, y’know, an’ I saw’r with a guy inna long coat…”

And then the dummy gave a remarkably lucid description of a camel’s hair coat.

rusty santoro

mirsky

miss elements

pops santoro

Rusty had not been to bed. The week’s sweat had dried on him and he felt filthy inside and out. The memories of the weekend were a jumbled, kaleidoscopic horror. The stand with Candle, the dance and the drag back to the old ways, the rumble and jail overnight—staggeringly terrible in terrible gray and steel—and then Dolores. The terrible wallop in the head of her death, like that, that way, in an alley. Then Moms and the trouble with the Cougars. And the first word about what had happened in the darkness back there, behind Tom-Tom’s malt shop. The word about the man in the camel’s hair coat. It was all too much.

Rusty had gone home and Mrs. Givens had still been there, hunched over in the big armchair, shrouded in darkness, only the black, scuffed tips of her shoes showing from shadow, in the reflected light from a streetlamp outside.

He had sent her away, telling her he would watch. She had asked him nothing, not where he had been, or what he had found out, nothing about Dolores or the word from the street. She merely nodded at his words and left silently, like some velvet-furred animal.

Rusty had sunk down into the armchair and summer night had gone by in remote noise from crosstown, and mugginess. Now with the faint gray wash of dawn slipping down the buildings, he met the day with a desperation and determination to find that man in the camel’s hair coat. Somehow, some way. And kill him.

The past had forged strong chains, not easily broken.

The buses ground past downstairs, and the sounds of the city awakening climbed higher and higher, like a generator warming up. Rusty sat immobile, thinking.

No one in Cougar turf wore a camel’s hair coat. That wasn’t sharp; black leather jackets, chino slacks, stomping boots, Sam Browne belts with razor-sharp buckles, duck-fanny haircuts, but no camel’s hair coats.

That was downtown stuff. Straight down the main line.

Rusty could not quite grasp the sense of that. What was a downtown hooker doing here in Cougar turf and why should someone like that kill his sister? Why should she be raped like that? The answer popped in sickeningly. Dolores had been an attractive girl, that was reason enough.

Rusty had seen enough of the streets to know the score. Sense, there was none. The blood that filled the manholes to the tops came from sick minds and fast action. There was no reason and no end to it, of course, so Dolores was dead, and there was nothing more to say after that. Except the man in the camel’s hair coat would die, naturally. That was the way of it.

But how to go about it?

There were still two problems, or rather, two untied ends, aside from the one final end that would be tied with a knife. What was the camel’s hair coat doing in Cougar turf and why had the gang clammed up so tightly? It had become apparent after a few minutes with them that the Cougars were quiet for a good reason and one a lot stronger than merely “the code.” There was something back there, but Rusty did not know what it was, what it meant, how it tied in. This was far out of his depth. He had no idea where to start, how to begin to find a murderer.

It was a far different thing, this hollow hungry killing need to find the man and punish him. A far different thing than bludgeoning his way through a rumble, or knife-gutting a rock who had offended him. They were in two different classes, and Rusty felt like a fly on flypaper, trapped and helpless.

But there had to be a way. There had to be a way because more than God, or Earth, or Life, or any goddamn thing he wanted his hands soaked in the blood of the man who had raped Dolores. Rusty Santoro, seventeen years old, and crying warm inside, sat tensed in the big armchair and swore he would find the man. There was nothing, nothing at all, for him, if that was not done. He sat back and started to figure—hard.

Mrs. Givens came in at eight o’clock and prepared a hot breakfast for Rusty. He slapped his spoon at the thick oatmeal. He toyed with and broke the toast. He ran a finger around the moist, beaded lip of the glass of milk. He did not touch a thing and when Mrs. Givens went into the bedroom to see how Moms was resting, he slipped out the front door.

He carried the big switchblade in his jacket pocket.

School was where he headed, down the street to the subway. But he never made it. Somehow, his feet led him away, far away from the subway and toward the line dividing Cougar turf from Cherokee territory. Rusty had decided something. Somewhere in their silence, in the fact of the Cherokee rumble at the dance, in the whole tangled web of it all, there was a hookup between the Cougars, the Cherokees, Dolores’ death and the man he sought. What it was, he did not know, nor how it was constructed, but there was a dragging in him that led him toward Cherokee turf. There was a hookup and it seemed he would have to knuckle down in enemy turf to find the answer; to find the next bit of path that led to the man in the camel’s hair coat.

He invaded Cherokee turf shortly before nine o’clock Tuesday morning, cold-eyed and searching. It was quiet, gang quiet, with the kids in school, but there was always the subterranean murmur of rumbles. The whispers were there, if you listened closely enough and if you could decipher the animal intensities that gave them meaning. Rusty was looking for a pigeon.

Looking that way, looking that hard, he was bound to succeed. It was like looking for trouble. Look long enough, turn over enough rocks with a rude kick and eventually a trouble came forth. That was the way of it. Seek and you shall find. A pigeon.

Finally, he got the word from a tailor deep in Cherokee turf—a little man with a hare lip who wore a satin-backed vest and who feared for his front window. He gave Rusty the second clue to the track. He directed the boy to a garage it was healthy for citizens to avoid, where the Cherokees spent their evenings shearing down cams, trimming away chrome, souping up their heaps.

Rusty asked the little tailor where a gun could be purchased in Cherokee land. The tailor did not know. He was lying, but Rusty had no stomach for the tactics which would persuade the man to tell him.

He hit for the garage.

It was a gaping hole in a line of apartment buildings. The street was run-down. The houses had once been stately brown-stones, but refugee owners had divided each apartment into dozens of minor one-room closets and had rented them to Puerto Ricans, fresh to New York. It was a dirty, noisy street with cardboard milk cartons crushed flat in the gutters, battered garbage cans on the sidewalks and obscenities chalked on pavements and walls. Laundry hung from windows. The smell was oregano and some sweet, the odor of cigarettes and pine cleanser fighting a losing battle with dirt-caked corners. It was a depressing street. It was all too familiar to Rusty. It was typical.

The garage was open-faced amid these buildings, with a big red sign announcing rates per hour, day and week, and the name TINY’S GARAGE STORAGE. Rusty walked up the sloping walk into the dimmer, cooler interior and almost immediately saw the rodent.