Chapter 22 #5
“Get the hell outta here,” Brasher said, pulling harder.
Laurie pushed against Brasher’s touch. “Don’t manhandle me. What about H? I owe him.”
“Let’s find him,” Chary said at once.
Laurie looked back fondly. “Is there nothing you shy from?”
Brasher’s nostrils flared. “To hell with you reporters.”
Laurie grinned, slightly crazed.
Into the fire. They ran downstairs, past the main pool, into the back hall, bare feet slapping on tile.
There, spittoons had been overturned, and round needle showers had been left turned on to hiss out water in their alcoves.
When they reached the Russian baths, there was audible shouting, scuffling at the entrance: three more undercover police stood in the doorway, towel-clad, armed with nightsticks.
They kept a handful of men inside captive.
Brasher pushed in front of Chary, shouting, “Boys!”; Chary nearly startled.
The policemen clearly felt similarly; they looked around almost as one.
“Ease up, boys!” Brasher barked. “We’ve got ’em blocked off at the front. They’re not going anywhere.” He swung a stolen nightstick.
He was so authoritative, Chary was taken aback, and for a moment heart-thumpingly, illogically betrayed, but it also worked on the policemen. They stood uneasy, insecure amongst themselves about what to do—until the centermost one yelped and crumpled forward. Before him was Sumner, looking deadly.
Just as swiftly, the other two were dispatched: Brasher applied himself, one massive hand per neck, and yanked, backward and down.
They went down stumbling onto their asses, nightsticks clattering, heads thunking the tile.
Brasher stomped with his heel somewhere around the kidneys, first one, then the other.
Sumner was the only one without a dropped jaw.
“Thank you, Sidney,” he said, stepping nonchalant over the fetal-position policemen. He was nude again. “They just about had us hands-up against the wall.” Nonchalant, but his pupils were blown wide, and his lips were pale.
“Jesus,” Laurie said.
“Gonna get worse before it’s better,” Brasher said chillingly. “No escape now.”
He was correct. The whistling started distantly, then came closer, louder, the stomp of many booted feet like a train, and then, almost at once, the hall behind them flooded with so many brass-buttoned, blue-twill uniforms that the electric lights seemed to dim.
It happened too quickly to comprehend; there was no preparing.
The police came down upon them as an echoing, shouting wave—spitting demands that came so fast and loud, Chary couldn’t properly hear them, much less try and comply.
He was ripped away from Laurie’s hand and tossed with harder, white-gloved ones straight onto the floor.
His bruise of a forehead met the tile with a crunching smack, and his cheekbone, his lips too; he groaned.
His arms were wrenched behind him, elbows twisting.
He wasn’t fighting; it didn’t matter. They hurt him anyway.
He hadn’t known it would be like this. Not at all.
“Don’t hurt him—” Laurie said distantly, “—you fuckers, you don’t know who he is—” He was cut off into gasping, grunting whimper by a dull thud. Another thud came, heavier, and a breath-stolen gasp, as though Laurie had been forced onto his knees. Worse.
Chary squeezed his eyes shut; he couldn’t look. Not physically, since he was so contorted, nor willingly. What hurt worse? Laurie discarding his principles of equality for the sake of Chary or that Chary wished, shamefully, that it might work?
Once Chary was restrained in handcuffs, face down, his shorts rucked up and over his buttocks but unable to fix it, the police were content to leave him there on the floor, surrounded by the threat of shiny, blacked shoes.
Brasher still fought and, from the sound of it, was absorbing nightstick blow after blow like a grunting mannequin, refusing to go down.
Sumner wasn’t audible in the din. Chary hoped, illogically, that he’d escaped somehow.
“Geez. Didn’t think fairies came built like that.” A patrolman, like observing a boxing match, loud enough he didn’t care if any of them heard.
“How about that?” another agreed. “Oop—there he goes. Timber!”
Laurie had been pulled far away from Chary’s line of sight, but another man had been pushed down and handcuffed a short distance away: one of the men from the Russian bath, hair and body wet. He stared past Chary, unseeing, nothing moving on him but a trembling mustache. Catatonia and disbelief.
“It’s all right,” Chary said, though it wasn’t. “It’s going to be all right.”
Shiny black leather jabbed in his side. Chary’s breath whoofed out of him. “Shut your mouth or I’ll smash it in.”
He did as he was told. Everything he possessed felt tensed and vulnerable. Breakable as a hollow-stemmed succulent. Bluebell flowers—Mertensia virginica—were described like that; a storm could snap them, never to recover. How many beatings could one survive in a week?
And the man hadn’t seemed to hear him, anyway.