Of a sudden she heard an inhuman cry and, looking up, saw Victor dash the butt of his pistol through the glass, then reversing the weapon pour through the opening a fusillade whose effect was presumably gratifying, for he laughed to himself when the pistol was empty, laughed briefly but with vicious glee.
That laugh levelled the last barrier of doubt and fear and nerved Sofia finally to test the forlorn hope she had been nursing ever since Victor had let her see a little way into his mind as to her fate.
Until he could reload, only the tradition of the sexes lent him theoretical superiority; whereas he was in fact a man well on the thither side of middle-age, his virility sapped by long indulgence of unbridled appetites; while Sofia was a woman in the fullest flush of her first mature powers.
Gathering herself together, she inched forward and made ready to spring, bear him down, overpower him—by some or any means put him hors de combat long enough for her to fling a door open and herself out into the street....
With squealing brakes the car shaved an acute corner and slid on locked wheels to a dead halt so unexpected that it was Sofia who plunged floundering to the floor, while Victor only by a minor miracle escaped catapulting through the front windows.
The next instant, as Sofia struggled to her knees, the door behind her was wrenched open from without and, at a sign from Victor, rough hands laid hold of the girl and dragged her out bodily.
In a passion of despair, she lost her senses for a time and like a madwoman fought, shrieking, biting, kicking, clawing, scratching....
With returning lucidity she found herself, panting and dishevelled, arms pinned to her sides, struggling on for all that, being hustled by some half a dozen men across a narrow sidewalk of uneven flagstones.
Simultaneously the shutter of perceptions snapped, photographing permanently upon the super-sensitized film of conscious memory the glimpsed vista of a grim, mean street whose repellent uglinesses grinned through the boding twilight like lineaments of some monstrous mask of evil.
Then she tripped on a low stone step, stumbled, and was half-carried, half-thrown into a narrow and malodorous hallway.