With a shock he awoke. It had sounded like a woman. How sharp! He was panting. With open eyes he lay on his bed listening.

The night was quiet. A slow summer breeze was swaying the curtains pleasantly. He looked at his window and regretted having left it open so wide. Suddenly the cries came again. ‘Aleese! Aleese!’ His fleshy arms jerked down to his sides. He lay perfectly still. Again the sounds pierced his room. ‘Aleese!’ They were coming from the street. Was he still dreaming? He tried lifting a leg. It worked. He got out of bed and walked barefoot out of the room and along the corridor to the front bedroom windows. Silently he raised the venetian blinds.

Near the lamp post across the street he could sense two moving figures. The cry went up again, but this time Mr Newman could make out what it said: ‘Police! Police! Please, police!’ He strained to see through the darkness, and crouched very still at the window. A woman seemed to be out there struggling with what looked like a large man. Now Mr Newman could hear the man’s voice. It was growling threateningly, drunkenly bass. The woman broke away from him now and ran into the street toward Mr Newman’s house. On the manhole cover in the middle of the street the man caught up with her and slammed his arm against her head. The manhole cover clanked under his weight. As he held her she broke forth in a shrill tirade of something that sounded like Spanish. Probably Puerto Rican, Mr Newman decided. The man’s sounds were English, however, he recognized with relief. The drunk’s free arm came up again as though to strike at the woman and again she screamed for the police. But now she was pleading for them, weeping to the darkness around her. Mr Newman, twenty yards from her, could hear the frantic breath rushing out of her body as she screamed for the police. She turned in the direction of his window now. She must have noticed that his blinds had come up only a moment before. Mr Newman quickly stepped back into the room. ‘Police!’ He thought of his bare feet; without his slippers he could not be expected to go out and stop this. Nobody else on the block was out there anyway. If he called the police the woman and the man would probably be gone by the time they arrived, and he would be embarrassed to explain why he had made such a fuss. The pair were struggling no more than ten feet from the edge of his little front lawn now. He could not see the woman’s face because the street light was behind her, but in the night, and awakened rudely from sleep, he thought he saw her eyes. The whites were bright against the dark skin, and she was darting helpless glances at his and all the other houses from which people were undoubtedly watching her. But he backed away from the window, the woman screaming ‘Police! Police!’ in her accent. He turned in the dark and went out of the room.