Into the Night

Then before she knew what was coming, he swung the flat of his hand around at her and gave her a terrific slap that covered one whole half of her face from eyebrow to jawline. The pain of it wasn’t as bad as the force, or at least she had no time to experience it; she went back onto the cot, shoulders prone, rolled over once in a complete body turn, and landed on the floor at the foot of it, but with one arm out to break her fall.

She saw him pick up the monkey wrench from the floor where she’d thrown it before, and for a moment thought he was going to attack her with it, but before she could have moved or done anything to defend herself, other than just draw her legs defensively in underneath her, he turned and went the other way with it, and banged the standpipe, not just once but three or four times in urgent succession.

Then he flung it away from him, and settled onto a chair, head bowed down and held in both hands. Not from pain, from remorse.

The room was quiet by the time the half-running footsteps came along the passage outside and a key started to work in the door. Neither of them had moved. They were both emotionally exhausted. They weren’t even looking at each other anymore.

A heavily built man with a shock of yellow-white hair came in. He had a massive neck, arms, and shoulders, and a sizable paunch under his blue denim work shirt. He had on a pair of peculiarly shaped glasses — they were either square or octagonal — that gave him an oddly benign, homespun appearance.

“What happened down here?” he demanded. “Vern, what have you been up to down here?”

“It’s over,” the man on the chair said apathetically.

The older man came over and stood looking down at Madeline. “What did he do to you?” he said. “The whole side of your face is red.”

“He slapped me,” she said, and began to cry from pent-up tension. “No man ever slapped me before in my life. Even my own father never slapped me.”

“What took you so long?” the man on the chair said accusingly.

“I was up on the roof, doing a yob,” the superintendent said.

He helped Madeline to her feet and brushed off the back of her dress with a heavy but well-meaning hand. “Sh-h, sh-h,” he said consolingly, as if he were talking to a child. “It’s all right now. Do you want a drink of water? I get you a drink of water.”

She stopped crying abruptly. “I don’t want a drink of water!” she said angrily. “I want to get out of here.”

“Well, go,” he told her matter-of-factly. “The door’s open. Nobody stops you.”

She went over and stood by it, but without leaving.

Jansen had turned his attention to Herrick, took no further notice of her.

“Get up,” he said brusquely. “Get up and come over here.” But she detected a paternal note in the brusqueness.

“I’m all right now,” Herrick said docilely, looking up at him.

“Yust the same, you do like I say,” Jansen insisted. “You come and sit over here.” He took the chair Herrick had just been on, and moved it over against the standpipe. Then he brought a table up against it, not the large round one in the middle of the room but a small unpainted one that had been against the wall. He opened a shallow drawer in it and took out a greasy deck of cards. “We play a few hands,” he said, and he brought up another chair for himself and sat down across the table from Herrick. Then he took a small drawstring sack of pipe tobacco out of his breast pocket and placed that on the table also.

“We better put that on a few minutes,” he said. “Yust to be on the safe side.”

Herrick sheepishly extended his wrist, and Jansen snapped the open cuff around it. Then he began to deal the cards.

Madeline had watched the proceedings with incredulous eyes. “He’s vicious!” she burst out. “He oughtn’t to be allowed at large, a man like that. He’s a menace. A maniac.”

Jansen turned on her as fiercely as though she were the offender, not the man.

“He’s not a maniac,” he said severely.

“No? Well, what do you call it when he beats women—”

“He’s just unfortunate, that’s all. Well, go to the police, if that’s what you want to do. Go and have him taken in, if it make you feel better.”

She bit her lip. “For personal reasons of my own, which don’t happen to have anything to do with this, I prefer not to. But he won’t get off so easy if he ever tries it again, with somebody else, let me tell you.”

“You’re as much to blame as he is,” he told her. “You didn’t have to come into his room. You know better than that. You’re not a child.”

“Why are you so ready to defend him?”