Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

He saw the Oldsmobile parked outside the bar, the lone car in the rain-swept lot. He opened the door of the bar, walked in, and stood dripping just inside the entrance. The bartender looked up at him. There was a cautious uneasiness to the bartender’s casual glance, as if he were steeling himself for a holdup. A glass of beer rested on the bar at the far end of the room. A telephone booth was pasted against the rear wall, alongside the men’s room. Larry began walking toward the booth.

“You want something, Mac?” the bartender asked.

Larry didn’t answer. He pushed open the door of the booth.

“... well, you’ve got to realize it’s not as easy as...” Felix was saying. He stopped talking when the door opened. He turned and looked up at Larry. “Just a second,” he said into the mouthpiece, and then covered it with his palm. “I’m on the phone, Larry.”

“Hang up.”

“What for?”

“Eve told me what happened,” Larry said tightly.

“Forget it,” Felix said. “I misjudged her. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t enough, Felix.”

“No?” Felix grinned. “I’d hate to have to tell Don Gault all about you and his—”

Larry reached into the booth, seizing the front of Felix’s shirt. He brought back his fist and then threw it at Felix’s mouth. Felix dropped the receiver. A thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his lips. Larry reached for him again, hitting him with his right fist, releasing his shirt and hitting him with his left fist, and then the right again, and then battering his face and his body with methodical precision, administering a coldly objective beating as Felix scrambled to escape the driving punches.

At last Larry shoved him into the booth, and Felix slumped against the rear wall, blinking, his lip bleeding, his right cheek streaming blood.

“Keep away from Eve,” Larry said.

He turned and started out of the bar. The bartender asked, “That guy do something?”

“Yes,” Larry answered, and the bartender nodded knowingly.

There were, by the next day, six people who knew that Felix had received a punitive beating.

Of the six who knew, the bartender was least concerned. A beating had been administered in his place of business. So what the hell? It was a quieter fight than most which took place in his bar. It could hardly be termed a fight at all, for that matter. He had led Felix to the men’s room, where he’d washed the blood from his face, and then Felix had gone home. By the next day the bartender had forgotten the fight completely.

It was not as easy for Felix to forget the beating.

To begin with, whereas the cut inside his mouth did not show, he had to explain the gashed cheek when he got home to Betty that night. He told her that some crazy bastard had hurled a beer bottle across the room and that the bottle had accidentally hit him. The man was obviously drunk and had been suddenly possessed of an urge to fling the bottle, not aiming at Felix and certainly not intending to hit him. As a matter of fact, Felix added tolerantly, the man had apologized profusely, when the incident was over, and had offered to take Felix to a doctor, which medical aid Felix had heroically refused.

Betty was properly sympathetic and properly indignant. She could not understand why a man drank in a bar — wasn’t his home a good enough place for drinking? But if he had to go to a bar, why did he choose a place where drunks threw around beer bottles? Fussily maternal, she had made him a purifying ice-cream soda with vanilla ice cream and Coca-Cola, and then they’d gone to bed. Felix lay awake half the night, thinking. By morning he had formulated an attitude and a course of action.

He admitted reluctantly that he had been wrong about Eve. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be had; there wasn’t a woman alive who couldn’t be had. It was simply that she couldn’t be had right now. His timing had been off, that was all. Nonetheless, he put Eve Cole out of his mind as a possible acquisition. He had violated one of his own tenets — “Never spit where you eat!” — when he’d approached her. The experience had been unsatisfactory and served to strengthen his own sound judgment regarding neighborhood philandering. Eve Cole, as far as Felix was concerned, was finished business.

On the other hand, Larry Cole stuck in his craw.

Felix had taken the beating, but even while the fists were pummeling him into the booth he’d been thinking, You won’t get away with this! He had lain awake the night before plotting his revenge. By morning, he realized that revenge, for the time being anyway, was impossible. Not only impossible but unthinkable. It annoyed him that instant reprisal was to be denied him. Larry Cole had behaved like an absolute ass. A man who was playing around had no right to get offended when a pass was made at his wife. Didn’t Larry know the elementary rules of the game? Immediate revenge against this rebel would have been delightful — but for now revenge was impossible.

For if Felix went to Don Gault, as was his first impulse, Larry would instantly know who had betrayed him. He might then divulge the story of the beating to Betty. Was a petty revenge worth the sacrifice of a way of life? Certainly not. Felix enjoyed his extramarital excursions. Should Betty learn about the Eve Cole incident, she might divorce him. Or, worse thought, he might become a prisoner in his own home. It simply wasn’t worth it, especially for something which had not paid off.

He wondered if Larry knew what powerful cards he was holding. And then a new, rather painfully amusing thought came to him. It occurred to him that should Don Gault, in any way whatever, tip to the affair, Larry would automatically assume Felix had been the informer. And believing that, there was again the danger that he would go to Betty in retaliation. The situation was a precarious one. Not only was Felix being forced to forego what would have been a delicious revenge, he was also being forced into the role of protector. Don Gault could not be allowed to find out about his wife and Larry. If he did, the repercussions would shake the very foundations of Felix’s home.

Felix Anders surveyed his new role sourly and reached the conclusion that it stank.

Someday, perhaps, he could strike back at Larry with impunity. But for now he could only hope that his blunders — like Banquo’s ghost — would not come back to haunt him.

It seemed coincidental but significant to Larry that the only two fist fights he’d had since he was twelve years old had both taken place in or around a phone booth and had both been in defense of a woman’s honor. When he was a boy, his mother had drummed her own peculiar brand of chivalry into him with the oft-repeated advice: “Never get into a fight over a girl.”

He had, in the past several months, got into two fights over two separate girls. One of those girls had been his wife. The concept was somehow amusing. Trudging back through the rain on the night of the beating, he had wanted to laugh aloud with the thought. He’d felt primitively, fiercely, instinctively protective of Eve when he’d left the house twenty minutes earlier. Now with his knuckles aching, with his clothes soaked, with the rain beating on his head in cold frenzy, he wanted to laugh to the skies. What the hell was so strange about defending your own wife? Wasn’t that what husbands were for? And yet it was strange and puzzling and amusing. Wanting to laugh, he walked through the rain feeling very heroic and very content and very baffled.

When he got back to the house, Eve was waiting for him. He was going to spare her the details of the fight, but she saw his swollen hands and torn knuckles, and she began to cry instantly. She went to the bathroom for boric acid and hot water and then, gently bathing his hands, she listened to the story. When he was finished, she took his hands from the water and kissed them. Her eyes were glowing. They made love that night the way they had not made love in a very long while.