A Matter of Conviction

He grinned, and then he remembered the silent phone call, and the grin dropped from his mouth. In the street outside, the buildings of justice had closed their faces for the night. An occasional light burned like an unblinking eye in the otherwise gray façades of the buildings. The streets, thronged with counselors and clerks and offenders and witnesses during the daytime, were almost empty at this hour. He glanced at his watch. Nine-ten. With luck, he’d be home before ten o’clock. A nightcap with Karin, outdoors perhaps, and then to bed. It was a beautiful balmy night, and the night stirred something deep inside him, a memory impulse leaping into vague restless prominence. He could not pinpoint the memory, but he felt very young all at once, and he knew the memory was connected with his youth, the smell of a summer night, the giant black arc overhead dotted with swarming stars, the sound of the city all around him, the myriad sounds gathering and rising to become the sound that only a city possessed, the heartbeat of a metropolis. It was a night to drive along the West Side Highway with the top of a convertible down and the jewel lights of the city gleaming in the sky, reflecting on the waters of the Hudson. It was a night for listening to “Laura,” a night designed to show man that romance was a very real thing which had nothing whatever to do with the daily grind of the rat race.

He was unconsciously smiling when he entered City Hall Park. His step, too, was lighter, and his shoulders were back and his head was erect and he felt as if he owned the city of New York. Lock, stock, and barrel, the city was his, a giant wonderland of peaks and minarets and soaring towers designed for his pleasure alone. He hated this city, but, by God, it sang in his blood, it roared there like the intricate tonality of a Bach fugue, it was his city, and he was a part of it, and as he walked beneath the spreading leaf canopy of the park trees he felt as if he were merging with the concrete and the asphalt and the steel and the blazing tungsten, as if he were truly the city personified, and he knew for a fleeting instant how Frankie Anarilles felt when he walked the streets of Spanish Harlem.

And then he saw the boys.

There were eight of them, and they sat on two benches flanking either side of the path which wound through the small park. The lampposts along the path, he noticed, had either gone out accidentally or been put out. In any case, the benches upon which the boys sat were in total darkness and he could not see the boys’ faces. The area of blackness, intensified by the high covering arch of the heavily laden trees, spread for at least fifty feet along the path. The darkness began not ten feet ahead of him.

He hesitated.

His stride broke, and he remembered the telephone call — “Mr. Bell?” — and then the silence, and he wondered if that call had been made to ascertain the fact that he was still in the office. There were two detectives assigned to his home in Inwood, but... Suddenly he was frightened.

The boys sat motionless on the benches. Silently, like wax figures shrouded in impenetrable darkness, they sat and waited.

He decided to turn and walk out of the park.

And then he decided he was being foolish. There was nothing ominous about a group of young kids sitting in a park in the middle of a city. For God’s sake, there were probably a thousand policemen cruising the area! His right foot touched the patch of darkness on the path, moved into it, followed by his left, and then his right again, and then the darkness was everywhere around him as he approached the benches and their silent cargo, the fear returning in him with alarming suddenness.

The boys sat quietly. There was no talking — hardly any breathing, it seemed to him — as he passed between the two benches looking neither to the left nor the right, neither acknowledging their presence nor denying it.

The attack came swiftly, surprisingly because, if anything, he expected a punch to be hurled, but instead something lashed across his chest, something hard and sinuous, something alive with fury. He balled his fists and turned to the first attacker, but the same live terror leaped out of the darkness at his back, and he heard the rattle of metal, the sound of chains, chains? can it be they’re using? and then he felt the sharp snap of metal across his face, and now there was no doubt that the weapons in the hands of these eight boys were tire chains, skid chains, spiked with metal prongs to catch at the snow, wielded with surprising deftness and agility.

He threw a punch at a shadowy figure and someone grunted in pain, and then from behind him another of the skid chains whipped at his legs and he felt raw pain rocket up his spine to explode inside his skull. Another of the flailing chains whipped across his chest, and he seized at it with his hands, pulling at it, feeling the ripping of his flesh as his hands tore across the metal prongs.