Aftershock/The Big Footprints/Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote [antikvár]

Chapter I Saturday a.m. It was a thin scream; the empty street and the night silence briefly nurtured it, then it was sucked up between the high-rise buildings like smoke up a flue and wafted away across a starless sky. It was a scream of anguish rather than terror, as though the woman who gave vent to it already knew that the situation was hopeless. Yet she persisted. "Help! Help! Oh, God, somebody help me!" Soft rain, no more than a soggy mist, mufHed her impotent cries as she sought to penetrate the dark houses and the consciousness of the sleepers inside. "Help me! Please, please, won't somebody help me?" she moaned, and the moan turnéd into convulsive sobbing, a retching of despair, the beginning of a dirge. None of the lights in the surrounding buildings came on, though there were people who heard. Her screams lodged in their memories and would echo later to disturb other nights. For now they were dismissed: by somé as the ravings of a drunk-it was just before Christmas, the season for drunks; somé rationalized it as one side of a family quarrel and wished that people would do their fighting indoors. In apartment 5C of the Riverview House on Eighty-second Street one man threw aside the covers, slipped out of bed quietly, so as not to disturb his wife, and padded to the window. But he had awakened her. Or the screams had. "Oscar? What are you doing?" she demanded fretfully. "Nothing. Go back to sleep." "What arie you looking at?" "There's a woman down there screaming." Rena Beinecke raised herself up on one elbow and waited. "Well? Can you see?" He was looking down on a wire-fenced parking lot adjacent to his building and extending to the corner of First Avenue. Newly installed vapor lamps bathed it in a bright, shadow-free glow. He could see between the cars and even a portion of the avenue as well as most of his own block, except for a few feet along the building line beneath his window. "She's just standing there screaming," he reported. "I can't see another soul." "God knows what she's high on," Rena Beinecke commented, torn between pity and disgust. Abruptly, her husband reached a decision. He strode back to the night table and fumbled under the lamp for the switch. "What are you doing?" his wife cried in alarm. "Fm going to call the police."