THE BLACK SERIES

  ⋅VOLUME ONE  ⋅

  Black Alibi

  The Black Angel

  The Bride Wore Black

by Cornell Woolrich

Published in collaboration with Renaissance Literary & Talent 

Post Office Box 17379 

Beverly Hills, California 90209
www.renaissancemgmt.net

Copyright © 2018 by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. as Trustee for 

The Claire Woolrich Memorial Scholarship Fund 

u/w of Cornell Woolrich R 671100, September 8, 1977 

Black Alibi

Originally published by

Simon & Schuster in 1942 

 Copyright © 1970 by Chase Manhattan Bank

The Black Angel

Originally published by 

Doubleday in 1943

Copyright © 1971 by Chase Manhattan Bank

The Bride Wore Black

Originally published by

Simon & Schuster in 1940

 Copyright © 1968 by Cornell Woolrich

 Copyright © 2015 by Laurie Bartlett Schrader & Cathy Bartlett Lynch

ISBN: 978-1-938402-97-5

Cover art: Abigail Larson

www.abigaillarson.com

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Other Novels by Cornell Woolrich

Cover Charge (1926)

Children of the Ritz (1927)

Times Square (1929)

A Young Man’s Heart (1930)

The Time of Her Life (1931)

Manhattan Love Song (1932)

The Bride Wore Black (1940)

The Black Curtain (1941)

Marihuana (1941, originally as William Irish)

The Black Alibi (1942)

The Black Angel (1943, based on his 1935 story Murder in Wax)

The Black Path of Fear (1944)

Deadline at Dawn (1944, originally as William Irish)

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945, originally as George Hopley)

Waltz into Darkness (1947, originally as William Irish)

Rendezvous in Black (1948)

I Married a Dead Man (1948, originally as William Irish)

Savage Bride (1950)

Fright (1950, originally as George Hopley)

You’ll Never See Me Again (1951)

Strangler’s Serenade (1951, originally as William Irish)

Hotel Room (1958)

Death is My Dancing Partner (1959)

The Doom Stone (1960, previously serialized in Argosy 1939)

Woolrich also published over 200 short stories and various Novellas.

Praise for Woolrich

“Along with Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich practically invented the genre of noir.” 

—Newsday

“Critical sobriety is out of the question so long as this master of terror-in-the-commonplace exerts his spell.” 

—Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review

"Revered by mystery fans, students of film noir, and lovers of hardboiled crime fiction and detective novels, Cornell Woolrich remains almost unknown to the general reading public. His obscurity persists even though his Hollywood pedigree rivals or exceeds that of Cain, Chandler, and Hammett. What Woolrich lacked in literary prestige he made up for in suspense. Nobody was better at it." 

—Richard Dooling, from his Introduction to the print edition.

“He was the greatest writer of suspense fiction that ever lived.” 

—Francis M. Nevins, Cornell Woolrich Biographer

THE BLACK SERIES

volume one

BLACK ALIBI

Chapter One: The Alibi

Chapter Two: Teresa Delgado

Chapter Three: Conchita Contreras

Chapter Four: Clo-Clo

Chapter Five: Sally O'Keefe

Chapter Six: Black Alibi

THE BLACK ANGEL

Chapter One: Angel with Whisk Broom

Chapter Two: Visiting Angel

Chapter Three: Announcement of Widowhood

Chapter Four: Farewell Scene

Chapter Five: Revery by Matchlight

Chapter Six: Crescent 6 4824............Marty

Chapter Seven: Atwater 8-7457......Mordaunt

Chapter Eight: Butterfield......Mason

Chapter Nine: Columbus 4-0011......McKee

Chapter Ten: Butterfield 9-8019 Again (and hurry, operator, hurry!)

Chapter Eleven: Closing Scene

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

PART ONE

Chapter One: The Woman

Chapter Two: Bliss

Chapter Three: Postmortem on Bliss

PART TWO

Chapter One: The Woman

Chapter Two: Mitchell

Chapter Three: Postmortem on Mitchell

PART THREE

Chapter One: The Woman

Chapter Two: Moran

Chapter Three: Postmoretm on Moran

PART FOUR

Chapter One: The Woman

Chapter Two: Ferguson

Chapter Three: Postmortem on Ferguson

PART FIVE

Chapter One: The Woman

Chapter Two: Holmes

Chapter Three: Flashback: The Little Casket Around the Corner

Chapter Four: Postmortem on Nick Killeen

Introduction

The six novels of Cornell Woolrich’s famous Black Series—The Bride Wore Black (1940), The Black Curtain (1941), Black Alibi (1942), The Black Angel (1943), The Black Path of Fear (1944) and Rendezvous in Black (1948)—are the pinnacle of the era’s noir crime fiction writing. At a time when the world was embroiled in war, crime fiction like Woolrich’s provided an escape from the horrors of the real world into horrors of a more artistic kind. As such, Woolrich carefully crafted each of these novels to instill a deep and overwhelming sense of dread in both his characters and in the reader. Fear of the dark, fear of unseen forces, and fear of forces outside one’s control dominate these nail-biting suspense thrillers for which the author is so well known.

In Volume I of the Black Series, three distinct female protagonists brave the dark worlds of Black Alibi, The Black Angel and The Bride Wore Black. Black Alibi, expanded from an earlier short story entitled “The Street of Jungle Death,” pits a rising singer against the dangers of an escaped jungle cat in the South American city of Ciudad Real, a beast who may or may not be responsible for the brutal deaths that keep occurring around the city. The avenging angel of The Black Angel must race against time to prove that her convicted husband did not murder his mistress. This plotline was expanded from two of Woolrich’s earlier short stories, “Murder in Wax” and “Face Work.” And finally, The Bride Wore Black, arguably Woolrich’s most famous novel, is a revenge story for the ages. The titular Woman goes on a well thought out and perfectly executed rampage against the men who she believes were responsible for the untimely death of her husband on their wedding day.

BLACK ALIBI

ONE

the alibi

SHE WAS SITTING there at her glass, at the fashionable going-out hour, trying to decide between a cluster of crystal grapes and a live gardenia as a shoulder decoration, when someone knocked at the suite door, outside across the adjoining reception room.

Whatever her decision was in the matter, she knew it would have a city-wide effect. It meant that for the next few weeks hundreds of young women would either all be wearing clusters of crystal grapes or live gardenias.

It was hard to believe that just a couple of brief years ago no one had cared a rap what she stuck on her shoulder. Nor anything else about her, for that matter. She'd been wearing her heels down to the quick and getting consistently laid off in an endless string of third-rate Detroit roadhouses. And now—She turned her head and gave it another look through the windows; she couldn't resist it. That was the testimonial, the badge, of her importance, however transitory it might turn out to be; that out there.

CASINO EXCELSIOR

KIKI WALKER

en la gran revista de arte

"TRIC-TRAC"

The biggest spectacular in the city, rearing against the cobalt late-afternoon sky. And when the current was shot into it next week, for the opening, you'd be able to read her name after dark all the way up at the other end of the Alameda.

They were already naming perfumes and nail polishes after her, and of course paying for the privilege, and the newest concoction at the smart Inglaterra Bar was the Kiki Walker Cocktail (fiery-red at the top and stunning, the barman explained to everyone). For the whole of the last "winter" (June-September) she'd been queening it over the third largest city south of the Panama Canal, with her own car and chauffeur, personal maid, hotel suite. Not bad for a run-of-the-mill roadhouse entertainer from Detroit, stranded down here when a traveling show blew up. Not bad at all.

She still wasn't quite sure how it had come about herself. A little dancing talent, a little singing talent, and a great deal of luck had done it for her. It was mostly a case of happening to be in the right place at the right time, and of having no competition to speak of. In Detroit her lyrics had been shoddy; down here they couldn't be understood, so they sounded witty. In Detroit her red hair had been a commonplace; down here it was a rarity. And then Manning and his crazy stunts might, just might, she was willing to admit, have played some small part in attracting the public eye to her.

Their first meeting was not a thing she cared to be reminded of. He'd been sitting at a table at a sidewalk café, needing a shave and a clean collar, and she'd stopped in to find out if they couldn't use a cashier—or even a waitress. He'd bought her a cup of coffee, because he was still good for a cup of coffee at that particular place and she looked as if she needed one. When they got up from the table half an hour later, he was her press agent. Two weeks later she had her first job and he had a clean collar.

"I made him," she used to end the unwelcome reverie at this point.

That he might have had something to do with making her was unthinkable, not even to be considered for a moment. Whoever had made whom, one thing was certain: now she had the place put away in her pocket.

The knock had been repeated. "It's probably Señor Manning, Maria," she called out to her maid. "Let him in."

She heard the latch go back, but then instead of the maid's usual little welcoming remark, there was a shriek of mortal terror, a scurry of footsteps, and the fling of a chair, as though somebody had dropped down behind it.

Kiki turned quickly on the bench she had been occupying, rose questioningly. Before she could do more than that, it was upon her, she had seen it herself. It was one of those incredible images that the mind disbelieves in even at the moment of apparition. It was a head, down there on the floor, coming through the open doorway at her from the outside room. The head of something or other was the best she could do to identify it at that first awful moment; some member of the cat tribe; leopard, panther, were the successive labels flashed before her shell-shocked mind.

It was black, spade-shaped, ears wickedly flat, muzzle to carpet, coming in fast with an impression of zigzag undulation. That was all she waited to see. Her own scream slashed out to join the maid's and she turned and vaulted lightly, and with an instinctive agility that betrayed the dancer in her, to the top of her own dressing table. Perfumes, powders, and knickknacks rained down all around her to the floor, including a little toy music box that promptly began to sound off a tinkling little tune. She stood there aloft in flurried motion, skirts clutched nearly at her thighs and waving them defensively to and fro to ward the horror off.

It was only then that she became aware of the muzzle gripping the jaws, the taut leash, and the familiar Middle Western face of Jerry Manning peering blurredly at her from the background. Her outcries only became more verbal, not less vocal. Between them was the graceful, sinuous, almost snakelike body of the thing, straining forward belly-low against the leash; powerful shoulder muscles rippling under the seal-smooth black fur, tail twitching feverishly, in the attempt to get at the flutelike music box.

"Get it out of here!" Kiki wailed in high C. "Manning, what's the matter with you, bringing anything like that in here?"

"It won't hurt you," Manning tried to reason with her, pushing his Panama farther back on his brow. "There's nothing to be afraid of. I rode all the way in with it just now in a produce truck myself. It's perfectly tame; it was raised from a cub by a guy lives outside of town."

"Well, what do you bring it to me for?" She had stopped screaming, at least.

"I thought it'd be a good idea for you to show yourself with it, when you take your daily outing along the Alameda."

"With that? Never! Not from here downstairs to the front door, much less driving along the Alameda! Now listen, Manning, I'm getting tired of your brain waves—"

He had taken time off to light a cigarette, using one hand. "Think of the splash you'll make. Just step out of the car with it, sit down at the Globo for a Martini for a few minutes. What's there so hard about that? I've planted photographers all around there, to take you with it. I can get you the whole inside spread of next Sunday's Gráfico on it; I've got an in with old man Herrera. Two whole pages of green rotogravure all to yourself. Look, here's a little gold whip I got you to go with it."

"You're too good to me," she said sulkily.

"It's for you, not me," he coaxed. "You're opening next week. The Latins like their stars to be exotic. You want your show to be a hit, don't you?"

"I'd also like to be still in it, not all taped up in some hospital," she let him know. "I'm set. What do I need this stuff for now? In the beginning it was different."

"You're never set in your business. Come on, Kick, be game. Look at this, watch me a minute." It was stretched out sidewise, lazily licking one paw. He bent down over it, gently grazed the soft fur of its underside a few times with a hooked forefinger. It promptly rolled over on its back with typical feline coquetry, lolled there four paws folded in air, coyly trying to kick his finger away. "You couldn't ask for anything tamer than that, could you? Come on, just take hold of it. Try it out, see how it feels." He reached for her reluctant hand, passed the looped end of the leash over her fingers.

She still remained up on the table. She was giving in by unnoticeable degrees, however. Her skirts had fallen back to normal level. She was holding the leash by herself now; he'd taken leave of it.

"I'll be right behind you in a taxi the whole way."

On this one point she was adamant, however. "Oh, no, you won't. You'll be riding right in the front seat of the car with me, or I don't leave here at all."

He had saved his most potent argument to the last, the one he knew by experience would persuade her if anything could have; he must have been something of a shrewd psychologist. "You ought to see how it goes with that outfit you've got on. You ought to see what a picture the two of you make together. Come on down a minute, Kick, take a look at yourself in the glass, standing next to it. Zenobia, Cleopatra, weren't in it!" He held his hands up, to help her down.

That seemed to do it. She continued to eye it askance, but she started pointing the tip of one foot warily downward, about to descend to floor level beside it once more.

"Jeezizz," she said at the very last, a touch of her Detroit-era crassness cropping up as it did every now and then, "the things I do for my art!"

Her arrival at the Globo, if it was in the nature of a sensation at all other times, was nothing short of a galvanic shock this time. It was brimming to the very edge of its sidewalk awnings, and beyond, with the usual apéritif-hour crowd. Everyone who was anyone went there; it was a gallery worthy of any actress' mettle.

Manning, who was in the front seat of the Packard beside the driver, had retained the leash surreptitiously across the top of it until the very last, at her insistence. He only passed it to her at the moment of arrival, in time for her to make her sortie. The liveried driver jumped down, ran around, and held the door for her. She stood up in the car, held the stance just long enough for everyone to get a look at her, then prepared to step down. There was a momentary, and quickly covered-up, hitch at this point. It was between her and the door and it wouldn't move for a second; she would have had to step over it to get out.

"Push it with your foot," Manning said in an undertone.

She nudged its flank gingerly with the toe of her shoe. Then a second time. It rose reluctantly, wavered for a moment, then sluiced out upon the pavement like a suddenly released coil of black water, giving her arm an awkward jerk that she managed to cover up only with difficulty. She descended in its wake with the smiling grace of a Venus.

It had come into full view of the café crowd for the first time. It had been hidden from sight until now on the floor of the car. One of those deep, somnolent hums rose that are created when dozens of throats all murmur in astonishment at one and the same time. Then a spray of excited comment was dashed up. "Mira! Mira! Look what she's got with her!" was repeated on all sides, from chair to chair and from table to table. Those farther back stood up in their places to get a better look at it. Women gave little cries of synthetic fright and dismay. "Ay, que horror! Que barbaridad! Is she bringing it right in here?" And they prepared to jump up and get out of the way.

Passersby along the sidewalk began to bunch up, keeping back at a respectful distance.

"Stay here, don't let him take the car away," she said tautly to Manning, from behind her smiling mask of composure and relaxation.

"He can't stand right here in front of the place, we're not allowed to park. We'll be right down there at the end of the street. Nothing can happen to you, just go over to your table and sit down." Then as the sound of the brakes being taken off seemed to freeze her where she was for a moment, he quickly warned: "Don't stand here like that, Kick. You're onstage. You're on the air. They're all looking at you."

The car glided treacherously out from in back of her, and she was left to her own resources. She touched it lightly with the little toy whip he'd provided her with, and it moved forward docilely enough, perhaps attracted by the odors of food coming from the tables. Those seated nearest at hand edged their chairs cautiously back as it made its way down the narrow center lane left between the tables, its coat all but brushing their legs at times.

The distance she had to cover wasn't far, fortunately. She reached her customary table, which had been held in reserve for her, paused, and managed to get it to halt also by reining in the leash slightly. Then she seated herself with an air of lordly indifference upon the reedy wire-backed chair the waiter had drawn out for her. He prudently took her order from that position, remaining behind her instead of coming out around to the other side of the table.

A Martini seco," she said. She crossed her legs and looked about her with that air of cool indifference fashionable ladies are wont to assume in fashionable places. A renewed tug or two at the leash, meanwhile, had caused it to sink down on the ground at her feet, after an undecided moment or two. The spool-like table, however, remained between the two of them. It remained that way, quiescent, as though overcome by supreme lassitude, only its ears twitching sensitively at each taxi horn bleat that sounded in the street outside.

There was a concerted if tactful drawing away on the part of those in the immediate vicinity. They moved the adjoining tables wherever possible, or, if not, shifted their chairs around to the other side, so that they were facing it and not sitting with their backs to it. She was left seated in the midst of a small empty circle. Even the waiter, when he brought her order, approached circuitously from the rear and put it down over her shoulder.

She would not, however, have been an actress if she had not enjoyed the inordinate amount of attention she was attracting. People could not take their eyes off her—or rather her appendage, which amounted to the same thing. She took out a gold-tipped cigarette, pointed it up into empty space with her lips in quest of fire. The match came accommodatingly down over her shoulder from somewhere behind her.

The press representatives arranged for by Manning now materialized from nowhere, converged upon her. "A few words, Señorita Walker?"

"Sí, como no," she said affably.

One of them dipped one knee, sighted a reflector toward her. "Fotógrafo, Señorita Walker?"

"Yes, you may."

The flash had a disconcerting effect on the recumbent brute. It cowered, edged cravenly closer under the table.

"What do you call it, Señorita Walker?"

"Big Boy. That means chamaco in English." This was ad libbing, but she was a performer after all.

"Have you had it long, Señorita Walker?"

"No, I only got it today. It was sent to me by a friend."

A leer creased the corners of the interviewer's eyes. "May we say a special friend, Señorita Walker?"

Kiki dropped her eyes, coyly rotated the toothpick thrust through the olive in her glass. "Yes, you may," she conceded at last.

"What do you feed it, Señorita Walker?"

She was at a loss only for a moment. "Oh, a little bit of this and a little bit of that," her stage presence came to her aid.

It was at this point that it happened. No two versions were alike afterwards as to what the immediate cause was. Some said a Pekingese passing in a car along the street just then had gone into a tantrum of barking, arousing it. Others said somebody at one of the other tables had tossed it a small piece of meat while Kiki was occupied with the interviewers, in a spirit of idle mischief, to see what it would do. Still others were inclined to believe that the intermittent flashes from the photographic apparatus had finally irritated its nervous system beyond endurance.

At any rate, there was no warning. Its furled legs suddenly shot up under it like steel springs, a disembodied snarl winged its way along the underside of the awning without seeming to have any source, the lightweight table went over, and Kiki and chair with it, and the circle of interviewers scattered like chaff.

Panic blazed up among the overcrowded tables like fire spreading through straw. There was a mass stampede to the rear, indoors, where doors could be closed protectively against it, even though they were largely glass. Women screamed, and this time not for effect, men shouted hoarsely, waiters' trays went crashing down flat with tinny reverberations; tables and chairs toppled on all sides, glasses broke, those in the rear stumbled and fell to their hands and knees now and then in their efforts to get through ahead of those before them; finally, even one of the veranda door panes itself shivered and disintegrated in the melee. No one was quite sure where it was any more, nor what it was doing, and no one stopped to find out.

Kiki, screaming berserkly, couldn't extricate herself for a minute from the position she had fallen into. She was flat on her back, but the chair seat, upended against her, held her legs helplessly in air. She had a horrifying glimpse of an infuriated black head looming upon her, ears flat, jaws balefully open in spite of the inadequate muzzle that still clung to them, to reveal a set of needle-pointed fangs.

There was no time to do anything. A thick, blue-glass, mesh-protected siphon of seltzer had rolled unbroken toward her from somebody's table. She snatched it up, hugged it to her chest, closed her eyes expiringly, and played it madly around her in all directions. Whether that saved her or the fear-maddened beast had had no intention of attacking her anyway and was only seeking its own escape, is one of those moot points that are never satisfactorily decided afterwards.

Moments later, eyes still tightly shuttered to avoid seeing what she could not escape from and the contents of the siphon beginning to ebb dangerously, she felt herself being hoisted upright again by helping hands that had come back belatedly to rescue her now that the acutest point of danger was past.

"Where did it go?" she shuddered, opening her eyes and looking blankly around at the carnage on all sides of her.

Brakes were screaming hectically out in the middle of the road. Somebody pointed. It had managed, almost miraculously, to breast the heavy evening traffic unharmed and get to the other side. She was just in time to see its loping black form, all the way across the Alameda, turn up into a threadlike little alley, a veritable crack between the buildings that opened on that side, and disappear in the gloom.

"How are you going to get it back, señorita?" somebody asked fatuously, fanning her with his hat while a restorative was held to her lips.

Kiki flipped her hands violently downward, her face a mask of wreathed weeping. "I don't want it back!" she screamed hysterically. "I don't care if I never see it again! Look at the way I look!" She pawed helplessly at her disarrayed hair tumbling loosely down her shoulder. "Help me back to my car," she sniffled after a moment or two. "I want to go home—"

Two of the men assisted her falteringly out to the edge of the curb between them, and the Packard was brought up. Manning, fortunately for himself, was no longer in it; he had jumped out to give chase, along with a few of the bolder spirits in the crowd.

Kiki flopped limply into the back seat, still weeping gently, or at least simmering in a resemblance to weeping, into a handkerchief held just under her mouth. For once she was not putting on any act; her nervous system had just received a bad shock, and she felt the way she was acting.

To complete the catastrophic misadventure, the main body of the crowd, as it ebbed back amidst the littered debris of the café terrace, had turned definitely unfriendly toward her, seeming to hold her personally responsible for ruining its apéritif hour. Hisses and boos could plainly be heard. And when a Latin crowd hisses you, it's like bricks and rotten eggs up North.

A very disheveled, discredited, and thoroughly unnerved lady was driven away from the scene of the fiasco.

It had been plainly seen to enter that alley at the Alameda end, by dozens of people. There could be no doubt on that point. It was a chasm of a lane, winding its way back through derelict buildings. This was an old section in here, one of those leftovers that dot all large cities, in spite of its proximity to the fashionable and ultramodern Alameda.

It should, then, have been simply a matter of following it through to the other side, overtaking it, and holding it at bay—if not physically recapturing it—until the police had a chance to arrive. At least in keeping it in sight, if nothing else.

It wasn't.

It was dusk, but the visibility was still fairish, even if dark-blue-tinted. The distance to be traversed wasn't long. Not only that, but the more venturesome spirits in the crowd that had been around Kiki at the Globo, Manning at their head, were only moments behind it in pursuit.

Yet it had dropped from sight, been swallowed up, disappeared completely somewhere along that short byway, in one of the most built-up, hemmed-in parts of the city! For when the advance posse, Manning still foremost, came surging out into the Plaza de los Mártires, a small, busy, palm-bordered square that the alley gave onto at its other end, a case of mass astigmatism seemed to have resulted. And it was not one brought on by fright and excitement, as sometimes happens, either. The plaza was bustling with people, yet not one person could be found who had seen or heard anything amiss, much less anything so striking as a jet-black jaguar rushing headlong out of an alley mouth into their midst. A shoeshine boy less than a yard past the turn of the alley corner was kneeling industriously to his task over a customer's raised foot. Both were close enough for the wind of its passing to have bowled them over. If it had passed. Nothing had, they both said in surprise. And then, not sure they had heard aright, repeated blankly, "A what?", thinking Manning and the rest crazy.

Farther on, but not much farther on, the usual little knot of hopeful loiterers were scanning the lottery lists. People were getting on and off the noisy trolleys that seemed to fill this plaza at all hours of the day and night, emitting turquoise flashes from their overhead conduit wires as they backed and filled.

It was—the way it always was.

While the rearguard of the pursuit was still streaming in from the Alameda side, clogging up the lane, Manning and the advance guard tried to beat their way back through them, passing the word along as they went that it hadn't come out at the other end.

Three gesticulating, whistle-blowing—and very belated—gendarmes now arrived to take charge, and the chase—or rather problem, for a chase requires something in front of it—now became an official one. Their explanation for their tardiness, and not an unlikely one, was that the report had been utterly disbelieved when it was first made known to them. A holdup, yes. A knifing. But a live jaguar running amok through the streets? This was Ciudad Real. You better go someplace and sleep it off, or I'll run you in.

Manning, momentarily leaving them to their own devices, buffeted his way straight through to the Alameda side again, to try to find the fellow from whom he had "borrowed" the thing earlier in the day, a ranch foreman named Cardozo, and who was supposed to meet him at a certain inconspicuous corner with one of the ranch produce trucks and take the thing off his hands again as soon as Kiki was through with it.

It took him only a few minutes to get down there, but the news was already there ahead of him, he found when he arrived.

"It's gone," he announced breathlessly. "It broke away from her, and nearly killed her in the bargain! That crowd you see up there right now is where they're looking for it."

"I know, somebody told me," Cardozo said disgruntledly. "Somebody must have done something to it to get it started off like that. I told you not to let it get mauled around too much. I thought you said you were going to be right with it, the whole time she had it out with her." He actually seemed peeved at losing the thing, as though he had grown attached to it.

"I wasn't more than two car lengths away," Manning answered heatedly, "and even then I couldn't get over to her in time to stop it! I saw what it did. It took a flying leap over her body; the only thing that saved her was she had a bottle of charged water in her hands and squirted some at it. I thought you said it was so tame and harmless, there was nothing to worry about! It would have been a fine thing if it had clawed her up, wouldn't it?"

"It was perfectly docile the whole time we had it out at the estancia. The cook's kid used to go right in the pen and play with it by the hour."

"When, two months ago?" Manning said bitterly. "Maybe it was growing up then. It sure came of age tonight!" He cut the discussion short, it being largely a spilt-milk matter by now. "Come on, there's no use standing here wrangling about it. I came down here to get you, because I thought you might be a help in getting it back."

"I've got a riata here in the back of the truck I was going to tie it up with on the trip back," Cardozo assented. "I'll bring it along, it might come in handy."

"It disappeared in there somewhere," Manning told him, as they made their way back to the hubbub on foot. "Where d'you think it lit to?"

"To know that, one would have to be a jaguar," was the ranchman's dry answer.

When they returned, order and organization were rapidly being brought out of the chaos. Order, but not any jaguar. The three gendarmes had already become five, and the five in no time at all became seven. Next a lieutenant of police arrived to take charge of this safari on city streets. Next, even one of the municipal fire trucks showed up; but this solely so that the beam of its high-powered searchlight, the strongest available on any piece of apparatus, could be trained into the alley to show them what they were doing. It lit it up with a strange pale blueness, making the weird affair seem even weirder. Finally—but this last of all and not for long hours yet—the curator of the zoo was sent for, to give technical advice and make suggestions, he presumably being an expert in such matters.

The obvious things were done first. The public at large was cleared out of the alley, with a great flourishing of police batons and repeated warnings of: "Move back, now. Nobody allowed in here, it's dangerous. It may suddenly reappear when least expected and attack." The majority of them needed no second urging. There was a confused milling about for a few moments, and then the alley was clear. Ropes were then stretched across it at both ends, to keep it that way.

The next step was a wholesale ordering out of all inmates who lived along it, for a house-to-house search was impending. Again the order didn't have to be repeated. There was a panicky mass exodus from the disreputable warrens all along it, with bird cages, cooking utensils, and even potted plants.

These people were questioned personally by the police lieutenant as they were filed through. For the most part fruitlessly. There was no single case in which anyone had seen where it went. It had flashed through so suddenly that they all arrived at their windows too late; the clamor of the crowd in its wake was what had drawn them to look out, not any sound the beast had made. Two or three were found who admitted they had seen it coming in the distance—although they hadn't known it for what it was, had taken it in the gloom for a large, rabid black dog. But even these were no help, though they had been right out in mid-alley at the time; they all gave the same answer. "Yes, I saw it coming toward me up ahead, and knew it was something bad because of all the hollering behind it. Where did it go? You think I waited to find out? I dove into the nearest doorway and slammed the door shut behind me. By the time I looked out again, it wasn't there anymore."

At last, near the tail end of the procession of refugees, was found a little girl of ten or so who, when her turn came, promised to be of some help. For a moment they thought they had something. She had been at the window in time to see it, she insisted proudly, because she had been leaning out of it for a long time before that. "I saw something big and black coming down our street, from way up there."

An alert conclave formed about her for a moment. "Where did it go? Where did it disappear to?"

"I don't know. I ran inside to call my brother to come and see it, and when we came back it wasn't there any more."

The conclave split open again, like an overripe pod.

It would have to be ferreted out by a house-to-house search, the lieutenant in charge decided. The only tenable assumption left was that it had found some doorway, crevice, gap, somewhere along these moldering walls, had sidled in, and was still lurking somewhere in one of the shadowy interiors, perhaps in a basement, perhaps in some unused flue, perhaps in the cavity under a staircase—there was no electricity anywhere along this cranny, inside or out—breathing latent death.

The search began from the Alameda end—it was nearing eight by then—and it was well on the way toward midnight by the time the posse emerged from the last house of all, flanking the Plaza de los Mártires—empty-handed. The search had failed as completely as the original pursuit had. It had been thorough, even if not successful. They had gone from top to bottom and from bottom to top of every building along the way, flashing lights into corners, tapping walls, poking aside crates and boxes and litter, revolvers and stout clubs ready at hand to deal with it if it should turn up. But it didn't.

The crowd behind the ropes at each end, peering down the hazy blue pathway of the fire-fighting headlight, would hold its collective breath each time while they were inside, the wink of torches through the windows showing their progress tier by tier. Then they would come out again, report, "Not in that one," to their commanding officer, the structure would be given a clean bill of health, and they would go trooping into the next. Finally the dramatic effect began to wear off, after the numerous repetitions. Here and there someone turned away and went about his business; it was getting late. Someone in the thinning ranks of onlookers was heard to suggest half facetiously that maybe it had ensconced itself in the back of some cart or vehicle that had been left standing there with its rear open, been inadvertently shut in by the driver on returning a moment later and all unknowingly transported out of the neighborhood. The only trouble with this theory was that there had been no such fortuitous conveyance in the alley at the time; they could be sure of this for the very good reason that the place wasn't wide enough to admit anything but a pushcart. Someone also suggested that maybe it had gone up in a balloon, and drew a big laugh. A spirit of skepticism began to make its appearance among the last ditch spectators, cheated of the excitement they had expected and taking it out that way. "Maybe it went into the church to say its prayers!" someone called down the alley through cupped hands.

The little church he had referred to sat at the end of a small cul-de-sac, down toward the Plaza de los Mártires end. The alley bent sharply in direction several times during its short length. At one of these bends it forked in two, in appearance though not in actuality. One branch of the fork was simply a brief dead end, coming up against a wafer-thin chapel, San Sulpicio, dating from colonial days. In other words, simply an inset, a niche, lying off the main course of the alley, only a few meters in extent.

This chapel was the least likely of all places along there for it to have found refuge. For one thing, it was no longer in use, having been abandoned years before at the time of some damage received during some long-forgotten earthquake. Its stout mahogany door, however, was still intact; it took them the better part of half an hour to force it with crowbar and chisel. It had been unopened for as long as the memory of the oldest dweller around there could stretch. And within, when they had dislodged it finally, they found simply a desolate litter of rotted pews and fallen plaster within a roofless shell through which the stars peered. It could neither have got in here in the first place, nor, if it once had, have got out again from the four-square stone cell that was all the place offered.

They came out again, brushing their whitened sleeves, coughing and sneezing, one man nursing a scorpion bite on the back of his hand.

Moments later, the Plaza de los Mártires had been reached; the search was perforce at an end.

The sensation-hungry idlers began to melt away with increasing rapidity. Midnight tolled from a belfry here, a belfry there. The log-maintained fire-equipment spotlight suddenly blanked out, the vehicle drove away. The ropes were taken down. The inhabitants were allowed to return. Oil lamps, kerosene, and candles winked here and there from within the fumigated buildings as they resumed occupancy. They stood for awhile in small clusters outside their doors, talking it over. Then these too disbanded as they went in one by one to their respective abodes to sleep. The alley returned to normal.

The majority of the police were withdrawn. One man was left posted, for the rest of the night, at each end of the alley, though for what purpose, it was hard to conjecture.

The night wore on toward its predestined finish, just as every night before it had in its time.

At any rate, only one thing was certain, so far, out of the whole episode. The jaguar had not been recaptured. The jaguar, therefore, must still be at large somewhere or other.

Morning came, and in its confidence-inspiring light a different view began to be taken of the whole thing. The brilliant, sunny daylight killed fears and vapors. It seemed incredible that such a fantastic thing could have happened. Ciudad Real was a town of natural-born skeptics anyway. By the time the morning coffees and pan dulce had been swallowed everywhere, a rumor had spread that the whole affair had simply been a publicity hoax perpetrated by Walker and her press agent. Like the usual actress' missing-jewels stunt. That this did not take into account what had actually become of the fleet-footed quadruped did not impair its ready acceptance; it spread from mouth to mouth. Even those who the night before had been the first to lock their doors and peer anxiously under their beds were the first to say: "I knew it all along. You didn't believe it, did you?" Whereupon the other fellow scoffed, "Of course not, what do you take me for?" In spite of the fact that there were dozens of eyewitnesses, the rumor very nearly succeeded in downing the reality. The very eyewitnesses themselves felt self-conscious after a while when they tried to insist they'd seen it. They began to wonder privately if they actually had, after all.

The newspapers, those barometers of public opinion, helped to disseminate this point of view. They all carried items about it, but treated it humorously, tongue in cheek. "The great jaguar scare"; "Who has Miss Walker's jaguar? Will somebody please return it?" were some of the headings. People greeted one another facetiously all over town with: "Well, have you seen the jaguar yet?"

The police, keeping their own counsel, may have preferred it so. It at least saved them from the nuisance of dozens of hysterical false alarms all day long. This way, not one came in. They noticeably didn't discontinue the search altogether, a sure sign that there was something to look for, after all. Only it became more diffuse; it was harder for the man in the street to tell just what they were doing, now that there was no longer any one particular locality, such as the alley, for them to concentrate on.

Manning, through all of this, had had a most unpleasant twenty-four hours of it. Not only was he detained in jail all of that first night, charged with violating some ancient city ordinance or other that prohibited the conveying of wild animals through the streets without a permit, haled into court in the morning, severely lectured for his misdemeanor, and fined a nominal sum before he was released; but he was also out of his job with Kiki Walker.

She made this known to him in no uncertain terms over the transom of her locked hotel-suite door when he tried to get in to see her the night after the debacle. Her voice came through ringingly; in fact so ringingly that other doors here and there along the hotel corridor began to open curiously after a moment or two.

"You've got your nerve coming around here again, after what happened! You've made me the laughingstock of the whole town, I want you to know! Beat it! Take your bright ideas somewhere else!"

"Now look, Kick, I didn't arrange to have it happen that way purposely, you know," he tried to reason with her.

"You got my pictures in the paper all right!" her voice went on wrathfully. "Did you see the one in the Gráfico? Flat on my behind with my legs up in the air, and squirting a stream of seltzer water through them! When the curtain goes up at the theater next week, that's what everyone'll see—and not the performance that's going on before their eyes! I'll be laughed off the stage!"

"I'll come back when you've cooled off," he said stiffly. "You don't have to make a scene like this, with everyone looking out of their rooms snickering at me."

"And what about me, out in the middle of the Alameda, with the whole town taking it in?"

"All right, I'll see you tomorrow," he said, trying to keep relations between them intact, no matter how brittle they had become. It was his livelihood, after all.

"You'll see me never!" What he didn't realize, and perhaps she didn't herself, was that it wasn't the jaguar episode that was basically the cause of her tempestuous indignation. It was really that first meeting of theirs. He'd seen her when she was broke, down on her luck, unable even to buy herself a cup of coffee. She'd never been able to forgive him for that. "There's your back salary. There's no reason for you to come around anymore now. We're quits!"

A handful of large disks, Ciudad Real silver pesos, sprinkled over the open transom and rolled about in all directions over the corridor. One or two of those standing in the doorways helpfully stopped them for him with their feet. A scattering of paper money had fluttered down more slowly in their wake.

He wasn't above picking it all up, every last scrap of it. He'd worked hard for that money, and in a way that basically wasn't suited to his temperament or talents. He needed it. And he didn't know where the next was coming from.

"All right, Kick," he said with injured dignity. "Lots of luck to you, if that's the way you feel about it."

The transom panel snapped shut with a sharp little crack. He turned up his coat collar at the back of his neck, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and trudged disconsolately away from there.

When a man has lost his job, the first thing he thinks of, usually, is to go out, have a drink, and take the edge off his troubles. Manning did that now too. Only he found he wasn't even to be allowed to forget the damnable affair in peace.

He went into a place a few short blocks from her hotel.

"Well," asked the barman, grinning with what was intended to be social jocularity, "have you seen the jaguar yet?"

Manning put down his drink abruptly, as though it sickened him. He gave the bartender a look in kind, as though he did, too. He snapped down a coin, turned around, and walked out without saying anything and went somewhere else.

Again he ordered. Again the barman, trying to make him feel at home, began cheerily: "What's the latest on the jaguar?"

Again Manning put down his drink short, scowled, and turned on his heel.

At the third place he beat the barman to the punch. "I want two things," he said bitterly. "A whiskey and water, and not to hear about the jaguar. Will you do that for me, try not to mention it? I came in here to forget it." He drew an imaginary line through the air, lengthwise to his own face. "Terminado. Finished. It's over."

But it wasn't.

Night brooded enigmatically over Ciudad Real, seeming to hold its breath. Three quarters of a million people, and somewhere in the midst, shadow slim, with velvet tread, and fangs for those who crossed its ill-omened path—

TWO

teresa delgado

EVEN THE Señora Delgado's trusty broom handle, that persuader of last resource, seemed to have very little effect tonight in getting her oldest girl to do her bidding. She reached threateningly toward it, and that alone was usually sufficient impetus to start her toward the door. Tonight it failed to. Next she picked it up and brandished it. Even that failed. She finally was driven to actually swinging it at the recalcitrant one's calves in order to drive her before her. Even this was a partial failure. The girl simply moved nimbly from side to side, but gave very little ground. Most of the light passes struck emptily against the wall, the girl avoiding being in the way each time.

There was always reluctance, dilatoriness, strife, whenever any question of going out on an errand arose. But tonight there was more than that. There was a deadlock, a form of passive resistance. Such opposition had never before been met with. Something stronger than fear of her mother's light broom whacks seemed to be holding the girl back.

She crouched in implicit unwillingness against the wall, large brilliant black eyes fixed imploringly, yet inscrutably, on her mother the whole time she continued to side-step the broom's corrective promptings. She was fairly tall for her age, and particularly her racial antecedents; already full-grown in height if not yet in girth. She was about eighteen or seventeen. Or perhaps sixteen; they didn't keep very strict count of ages in this household. Her skin was the pale gold of wheat, but would probably darken slightly as she grew older. She had donned a rebozo*—the ubiquitous head covering of lower-class Latin American girls and women—as a first step toward going out, but beyond that one preliminary she seemed unwilling or incapable of going.

Her mother began to poke the broom forward at her now, its broadside swipes having failed of effect. She was shrilly denunciatory as she did so. "Three times I have asked you already! Will you go?" She lunged. "Has any other woman in town got such trouble with her children? Why do you afflict me like this, Teresa? What is it that has gotten into you tonight? Is it so much to ask you to bring back a little charcoal from the tienda, that your poor father may find his food hot when he comes back from working hard? You could have been there and back already, twice over!"

"Madrecita," the girl implored dolorously, "why can't Pedro go for a change? I work all day in the laundry and I'm tired."

"Pedro can't be trusted to go, and you know it. He throws the money up in the air all the way there, and then the first thing you know he loses it."

"Why can't you use sticks or papers until tomorrow? Why do I have to go now?"

"Is paper charcoal? How long does it last? It flames and then it's gone!" This reminded her. She desisted momentarily from her broom cudgeling to waddle back to the russet-tiled brasero she had quitted some time before. She snatched up a palm-leaf fan, jerked aside an earthenware receptacle, and anxiously fanned the orifice thus exposed until it had begun to glow a dull red again from below.

"See that?" she said accusingly. "It's going down already! If it goes out—"

She rushed back for the broom, this time bent on inflicting the final stage of chastisement, all else having failed: an actual belaboring about the shoulders. In the face of this onset, the girl at last retreated as far as the doorway itself, but then she still hovered there, as though hoping against hope to win some miraculous last-minute reprieve.

A small boy of nine or ten, the aforementioned Pedro, pulled his face out of a bowl it had been buried in until now and remarked jeeringly: "I know what she's afraid of. She's afraid of the jaguar."

The girl flashed him a parenthetic look that was an admission. Then, as though the first reference to it, by coming from someone else, had been enough to free her own powers of expression at long last, she began to importune her mother, in a half-eager, half-bated voice: "They say there's one around somewhere. They say a rich lady had it on a string, and it got away and it hasn't been found yet. I heard the girls talking about it in the laundry today—"

The broom was arrested only momentarily. "A jaguar? What's that, one of those things they have in the mountains?"

"They're big and they jump on you," said the impish Pedro, with a sidelong look at his sister that showed what prompted him to make the remark.

The Señora Delgado wasn't having any of this nonsense. She was too hard-working and careworn to take into account anything not of and within her daily toil and habits. "Did you ever meet one of those things yet when you went to the tienda for me?" she bellowed.

The girl swallowed, shook her head mutely.

"Then you won't meet one this time either! Now get out! Do as I told you!" And she gave the broom such a backward swing of final purpose that the girl disengaged the door behind her and slunk out backwards, big liquid black eyes, still futilely pleading, the last to go.

The exasperated Señora Delgado laid her broom aside and returned to her interrupted duties, grumbling darkly and shaking her head. But a moment later the door had stealthily reopened and the girl was attempting to sidle in again unnoticed behind her back.

She caught her just in time, made a tempestuous start in that direction, but the door had closed a second time before she was able to reach it, and the girl was once more outside.

The Señora Delgado took care of that by driving the midsection bolt home, not without a great deal of difficulty. It was rusted from lack of use. It probably hadn't been driven home into its socket for years past. Their door was never barred; there was nothing in the place that anyone would have cared to make off with. Flakes of scabrous rust fell off the bolt and a little cloud of dust winged up as she finally jammed it all the way in, by main force, and compelled to use both her sculpturesque forearms to master it.

Then she shook her hand at the sightless wooden barrier. "Now you'll stay out there until you've done my bidding! You won't get in again until you've brought that charcoal back with you!"

Outside the girl cowered for a moment in the shelter of the set-in doorway. She gave her rebozo a tightening pluck over her mouth. That was to ward off the night air, known to be unhealthful; keep it out of her nostrils and breathing passages. Only strangers, Americans and such, braved it. She peered cautiously up one way and down the other, along the grubby, uptilted little slum lane her house faced. Not straight, but gradually curving. No sidewalks, just a middle of the way. A single wan lamppost gleamed dismally at the far end of it, leaving the rest in shadow. But she had to go down the other way, where there wasn't any. There wasn't a soul to be seen anywhere on it. They were all indoors already at this hour. They worked too hard around here. To stay out at night, that was for the rich. On a night of fiesta, that was different. Or for the head of the house to step down to the cantina for a few hours, that also was a different matter. Even while there they were not out on the street itself, they were indoors.

Well, it wasn't far. She couldn't get in again until she'd fetched it, so the quicker she did, the better. She struck out boldly from the doorway, moved down the middle of the road, arms tightly clasping her sides under the ends of her rebozo, eyes watchfully going from side to side in the oval gap it left for her face.

She rounded the sort of blunted corner the alley made in turning in to join the next one below. For a moment she could glimpse the diluted, tawny light shining out from the inside of the tienda, down there ahead of her. This new thoroughfare continued the steady downward course her own had maintained. This whole quarter of the city had been built down a slope leading to the dried-up bed of what had once been a river.

But right while she sighted it, as though it had only been waiting long enough for her to identify it, it went out. Old lady Calderón had closed for the night. No system of clock entered into this; she couldn't, as a matter of fact, read one, and didn't have one, any more than any of the rest of them did. She closed up whenever there had been a long enough lapse after the last customer to suggest that there weren't going to be any more that night. Thus one night she might close at ten, the next at eleven, the next at nine.

The girl gave a warning hail from where she was, to try to hold her at the door until she could get there; she began to run fleetly down toward it. She got there just too late; the padlock was on the inside. This being a depot that dealt in valuables such as sugar, candles, chickpeas, et cetera, it was kept locked during the night, unlike the domiciles around.

She could still make out a faint gleam of candlelight coming from behind a hanging at the rear when she put her face close to the glass display window to one side of the door. Electricity for the front part of the store, candlelight for the living quarters at the back, that was the natural order of things, nothing surprising in that. She pounded her palm on the window hopefully.

The hanging was withdrawn diagonally and old lady Calderón showed herself, already in a partial state of deshabille, which consisted of being barefooted and of a braid of platinum hair having been uncoiled from her head and allowed to dangle down in front of one shoulder.

"I just want a little bag of charcoal for my father's supper!" Teresa Delgado called through the glass between her hands.

The tienda-keeper shook her head, motioned her away, while she continued working her way down to the bottom of the braid. "Mañana."

"It'll just take a second. While you're standing there talking you could measure it out—" She held up the coin for her to see.

"It means taking off the lock again, putting on the light, digging down in the sack. It's too much trouble. Once I close I close." The hanging fell vertical again, blotting her out.

The girl turned away frustratedly. Now she'd either have to go home without it or she'd have to go all the way down to that other store, streets away, over on the other side of the viaduct. That was the nearest one there was to here. The viaduct was a parapet of solid masonry supporting a boulevard that crossed the former riverbed at a height equal to its sides. You had to go through an arched passageway tunneled through its base to get over to the other side. It had always, even before now (now being that rumor), given her the creeps to have to pass through there late like this, when there was no one much around anymore. It was so black while it lasted.

But if she went back without the charcoal, her mother wouldn't let her in. Or, if she did, would probably disbelieve her about the store being closed and would take the broom to her some more.

The more embodied fear always overcomes the more formless one, even when it is the lesser of the two. She reluctantly resumed her descent toward the causeway ahead, instead of turning back for home.

When she got down to it and was about to enter, she took a deep breath, stored up enough air to see her through to the other side. It was black and impenetrable. The slant of the ground outside prevented what reflection there was from streetlights in the distance from entering, beyond a slight indentation at its very mouth. You'd think they'd have a light hanging in it at least, or just outside up over the entrance. Well, they'd tried to many times, but the kids who played around here in the daytime had always ended up by busting it in a day or two, so finally they didn't try to keep one going anymore.

Her footsteps began to echo hollowly the minute the unseen rounded roof had closed over her, and the stonework all around made it a little damper and mustier. Once, a year or so ago, somebody had been found dead in here, with a knife in him and his pockets—But she didn't want to think of that now. This was no time for it.

She had quickened her gait unconsciously, from the moment of entering. Her eyes, brilliant and large at all times, must have been enormous in the gloom, though they couldn't be seen. Gracias a Dios, it wasn't very long, just about the width of the boulevard that ran atop it. She was halfway through to the other side now. Her footfalls went bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, like the thumping of gourds, the stones above giving the sound back to the stones below.

There—she could see the other opening ahead of her; she was coming out. She began to breathe again, and, only in doing so, realized she hadn't been until now. It wasn't very much lighter out ahead than it was in here; a few motes of dark blue or gray mingled with the smooth textured black to make it seem threadbare, that was all. But the deep resonance of her tread began to dwindle a little, and the air to become a little less damply oppressive. Those were the chief signals of approaching emergence, rather than vision itself.

And then, as she hurried to meet the open again, she happened to glance over to one side of her. For no reason, or for whatever reason it is that draws the vacant glance when there seems to be no cause yet there is. Her throat swelled with suddenly congested breath. What was that? The stonework must be wet over there, there must be some slight seepage of water trickling down between their seams. For she caught a sort of reflected gleam, an iridescent winking, as though light from outside the tunnel mouth—

But there wasn't any light outside the passage, nothing that could strike that far in, create such a high light against the stone tunnel facing. It was not expansive, in a sheet; nor yet was it continuous, in a perpendicular thread, such as water might have made. If it was water, it was in the shape of two drops, side by side. Two elongated, almost slitted drops; rod-shaped; like bacilli seen through a microscope. Faintly wavering, as if with inner heat carried upward behind them, in a fuming sulphurous yellow green. Yet not distinct, not clearly etched against the blackness, nothing like that. Rather a diffuse, a thin-surfaced glistening that, but for the blackness itself, which gave the eye, her eye, nothing else to rest upon, would have escaped her notice entirely.

They weren't eyes, were they—other eyes? So steadily maintaining their twoness, their equidistance, their taut, stretched-out suggestion of wicked peering—No, of course not. How could they be? What would eyes be doing in here, and—whose would they be anyway, and—Just don't let them be; don't think they are; if you think they aren't, they won't be. Only light glinting from the wetted projection of two small roughnesses, two unevennesses in the stonework, side by side, that was all.

It had sidled back to the rearward now, as her feet continued to do their duty, like soldiers who continue to carry out previously received orders long past the ability of the commanding officer to issue or even be able to think up new ones. She didn't dare turn to look back, once the continuity of her line of vision had been broken; she was afraid her carefully patched explanation couldn't stand the confirmation of a second look, might fall to pieces at it.

A few short steps more, and the night sky had opened around her again. Look, a star. Another. Oh, the beautiful openness of night. Space to run in. Even the darkness a lesser darkness, with color beneath its surface: sooted white and submerged green and blue. The gourds of her measured tread became the rattle of her flying feet, one end of her rebozo winging out behind her.

She only stopped again when the silvery pallor of the store, falling in a fan across the ground, lay just ahead, around a turn in the crooked byway. How beautiful it seemed, with its bedraggled fringe of paper strung across the front of it, limp from many rains, and with the colors it once had been dyed transferred to streaks down the stucco wall. How friendly that dissonant jangle of the bell cord attached to the door sounded as she pushed her way in. What a lovely place to be in, with its smell of hemp and cordage and kerosene.

The old Basque who ran it came out of the back, still smacking his lips from his own meal, beret left on his head even while he ate. He knew her by sight. "Ah, Teresita." He shook his head as he weighed out the charcoal. "They shouldn't send you out alone so late, hijita."

She was brave, now that she was safe again. She wasn't going to admit how frightened she'd been herself just now. She fluttered her fingers in rotation on the edge of his counter. "What can happen to me? This is Ciudad Real."

"Many things can happen," he said enigmatically.

They exchanged a look of complete mutual understanding. But they didn't say what they meant. It wasn't necessary to. So he'd heard about it too. She knew what he was referring to. And he knew that she knew.

She tried to prolong the trivial little transaction all she could. Because while it lasted it spelled safety, light, another's company. Afterwards would come darkness, fear, solitude again.

"Will it hold that way?"

"Yes, just hold it up straight; hold the two corners together like this."

"Oh, what a pretty cat!"

"You've seen him before. Don't you remember? I've always had him."

"Yes, that's right, too. I guess I have." She gave a brief look at the door behind her, as she put down her money on the counter.

"They didn't give you enough. It's gone up."

"I'll bring it next time. Will you trust me? I live in the Pasaje del Diablo, over on the other side of the viaduct—"

"Never fear. Next time you come in." The poor don't cheat one another, they're all poor together.

"Well—good night, señor." She seemed to have to wrench it out of her throat, it clung so.

"Good night, Teresita. Better get back, don't linger on the way."

The bellpull jangled once more, and she was out in the dark again. What a dismal forlorn sound it had this time, though; a sort of farewell.

The fan of light on the ground behind her slowly closed, wheeled around the other way, as the byway made its turn around. She moved along at a normal gait until the turn had completed itself and she had come in sight of that black arched causeway maw again. Then she began to hurry up, to go faster and faster—toward it, it is true, but in order to get through and out again at the other side as quickly as possible. The excuse she tried to give herself was that her father might be home by now, and she would get the broom for taking so long with the charcoal. But she knew that wasn't the reason at all.

She could have gone another way, up and over the boulevard. There was a place where there were stairs built into the side of the structure that carried it. But it would have taken her blocks out of her way, to reach it and then come back again on the opposite side. Oh well, she'd been through here a dozen times before. Just once more couldn't hurt. If she'd passed through it just now without having anything happen to her, then she could surely pass through a second time on her way back and nothing would happen either.

While she was thus engaged in trying to rationalize her fear, the intervening space had petered out and the viaduct had started to climb the night sky mountainously before her, like a sheer cliff wall, blotting out the stars as it rose. High aloft on the top of it there was a faint powdery-blue haze from the arc lights strung out along it, and cars, she knew, were probably whistling by, all unwitting of the little dramatic adventure occurring below them in the shadowed depths of the ravine. That was the city; spiraling planes of existence that had no knowledge of one another.

Here it came now. The stone oval—or rather half oval—swept over her like a black scythe. Again that hollow ringing beat came into her footsteps. She was not going to look, she was going to make sure of not seeing anything, when she came near the place where she had imagined seeing those twin phosphorescences the first time; she had made up her mind to this ahead of time. "If I don't look," she said to herself softly, "I won't see it, and it can't frighten me again. There is probably nothing there anyway; I just imagined it," But the real reason was she was afraid it still would be there, if she did look.

Since it was, presumably, ahead of her, and it would be difficult therefore to keep it out of the corner of her eye, she advanced holding her face stiffly averted, turned to the other side, as she went by. She could not identify the exact spot at which it had been, in this all-erasing darkness. You couldn't see your hand before your face in it. She had to judge more or less by the distance it had been from the entrance, the one she had just come in by, the first time. It had been very close to it; not more than fifteen or twenty paces in. This was about fifteen or twenty paces in now.

Her neck arched with the rigid curvature she maintained it at. It was hard to walk with your head pointed one way, your body another. It kept trying to pull around of its own accord. She started to say the multiplication table over to herself, to keep her mind off it.

She hadn't stayed at school very long; she'd been working at the laundry since she was twelve or thirteen. But she could write a little, read a little—when the words weren't too long—and she knew a few of the lower tables, the twos and threes, up to about twenty or so. Her breath started to simmer softly with it. "Three times one is three. Three times two is six. Three times three is—"

There, it must be behind her by now. See how easy? See how sensible to do it that way? She let her head swing slowly around to its natural position once more. Nothing ahead of her, nothing at the side; nothing but even, unadulterated black, no greenish glows, no glimmers. Behind her? Well—it was better not to try to find out, to let that alone. Even a little courage came back. A few steps more and she'd be out of the place altogether. She was a big coward to let herself get worked up like that. In a moment more now she'd see the first star out ahead at the other side, and then it would be just a matter of climbing the lower lane, turning up the Pasaje, and she'd be at her own door. The worst was—

Suddenly her heart did something before she could even understand why it had done it, as though it heard better than her very ears. Missed a beat, or got in one too many, or something. Her breath clogged in her throat again, as it had the time before. Only her feet kept on moving, doing the duty for all the rest of her.

That soft, blurred pat behind her had been something she hadn't made. No echo or transfer of any sound of hers. Something disparate, isolate, apart, she was sure of it. One's senses can identify one's own aura of sounds at all times. It hadn't been the impact a shod foot makes; more on the order of something padded or bare pressing incautiously on the ground. A cross between a rustle, such as a leaf might make, and the softest of soft slaps. A tiny sound, a ghost of a sound, yet a sound of monstrous swelling terror, expanding balloon-like within her heart and brain.

She nearly dropped the small-sized sack of charcoal and just regained her hold on it as it started to slip from her grasp. She wanted to do two things, diametrically opposed, at one and the same time. Her limbs wanted to stand still, lock there, give her a chance to listen for it again, confirm it, disassociated from the sounds she herself was making. Terror wouldn't permit it. To stand still was to die. She wanted to throw the encumbering charcoal bag from her, break into a headlong run then and there, all the rest of the way from here to the door of her house. Again terror wouldn't let her, held her down to the gait she had been using until now. It was the age-old instinct to avert danger by pretending to ignore its asserting itself in her. Keep walking as you were, and the attack is postponed, if only a moment or two longer. Flee—or try to flee—and you bring it on that much sooner.

She continued to move forward like a rigid automaton, unaware any longer of what her legs were doing, leaving them to their own devices. Her ears were straining to catch the faintest—It came again, closer behind her this time, and yet, inversely, much fainter. A nothing at all, a whisper of the paving stones. So faint indeed that had she not heard it the first time, she would not have known she was hearing it at all this time.

Something else now assailed her, again from without herself but of a different sensory plane than hearing this time. A prickly sensation of being watched steadily from behind, of something coming stealthily but continuously after her, spread slowly like a contraction of the pores, first over the back of her neck, then up and down the entire length of her spine. She couldn't shake it off, quell it. She knew eyes were upon her, something was treading with measured intent in her wake.

And at this moment, meaningless now, for terror no longer had bounds, was no longer confined but on the move, the black archway of the tunnel roof fell back a second time and she was in the open once more. But dragging terror out into the open after her.

Her numbed feet, beginning to falter with faulty muscular coordination, carried her a few yards onward up the lane. She knew she couldn't manage them any longer; they were slowing, they were stopping, they had stopped. She had fallen still, vibrating all over. A sort of pulsing that came from within, like the ague.

She had to see, she had to know, her fright-distended soul could bear no more. The muscles of her neck started to tug, to pull her head around, to look behind her at the doom-pregnant entrance she had just quitted. And even while they did so, before the motion had been completed, the sack of charcoal started to slowly sidle out from between her nerveless hands, about to topple to the ground at her feet, in catastrophic premonition.

She was trapped there, held fast, as surely as a bird is by a snake, unable to move another step until her head had accomplished that devoted, self-destructive turn to rearward to see what it was that the tunnel mouth was about to spew, rabid, at her heels.

The slowly mounting anger of Teresa's mother had increased in inverse ratio to the dwindling heat within her brasero. When fanning would no longer bring the faintest flush of red to the charcoal ash, then her ire reached its hottest.

She bent low above it, dexterously manipulated her breath upon it, trying at one and the same time to skim the film of incinerated white ash off the top and unearth some spark of continued heat below. That failed too. Her fire, the core of her daily existence, had given up the ghost.

She straightened, flung up her arms, let them fall again. "Out," she said catastrophically. This was the unforgivable sin, to have one's fire expire like this. Any woman who had that happen to her—well, she knew what the others about here would say and think of her.

"Why don't you put some straw on it until she gets back?" the small boy over in the corner suggested.

"Straw! Is straw charcoal? How long does it last? It flames and goes, and fills the room with smoke. And there isn't any anyway." She picked up the broom, shook it threateningly in the general direction of the door. "It's her fault. Had she gone when I first warned her to—And even now, is she back yet? Look how she dawdles! How she lingers on the way! A snail would have been here before her!"

She gave the earthenware pot sitting on the brasero a slight shift. "He'll come home, and what will he find? A wife who cannot even keep the food warm for him. A disgraced creature!"

The boy sat watching her in utter silence, palms to cheeks, a rapt smirk on his face.

She made some more passes with the broom. "Oh, I'll give it to her! I'll break this palo in two over her back. She will ache all day tomorrow—"

Something struck against the door suddenly. It was as though a flurry of footsteps, only audible at the very last, had suddenly ended with a fling against the door. A scream winged its way in like a knife slicing through all the seams at once, above, below, at the sides. And then words, in a smothered paroxysm, as though the mouth uttering them were cupped to the very woodwork itself. "Mamacita, let me in! Oh if you love me, let me in!" They were all run together in a sort of spasm of the voice.

The Señora Delgado had waited for this moment, though not knowing that it would take this precise form. She clasped her enfolded arms to her sides, hugging herself and nodding her head in bitter, long-delayed retribution. "Now she comes, eh? Running at the last, eh, now that it's too late, now that my fire is gone and the damage is done!" She mimicked the suffocating tones outside. " 'Mamacita, let me in. Oh if you love me, let me in!' Afraid of the dark, eh? Afraid of her own shadow, eh? Well she'll stay out there. We'll see how she likes that. She'll learn next time to make more haste—"

There was the sound of nails clawing helplessly at the wood; the voice was crazed, ungovernable, all but incomprehensible, sputtering a gibberish that had to be guessed at rather than understood. "Ay, madrecita di mi alma, it's coming, it's coming closer. I can see it coming by the wall—It's closer, it's closer—!"

The Señora Delgado gave an authoritative bellow that stopped the boy as he was beginning to sidle around the side of the room toward the door. "Pedro! Stay away from it!" Again she mimicked her. "Yes, it's coming nearer, is it? Lies! Mentiras! She thinks her lies will save her. You think I believe there is anything out there? There should be, I only wish there were! It would teach you next time to obey your mother better—"

There was a scream of agonized finality, a veritable catharsis of the lungs, that made all the others before it seem like nothing at all. Mingled with it, and blurring it, quelling it at the end, came an impact of such violence that the whole door structure seemed to start with it from top to bottom, curve inward at the middle, then spring back rigid again a moment later. It seemed incredible that anyone could do that with her body without breaking all her bones. A puff of plaster dust welled up around the sides.

A change had come over the urchin's derisive face. "Carajo, Mamá!" he breathed huskily. "She isn't fooling—"

But the woman, in a reversal of attitude as instantaneous as his own, had already flung herself forward, squat and bulky as she was. "Wait, Teresa," she panted. "I come, I'm here, I open—" She clawed desperately at the bolt. "Only a moment, my beloved, Mi querida, only a moment more. Your mother is here, your mother admits you—"

It wouldn't move. It had jammed. It had been too long unused. Its surface had roughened too much with rust, or that last impact had warped it. It was fast in its socket. She continued to pluck despairingly at it. She half turned around in helpless appeal, then turned back again. She struck frustratedly at the wood just above it with one open hand, while she tried to wrench it back with the other.

"Pedro, Pedro, you have smaller fingers—"

The incipient maleness of the boy rose to take the emergency in its stride. That was what men, big and small, were meant for: a sudden crisis like this, a flurry of violence. The rest was for women. "A stone—something to hit it back with—Gimme, I can get it! Get out of the way—"

There was a building brick lying there on the floor across the room, brought in for some forgotten purpose. He snatched it up, ran back with it. A tap, two taps, three; the unruly bar sprang back.

There had been silence for a minute past, ever since the last climactic scream and maniacal lunge, but only now did they have time to realize it. There was a stillness on the other side.

In the fraction of a second's pause that followed, she saw the boy's eyes swollen downward at the floor. A tongue of red was licking out at his bare foot from under the door. Just that in size and shape, the tip of a human tongue. But it was in flux, fluid. Right as their eyes beheld it it was already widening, lengthening, glittering with its own volatility.

He had snatched the door inward upon them before the mother's slowly gathering scream had time to leave her. He jumped agilely back as though something had bitten him.

It was as though clots of red mud had been pelted at the outside of the door, until, adhering, they formed a sort of spattered mound up against it. There were rags mixed in with it, and snarls of hair, and even tiny crumbs of coral, broken off a string.

The mass sidled, disintegrated all over the threshold.

Manning saw her in the Morgue, the Caja de los Cadáveres as it was familiarly called by those who had to do with it, the next day, before her people had claimed her. He went there with one of the men from the police department, an inspector named Robles, who felt bound to accommodate him because Manning had once secured him a couple of passes to one of Kiki Walker's shows.

"If you insist on looking, my friend—" this Robles warned him. "I advise you not to, unless you have exceptionally strong nerves. You are liable to see it in your sleep for weeks to come. The authorities should really have her cremated, if her own people can't afford it. Open this one," he said to the attendant. He stood aside, to give the other an unhampered view. "Formidable, isn't it?"

The American looked without flinching. His face whitened a little, that was all. He nodded, spellbound.

"That's enough," Robles said to the attendant. He turned to Manning, evidently with the idea of reading him a little lecture. "So you see what your foolish stunt has led to. It has cost a human life. And this may not be the last, before it is over. That thing has not been caught yet."

Manning didn't answer. He was staring down at the cement floor. But in a way that suggested puzzlement of some sort, rather than contrition.

"Juridically, of course, you are not responsible," Robles went on. "That is to say, you did not foresee this, did not mean it to happen, cannot be punished personally for it. But morally you are to blame for it. It is through you alone that this girl lost her life. That is why I so readily acceded to your request and brought you down here with me to let you see her for yourself. It may teach you a lesson."

"It wasn't remorse that made me ask to come here," Manning said quietly. "Nor morbid curiosity either. You've got me wrong. It's—well I've had a troubled feeling that I can't seem to shake off ever since I first heard of it."

"You should have," said Robles severely.

"No, you still don't get me." He ran one hand baffledly up through his hair. "Are you sure that thing, as you call it, did this?"

Robles looked at him first in astonishment, then almost in scorn. "What are you trying to suggest, it didn't? Well, you've just seen with your own eyes. What else but the claws of such a monster could leave such ravages? She was in ribbons. No, there is no doubt in our minds on that score, how can there be? I could take you over to our laboratory, let you talk to some of the men there. Small bits of fuzz, loosened hairs from its coat, were found upon her body. They are in our possession right now. What more do you ask?"

"Nothing," admitted Manning, looking down. "Nothing more. But then why have I got this dissatisfied feeling—?" He didn't finish it. "Was she—did it make any attempt to—?" he faltered presently.

Robles finished it for him without a qualm, with the matter-of-factness of the professional investigator. "Was she eaten, is that what you are driving at? No. I don't know whether they do or not, I don't know enough about them. I must ask the curator of the zoo. In any case, there is sufficient reason for its having done so this time. It occurred outside her very door, in full hearing of the mother and brother. They came rushing out, and the monster was undoubtedly frightened away before it had time to—accomplish its full purpose. If, as I said, they do that."

"Well, was it seen?" Manning persisted discontentedly. "That's what I want to know. If you say this happened right in front of her own door, and there are other houses around there, was there anyone who actually saw it? There should have been, if she screamed."

"Oh, unless someone saw it, it doesn't exist, is that it? That's a very risky theory in police work, don't you think? The houses around there are of the poor, you know the kind. One- or two-room hovels, mostly without windows, simply with a single entrance at the front. By the time they began peering timidly forth up and down the lane, it was over. Some claim they were just in time to glimpse some black form slinking around the turn at the bottom of the alley. They may have, they may not have. What difference does it make?"

"It isn't that I really doubt the jaguar attacked her," Manning said hesitantly. "I have no theories about this. I'm not a detective at all, just a press agent out of a job. Only—only—I just have that peculiar feeling I spoke of, that there's more to this than meets the eye."

"More? What more could there be?" countered Robles. "What more should there be?"

Manning tugged perplexedly at the skin on the back of his neck. "I don't know myself. I can't explain. But tell the truth, doesn't it strike you as strange, almost incredible, that a wild thing, a jungle animal the size and conspicuousness of this jaguar, should remain at large, undetected and absolutely unseen by the human eye, in a city this large, and for this length of time? This isn't a hill village, with the jungles nearby. This is the third largest city of South America. It has not left it and then come back again, obviously. It has been here the whole time. Where? How?"

Robles pursed his lips in conditional agreement, nodded. "It's unprecedented, it's unbelievable, but—it has undeniably happened, hasn't it? The animal has not been recaptured alive, its body has not been found; therefore, it's still at large. That's logical enough, isn't it, Manning my friend?"

"But where does it keep itself, where does it hide in the daytime, where has it found refuge? This place is built all of stone, remember. Asphalt, cobblestones, cement sidewalks, stone houses. There are no trees, except out in the Bosque and in a few small plazas and parks. Where can it go? Thousands of people swarming about it all day long. It was seen to go into the Callejón de las Sombras at six o'clock one evening—with a crowd almost at its heels. Presto! it disappears. Not another glimpse of it from then on. It didn't get out at the other end. The police and fire departments searched every house along that alley from top to bottom. No sign of it. Now this young girl is found torn to pieces all the way over in the Barranca working quarter, half the city away. How did it get over there unseen?"

All Robles could give him on this was, "It's true, it's an amazing thing. Who can say what happened? Perhaps it squeezed itself down into a sewer and traversed one of the big drainpipes that run under the city. The water in most of them would not be deep enough to drown it. And then again there is that so ridiculous suggestion some onlooker was heard to make, that night it disappeared; which may not be so ridiculous as it sounds, after all. That it took refuge in the back of some van or merchandise truck standing in there along the Callejón, was driven unsuspectingly away by the driver, and bolted out again undetected at the next stop the vehicle made."

"Augh!" Manning swung his arm at him impatiently. "Now I'll tell one. Here's something else: what has it lived on during these past days and nights? Where has it gotten its food—and, above all, its water?"

"How do the less ferocious animals, stray dogs and cats, for instance, get theirs? From refuse heaps, from puddles, from the river margin."

"Yes, but they're seen."

"How do we know it hasn't been seen, more than once, in the distance or in the dark, and mistaken for some large black dog? There are other ways possible for it to keep itself alive, too, which we need not dwell on. These same homeless dogs and cats, lizards clambering up and down cracked walls, rats from the sewers—"

Manning turned his head away involuntarily for a moment. Then he looked back again, went on: "How is it it wasn't easily tracked down, cornered almost at once, this second time? How is it you lost it again like the first time? Its claws, the pads of its paws, the fur about its belly, must have been soaked after such an attack—"

"It's true, there were numerous traces of blood-dyed paw prints and even drippings found nearby. None led very far away, however. The dirt and dust of the pavements must have quickly dried and coated the brute's pads. And then so many people quickly milled about, obliterating everything before we could get there."

"For every objection of mine, you have an answer ready. But still and all, you haven't been able to remove that dissatisfied feeling of mine. What we call in my language a hunch. Something isn't right. There's a basic implausibility to this whole thing that I can't accept as easily as you people."

The inspector smiled bleakly, tapped him knowingly on the shoulder. "Tell the truth, Manning. Isn't it your own guilty conscience, about being the indirect cause of this four-legged demon's depredations, that makes you keep trying to raise vague objections, cast shadowy doubts, on what is glaringly self-evident? Of course it is! You would like to believe that it is not the jaguar which did this, for the sake of your own peace of mind. I'm afraid I cannot accommodate you. Our test tubes, our high-powered glasses, our reagents and analyses, have been brought into play; their evidence has been given and found irrefutable. Our report has been made out accordingly, and can be substantiated by the scientific investigation which it is based on. We are not guessing when we say such-and-such and so-and-so. All these things that have occurred to you, they have occurred to us ourselves, and been weighed, never fear, and—discarded. Our findings are: that Teresa Delgado was attacked and clawed to death by a jaguar outside the door of her house in the alley known as Pasaje del Diablo, at 11:15 Thursday night, May fourteenth. And there is nothing further to be added."

"Except by the jaguar," said Manning grimly.

THREE

conchita contreras

THE SEÑORA VIUDA de Contreras raised her pillowed head alertly. The footfall that had attracted her, in the tiled corridor outside her open room door, had had a hesitant quality about it, as though undecided whether to come down full weight or tiptoe.

"Is that you, my daughter?" she called out.

The Señora Viuda was stretched out on a chaise longue, in a state of infirmity that was becoming more and more frequent of late. She was a handsome stately woman, with unplucked brows as thick and black as charcoal smudges, giving her face the look of habitual serenity that straight, horizontal lines are always apt to produce. Her head of thick black hair, only white as yet in one plume steaking off from her temple, was as glossy as a cockerel's tail feathers and, like them, crisply curling in little bunches. A handkerchief soaked in cologne and placed in a narrowed band across her forehead was the only concession to her affliction. She was not one of your whining hypochondriacs. Pain was a thing between oneself and one's God.

At her interrogation the footfall had made up its mind to come down full force. Or rather the succeeding one did, that one having already been made. A couple more followed, rather reluctantly, and then a young girl appeared in the doorway. It is hard not to be beautiful at eighteen, and for her it would have been a physical impossibility. Even the dimming devotional mourning that encased her from head to foot, complete even to smoky veil, couldn't obscure that fact. She stood looking in submissively at the benevolent despot on the chaise, who was aware of one's lightest footfall, almost of one's innermost thoughts, it sometimes seemed.

"Did you wake up from your nap, mamacita? Do you feel better now?"

The Señora Viuda reached out to the night stand beside her, flicked open a small jet-sticked fan, began to use it. This had nothing to do with room temperature, but was the outward symptom of approaching interrogation. Lengthy, exhaustive interrogation. The deceptive brow line remained ruler straight. "Sit down a minute, Conchita mia. Here, by me."

The girl came forward, shifted a chair, sank primly down on the very edge of it.

"There, that's it." The fan continued to move, taking its time. The girl shifted both insteps far in underneath the chair.

"Tell me, hija." There was a pause while the fanning went on. "You were on your way to All Saints Cemetery, to pay your respects at your father's resting place?" The examination was under way.

The girl looked up from the finger she had been wrangling with. "It is his saint's day. It should not be allowed to pass unnoted. And as you were ill, I thought perhaps I'd—"

The Señora Viuda nodded with benevolent approval. "A good daughter doesn't forget her departed father. She keeps the flowers fresh on his grave, doesn't forget to visit it. That's as it should be." The fan whirred blandly on. "When was the last time you were there?"

"Last week, I think—I don't know exactly. Why do you ask me, mamacita?"

"I was just wondering, that is all. Why this sudden intense fervor, this devotional passion, this locura almost." The fan closed, pointed upward, descended again, reopened, went on fluttering. "I don't like it. It isn't good at your age. It isn't natural. It is not that your papa passed from us yesterday. It is five years ago, now, may he rest in peace. You were thirteen then. You loved him, you were desolated. Bueno. Then it passed, as it should with the young. You were like other girls your age, you enjoyed the cine on a Sunday afternoon, having an helado in a sweetshop now and then, those things. Now all at once this frenzy of tragic grief descends on you, excluding every other interest. It is almost feverish, I have seen you brooding by the hour. You cannot go often enough, nor remain long enough, at All Saints Cemetery. You are unable to eat or sleep, unable to think of anything but the departed. It's morbid, it's melancholy."

The fan never stopped a moment. The monologue ran on, with a sort of velvety firmness that didn't raise its voice, threaten, command. That just stated facts. "It is to stop now. No more of these visits to a burial ground. They're not normal. I don't understand them. At your age one shouldn't think of the other world so constantly."

The girl gave her a look of almost tearful supplication. "Just one more time, madrecita. Just today, and then I won't go anymore—if you say so."

"Very well, one more time. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I will feel better, I will take you myself, if you insist on going."

The girl looked harassed, almost terrified at the alternative. "But today's his saint day! Just this once. Look, I'm all ready to leave. It's after half-past four already. I can be there and back before you know it. Just this once more—"

The Señora Viuda wagged her head darkly, in accompaniment to her fanning. "Always there is one time too many, daughter of my blood. Who knows, this may be it? Don't go; listen to your mother. I had a dream I didn't like when I was napping just now."

The girl showed a momentary interest. "About me? What was it about?"

"Only that I could hear your voice calling to me from some dark place, and I could not reach you."

The girl chuckled indulgently. "Is that all? In school the sisters used to tell us we mustn't believe in anything like that."

The Señora Viuda, who was anything but irreligious, muttered something that sounded suspiciously like, "Are the sisters mothers?"

She fanned a while longer, still withholding consent. "Stay here," she urged. "Here, within the walls of your home, where you should be. Read, sew at something, sit by the bars of the window, looking out, dreaming the dreams a young girl does. Or go into the patio at the back, bask there in the late sun, looking at yourself in the water, doing your hair some foolish new way. What is the worst that can happen to you here? Only that time may drag a little. Better that time should pass too slowly than too quick. Tomorrow we will go out, buy you something at one of the stores, have a refresco, take in the crowd at the tables around us—"

She sighed. She could see it was no use, even before the answer came. "Go then, if you must," she gave in grudgingly. "But today is the last time." Then as the girl half started up from her chair in unleashed alacrity, a gesture of the fan stopped her short. "And I want one thing understood. You are not to go there accompanied by Rosita any more."

The girl looked stricken. "But I can't go by myself! Who else is—?"

"I don't trust her. She's giddy and only a few months older than yourself, no fit companion! I should have put a stop to it long ago. I don't know what I've been thinking of until now. It will be old Marta who will take you, if you go at all."

A look of unadulterated horror passed over the girl's face at this Before she could answer, a telephone had pealed distantly, in some remote room.

"Rosita!" the mistress of the house called.

There was a wait that somehow suggested more a stage wait than an actual approach from a distance, and then a comely young girl-of-all-work, with a shawl already coifed around her head, materialized in the doorway, without any preliminary tread along the hall having been audible.

"Sí señora?"

"Was that the telephone just now?"

"The operator must have made a mistake. Nobody answered when I got to it, there wasn't anybody on it."

The Señora Viuda's horizontal brow line arched slightly, then evened out again. "Every now and then that seems to happen in this house. You can take off your shawl, Rosita," she added with an indifferent drawl, "you will not be going out."

The girl put her hands to it, but left it in place, as if hoping the order might yet be countermanded. "But the Señorita Conchita wanted me to accompany her to—" she said with an odd sort of breathlessness.

"Call Doña Marta, she is to go with her instead."

The girl's black-pitted eyes were fixed on her mistress's face with a sort of tremulous fixity that somehow suggested they wanted to direct themselves at somebody else in the room, but were being restrained. She gave a little knee dip, "Sí, señora," vanished from the doorway.

The Señora Viuda turned back to her daughter. The latter was sitting almost in the attitude of a penitent by now, her second ankle had retreated far under the chair to join the first, and she was busily engaged with both hands in pleating and smoothing out again a small section of dress over one kneecap. She could feel her mother's gaze on her, looked up through her long lashes to confirm the impression, looked down again when she had.

Señora Contreras said, with an odd sort of kindliness seeping through her mien of authority, "Come here a minute, my child." Conchita got up, moved to the side of the chaise longue, crouched down to the level of her mother's face. The fan had finally stopped, for the balance of the interview; was laid aside. The Señora reached out, tipped up her hand to her daughter's chin, held it under it in a sort of static caress. She looked questioningly into her eyes.

The girl's eyes never wavered, they were crystalline innocence itself.

"I did not come into this world a middle-aged woman, a widowed mother, as you see me now, you know. I was a young girl myself once, and not so many years ago. Always remember, hijita de mi alma, anything you think, your mother thought before you. Anything you do, your mother did before you. And her mother before her. There isn't anything new in women. I know, I know."

"Know what, madrecita?" the girl breathed so low it could scarcely be heard.

The Señora Viuda kissed her with classic benevolence on the forehead, then more fondly on the lips. "You are a sweet little thing. You are the morning sunlight in my dreary afternoon sky. It is not that you would do anything so unforgiveable. It is just that there is a way of doing things that is right and a way that is wrong. You are young, and the world is old. When you are a few years older, I don't want you to have to look back on anything lacking in dignity, in which you cut a ridiculous figure. Anyone who may become interested in you should come here to our house, as the established custom is with us; should be introduced to you by myself, or Uncle Felipe, or some other older relative."

"Mamacita, I don't know what you mean—"

The Señora gestured leniently. "I haven't said anything. It is just my heart talking to your heart. Now go there if you insist, with Marta, and come right back. The sun will soon be down, so don't linger—"

Without actually springing up, the girl was suddenly all the way across at the open doorway, like something from which a leash has just been detached.

At the threshold she turned for a minute. "What, madre mia?"

"Nothing. Run along." What the Señora Viuda had just said, half to herself, with a sigh of resignation, was: "It will do no good. It never has from the beginning, it never will to the end of time. One can't change the world."

In the passageway outside, Conchita crossed paths with Rosita. They brushed by one another like two people unaware of one another's presence, or at least trying to give that impression. The daughter of the house whispered, "She's sending Marta with me, what am I going to do?"

The serving girl reached out backhand and clasped hands with her in passing, as if to lend moral support.

Conchita looked down at something. "What's that?"

"Don't be afraid, it'll just make her drowsy."

"Me? I can't!"

The other fanned both hands at her in a violent affirmative.

"It won't hurt her, will it?" Conchita breathed anxiously.

"It's nothing, just an herb from the mountains. I got it from an Indian down at the market. I've tried it on myself. All it does is—Shh! Here she comes." They resumed their interrupted transits.

An old woman of about sixty, shawled for the street, was coming down the passageway. "Are you ready, my flower? Have you said goodbye to your mother?" And to Rosita, in angry authority, "Go in there and stay with the Señora, useless one! She may need you for something."

Conchita brushed past. "Wait for me at the door. I'm just going back to my room a second."

She stopped before the mirror in there, scanned herself anxiously as though to make sure she was looking her best for the sake of the dead in the cemetery. She threw open a drawer, unearthed a lipstick from some secret hiding place at the back of it, hastily touched it to her lips. Then she lowered the dimming veil over her face, obliterating the improvement she had just made, and hurried demurely back along the passageway to rejoin her companion.

Her chaperone already had a public carriage drawn up at the door and was sitting waiting in it. To go to the cemetery in a gasoline-powered vehicle was somehow improper, she seemed to feel. "To the flower market," she ordered the driver, as the slim veiled figure climbed in next to her.

Ten minutes later, after driving through a number of narrow, elbow-jointed streets, they reached a small plaza fronting a rose-tan church of massive Spanish colonial architecture. What was remarkable about it was the broad expanse of worn stone steps leading up to it, spanning the entire foundation in width. They were invisible as steps save for a narrow lane of clearance left in the middle, running directly up to the entrance. All the rest had disappeared under what seemed to be a multicolored, unbroken flower bed, with patches of shelter over it here and there. It was only on closer inspection that this disintegrated into separate little zones of barter, each presided over by its individual vendor. Some had rigged up little portable stalls, poles supporting awnings, or straw mats to keep the sun off their perishable wares. Others, unable to afford this, simply squatted on the steps in hollow squares, their merchandise ranged around them in open sheaves or clusters thrust into clay water jars. The air was cloying with an indescribable odor of ferns, crushed leaves, bruised and trodden petals and stalks, and, above all else, the peculiar brackishness given off by age-old paving stones saturated repeatedly with water all day long without ever having time to dry off. It was an odor compounded in equal parts of verdant, blooming life and stagnant, mildewed decay. This was the flower market, held on this site for two hundred years past every day from sunrise until dusk.

Conchita's chaperone got out of the carriage at the foot of the steps, turned to ask: "What kind shall I get?"

The girl descended right after her. "I'm coming, too. I want to pick them myself."

Marta started to protest that it wasn't necessary, she would do it for her, but Conchita had already taken the lead, was moving slowly up the main aisle of display, looking about her, assailed from either side by an advancing barrage of shrill, wheedling, poetic, and personally flattering cries that kept pace with her, to die out again forlornly behind her as she passed out of reach into the next vendor's jurisdiction. Hands reached for her, tugged importunately at her clothing. Marta slapped them down again.

"Here, niña, roses crying for you!"

"Look, chiquita, carnations begging to be bought. Ten centavitos. Five. Any price you say. Only take them, take them!" It was late and the market was about to disband.

Marta halted. "Here are some. Will these do, niña?"

Conchita glanced around, but without halting her ascent. "No, up here at the top. I always buy from this one at the end."

The stall she indicated, as a matter of fact, had a less sizable assortment to offer than many of those they had just passed. The vendor was an old woman with a face as finely lined as though mosquito netting had been drawn over it.

"Some of these." Conchita picked up a single white rose and held it to her face outside the veil, causing a small indentation to appear with indrawn breath.

"Sí, little angel, sí!" the vendor jabbered, bustling to collect them. "White roses, as beautiful, as young, as you are yourself"

"And gardenias," Conchita instructed.

Marta held out her arms for the unbound accumulation. "I'll carry them, they may tear your clothes." She handed the old woman a coin, turned to pick her way down the slippery steps.

The vendor, however, was not yet satisfied. "Look, a little cluster of white violets to go with them. The last one left." She laid one finger craftily alongside her nose for a moment, glanced after the retreating chaperone. "I've been saving them for you all day. Free! I give them to you free!" She pulled twice at the girl's skirt, almost as though it were a bell cord.

The girl took them, moved down the steps in the wake of her companion, holding them close to her face. They were plaited together on a single, large leaf of some sort. She had extracted the thinly folded note twined around their stems even before she re-entered the carriage. She opened it with one hand, read it, holding it down out of sight on the side away from Marta, as they jounced back through the narrow, erratically turning streets on their way to the cemetery.

Just a few words. The oldest message in the world, that said nothing, that said everything. "Sweetness of my life. Will you go there again today? I will be waiting. I have counted the hours all week long, since the last time. Sweetness of my life, have mercy on me."

Somehow she got it inside the lining of her glove, refolded, by thumb motion alone. Then she dipped her face to the violets once more. As the Señora Viuda had said, one shouldn't change the world.

They came out of the older part of town with its tortuous, cobbled streets, where respectable, conservative families like hers lived, into one of the new semi-suburban sections, favored by foreigners and the more flashily prosperous who copied their ways—even to letting their daughters run around without an older woman in attendance. They traversed this along a straight, broad asphalted driveway, and beyond emerged into open country for awhile. Then in the distance ahead a symmetrical line of dark-green poplars began to peer over an intervening rise of the ground and, when they had topped it, suddenly seemed to spring forward to join the road, behind a stone wall that ran back as far as the eye could reach.

It turned and followed the roadside for a while. All Saints Cemetery was known as the largest in the city, if not anywhere in the world. It was said of it that it was big enough to accommodate all the world's dead at one time.

On the opposite side of the road, buildings had sprung up once more, called into being to accommodate the living who on Sundays and certain religious holidays came out here in such shoals to pay their respects to the dead. A headstone carver's shop and workyard, littered with ornamental urns, cherubs, mourning angels, and crosses, a refreshment and eating pavilion, and others such. They were intermittent, with large gaps between, and the whole atmosphere was one of abandoned desolation rather than life-quickened activity, somehow.

The carriage drew up at the main entrance, marked by a pair of massive bronze doors set within a stone arch, and they got out. "Come back for us within a half-hour, no more," Marta instructed the driver.

The carriage ambled aimlessly off on some mission best known to its driver—perhaps the nearest cantina at the next crossroads ahead. As it left them, Conchita held back in seeming irresolution a minute.

"Marta, before we go in, can't we go over to that place across the way and sit down for a minute? I'm so thirsty."

Marta objected querulously, flattening the sheaf of flowers so that she could look at her clearly over their tops. "No, niña. How can we? Your mother told me to bring you right back. Look, the sun's already far down. Night will be upon us before we can get back to the house."

"How long will it take?" the girl coaxed.

"But did we come out here to visit your father's grave or did we come out here to have refrescos?" the old woman said with peevish stubbornness.

"Just a cup of mint tea. You know how you love your mint tea. You always take it at this hour at home."

The chaperone wavered, obviously tempted. She cast a look across the road, as though judging how long it would detain them to go over and back. "But isn't it better to go in first and pay our respects, and then have it when we come out? The place may close."

"I'm faint, Martita. Why do you refuse me?"

Her companion was at once all whimpering solicitude. "Oh my light, why didn't you tell me sooner? What am I thinking of, standing here wrangling? Come, my heart, take me by the arm, we'll go right over."

They inched across the road, held to a painfully reduced gait more by the stout figure's slowness of limb than by the slender one's weakness, if the truth had been known. The devoted Marta even had to caution her charge, "Not so fast, linda. You may get dizzy."

The establishment was bare of customers at this hour. A waiter with a tray tucked under his arm came attentively to the door, waiting to see where they would decide to sit before moving any further. There was a terrace strip of terra-cotta mosaic tiling laid out in front of the place, holding a row of reedy, forlorn-looking, wafer-sized iron tables, each one with more wire-legged chairs wedged around it than it could accommodate.

"Let's go inside out of the glare," Conchita suggested demurely.

They continued on into an interior of cavelike dimness, after the outer brightness, in which a sea of other equally reedy, equally untenanted iron tables could be made out. A loosely strung pasteboard sign proclaiming ASK FOR EL SOL BEER brushed against Marta's head as she passed below it. She swept it indignantly aside.

They seated themselves opposite one another in a small booth against the wall, duenna and massed flowers on one side of the table, young mourner on the other. The waiter approached. "Buenos días."

"Buenos días," Marta grunted, with the curtness one employee often has for another.

Conchita waited until he had gone away again, then tipped the veil from her face with an air of angelic primness.

The visibility lightened up a little around them as their eyes grew accustomed to the place, though not much beyond the blue-green transparency of a submarine deep from first to last. Then too, the daylight outside was fast toning down, losing its contrasting vividness.

They sat for a moment or two. "We'll be locked out," Marta mourned. "We'll have had the whole trip out for nothing." She shifted her head and shoulders outward along her seat to scan the seemingly lifeless rear of the establishment. She shattered the silence with an explosive double smack of her cupped hands. "Muchacho! We're in a hurry!" she called imperatively.

The waiter returned at a trudging walk, his excuse for not hurrying any faster the brimming cup of strongly aromatic tea and glass of lemonade he bore on the tray.

Marta ducked her chin to the cup, smacked her lips expressively as she raised it again. Conchita, who was sitting facing the thoroughfare outside, kept scanning it, more as though she were on the lookout for something to come along and catch her eye than because something had. Suddenly she gave a little sob of suppressed laughter, flexed one finger toward the outer panorama.

"You should have seen that! The funniest-looking man just went by. I wonder what he was."

Marta, who was sitting back to the road, laboriously swiveled herself around and tried to peer out past the edge of the booth partition behind her.

She turned back in a moment, shrugged. "I don't see anyone."

A little ripple was going around in her cup.

"You missed him. He's gone past now."

Marta said, "You do look pale, niña."

Conchita did look pale. She wasn't used to acts of overt treachery against members of her own household. Against anyone, for that matter.

Another minute or two went by. Marta put down her drained cup.

"Come pequeña, we must go."

"Just let's sit a minute longer. It's so nice here. I haven't quite finished my lemonade yet."

"The sun is almost all gone. It'll be dark before we know it. We can't go in there in the dark—"

"You look tired, Marta."

As though she had only realized it now that the thought had been suggested to her, Marta admitted: "I am tired. I went to six o'clock Mass this morning." She sighed self-indulgently. "When one gets to be my age—"

"Put your head back a minute against the leather padding," the girl suggested.

"It wouldn't look right, out in public like this."

"There's no one but us here to see."

The old woman's head went back almost of its own accord, she closed her eyes gratefully, and gave a deep sigh of relaxation. Her head stayed straight for a minute, erect on her shoulders. Then it slanted over until it had found the angle between the two walls of the compartment, remained leaning against it, supported by one of them. Her breathing started to become more gritty. Her lips parted company slightly, just in the middle.

The girl sat quietly on opposite her a moment longer. Then she shifted outward along the seat until the impediment of the table had ended, stood up, never taking her eyes off the deputy guardian's face. The heavy jowls were shaking a little now, with each breath.

She reached cautiously downward for the mass of flowers beside Marta, scooped them up in the crook of one arm, careful to keep them from rustling too flagrantly. She got them all but one, a long-stemmed white rose which escaped her. She let that remain where it was. To have tried to retrieve it might have cost her all the others.

She picked her way through the shoal of spool-topped tables, moving like a black-garbed wraith against the dying brightness of the day outside. When she had gained the lateral aisle of clearance that led to the front and out, she motioned the waiter toward her before proceeding along it, at the same time cautioning him with fingers to lips.

"Sí, señorita?"

"My nodriza's very tired, pobrecita. I'm going to leave her here for a few minutes. Don't wake her up, please, until I get back. I'm just going across the street. I'll be back for her in a quarter of an hour."

"Just as the señorita orders it," he murmured respectfully. A refined young girl in mourning from head to foot, an armful of flowers obviously destined for a grave—who could think anything amiss?

She moved decorously enough until she had gained the terrace outside and the street beyond that. Then, because the cemetery entrance was some considerable distance down, not directly opposite, and because the sun was already expiring in a pool of blood in the western sky, and her precious store of stolen minutes was draining away through her fingers like sand, she began to hasten. Unnoticeably at first. In a moment more she was presenting the rather grotesque, not to say scandalous, spectacle of a black-garbed mourner, flowers bobbing up and down in arms, veil ends and skirts streaming out behind her, rushing along full tilt toward a burial-ground entrance, as though the dead couldn't wait, as though she couldn't get in fast enough to offer them her homage. One or two heads turned to look incredulously after her as she whisked by.

She was out of breath as she rounded the ornamental entrance archway, black-silk-encased legs trip-hammering under her so fast they almost blurred. "I don't want you to have anything undignified to have to look back on later." Tell that to love!

Her sense of propriety returned to her just in time; she forced herself to slow to a more sedate though still rather rapid walk, as she passed between the ponderous bronze gate flaps, outstretched like a pair of wings waiting to receive and fold upon her. The gift of some wealthy private donor, they were expensively worked in bas-relief. On one was inscribed: That which is so universal as death must be a blessing. And on the opposite one: And none may escape its benediction.

She passed through them without a glance. The living have no time to look at death; they cannot see it even if they try.

A short distance within and beyond them was a little lodge, scarcely more than a stone sentry box, used by the gatekeeper during hours of admission. He was standing in the narrow doorway of it, looking out, as she went by. He was a kindly, commonplace-looking old man, obviously nearsighted as she could tell by the way he squinted at her in peering uncertainty.

She stopped short, moved a step or two over toward him. "Has a young man come in here within the past half hour or so, have you noticed? Dark-haired and thin and, and by himself?"

"Sort of a good-looking young fellow?" he suggested.

"Oh, handsome!" she agreed fervently, casting a rapturous upward look at the sky.

The old man smiled a little with tolerant understanding. "Yes, niña, yes, I have seen someone like that. Three times within the past ten minutes he's been out here to the entrance, looking for someone, getting more restless all the time, asking me if I'd seen—someone very beautiful, in black with jet-black hair, bringing a servant girl with her."

She dropped her eyes, quickly raised them again.

"He's still in there, though? He didn't leave?" she said relievedly.

"He's still in there as far as I know. I don't remember seeing him leave. Unless he left while I was making my last tour of inspection."

"No," she assured him, with a sort of charming inner conviction, "he didn't, he's still in there. Thank you."

She turned and resumed her way down the long broad central avenue that led farther in before it began to unravel into numberless, winding, white-graveled paths, all looking pretty much alike and all already taking on a bluish cast as they filled up with the silt of night shadow.

"Don't stay in too long, señorita," the gatekeeper called after her in kindly warning. "When you hear my whistle blow that means we're closing. You only have a minute or two left."

She only half heard him. An invisible current that he couldn't see had swept her up, was pulling her irresistibly forward. Whistles and gates and quotas of minutes couldn't weaken or stop it or interfere. This was the time for love, treasured, hoarded, waited for, ever since the time before.

She walked rapidly down the somber avenue, through an eerie landscape fast dimming in the twilight. Eerie because it was neither natural nor human; it was that of the other world. There was a classical severity to it, a cold melancholy, that nature lacks. These cypresses, poplars, weeping willows, artfully disposed here and there, singly and in copses, they were rooted where dead human beings lay. They touched death, they sheltered it, they even lived and were nourished upon it. And scattered all about under them, through every opening in their low-hanging branches, in every space between their trunks, down every vista and at every turn, was a silent, soulless population, gleaming white in the wavering shadows. A population that seemed to be waiting some necromantic signal in the depths of oncoming night to come to swarming, malignant life. A population of angels, phoenixes, griffins. The very marble benches here and there along the paths, they seemed to be put there not for the living to rest upon during the course of their visits, but for the use of unguessed shrouded forms flitting along these thoroughfares and lanes in silent passage late at night.

And over it all hung a violet pall of expiring light, the crepusculo, whose very name was a little death in itself. The death of day.

Through this land of the dead, love made its way, nineteen years old, blood warm, eyes bright, breath quick, heart pulsing. She was no longer running. She was in now, that was the main thing. It was just a matter of a minute or two more, and it wouldn't have been respectful in such a place. But she moved along at an eager little walk, with a double step of added impetus every three or four paces, that was not quite a trot but threatened to be one.

She reached a little circular axis that was a landmark to her. In its center stood an alabaster urn on a slender graceful pediment that she always used to guide herself by. Here four paths spoked out. The one she had been following continued on beyond, into reaches of the cemetery that were unknown to her. Then there was a lateral one that crossed it at this point, making two more. She knew by experience you turned left at this place to reach her family's burial plot. Then coming back, of course, you just did the opposite, turned right, to get back on the main avenue leading to the entrance gate.

It was just a little further on now. She followed this lesser, winding, graveled path, with its half-remembered particulars of surrounding. First it led through a depressed open treeless patch, a sort of meadow of the dead. The depths of this were inked in with blue already. Then it climbed and wound its way through a thick grove of trees, almost like a tunnel, and just past that was her destination. She hadn't had a chance to notice these things much on her previous visits. Going, Rosita was always chattering away to her. And coming back, more lingeringly, there was an arm about her waist and a low voice murmuring in her ear. This was the first time she'd made her way through here alone.

She arrived finally. She reached the short but head-high length of box hedge that ran along the path for a few feet, marking her family's plot. She turned in through a gap in it, made her way to the newest of the several monuments and markers it contained, a pylon of bone white, with a bronze wreath clamped to it circling a simple inscription.

DON RAFAEL CONTRERAS Y GALBO

PRAY FOR HIS SOUL

It was at the far end of the enclosure. The rest were just great-aunts and people she had never known. He wouldn't be waiting for her in here, of course. That would have been bad taste. There was a place they had—But first, the respect due one's dead. She sank down on one knee beside the mound, firmly put all thoughts of that someone else out of her mind for the time being, lowered her head, murmuring a short prayer that was a plea for forgiveness. "Father, forgive me for fooling Mother like this. We didn't mean to, but we're both going to be old so long. I'll have him come to the house and meet her this week, I promise."

She rose at last, spent several more minutes arranging the flowers she had brought with her about the base of the pylon, moving from side to side to shift them until the effect suited her. Then she dipped her knees, crossed herself, and left the enclosure, with a lingering backward glance. The dead had received their due, and now for the living.

It wasn't very far away, just a little farther over to the left along the same path. It was a little marble pergola, a circular roof supported by slim columns, without any walls. It didn't belong to anyone; that is to say, it was a "public" structure put up by the cemetery itself, like the benches and the landmark urn farther back. That was where they always met. He'd be waiting for her in there right now. She'd probably see the ember of his impatient cigarette moving around restlessly inside it like a red firefly as she came hurrying up. It was a shame; her getting here late like this would give them hardly any time together at all.

It already looked indistinct in the dusk as she sighted it, a misty blue shape peering through the haze, instead of clear white anymore. But what did she care what it looked like, it was who was in it that counted. She made a little crowing sound of mischievous delight as she turned and ran in between two of the fluted columns. "Raul," she greeted him. "Did you think I'd never—"

It was empty.

Gone! He'd given her up, left without waiting—No, he couldn't have, the gateman had said he'd just seen him. And if he'd tried to leave after that, the gateman would have told him that she had arrived herself in the meanwhile, and he would have come back looking for her.

She stood there for a moment, uncertainly, in the clear floor space ringed by three semicircular backless benches. He'd be back in a minute. He must have gone just as far as the entrance, to look for her one last time, and the gateman would surely tell him. They must have missed one another in some way; maybe while she was behind the hedge in her family's plot, he'd passed by unheard outside. Without noticing her in there, all black against the shadows. Or taken some shortcut to the gate that didn't bring him by there at all. She'd better wait here, where he could find her, or they might miss one another a second time, never get together at all.

Just tonight that had to happen, when the time was so short anyway! She sat down forlornly on one of the three benches. Presently, even in the murky light that filled the place, she made out something on the floor. A half-smoked cigarette lying at her feet. Another. A half dozen, strewn all over. She picked the nearest one up gingerly between two fingers, held it directly under her eyes in the obscurity. Part of the trade name still hadn't been consumed. "Exquisito." Those were his, she knew them. She smiled compassionately. Poor boy, she could see him now, pacing back and forth, fretting at the long delay.

She continued to hold it for a while, looking at it. It was a part of him. It was the most she could have of him for a moment or two, until he got back here himself.

She whispered to it. "Little cigarette, does he love me? Did he miss me, because I wasn't here? Tell me, how did he act? Did he whisper my name when he held you in his mouth? You should know, you were very close to him." She touched it caressingly with the tip of one finger. She was very young yet.

It was taking him long to come back from the gate. He wouldn't fail to come back, though; the gateman would surely tell him he'd seen her. It would be foolish not to wait, now that she was here. This was the only place where they could be unseen, alone together for a moment or two. It was different when she'd brought Rosita. Rosita was one's own age, understood, even aided and abetted one. With Rosita they could have taken a lingering farewell of one another, even out in full sight at the main gate. She would have waited tactfully out of earshot, or walked ahead of them, leaving them to follow to the carriage with arms linked, heads inclined together. But with Marta along! She'd better stay where she was. He'd show up any minute.

How strange it was. You met someone, and suddenly the whole world became different. She remembered the first time they'd met. It wasn't so long ago, just a few Sundays ago, but already she couldn't recall what life had been like before that time, before there'd been a "him." It was on a Sunday afternoon, at the cine. Her mother had had one of her spells, and Marta was too strict to go to a cine on Sunday, so Rosita had gone with her. You had reserved seats at a cine on Sunday afternoons, you rented them by the season and you occupied the same ones every time you went, so he must have known her by sight, watched her each time the lights went up at intermission, for a long time before. Well, she had noticed him herself, but you couldn't stare of course. You could only let eyes meet eyes for a passing instant.

Then when they came out that afternoon, they found that a terrific downpour was drenching the streets. They huddled there helplessly under the sidewalk canopy along with everyone else, unable to move, while the theater doorman blew his whistle up and down the street—that querulous sound just then, chiming in upon her thoughts from somewhere in the distance, reminded her of that day, brought it before her more vividly than ever—calling up carriages and cabs and anything on wheels to the rescue. But everyone else kept getting them, and the two of them, she and Rosita, would have stood there stranded for there was no telling how long, if he suddenly hadn't appeared at their side and forced a passage for them, and arbitrarily commandeered the latest one standing at the curb, to the exclusion of—

Suddenly she was upright, with a sort of shock of delayed timing coursing through her. That had been the gateman's whistle that had blended in so patly with the stream of her thoughts, back there before!

She ran out between the columns, stood poised for an instant on the two low steps that formed the structure's flooring, listening with frightened intensity. It came again; then, piping, sounding miles and hopeless miles away across the darkness. Farther away than she could ever hope to reach in time. The second and the last warning, and after that—they just locked up without waiting any longer. He must have missed her in some way, the gateman, just as she and Raul had missed one another. Because obviously they would have to do more than just blow a whistle at the gate, in a place of this size. Perhaps on his last tour of warning around the grounds he had failed to come near this pergola, never realizing there was anyone sheltered in it. And she, in her daydreaming, had failed to note the distant flicker of his lamp—if he used one—or grasp its significance. Or perhaps he had mistaken someone else who had passed him on her way out, garbed in mourning as she was, for herself, and not bothered to come in looking for her at all. He was nearsighted, after all.

All this in a single, horrified pause on the steps, quicker even than her fluttering garments could settle about her into motionlessness. And to add to her dismay, she realized only now that it had grown completely dark while she was sitting in there waiting. Even the afterglow of the sun was gone now. Only a slight greenish blackness, like oxidized metal, above the trees in the west, showed where it had been. The rest was dark, dark, dark; night was in possession and had caught her in its trap.

She was running along the winding graveled path now. She thought she'd never run so fast in her life before. A spray of gravel flew up, like sea foam, at the tiny prows of her plunging feet. Through the tunnel of trees. Down into the declivity of the meadow of the dead. Up again on the other side. Past the box hedge behind which her father and the great-aunts lay. A sob of helpless appeal winged back toward it as she darted by: "Papacito!" The whimper of a frightened thing, tossed over her shoulder as she fled headlong past the place. To someone who once could have protected her—but couldn't now anymore.

The trees were invisible against the black sky. But under them, and far too visible, the white of the monuments and the markers made blurred gray ghost shapes here and there. An angel poised on one toe threatened to spring out at her from ambush, seize her about the neck with both arms tightly entwined, bring her down. She screamed, and shied aside, and nearly fell, then went floundering on again.

A wind seemed to come sighing up out of the earth around her, damp and moldy with the aroma of long-buried things. It wasn't just static, it seemed to pursue her, threading through the trees, winding down the path after her, moaning, trying to claim her for its own. The pathway under her was just a gray ribbon, an indistinct tape, stretched across the dark. It never seemed to end, it never would end—

This was panic, and she knew it, and she knew it must be conquered or she would never reach the gate alive. Even as she tottered on, chest exploding and collapsing at each in- and exhalation, she fought to regain her self-control. It's all right, Conchita, nothing will happen; it's all right, don't be a fool. In just a moment more you'll reach that landmark of the urn, and then you turn left—remember?—and after that just the one broad central avenue takes you to the gate, nothing to it. Call out now, from here—they'll hear you, they'll wait, they'll hold it open. Call out so they'll know; you should have already, from the moment you first heard the whistle.

She didn't think she'd have breath enough left, but she managed somehow. Shrilly, falteringly, jerky with the vibration of her continued running. "Gateman! Gateman, wait! I'm still in here! Don't close yet! Wait until I get there—"

Then she couldn't anymore, there wasn't enough strength of lung left. She was wavering from side to side as it was, no longer able to keep to a straight course. And the treacherous gravel, so easy to tread upon when you were at rest, seemed to roll and sidle under her feet, unbalancing her.

The urn! Oh, saints be praised, the urn at last! Rearing there before her, higher than her head, seeming to swim against the darkness without support, until the lesser pallor of its pediment had come into focus under it.

To the left now, she warned herself harassedly; to the left, be careful—She couldn't even tell for a moment which it was. The heart. The heart was always on the left. She put her hand to it, and its pounding was almost a physical hurt, like hammer blows against the hollow of the hand. She let it guide her, swerved around toward that side, and the urn was whisked from sight behind her, like something worked on invisible strings.

The broad, paved alley that led straight to the gate lay before her now, and the worst was over. Its firm surface was easier to run on than the shifting gravel, but she couldn't gain much added advantage, she was already too exhausted. She tottered waveringly on; she daren't falter now. She tried to call out again, and found she couldn't. A muted, strangled sound, that scarcely outdistanced her, was all that she could utter. It seemed to tear at her suffocating throat. "Leave the gates open, wait for me—!"

Straight and broad the avenue stretched before her, its side boundary lines drawing to a shadowy junction in the darkness ahead that kept eluding her, never came any closer. Behind her, that same malignant wind that smelled of the clamminess of tombs and the stench of rotted coffins seemed to have turned at the urn just as she had, seemed to be keeping up its insatiable, humming pursuit, even down this straightaway. It was like running down a track of perpetual motion, whose reverse direction ate up all the gain you made, kept you standing still at a fixed point after all, though limbs and heart and lungs wore themselves out.

A bench went slowly past on one side. Then, after a while, another went slowly past on the other. How she wanted to topple down on one of them and just lie there half senseless—but she daren't. It was so long ago that the whistle blasts had sounded; would they really have heard her cries? Would they still be waiting, keeping them open? Then why didn't they come forward, even a little part of the way; why didn't she see the glimmer of their lanterns down there at the end of this interminable perspect—

There was something wrong. The distance to the gate seemed greater than she remembered it. It was greater, there was no mistaking it. This wasn't a distortion of panic, of darkness; it was a question of the length of time she had been running, and the distance she had covered. She should have reached that gate already two or three times over by now. Even at a walk it had never seemed this far, never been this far, before.

The thought of what it was, of what had happened, was like ice creeping through her veins, numbing as it wound its way. And then behind it was heat again, ready to claim her in turn; but not the warmth of sanity, of normalcy, anymore. The fever heat of burning madness, the temperature of nightmare.

She was scarcely moving forward now. She couldn't anymore. She was swaying there, her limbs still trying to carry her forward, only succeeding in making little rotary motions on the ground. And still it stretched endlessly before her, to that immutable vanishing point it had had all along, ever since back there at the urn.

She tried to think. Left. Yes, left. Izquierda. That was the word, that was the direction. But left when? On coming in, when you wanted to go toward your family's plot? Or on going out, when you wanted to go toward the gate? Left was the word. Rosita had said it that other time, when they had stopped uncertainly for a moment there by it. She could still hear the remark sound in her mind. "No, left, Señorita Conchita." That part was all right. But left when? She couldn't remember whether they had been coming in or going out at the time. Her mind had been full of him.

She reeled around and looked behind her. The urn had been lost long ago. All that met her eyes was another of those vanishing points, no different from the one in front of her.

She'd made the wrong turning, come the wrong way. She'd plunged deeper into this fastness of the dead, instead of making her way out. The preliminary sobs of hysteria started to form in her throat, each one rising higher than the one before. She drove both hands distractedly through the ringleted hair that Raul had once admired so, dislodged the coronet of twisted black braid that encircled it and the veiling depending from it. They fell to the ground behind her, and she let them stay there unheeded.

The gates must be closed long ago. They'd never heard her, never guessed. She was locked in this hideous place for the night, and no one knew it. They'd gone away and left her in here, with the dead. She knew that nearsighted old man didn't sleep here on the grounds. The little kiosk that sheltered him during visiting hours was dark and locked up now. Its size had told her that at sight; it was just a daytime niche.

She turned and tried to go back along the way she had come just now. One faltering step was all she could manage. Her courage failed her. She couldn't do it. She couldn't go back into that maw of darkness behind her that she had passed through once already. True, it was as dark ahead of her, but there was something even worse about darkness revisited than about darkness already explored. As though she would be giving latent evil a second chance at her if she returned. That dolorously crooning wind was coming from back there. The trees were rustling and hissing, like living things stalking her, from back there.

She heeled her hands to her eyes, held them tightly pressed there to try to shut out the terrible sights she had not seen yet, but was afraid she might have to see at any minute. Her teeth were chattering with terror, and with the nervous chill induced by it. She took her hands away from her eyes at length, and found she had begun to move again, without knowing it, in the meantime. Slowly now, uncertainly, erratically, without purpose or destination. She was meandering down the center of the avenue, with the wavering gait of someone about to drop in a heap at any moment. Still in the direction in which she had been going all along, for she could still go forward if not back. Her jerky, unpredictable progress was that of something bereft of all reason. Which, temporarily, she was.

A bench edged up beside her along the perimeter of the lane, bleached white, cadaverous against the gloom, like something with an invisible spotlight trained on it. She turned aside; fell rather than walked over to it, and, as though its presence and support were some sort of emotional release, flung the upper part of her body prone against the seat of it, legs trailing out behind her along the ground, and exploded into a cataclysm of sobbing that was so violent it couldn't by its very nature have lasted long without rendering her unconscious.

It didn't. She stopped again, from sheer rib stricture and breath stoppage, and remained there quiescent. But not unaware. Fear was creeping back over her again, like a thin glazed coating, even while she huddled there without moving. It touched off reflex action, finally. She scissored her legs suddenly, like a swimmer on dry ground; switched her head around, looked behind her. The instinctive reaction of those in the dark, afraid of the dark. A scream of dismay wrenched through her stiffened lips, and she tried to burrow her head and shoulders into the furthermost inner corner of the bench seat and back with such spasmodic terror that she struck her forehead violently against the cold hard stone and still didn't even feel the blow.

There was something creeping up along one side of the blurred gray pathway upon her. Something black, sinuous, belly-flat, tail snaking. Sometimes the offside gloom effaced it, sometimes the lighter tone of the path outlined its undulation. But on one side only. There was a wink, a tiny flash too dull to be called bright, every now and again from its forepart, as a ray from some star high overhead struck some glistening or liquefied beadlike area receptive to light.

Its advance was irregular, with the irregularity of stealth. It would undulate quickly, covertly, forward; so quickly the ripple it made seemed almost an optical illusion. Then it would stop short, seem lifeless, nothing but a shadow, gathering itself for the next treacherous little creep. Even while she looked, eyes huge with brain-turning horror, she saw its tail, its slender ropelike after appendage, give a little flirt upward, a twitch, then flatten again. It made another little stealthy, squirming run, stopped again with hair-trigger timing.

She was paralyzed. Approaching dissolution robs the body of movement. She was cataleptically silent, after that first scream of discovery, for the same reason. There is a depth of fright beyond screaming that is silent. She had heaved herself upward off the ground without use of her arms, climbing up the joint between bench back and side arm by motion of her shoulders alone, without turning to look at it. That was the most she could do to try to get away from it, wedge herself distortedly into the shallow indentation of a low stone bench arched backbreakingly at the waist around its seat. Her face was a frozen grimace of convulsive anticipation.

It gave no warning. It was as unpredictable as mercury or lightning. Suddenly it sprang, streaked out at her feet—and a little beyond, as though it had overreached itself. Its tail part came lashing, switching after it.

All she did was shudder, in a form of death without contact. Then she deflated as suddenly as it had leaped, her waist sank in, rippled down over the edge of the seat, and she sidled inertly to the ground, retched a couple of times. There beside her own discarded black coif, with the two jet ornaments spaced on the front of it, and the long sinuous length of whipped-around veiling, that bulged like muscular haunches in places, that the wind had been sending creeping stealthily up on her a little at a time.

Cruel minutes went by, in a gift of renewed life that was hardly wanted anymore, it had been so expensive. She got to her feet again somehow, presently, the black garment on her a biased misfit now, too high up on one shoulder, down off the other one entirely. Smoky ribbons on her white legs where there had been stockings before. She wasn't a civilized being any more. She wasn't a young girl of the city. She wasn't the Viuda de Contreras' daughter. She had no name, she had no address. She wasn't feminine, and she wasn't masculine, she'd sunk to a lower genderless plane. She'd forgotten what love was, and her tears or the action of her hand had carried a surly red streak of lipstick from the corner of her mouth down to the bottom of her chin and under. She was just a blindly instinctive thing, struggling feebly to get from the dark to the light, to get from fear to safety.

Terror now was only something comparative. There were accesses of it at times, then at other times there were diminutions of it; there never at any time was a complete absence of it She wavered along, on the move once more, head lolling downward on her chest, legs splaying stiffly out behind her, first one then the other, like crutches. There were stars over her, but they were cold and meaningless. They seemed so distant, so aloof; pin-point intelligences without pity, looking down from a great height on something trapped in a black pit, watching it go around and around, trying to find its way out, and knowing that it never would.

Then suddenly a new terror was added to those she was already enduring. A chromatic one, this time. Color began to well up into the cemetery, giving it a new dimension, giving its horrors depth, that the two-dimensional black and gray had lacked until now. It was like a reflection from a distance; she couldn't see where it was coming from at first. It was like the shine of red fire through the trees and between the graves, not rising high, but creeping closely over the ground.

A great, angry eye was opening behind her. The moon. But not the cool, tapered moon of lovers and of wishes. Full-bellied, carnivorous. With animus toward the living, like everything else in here. Fuming, fevered, glaring diseasedly, redolent of evil and of things they had taught you long ago in church not to believe in. Unhallowed things. Ghouls and goblins, grinning cadavers that pushed their way up out of graves, all subcuticle muscular ligaments in crisscross patches, like something on a medical student's dissection table. The moon. The planet that controls madness and psychopathic urge to shed blood.

It doubled, tripled the shadows where it had been black before. And in the places where it had been less than black, it brought a horrifying, threatening simulation of motion, filtering through the restless leaves and branches. It made the forms and figures on the graves seem to waver, to sidle and stir and shift in its rays, to mottle like leprous things and glower and leer, where they had at least been still before. Trees became gnarled shapes bending toward her, reaching down to clutch at her. Monuments became things crouched behind the bushes and the flowers, dropping their heads lower at the moment she skirted by, to rear up again and slink out after her the instant her back was to them. Even her own shadow turned against her now, treacherously assailed by creeping up on her when she least expected it or flinging itself abruptly at her from one side.

She had no leisure to think of anything but the present moment, in the midst of all these terrors, but if she had she would have realized the darkness had already had its victory. She was already a little dead. Whether she ever got out of here again or whether she didn't she would never be the same. Fright had pushed her permanently back into some atavistic past, lived long ago.

And meantime the bilious planet, like everything else in the place, seemed bent on pursuing her. It slowly climbed the sky after her, clearing itself as it went. From angry orange to a sulphurous yellow, and from that to white, the bleached white of a skull, eye sockets faintly discernible, inclining downward to look at her from the sky.

A period of trancelike inanition followed for a short while; she was conscious of still stumbling on, but her mind was a little hazy. Even terror had become a little blunted, lost some of its sharp edge, though it was still with her. She was experiencing a sort of hangover of the mental faculties, brought on by shock and overstimulation.

And then suddenly a little sound came to her, roused her, brought her back to whiplike alertness again. A little sound of life, the first she'd heard since this horrendous solitude had begun. The first besides her own screams and footfalls; the first objective one coming from outside her own travail. The sweetest thing she'd ever heard; sweeter than the sweetest note of music ever struck, lovelier than the loveliest birdcall ever trilled. A little discord, a thing between a squeak and a grunt, faint, far-off, ugly, awkward, gauche, but, oh, how welcome. The distant honk of a car horn sounded in passage.

The outside world, the world of the living, was someplace near here, closer at hand than she'd suspected. She stood there straining her ears, forcing them beyond their powers of attunement, to try to catch it again. It wouldn't come again. Just once, and then no more. She held her breath, she even quieted one of the stirring strips of torn garment hanging from her, so that there wouldn't be the slightest sound about her that might cause her to lose it. But no, it wouldn't come again.

She didn't know which way to go, for she hadn't been quick enough to catch which way it had seemed to come from. If she moved incautiously she was afraid she might be going farther away instead of nearer to it, end up by losing it altogether. It hadn't come from behind her, that was the one thing she was sure of.

Since her ears couldn't aid her, or were given no second opportunity to, she tried to force her eyes to do service in their stead. But the darkness seemed to lie impartially around her in all the three remaining directions—No, wait; didn't there seem to be an evenness to it, over there, on her right, as though there were a surface backing it instead of it continuing to an unconfined depth? Didn't those motelike flicks of moonlight peering through the leaves over there seem upright against something, instead of lying flat upon the ground?

She struck out suddenly, all hopes of recovering the original position at which she'd heard the telltale sound gladly cast away on the single chance of being right about it. Through grass, and over lumpy rises at times that, though they might well have been graves, were robbed of all power to terrify her now, for this was life itself that was beckoning to her through their midst. They could have yawned open under her feet and she would have still leaped across them from lip to lip, the quicker to get where she was going.

And there it was at last, something upright looming there ahead of her, coming closer, gliding toward her with her running, striking at last against the flats of her hands, outstretched to it in appeal, with a roughness of masonry, a scratchy prickliness of mortar, that was more caressing to the touch than velvet or satin could have been. The boundary wall, the limit of death, the line beyond which it did not go.

Pressed against it, motionless at last, arms upright at her sides, she put her lips to it, kissed it in poignant gratitude.

She must have been making her way, all unsuspecting, along parallel to it for some time past, although it was set out at a considerable distance away from the path she had been following. It obviously wasn't the front wall, where the gate was, for she had been moving steadily away from that the whole time. Unless, of course, she had made a complete, blind circuit of the place in the dark, and come back to where she had started from. But more likely it was either one of the side walls, or the rear one. She had probably gone entirely through the dread place, to its other end.

There was a noticeable hum now in the air, coming from the other side of it. Faint and disembodied, an echoing murmur from far off, but still able to intrude upon the stillness that reigned in here. It was the hum, the drone, that comes from houses, from streets, in the distance, in the night. It must be built up on the other side of this wall, or at least to within a short distance of it. A finger of the city must stretch out toward the cemetery from the rear, even though the main gate around at the other side gave onto more or less open country.

And then, in confirmation, the axle of a tramcar wheel grated as it rounded a turn, off in the distance someplace but querulously audible.

She began to beat her way along the inside of the wall, face turned to look up hopefully at the top. It was too smooth, too high, to be scaled unaided, even if she'd had the strength left. Why had they had to make it so high? What had the dead in here to fear from the living?

Some of the trees, she noticed, seemed to grow fairly close to the wall. The branches of certain ones even spanned the top of it, occasionally. Perhaps if she could get up the trunk of one, she could work her way out along one of those over-reaching branches and transfer from it to the top of the wall. Even if she couldn't descend from there unaided, she would at least be in a better position to attract someone's attention on the outside. She couldn't from down below here, where she was. Her voice seemed to be gone, from overuse; she could only make low whimpering noises now. And there was obviously no ground-level gap within this solid bulwark, at least not near enough to be of any use to her.

Most were set too far in; there was a gap up above that would have defeated her even if she had been able to get to the proper height; or else the slenderness of the trunk itself warned that the upper reaches would be even more unsubstantial; she would only have succeeded in killing herself. She found one at last that seemed just right, although it was hard to be sure in the dark. By standing still under it and peering intently for several minutes she thought she could make out a thick, massive bough forking out from it, in a straight line over the wall and beyond. It looked from where she was nearly as broad in girth as the lower trunk itself.

She tried to clasp her arms around its base to gain a fulcrum, and they wouldn't meet around it, it was too large in diameter. She tried to claw her way up it, then, on one side only; to dig her nails into the rough-edged bark and hang her entire weight on them. The bark only peeled off in little segments, her nails broke, and the tips of her fingers grew lacerated. The tips of her prodding, gouging shoes slipped down again each time without being able to gain a hold. Once she was able to get up as high as half her own height again, but then she slid down again, scratching and bruising her own skin. She let herself lie where she'd fallen a minute to rest.

Oh, if she'd only been twelve again, she knew she would have been able to do it. When she was twelve, and they'd taken her to the country in the summer, she'd climbed many trees for pears and apples and thought nothing of it. And now, the pear, the apple, was safety, life itself—and she couldn't do it!

She cried a little with the bitterness of frustration, pleaded with those who weren't there to hear, with her head lowered toward the ground, there in the darkness at the foot of that pitiless tree. "Raul, Raulcito, why did you go away like that? Mother, mother of my life, let me come back to you. I'll never do it again. Why didn't I listen to you? You always were right. You didn't want me to leave the house—"

The words died to a blurred whimpering, the whimpering muted to disconsolate sobbing breaths.

Then suddenly as she lay there like that, head and shoulders reared off the ground, the rest of her sprawled supinely out upon it, a sound came from over the wall, so matter-of-fact, so casual, so close at hand—she couldn't believe it was real, she couldn't believe she'd actually heard it. It was the hollow, slightly wooden-sounding clap a car door gives when it is carelessly flung closed against the chassis. And then a lesser sound, the snap of a key in a lock.

An empty car must have been parked outside there all along, close up against the cemetery wall, waiting for someone. And that someone had just returned to it and gotten in, and was about to drive off all unknowing!

It was down farther, a few yards below, judging by the direction of the sound. And yet for all practical purposes, its and her own parallel placement could be considered a freak of exactitude; they were as good as diametrically opposite one another, she and this potential savior car. Had she seen it, known it was there all the while, she could scarcely have come to a halt much closer to it than she had. Strange are the geometrical patterns devised by night and the stars.

Oh limbs, lift me, bear me up, just this one time more. Oh voice, call out strongly enough in time to be heard. Quick, quick, a second's inability may be already too late!

She opened her lips spasmodically, and a soundless gush, residue of exhaustion, was all that came the first time. Then a second try and voice followed. She couldn't hear it. A torrent of mechanical noise drowned out her lungs' pitiful effort. He'd started the motor. Six cylinders against one fragile larynx. It was a raucous engine, that must have needed oiling somewhat, that bombarded the night.

She was upright and thrashing, almost spinning, frenziedly along the inside of the wall, and even as she did so it already seemed to begin gliding unnoticeably ahead of her, increasing those few yards of differential there had been to start with, as the wheels began to turn. For a long, unendurable moment there was an equipoise; a hideous contest between her fraying screams and the increasing revolutions of its cylinders. Which could keep it up the longest? She was so tired and the engine was so strong.

Then it began to pull away; not just glide now but accelerate into full career. And in the very act was her salvation. It ebbed a little in volume, the rhythm of a more even vibration set in. Her voice found an opening in that, an echo if it managed to slash through its new regularity of tempo.

There was another ghastly equipoise, a second or two before the effects could show, while it seemed to leap away from her. And she couldn't scream any more, that had been her last one. Then brakes rasped and it slurred to an unwilling, unintended short stop. She could even hear the hiss of reluctant rubber against stone.

Silence.

Then a man's voice, questioning the blank night. "Who is it? Hello? Hello?"

She could visualize his hand starting toward the clutch once more, to continue, thinking he had been mistaken, it had been some flaw in his own car's mechanism.

Her swollen heart leaped up like a salmon, turned over, dropped down again, almost stopped beating with the effort, but she managed to get one suffocating sound out. "No—!" And the rest was just unheard lip vibration.

"Who's that? Where are you?" The car door cracked tentatively open, while he still remained in the seat. Probably one leg out.

"In here, in All Saints, behind this wall." It was all blurred vowel sounds, she couldn't articulate consonants anymore, but there were enough vowels to carry the burden of the message, to at least hold him there.

A leather sole hit stone. The car door cracked a second time—but in token of egress. Saved!

He said an inane thing. "What are you doing in there?" But oh, the sound of his voice alone, it held the wisdom of the ages in it, it was so welcome to her.

"I'm alone in here. I've been locked in. Oh, for the love of God, take me out—get me out to the other side—"

"Now just a second. Don't be frightened. I'll climb over and get you—"

Shoe leather scorched down stone, futilely, two, three, four times. Each time he landed back on his feet more heavily. Then she could hear him trying to run at it, trying to hoist himself with the help of his own projected momentum. Each time that floundering sound.

"I can't get up it, it's too high." He was breathless now himself. "Wait a minute, I'll get someone. I'll get hold of someone with a ladder, and come back with that—"

The car door spitting again, like a hinge of hell.

Her voice rose to an unendurable scream. "No, don't leave me! Don't leave me, I can't stand it!"

He held back, probably half in, half out, trying to reason with her. "But you're all right now. Someone knows you're in there. I know you're in there. It's just a matter of a moment. Pequeña, pequeña, don't you see?"

She screamed again. Just instinct was screaming, there was nothing there anymore he could reason with. "You won't come back! Stand there and talk to me, if you can't get me out. At least stand there so I'll know there's someone near me. Señor, señor, whoever you are, have pity on me. Don't leave me all alone again."

"But you must be gotten out. There's a paint shop only a few blocks from here. They must have a ladder there. I'll get hold of the proprietor, and in less than five minutes I'll be back here again—"

"You won't come back, you won't come back—"

"Little frightened señorita. I swear to you by all that's holy that I won't leave you in there. Who could do such a thing? I'm a man. This way I'd only stand here all night without doing you any good. Trust me."

She held out a moment longer, instinct against reason. Then she gave in. "All right, señor, I trust you," she said in a watery voice. "But hurry. It's so dark, and there are things moving in the shadows behind me."

"Stand with your back to them. Don't look around. Stand turned toward the wall, until I can get back, and they won't hurt you."

"But that way it's even worse. Then I seem to hear them creeping up behind me, getting ready to pounce, without my seeing them."

His own voice was wrung with pity, whoever he was, at the state she was in. "Pobrecita. Just a minute, muchachita, just a minute and we'll have you out."

She couldn't resist one final bleat as the car door closed once more. "Don't forget me, señor—You won't forget me señor?"

"Just stay where you are, and I'll be back in no time," his voice sounded over the renewal of the engine. "Don't move, now, so that I'll know where to find you."

The engine evened out, drew away, and she heard him go whirring off on his quest. One last wisp of it came drifting back, after the rest was already gone, like a postscript, like an afterthought from the distance. And then no more.

Silence again. Night again, and by herself again.

She stood there for a while in a sort of state of suspended animation, staring blindly toward the black presence of the wall, as though trying to fix and hold the exact spot at which she had last heard his voice, lest if she lose it by so much as a quarter of an inch, if she deflect her eyes, he would not come back, there would be some magic compulsion gone. Frightened children have that fetishism.

"Don't move, he said," she whispered to herself once, in cautioning reminder.

Then suddenly, as though unable to support her upright position anymore, as though something had given way under her, she floundered down to her former position on the ground, half-length prone, head and neck and shoulders still upright on one arm. Not senseless, but drained of all strength. Only able to do two things, breathe and wait. Three.

Hope was a white moth, tiny of wing, fluttering around her in the darkness.

Coldness seeped into her legs and the outspread flatness of her own hand from the moss and the damp ground, numbing them. Or was that the ichor of those who lay so thickly scattered about under here being transfused into her by some horrid sort of osmosis? She snatched her hand up and flung it out, as you do when you try to drain something off.

The moth was making wider circles now, not so close around her. How long was it now? Four minutes? Five?

She struggled to her knees, and bunched her hands together, and bent her face to them. "Make him come back. Just this one little thing give me: make him come back."

The moth was going now, the moth was leaving fast, going somewhere else. Its minute wings were glimmering off into nothingness.

She whispered into her hands, as though it were a secret they alone shared with her: "He told me not to move. See, I'm trying not to be frightened. I'm quiet, you can't hear me. That one nearly got out, but I didn't let it, I stifled it. This one isn't going to either—"

And then a bereft scream went winging up overhead and, almost puzzled, she realized it had come from her.

She put her hands to her throat, as if to stop it outwardly, if she couldn't inwardly. They were powerless too. A second one was wrenched from her against her will. "Hurry up! Where are you—?" It vibrated in the cemetery stillness like a thrumming knife blade, went winging over the wall into the night beyond.

In the redoubled silence that followed she thought she heard a sound. Nothing definite, like that car door before, or even the chirp of the horn preceding that. Something less easily identifiable, like a—a pad. Over somewhere on the other side of the wall, not in here where she was. It must have been simply some leaf, or small cluster of leaves, that had fallen to the ground with a splat. And yet, it hadn't been quite like that either. It had been both firmer and at the same time softer; less scratchy, more resilient. Almost like a velvety tread, the merest silkiest whisper of a tread, except that a tread is continuous, and this was an isolated fragment of one, cast into notice by some uncertainty or flux of the ground being trodden upon. That, at least, was what it could have been taken for, what it bore a resemblance to most. But was it anything at all? The sudden fall of a kernel or heavy burr, or a piece of mortar loosened from the wall surface by his recent gymnastic efforts, could have caused it as well.

Alertness was ebbing again, as nothing followed for a moment or two.

Then a twig snapped. The smallest of small twigs. Little better than a membrane. Still over there on the outside, not in here.

The wind was from behind her, blowing outward across the wall, as it had been all along. Not strong; of an impetus enough only to sway dangling leaves a little, to carry scents from one part to another. To carry the scent of the many dead over the wall and beyond. The many dead, and the one living. But what nostrils could detect such a thing? What senses were keen en—?

There was a huff. The sound of hot body breath being blown against a surface that acted upon it as a sort of sounding board. As if nostrils were being pointed searchingly against the wall. But distended vents of nostrils, tubes of sonorousness.

There was something living near her. It was a feeling, a surety, a knowledge, that grew on her without any further audible proof to confirm it. Every nerve in her body, every hair follicle in her head, told her so. And the longer the silence continued, the stronger the impression grew. As though, while she held her breath, listening through, something else was bated near her, listening also. More than just listening with ear. Identifying her with rippling pores of acuteness. Projected waves of awareness, magnetized with some sort of powerful, leashed dynamism, reached her through the bulky stone barrier. Something, someone, was present there, hidden from sight on the other side of it. Stalking her in complete immobility, so to speak.

Her screams, just now, had drawn something to her. It couldn't be a human being, it was too stealthy. A dog, perhaps? But a dog would bark or at least growl its distrust. This thing was still. Deadly still, venomously still.

She couldn't stand the prolonged tension any longer. A tension not alone generated from her, but that was a two-way current, flowing both to and from her. "Is that you?" she quavered. "Why are you so still?"

She knew it couldn't be. He would have come back in the car. Or if not, there would at least have been the sound of hurrying footsteps, unconcealed, the drag of a ladder, a hail to her.

There was a rasping, along the outer side of the wall, in answer to her voice. A sandpapery friction, directly abreast of where she cowered. The sound—the sound that a cat sometimes produces when it tries its claws on something. Following it an instant later, she could detect a vibration of the ground, communicated through to where she was. As though something, some heavy body, had dropped heavily. Had flung itself up first, and then dropped frustratedly back again.

"Who is it?" she cried sharply. "Who's there?"

A spring is soundless, until it meets its objective, and yet somehow she knew that something had sprung. Some disturbance of the air told her. A moment later, in confirmation, somewhere over her there was a creak, as of wood being strained, a great rustling of leaves. And yet at the moment there was a lull in the wind, there was nothing to cause it.

Her eyes flew up to that bough that spanned the wall almost directly over her. It was thick, well rounded, heavy enough to bear—many things. Something had happened to it; it had altered. Dark as it was, she could see that a change had taken place in it. It had stood out straight until now, well clear of the top of the wall; it had been horizontal to the trunk. Now it was sloping downward, was far lower at its outer end, where her eyes couldn't follow it, than in at the trunk. More than that, it was grazing the wall. It was emitting sound. It was tapping lightly against the top edge of the wall in vibration, at point of fulcrum; it was fluctuating noticeably, it was shivering under pressure. Something had hold of it—or was on it, clinging in delicate, wary, painful ascent, up and in toward the tree heart.

She couldn't summon up any more voice. "Who is it?" she whispered hoarsely. She couldn't tear herself away, turn and run as she wanted to. She was rooted there, hypnotized as in a nightmare, head straining back, staring up into the blackness over her, that was like something gathering itself to a head.

There hadn't been anything to strike light up there before. The tree was shrouded by the other trees around it; the wall and the ground below were shrouded by all alike. The moon was there all along somewhere in the background ready to supply the kindling, but with nothing to receive it.

Now something did. Through the stirring, undulating masses of leaves that garnished the outer end of the bough where it vanished across the wall, something peered through at her, through and downward. Something faintly lucent, palely green, phosphorescent. Like an avid, remorseless eye, become visible by drawing to a head upon itself the unsuspected moon motes swimming invisibly in the darkness, and now aflame, sighted balefully down upon her through the covert of leaves.

Her mouth parted spasmodically, trying to give the last cry that there was already no time for. The death cry that was too late.

Manning arrived on the scene almost immediately afterward, this time. He had been with Robles when the flash reached the central commandancia, and came out in the same car with him.

A number of the official departmental cars that had preceded them were strung in a line along the outside of the wall. Three or four ladders, with policemen guarding their bases, were tilted to the wall as the shortest and easiest way of getting in and out. It had happened all the way around from the main entrance.

They tried to keep Manning out, as an unauthorized person, as he tried to clamber up the rungs of one of these at Robles' heels. He grabbed the police inspector by the tail of his coat, hung on tight, refusing to be parted from him.

"He's with me," Robles said briefly.

On the inside of the wall there was a complement to each ladder, to give access to the ground. They turned and went down these backwards.

That whole immediate section of the cemetery had been turned into a grotesque charivari of portable, high-powered, icy-white lights slanted at cross-purposes to one another whose thick beams were edged with violet. Around and about them were the occasional blue flares of photographic flashlights, the yellow bees of pocket lights flitting all over far and near, some of them momentarily playing up the inscription on the headstone as it sidled across it. Red cigarette and cigar embers would glow occasionally from some grave mound, where someone had sat down for a moment to rest or tie a shoelace or compare notes with somebody else. The place was a madhouse of swirling, irreverent activity.

At the foot of one of the ladders a grief-stunned youth in a belted Cravenette topcoat, hatless and disheveled with shock, was being held up on his feet between a policeman and a man in plain clothes. He kept straining away from them, shoulders and head forward, toward a spot farther along at the base of the wall where the beams of several of the high-powered lights fell interlocked in a pool, terrible in its dazzling clarity. There was sacking spread there. His sobs kept coming, low and pulsing, from his stomach. You could see it go in and out each time one sounded. His face was a white mask that didn't move any more.

"El novio," one of the men explained in answer to Robles' inquiry in passing. The sweetheart.

Some martinet nearby snapped, "Shut that man up. Take him out of here or else give him something to keep him quiet! He only makes it worse."

Manning, who had lingered behind a moment watching him, hurried to rejoin Robles. Robles was at the sacking, standing there motionless. The American arrived just at the wrong time.

It was awful, even worse than the first one had been. That had been given some semblance of concealment and classic repose at the morgue. This was madness, strewn upon the ground. Manning stepped hastily backward out of the glare and furtively wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Robles stared down, his face impassive but sweating a little at the temples. He did something with his little finger, and it was hidden again.

The pertinent details were being poured into his ear by one of his men, standing just outside the radius of light. He seemed not to be listening at all. Only one thing about him moved, his eyes. They took in everything, darting about restlessly: over the ground, up the trunk of the death tree, out along the bough, then down again along the wall, boxing in the setting in a complete little square.

He spoke at last. "Eyewitnesses—none, you say. Very well then, secondary witnesses."

A shifty-eyed man in his thirties stepped forward into the light. "Juan Gomez, thirty-six Avenida Betancourt," Robles' second reeled off in the background.

"—luckily he came back with me. He didn't want to trust the ladder out of his sight, I guess. Anyway when we got back here, it was strangely quiet. I called to her, and she didn't answer anymore. I put the ladder to the wall and started over, to see what had happened to her. I thought maybe somebody else had gotten her out during my absence. Before I'd even gotten down on the inside, I heard him give a yell out there on his side. He'd already found some bloodstained marks or tracks on the outside of the wall—"

Robles seemed not to have been listening. All he said was, "You'll be required to appear at the inquest. And give us your right name before you leave here tonight, Señor Gomez."

"But I'm a family man—"

"Where you were visiting is none of our business. You were out late in your car, that will be sufficient. Next."

The gateman was shoved forward into the light, spoke his piece, relegated to the outer darkness again.

"—and I thought she'd left already. I'd seen some woman go by, all in black, and, well my eyes aren't so good any more, especially in the twilight. So I gave the warning signal, and locked up. They're supposed to know at what time the grounds close—"

Again Robles acted as though he hadn't heard a word. His head hadn't once turned toward the speaker.

Distant sounds, of men calling to one another from various remote parts of the grounds, attracted his attention. He turned his head away from what lay before him on the ground for the first time, spoke sharply to one of the underlings nearest him. "What are they doing out there? Call them back, the fools. It's not in here anymore, they're just wasting their time."

"But the trees are quite thick in places, especially toward the center," remonstrated the subordinate. "And this wall which completely encloses it would act as an effective pen. On the east side it's even higher than here and spiked with broken bottle glass—"

"Haven't you eyes? You were all here half an hour before I was. Anyone can see that it got out again as it got in."

Manning turned toward him in time to see him crouch down close to the gruesome litter, remove some indeterminate, blood-caked, boat-shaped object adhering to the remains themselves. He straightened again, transferred it to a clean piece of white paper. A tiny stem could now be seen to project from one end of it. Even yet it was hard to tell what it was, without his word of explanation. Its patina disguised it.

"A leaf," he rapped out, in the sudden attentive silence that had fallen. "This was originally a leaf. One of God's green leaves, before it became encrusted with death matter. There are dozens of them, clinging all over her, like feathers to a half-plucked fowl. They don't fall this time of the year. They were not on the ground originally." His eyes flicked to the bough above. "They were shaken down upon her. It dropped down upon her bodily, from up there, in a shower of leaves. Her cries must have attracted it to her as it prowled the outside of the wall. Then, the carnage perpetrated, it sprang up to the bough again, crossed over the top of the wall, and returned whence it had come. Where are your eyes? What were you doing here while you were waiting for me? A glass." It was handed to him and he traced it along the contour of the trunk, at a distance close enough to obtain a clear focus. "Keep your heads out of the light, stand over on the side. Now. Do you see? It is plain enough for you? You detect the livid gashes on the bark from its claws? They are deepest at the top, each one; they are full punctures there, tapering off to a mere shallow scratch at the bottom. That means they were made by the beast going up. Its claws dug in to obtain a hold, slipped slightly downward each time with its bodily weight, then were transferred to the next claw hold higher up, until it had reached the bough. Even so, it probably made its ascent almost more quickly than the eye could follow—but the traces of it do not vanish so swiftly, fortunately. Get them on your negatives." And as he handed back the borrowed glass, he added disgustedly: "You should really be provided with alms bowls and sticks and sent to join the other blind on the benches around the Plaza Mayor."

Manning knew he was there only by sufferance, should have kept his mouth shut. But he couldn't resist breaking in scathingly: "And in the face of that, you still think it's a jaguar?"

Robles whirled on him. "What do you mean?"

The American eyed him almost contemptuously. "A jungle animal, once in here, would turn its back on all this greenery, trees and plants and protective shrubbery, all the very things its instinct leads it to seek, and deliberately return of its own choice to the stone and asphalt traps of the streets out there? Ha!"

One of the other operatives rushed to the defense of his superior, probably to regain his esteem, before Robles himself could answer. "There are traces left by bloodied paws on the outside of the wall, where it dropped down after the attack had been completed. We have already photographed them."

It was a telling blow; Manning's mouth opened, closed again, without his being able to utter a word.

"And just for golpe de gracia, look at that," Robles said crushingly. He borrowed a small pair of forceps, stooped down swiftly over the mangled form a second time, fortunately keeping his back to all of them as he did so. Manning couldn't see what it was he was using the forceps to extract, only the wrench of his elbow joint that accompanied the act.

He stood up again, turned, again bedded it on paper. This time it looked like a small thorn, curved, and thicker at one end than the other.

"And in the face of this, you still think it's not a jaguar?" he parodied tartly. "Hold that glass over it a minute, for señor the know-it-all."

Manning peered down at it, magnified. It was enlarged now to a miniature tusk, of hornlike substance, broken off short at the wide end. "What is it, a tooth? A fang?"

"For anyone that knows so much about jaguars, you are not very good; you should study up on your zoology," was Robles' merciless retort. "It is the tip of one of its claws, broken off short. And left imbedded in her throat."

Manning couldn't answer for a minute, but he wouldn't give in, retract. He drew his head away from the derisive proximity with which Robles was holding the nauseating token up to him, muttered disconcertedly: "It's against all the laws of nature for it to turn its back on here and go out there again."

Robles raised his voice overbearingly. "When the laws of nature conflict with indisputable evidence like this, the laws of nature go into the discard. Who is to say what they are anyway—you? I? Are we animals ourselves? Not enough is known about this species, in the first place, to lay down hard-and-fast rules of behavior for them. They can be as unpredictable as human beings, for all we know. Perhaps it is not the nature of jaguars to return to built-up streets. This one did. Perhaps it has grown accustomed to its lair. Perhaps it is the one exception to the rule. But exception or not, it is still a jaguar!"

The heretic properly and publicly shown the error of his ways, to the obvious satisfaction of all his men, he turned back to the business at hand. "Who is it keeps making that noise?" he inquired irritably.

"El novio," someone murmured.

"Have you questioned him yet? Bring him over here."

The grief-crazed youth in the belted topcoat was hurried staggeringly forward between the two men who had been supporting him the whole time.

"Raul Belmonte," read off Robles' assistant. "Fourteen Calle San Vicente. Cashier, Banco de Comercio."

His face was pitiful. A man shouldn't love too deeply, Manning thought, looking at it; it's better for him not to. He's more defenseless than a woman, when it comes to a thing like this, that he can't fight back against.

"Are you able to talk, Belmonte?" Robles said curtly. "Give us your story."

His voice was dead, listless.

"—I came out to telephone to her home to find out from this little servant girl who was backing us up whether she'd really started out at all. To do so, I must have entered the very establishment she was in at the time with her compañera, it's the only place around there one can telephone from. She must have been sitting hidden from me in a booth at the back. My back must have been to her, in the telephone enclosure off to one side, and as she left, we neither of us saw one another! Then, on finding the grounds locked, instead of leaving at once, I returned across the road a second time, to ease my disappointment with a cognac before driving off. And when I finally emerged at last and got into my car, it seemed to me that far off somewhere I heard a faint cry—I remember that now. But I thought it was my imagination, and I was too heavyhearted at not having seen her to care what it was. What had it to do with me?"

He was starting to shiver. Robles made a sign and they led him away. "Lock him up for the time being," the inspector said quietly as soon as he was out of hearing.

"Surely you don't think—?" Manning expostulated.

"Protective arrest," Robles answered. "He is a danger to himself, until he has recovered somewhat. It is written all over him."

Manning turned and moved slowly away from the hideous glare that continued to beat down on the mortal remains of Conchita Contreras. They all glanced after him curiously, noticing the thoughtful way he held his head lowered and kicked at nothing along the ground; to show the personal dissatisfaction and lack of conviction he derived from this.

"He's got an obsession, that man," he heard Robles explaining scornfully to some of his cohorts without troubling to lower his voice much, "that there is some other element than the jaguar involved in this. Don't ask me why!"

"Don't ask me either," Manning turned his head to call back. "But don't ask me to give it up." He put his foot to the lower rung of one of the ladders, to get out of the accursed place.

"It's right here before his very eyes," Robles went on in a loud, carrying voice, provoked by the opposition. "Look, the very ribs are exposed in places! Nothing human could commit such a shambles."

They were dropping slowly below Manning, a rung at a time. "And I say the very opposite," he contradicted over his shoulder, "that only something human could be so thorough about it. It's carried too far for even the most vicious brute animal. Their rages don't last that long, the death of the quarry ends them. Their memories are shorter—"

A hard, mirthless laugh went up all around as he straddled the top of the wall with his legs and took his unlamented and somewhat undignified departure.

FOUR

clo-clo

CLO-CLO WAS RAPIDLY tiring of the German merchant-marine officer. She wasn't sure he was German and she wasn't even sure he was a merchant-marine officer. All she knew was he came from one of those countries where the people have butter-colored hair and blue eyes and can't speak Spanish properly, and that he had tarnished brass buttons on his short blue jacket, instead of the bone kind other people wore.

There was nothing personal in this rapid tiring on her part. Just as there was nothing personal in anything she did after six in the evening. Those were her working hours. He hadn't been any too loaded with money even when she first met him—some of his shipmates must have warned him, before he came ashore down on the coast, about bringing his whole pay up to the city with him at one time—and now he had slowed down to about a drink a half-hour. Also, he kept wanting to marry her all the time, and that made for heavy conversation. The main thing wrong with him, though, was he was holding her up, making her behind time on her schedule of nightly rounds. She'd have to skip her ten-o'clock stop and go straight on to the midnight one, from here.

Clo-Clo adhered to a rigid timetable. She lived by the clock. If you didn't you didn't get anywhere. You had to work fast, you had to keep going. Each night had its fixed stops, and each stop had its hour and its allotted duration. The daylight hours up to, say, about seven or eight in the evening, that was strictly antemeridian, that didn't count. You didn't expect anything. You didn't get anything. You stayed home and did your hair. You washed stockings. You lazed around. If you felt good maybe you even gave the poor old lady a hand, with that never-ending cooking and dishing it out to hungry mouths that she was always doing. Or if you went out, it was just to get something you needed, a bit of nail polish at the five-and-ten. The grand sortie didn't come until around eight, eight-thirty. You looked things over, you got their feel, you warmed yourself up. Her nine o'clock stop was the Elite Bar. This was the Elite Bar now. There wasn't really much doing yet. The real swells, the real spenders, were all still at home with their families, lingering over their cigars and after-dinner drinks. At nine o'clock you got things like this foreign sea officer, good enough to kill time with, a couple of brandies over a bar.

Ten to eleven was a notch up the social scale. Places like the Tivoli and the Miraflor Gardens. The swells were all at shows around now, they still hadn't appeared yet. You hung around over a table, with young writers, clerks, businessmen. Wine now.

Midnight to about two was the zenith. Meridian of her "day." That was when the shows let out. They let out late in Ciudad Real. The Casino Bleu, the Madrid out in the park (she never went out there, though; too far to walk back in case you didn't connect), the Jockey Club, the Tabarin, the Select. Those were the places to seek out then. That was the cream of the night life, swarming with the sports, the swells, the heavy spenders. Most of them had cabaret entertainment; if not, tango bands and dancing at the very least. Benedictine, then. Crème de menthe. Sometimes even champagne.

It tapered off quickly after that. From about three on, that was the lees of the night. That was the time to watch out for. That was the time when the laughter died down, lights started thinning and the shadows came creeping on, and if you were smart you didn't hang around any more, you went on home. It was a bad time. "The Blue Hour," some of them called it. "The Deathwatch," others. It was a time when things sometimes happened. Things they told you about behind the back of the hand. If they were going to at all, that was when they did.

So it will be seen, Clo-Clo was on the town. The technical designation for her might be a little harder to arrive at. She was acquiring a second nickname, in fact, that threatened to obliterate the first. "Engañadora? the little cheat. Fulfillment withheld for promises implicit in her very presence at the places she went. She honored obligations only when cornered, and even then, in a manner that made it hardly worthwhile, except for professional wrestlers. She had already had one or two brushes with the police; not because of her supposed activities, but because of their absence. Others in her own immediate bracket would warn her, "Look out, chica, you'll be getting a bad reputation. Once you do, they'll steer clear of you like a bad case of smallpox." In other words, in the underworld a bad reputation was directly inverse to what was commonly meant by one in the upperworld.

Nonetheless, Clo-Clo remained stubbornly, you might even say fanatically, virtuous at heart. Her every instinct was that of the good, respectable, industrious middle-class girl who expects to be a wife someday. She had her own future all staked out. By thirty at the latest she was going to be married to some honest, hard-working fellow, and have a raft of kids, and maybe a little produce farm outside of town, just a patch. And if any of them were girls, and so much as looked at anybody, she'd knock the left side of their faces loose from the right.

She still had eleven years and six months to go.

This interlude, therefore, was not a question of looseness of character, it was a matter of financial stringency. Her intrinsic morality was not in the least impaired by it. Strangers in bars couldn't reach that. It was simply being bent a little to permit her to achieve financial security.

At home, in the tumbledown shack on Rivera Street, with shoals of kids sleeping all over the place, they knew that Clo-Clo was not exactly a saint, but the money sure came in handy. They didn't inquire too closely into her comings and goings. They had a euphemism for her prolonged and nightly absences, among themselves, among their friends and neighbors, if anyone inquired for her. "Salió para dar una vuelta." She went out to take a stroll. Well, she had, in a way. One of these little strolls of hers had once taken her clear across the spine of the continent, as far as Buenos Aires. But she had come back two days later perfectly unharmed, having jumped the train just one station before it got in in order to retain her freedom of movement, and with marvelous tales to tell.

Her fat, slow-moving mother would sigh and shrug as she broomed a few of the younger kids out of the way. She was a good daughter. Here in the home, she was a good daughter. Outside; well, that was outside. After all, who was perfect in this world? Should she, a mother, throw the first stone at her own child? Besides, it was only for now, a great change was coming someday. Didn't she, Clo-Clo, say so herself over and over? "You wait, mamita, when I'm thirty I'm going to stop being bad, I'm going to be good after that."

And now here she was, stuck in a nine o'clock stop with a nine o'clock patron, and it was rapidly nearing eleven. And one of the sentimental type, the worst kind. The more sentimental they got, the less they seemed to spend. This one, perhaps more perspicacious than she gave him credit for being and sensing something within her beneath the scabby outer shell, wanted her to come back to the ship with him, wanted to marry her and take her to someplace called Copenhague and settle down with her there on a dairy farm that he would buy.

This was sheer nonsense as far as Clo-Clo was concerned. A peso slipped into one's hand at leave-taking, as a little gesture of gratitude for one's time and entertainment efforts, was worth a dozen offers of marriage in Copen, whatever it was.

She was sitting perched there on one of the tall barstools alongside him, hair a short-cropped black chrysanthemum mop, in a pert bang above the eyes. Her attitude was a clever synchronization of absorption and vacuity; the former assumed, the latter real. She was sitting sidewise, with her face toward him, the point of her elbow to the bar and the back of her head balanced in her outspread hand. She sidled one leg unnoticeably off the rung of the stool, felt for the floor with it, and poised it toe down, having decided to break this off short without wasting any more time about it.

"And you'd like it, I know you would."

"Sure," Clo-Clo said readily. "Where'd you say it was again?"

Clo-Clo was having trouble with this. She knew the names of most of the principal countries, England, France, Spain, like that. You picked them up around town. It was either a country she had never heard of, or it was an utter lie. She decided it was an utter lie, since there couldn't be many more countries than England, France, Spain. It was time to get going. The shows would be out soon. Her second leg shifted down and lined up against the first. There was only one more thing that had to leave the chair now.

He noticed finally that her entire figure was about to leave him, just as her attention had some time before. He thought it was because his hospitality was remiss. He looked a little hurt, stopped offering her his heart and soul. He called the barman over. "Another for the lady." He'd already told her he didn't like to see her drink. He'd already started in trying to change her around.

"No, I've got to go," Clo-Clo said. She was off the stool now, and he couldn't get her back. Every move in these breakaways had to be carried out craftily like that, to accomplish them successfully. Now if he reached for her to hold her, she'd just have to step quickly backwards. "I've got a date."

"But this is one now you're having with me."

"Sure, but I've already had it, it's over now. So long."

"But I want you to marry me."

"Day after tomorrow."

She was two stools away now. The barman cut in sidewise toward her, said in a rebuking undertone, "What's your hurry? He's buying good and steady, what do you want to break it up for?"

"Give me my commission," she said out of the corner of her mouth. "Come on, or I'll tell him you insulted me. And you know what that'll mean; the mirror behind you, all the glasses on the shelves—"

"You little bandit," he said bitterly. Their hands touched briefly across the top of the bar.

"I can go to Robles' just as well, I don't have to come in here. You're not losing money on me."

Her late host tried to reach her with a persuasive sweep of his arm. She knew enough to stay back beyond reach of it. "Come here a minute, Clo-Clo. Little Clo-Clo, don't leave me like this. We were just beginning to get along so well."

"I know, but time's up now."

He wavered toward the entrance after her, both arms out. "I wanted you to marry me. I wanted to take you out of this." He seemed undecided for a minute whether to cry maudlinly or fly into a rage.

She got out over the threshold backwards. "Keep him in there, Manuel."

Manuel just gave her a dirty look, for cutting short what had been a profitable session.

Her recent escort stood there in the lighted entrance, looking out after her. "You're a fine one," he called resentfully.

"You better go back to your ship, mister, and get some sleep. Marry the girl in the next port you come to, instead. After all, we're all alike."

She moved on down the narrow, crooked, poorly lighted street, swinging her bag jauntily at her side, a long-legged dryad in a tight black satin skirt. She glanced back once and he was leaning up against the side of the door, with his face burrowed into the right angle of his upthrust arm, crying because he'd lost her, after looking for her half around the world. Probably it was just the alcohol alone. How could you tell when it was real and when it wasn't, anyway, this love stuff?

"Maybe I should've at that," she dismissed him with an unconcerned shrug. "Who knows, maybe if I could see ahead. I'd be sorry that I didn't."

Around the very next corner a sudden confrontation occurred. He stopped short, came back to her. "Oh, it's you, is it?"

"Have we met before?" Clo-Clo asked with polite uncertainty.

"Have we met before!" he scowled. "You were coming back in five minutes, and I sat up there alone waiting for you all the rest of the night, like a fool! The whole hotel staff was laughing at me behind their hands, when I had to walk out in front of them by myself the next morning!"

Clo-Clo shoveled her hands ingenuously toward him. "I couldn't find the room again, when I tried to get back for you. There were so many halls and turns, I got lost. Was it my fault?"

"You know what you are? You're a cheat. A false alarm."

She touched the underside of his chin lightly with one finger. "Don't be sore. Look at all the fun you'd already had out of me by then, anyway. You told me so yourself. You shouldn't be a hog."

"I wasn't out for fun," he let her know aggrievedly. He reached. "C'mere you. I've got something coming to me."

Clo-Clo did the back-step again. "No you haven't," she laughed. "That was then, this is now. No long-term credit extended." She shifted around to the opposite side of an octagonal advertisement kiosk, saw to it that it stayed between them.

"C'mere, or I'll come over there and get you. You're coming with me if I have to drag you by the back of the neck."

She just laughed, flirted her handbag out toward him at the end of its strap.

He saw that threatening wouldn't work, he tried bribery.

"C'mere," he coaxed, "I'll buy you a drink."

She made a face at him. "I've just had a drink." Return engagements, she knew by long experience, were no good. Never any good. Not with her, anyway. There was always a redoubled vigilance on the part of the investor, remembering how he had been given the slip the first time, and she found it twice as hard to get away. Fool them once and then stay away from them was the best policy.

He held out both hands toward her, appealingly. "Ah, come on, won't you? I like you. I can't help it, moma, there's something about you that's gotten to me. You're so hard to pin down. First you're here, and then you're not here."

"Isn't it the truth, though?" she laughed. "And now take a good look, I'm not here."

She glanced back once, a wholly precautionary measure to make sure that he wouldn't rush after her and try to take her by surprise, and he was still standing there forlornly where she'd left him, in the middle of the sidewalk. Looking after her sort of wistfully, as though hoping she'd change her mind. She really must have made an impression on him, she reflected indifferently. As for her, she already couldn't have told what he'd looked like very precisely, although she'd just left him.

She took a look into the Select from the outside first. It was a little bit slow tonight in there, for some reason, so she decided on the Tabarin instead. It always paid to reconnoiter first. After all, even the best of places had its off-nights, and once you'd sunk your own twenty centavos into a grenadine, you couldn't get it back again.

The Tabarin was brimming over. She retouched herself at a mirror panel in the lobby and went sauntering in.

You couldn't demand a cut in these swell places. You had to be glad if they'd let you in at all.

The barman looked her over, got her immediately. "Take the one on the end," he said, just as she was about to come to rest on one of the coral leather stools. "I want the middle left clear for paying customers."

She shifted acquiescently, at the same time letting him know pertly: "Don't let it worry you, I don't expect to be on it very long."

An unaccompanied, rather insipid-looking youth with a needle-pointed mustache came up the steps out of the dancing room, stood up to the bar, and gulped a quick drink between pieces without taking the time to sit down.

He felt the eye flash and turned to look at her, glass in hand. She smiled, blew a slender wand of smoke at his face. It didn't reach, but there was no mistaking her aim, she'd pointed it with her mouth. He must have had someone waiting for him in there. He turned away again as though he hadn't seen her; just a trifle more priggishly than was necessary. He threw down a coin, went back again, just as the next tango got under way.

The barman cautioned her, as soon as he'd gone, "Now listen, nothing too raw, understand? Leave off this smoke-ring stuff. Watch your manners."

"How much are you charging to give lessons in deportment?" she asked wearily. "Who dolls the place up more, me or that dead-fish face you frighten them away from your bar with?"

"There are worse faces than mine," he grunted.

"You've been looking at people upside down." It wasn't really a wrangle, they understood one another too well. Just idle repartee while they were both killing time.

She would have gone back to the Select after all, only she'd already invested her twenty-five centavos here and she was going to cash in on it.

Somebody else came up the steps from the lower level, presently. This time it was a somewhat portly, dignified-looking gentleman of uncertain years, whose florid mustache was just beginning to whiten at the tips. He carried himself erect enough, and his skin had a healthy coppery tint to it, as though he spent a great deal of time in the open, but just now he wore a harassed expression, as though he had been greatly bored, was wishing he was anyplace but here. He threw away the mangled remnants of a cigar and stepped up to the bar.

"Could you tell me—" Then he became aware of Clo-Clo, muffled the rest of it.

The barman said, "Where that page is standing, señor."

Just before the door closed after him he took another brief look at her. The page turned and entered after him, probably to be on hand in case he required a whisk broom or hairbrush.

He emerged and headed back toward the dancing room, but not without throwing still one more quick look in her direction.

"Technique a little rusty," Clo-Clo thought with a chuckle. "Probably has had a wife since the last time he tried it."

She put out her cigarette, got up, sauntered over to the page, drink in hand. The barman looked like the kind that would empty it out on you behind your back, if you left it unguarded, to get you out of the place.

"How'd you do just now?" she inquired with ready camaraderie.

The boy's eyes rounded enthusiastically. "A whole solid peso for doing nothing! He just looked at himself in the glass, asked if I knew who you were, and asked me about how old I would take him to be!"

"Ricardo, you're on duty," the barman warned disapprovingly.

"So am I—from now on," Clo-Clo said to herself, drifting back to her original perch again. She'd found out all she wanted to know.

She gambled on it and waited patiently, although if she had turned out to be wrong, the time wastage would have been irretrievable. But she was usually right, and she turned out to be this time too. Two tangos later he had come back again.

He advanced halfway to the bar, took a good hard look at her, then made an abrupt turn and went in the same doorway as previously.

"He didn't come back here to go in there, he came back to see if I was still out here," she told herself knowingly.

She snapped her fingers authoritatively to the barman, to show she was on the warpath, not idling any more. "Put a little more water in this." She wanted to dilute the grenadine dye as much as possible.

He handed it back to her with a lethal scowl. "What're you trying to do, make it last over the weekend?" He didn't guess what she was up to, or he would probably have frustrated her intentions by purposely delaying to return the denatured drink to her.

As it was, she got over to the door, glass in hand, just a bare second before it reopened. She was standing there saying something to the page as her quarry sought to pass in back of her. He would have made it without grazing her, but she moved her elbow back into him as he tried to. The elbow of the hand holding the drink. The glass turned neatly and the grenadine-water went down the side of her dress.

She let him show all the dismay. He showed enough for two. She was good-natured about it. He flung out a handkerchief, dipped one knee, and patted at it all the way down.

"Things like that will happen. I assure you it's nothing, señor. It's my fault, I shouldn't have been in the way."

"You must come over here and at least let me buy you another one."

She shook her head with sad indifference. "It's not much fun drinking alone."

He glanced out toward the dancing room. "I—I'll sit with you for a minute. My family's in there, and I have to get back."

He was taking an awful chance, in Clo-Clo's opinion, but that was his lookout, not her own. She settled herself demurely beside him, on the same stool as before.

"Champagne for the señorita. Pol Roget."

The barman was all smiles for her now. He even scraped, trotted out the two French words he knew, reserved only for champagne buyers. "Monsou. Madamasella."

"To a lucky accident."

"To a delightful accident," Clo-Clo improved on it.

They became acquainted by leaps and bounds. He began to smile more and more often. The smiles became grins. The grins became gusts of hearty laughter. Once or twice he glanced behind him, in remembered caution.

"Don't you think the music is a little too loud out here?" he suggested finally. Since he had just come from where it was actually playing, he seemed to have developed unusual sensitivity all at once. But then maybe in there there hadn't been anybody he considered worth listening to.

Clo-Clo had no fault to find with this point. "Yes it is, it makes it hard to hear what one is saying," she agreed.

"Barman, is there some other place around here where we can get further away from the music, be a little more secluded?"

"There is a little private room, looking out on the rear terrace, if the señor and lady would like to try that. Straight back at the end of the corridor there."

"Send in another bottle, and something to eat." Then, as an afterthought, he came back a step, leaned toward the barman confidentially. "And in case anyone happens to be looking for me, I have gone out to get a breath of air for a minute." He put something in his hand. "That way." He pointed in the opposite direction to the one they were about to take.

"Hit me on the back again," he pleaded in a strangled voice. "I can't help it. I laugh until my throat closes up—" The rest of it was lost in an exhausted cough. He continued to shake, wiping the excess water from his eyes.

Clo-Clo jumped up from the table alarmedly, ran around behind him. "You should rest for five minutes." Thump. "You'll kill yourself." Thump. "Isn't there something sad we can talk about, just until you get over this?"

He continued to shake. "We tried that," he said weakly. "That was what we were supposed to be doing this time. But even when you try to tell something sad, it comes out funny. Harder than that, there must be a piece of chicken lodged there."

"Wait a minute, I'll pour a little cold champagne down the back of your neck. The shock may dislodge it. Like with hiccups. Do you mind?"

He waved a hand in helpless permission. "Go ahead. I don't care what you do to me. If I die here in this chair, it's been worth it—"

"I'll get up high," the helpful Clo-Clo said. "So it'll give a little splash." She pulled her own chair around to the rear of his, stood up on it, and tilted a champagne bottle with both hands. "Now get ready, here it comes—"

The door was flung open without the preliminary of any knock, and what can best be described as a gasp of virtuous outrage entered and swirled about the room like a current of chill air. Its producer remained posed accusingly at the threshold without coming forward. It was the same priggish young man with the needle-pointed mustaches whom Clo-Clo had glimpsed earlier in the bar alcove.

They were both staring at him by indirection, in a wall mirror opposite that gave them back his reflection, coming from behind them.

Clo-Clo's supper companion murmured ruefully for her private benefit, "That was the shock I needed. It went down by itself."

She regained the floor with a lithe bound, returned the bottle of christening champagne to its bucket.

No one had said anything yet, at least not for general inclusion.

The dinner-jacketed sphinx in the open doorway finally broke the ice. He said a single word: "Papa!"

The older man in the chair waved his hand disgustedly, without turning to look at him. "Please close the door. I'll be right out."

"I'll wait for you in the foyer. You came here with us, please remember that!"

Clo-Clo's host mumbled something indistinct that sounded like, "Try and forget it!" The door closed.

Clo-Clo gasped, "Not your son! Why you hardly look—"

He sighed, shrugged, clapped his sides frustratedly as he rose to his feet. "It is having sons like him that makes one old," he complained half under his breath.

Then his expression changed, he smiled at her, wistfully, almost tenderly. He took her hand between both of his, carried it to his lips. "Never mind, we had some fun, didn't we? I'll have to go now. I don't know whether we'll ever meet again. We live outside of town, and I'll never hear the end of this. But, little Clo-Clo, you're a lovely girl. You've made me feel young again for an hour or two. Like I used to be years ago. You've made me feel happy with your laughter and your little ways. Let me do something for you. You deserve it. That sour-pussed daughter-in-law of mine gets enough of it as it is."

"Not so much, señor!" For probably the first time in her life the protest was genuine, almost alarmed.

He'd given her a hundred and fifty pesos, out of a wallet that must have held close to a thousand.

"Take it, take it," he said. He folded her fingers persuasively back upon it, patted her hand reassuringly. "Anyone that calls you bad, they must be blind," he said with low-voiced sincerity. "To make others happy, what better claim to goodness is there than that?"

She looked down, abashed for a moment. She was used to all sorts of compliments, but not to having her sanctity praised.

He gave a little smile of mischievous approval.

"That's right, put it down where they won't get at it, don't let them take it from you, hang onto it." And then, almost as though some premonition were assailing him, he urged: "Be careful, little Clo-Clo, I know I've got champagne in me, but—Don't let anything happen to you. Your way of life is so dangerous at times. I am a man that would not hurt you. But there are others—Go home, now that I've given you this. Don't stay out anymore tonight."

"I won't," she promised fervently, hands pressed tight to her bosom where the money now rested. "Believe me, I won't!"

Something about her must be still getting at him. He even made a move toward removing a large diamond ring on his little finger. Then he changed his mind regretfully. "Those two vultures would miss it the first thing, and only make trouble for you."

The door was flung open again at this point. The younger man was even sorer than before. "Papa! The car is waiting. I've told Elena you've been suffering from an upset stomach. How much longer do you think I can keep her from finding out about this—this situation I've found you in?"

"I'm coming!" Clo-Clo's late host thundered infuriatedly. "I'm coming, you damn killjoy!"

He turned and went out after him. Even so, his last thought was of Clo-Clo. As he closed the door lingeringly after him, he repeated what he'd said before, in a poignant murmur of farewell. "Don't let anything happen to you, little Clo-Clo. Take care of yourself."

She got up and waltzed around the room, holding skirt aloft at waist level and revealing a sector of abbreviated pink hip trunk. A chair went over at her spinning passage and she let it lie. She snatched up one of their partially filled glasses and drained it on the wing, put it back again the next time she came around. Then the second one. Then she stopped whirling and attended to the bottle remaining in the ice bucket. This was not dipsomania on her part, it was thrift pure and simple. It was a shame to waste good champagne that had already been paid for.

She was standing there with her back to the ceiling-high terrace windows, alternating gulps of champagne and bites of chicken sandwich, when something unaccountably made her turn her head. The drapes had been drawn closed over the window, for privacy, by the waiter when they first came in. There was a gap, however, midway down the long intersection where they had fallen partly open again. A feeling of being looked at through it came over her. It was so strong she even went over toward it and tried to peer through. There wasn't anything or anyone out there. Just the canalized light gleam cast on the terrace flooring by the room lights in here escaping through.

She came out of the room a few minutes later, munching the last of the chicken. The barman, wiping a glass, said jeeringly out of the corner of his mouth as she passed, "Left flat, eh?"

She thumbed her nose at him in a long, lingering farewell insult, that lasted from the third barstool all the way out to the porte-cochere, turning her head slowly in time with it as she did so.

And now to go home. She was whistling softly under her breath as the pinkish-amber glow of the Tabarin's lights faded out behind her. There were stars overhead, and the night felt cool and good. And the hundred fifty pesos at her bosom felt even better. She snapped her thumbnail at the fluted iron post of a streetlamp as she passed it, just for luck. It hummed hollowly for several moments after, like a muted organ note.

She was passing through tortuous, cobbled San Rafael Street a few minutes later, when a church bell somewhere nearby tolled the hour. She counted the strokes as they lowered out above her in the night stillness, each one seeming to hang vibrantly suspended until the next had come along to displace it.

Three already. She shivered defensively, quickened her step a little. The Deathwatch was beginning. The Blue Hours. Time to get in, pull walls around you. She quitted the sliver of sidewalk, took the indented middle of the narrow thoroughfare, undeterred by the thread of open sewage coiled along it. A moment later she was glad she'd done so. A columnar blackness standing unsuspected in the niche of a setback doorway found voice as she went by, slurred softly: "Hey, what's your hurry?"

"Shop closed!" she snapped, and quickened to a run, and kept it up until she'd reached the lower end of San Rafael and it had opened up into one of the subsidiary plazas that dotted the town. This one had palms, a bandstand kiosk, a gleaming white statue of one of the heroes of independence, and faint arc lights gleaming in misty violet around the four sides of it. It was dead to the world.

She cut across it, and on the other side had a choice of two. San Jacinto was the shortest way out to her own place, but it was another of those long, dismal, poorly lighted lanes like the one she'd just left. The fifteenth of May would take her a little out of her way, but it boasted a little better lighting and there was an occasional food or drink shop to be found along it. Other nights when she came along here she never hesitated, she took the quickest way. Tonight, for some reason, she was in a creepy mood, shy of dark and lonely places. She entered the Calle Quince de Mayo. The two diverged like the arms of a narrow V.

She had just gone past a small, dimly-lighted bodega, a drinking and eating place patronized by the poor, a few moments later, when someone came out and hailed her.

"Hola! Is that you, Clo-Clo?"

It was one of the others of her own immediate sorority, a girl known as La Bruja (the witch). She had a shawl coifed around her head to ward off the night chill, and might have looked almost nun-like save for the cigarette suspended between her lips without benefit of fingers. She stood there arms akimbo.

Clo-Clo turned and went back to her, glad to find herself in someone else's company, even though it meant a temporary delay in her return home. After all, you didn't have to be afraid of another girl.

"What's the matter, you getting airy?" La Bruja demanded.

"Get out," Clo-Clo chuckled disarmingly.

"Going home already? How are things?"

Clo-Clo hooked two fingers, kissed their tips to denote the indescribable. "What a night! I ran into Croesus himself."

"Who's he, one of these rich paisanos in town for a spree?"

"No, it's somebody my mother's always talking about." She described the supper in glowing terms, prudently omitting all reference to the hundred-and-fifty peso bonus. It probably wouldn't have been believed anyway. "You know, I'm almost frightened. When things are so good, they say it's a sign you're in for trouble, to watch out. I hope this night don't end up bad."

They stood for a while like that chatting, two lone figures on the night-bound sidewalk. "Knocking off?" La Bruja asked finally.

"Sure am. I don't want to crowd my luck any."

"I guess I will too. Got a cigarette left on you?"

"I'll do better than that for you. Come on. I'll blow you to a cup of steaming coffee. I keep feeling chilly down the middle of my back."

They went back inside the place La Bruja had just left. There was no one in it but the proprietor, a weary-looking man in rolled shirt sleeves and a floor-length apron. They sat down at one of the battered wooden tables.

The first thing Clo-Clo did was kick off her shoes under it, wiggle her toes. "Some relief, huh?"

La Bruja brooded dully down on the tabletop, flicked a leftover matchstick away, flapped her hand in disgusted agreement toward her.

"This is the part I like best, when it's all over. Don't have to smile, don't have to listen, don't have to watch what you say next."

"Are you that way? I'm that way, too," Clo-Clo admitted. She siphoned hot, watery coffee noisily into her mouth without lifting the cup from the table at all.

Presently, the warm brew flooding through her, she began to wax philosophical. "I wonder where we'll all be a year from now."

"Tomorrow night, for that matter," said the disgruntled La Bruja, continuing to lower down upon the table.

"Tell my fortune," Clo-Clo urged. "Come on, chica."

La Bruja grinned lopsidedly at her. "I know you, you little monkey, that's the reason you offered me the cup of coffee."

Clo-Clo didn't try to deny it. "After all, it's the only relaxation I ever get during the course of an evening."

La Bruja balanced her cigarette on the edge of the table. "All right," she acceded wearily, "pass me your mitt,"

"No, try it with the cards. I like it better with the cards, there's more stuff to it." Clo-Clo raised her voice to the shopkeeper in the shadowy background. "Hey, got a deck of cards?"

"Yes, but I'm going to close up." He turned off a light, and doubled the previous dimness.

Clo-Clo looked around at him with a mixture of sudden annoyance and nervousness, totally unlike her usual self. "Couldn't you wait a minute, what's your hurry?" she said sharply.

"I want to get some sleep myself," he grumbled. "Think all I've got to do is stay up all night for two hustlers?"

Clo-Clo gave the table a smack. "You bring us those cards!" She wanted respect for her ten centavos. She was, for once, in the unusual position of being the customer in her own right, and she was going to get everything out of it that was coming to her.

He shuffled grudgingly forward and slapped an unsanitary deck down between them. "Five more minutes, you two," he grunted. On his way back he turned out another light. There was only one left now in the entire place, casting a smoky pool of light down over their immediate table and nothing else. The rest was all shadows.

"Will you be able to see?" Clo-Clo asked anxiously.

"Good enough." La Bruja, cigarette vibrating unsupported between her lips once more, shuffled deftly with a low whirring noise. "Cut," she ordered. She began to pay them out.

Clo-Clo pointed both elbows to the table top, rested her face between her hands, looked on absorbedly. A period of low-voiced intermittent recital ensued, all on La Bruja's part. Then it broke off again suddenly. There was a long pause.

Clo-Clo raised her eyes from the cards to the other girl's face. "What's the matter? Something go wrong?" La Bruja had mangled them all together, was restacking them to start over.

"What're you doing that for?"

"I want to try it over," La Bruja said noncommittally.

The low-voiced recital began again. Then it stopped short again, just as before.

Once more she began over. Once more she stopped, as though at a loss.

"What do you keep quitting like that for?" Clo-Clo asked.

La Bruja shook her head slightly, whether at the question itself or at the condition that had caused the question to be asked she left unresolved.

"It's still here," she murmured finally.

Clo-Clo looked them over. "I know, but what is it?"

"It's something, but I can't make out myself what it is. It's nothing good. Wait a minute. I'll see if I can get it for you. It's dark, and that means some kind of trouble. It's a four card. It's the four of spades and it's right over you. Every time I shuffle them it keeps coming out right over you. Whatever it is, it's something that's hanging over you, that's nearing you, that's on its way." She spread her hands helplessly.

Clo-Clo rolled her eyeballs upwards half under her lids in unspoken dismay.

"Wait a minute, I'll try it again." La Bruja's hands reached out, harvested the cards into a bristling heap.

Clo-Clo turned her head stiffly aside, looked off into the shadows. "Call me if—if it comes back again." She crossbarred one index finger over the other, held them that way.

There was a period of bated waiting. She could hear the faint tick the cards made going down on the wood. It was very still in the room. The only thing that moved was a silent thing, the shadow of La Bruja's hand on the floor, rising and falling, rising and falling where Clo-Clo was looking down with averted head.

The hand stopped. The ticks of cardboard stopped. La Bruja spoke.

"It's back again. Fourth time in a row."

Clo-Clo bunched her shoulders. "It's drafty in here," she said. She turned slowly, glanced down as at something coiled to strike her. "But isn't it you that puts them there? Isn't it—isn't it your hand?"

"They come in rotation. What have I to do with that? As soon as you come out, and fall into the center place, all those that follow have their places in order around you. If I meddled with that, the fortune would be worthless."

"You mean it has been in that exact—upper corner of my card, each of the four times?"

"No, but it has been in the row over you each time. It has come out within three or four cards of your own. It is something on its way to you."

Clo-Clo slashed out, caught the other's wrist in frightened appeal. Her voice broke. "Bruja. Brujita. You gotta figure out—you gotta tell me what it is! Try!"

She waited, then seeing that no answer was forthcoming, began to try to coach her in her own metier. "What does the four mean? Is it a date I should beware of? Today's the, let me see—"

"No, it's no date. There are no dates in these cards. It's in the first row over you, so it's soon."

"Well, is it a man?"

"No, the picture cards are men, the jacks and kings."

"Well, what could it be then? Something with four legs? Maybe it means I'm going to be trampled by a black horse."

La Bruja shrugged.

Clo-Clo snapped her fingers. "I've got it. Four. Something with four wheels. I should stay out of a black automobile or I'm going to get smashed up."

"It could be," La Bruja said uncertainly. Whatever it was, it was as disturbing to her as to her client; she wasn't taking it lightly. Perhaps because it was a challenge to her professional skill. She continued to stare downward in stony concentration at it, the brick of still-unused cards retained in her hand, kneading a corner of her lip every now and then between her teeth.

The proprietor had fallen into a doze somewhere in the dusk-laden background. His heavy breathing was the only sound to be heard in the silences between their remarks.

"But they're your cards. Can't you read them?"

"Sure I can read them—as far as they go. The spades suit is always trouble or misfortune. The ace of spades itself is the one to look out for, that's the death card."

Clo-Clo took a deep breath of unutterable relief. "It's not out. So maybe if I just steer clear of a black car—" She lit a cigarette with a hand that was shaking so, the match singed the paper all down one side nearly to her lips. "Go ahead a little further, instead of turning back. Pay more out. Maybe something'll come out after that'll—that'll make it clearer."

La Bruja lidded her eyes acquiescently. Her hand moved. "That's a money card." Her hand moved again. "That's a card that means a trip or journey, a small one."

"I'm to get more money and go on a trip or journey?" suggested Clo-Clo hopefully.

"No, they're in reverse. That means, a trip back because of money. Money is going to cause you to take a return trip to somewhere."

This time Clo-Clo didn't comment, she kept her own counsel. She thought: "Sounds like I'm going back to the Tabarin one of these nights and meet that same darling of a papacito and be given another—"

"Go ahead," she urged, "put the next one in line down."

La Bruja's free hand moved to the brick she held, stripped the top of it, carried it to the table, reversed it with a deft twist.

There was a sort of impalpable detonation between them; unseen, unheard, but as keenly felt as the flare of flashlight powder.

"Wait a minute, what'd you say just now was the—?"

Clo-Clo, eyes dilated, craned her neck toward the layout. Before she could verify it, La Bruja had slapped her hand over it, effacing it.

"Don't look at it." La Bruja suddenly whipped it out of the setup and left a blank space where it had been.

"The death card," Clo-Clo whispered.

"It wasn't right over you," La Bruja said roughly.

"But it was right over this other one, this four thing. And that was touching me. Corner to corner!"

"Now look at your face," La Bruja said accusingly. "You're all white. You shouldn't have asked me—" She swept her hand back and forth across the cards, obliterating their arrangement beyond repair. She jogged her chair back. "Let's get out of here," she said impatiently.

Clo-Clo didn't move for a minute, didn't act as though she'd heard her. Her eyes were still fixed unseeingly on the barren table top, where the cards had been until now, as though she could still see them. Once she backed her hand across the brow fringe of the chrysanthemum hair mop, leaving a little indentation in its evenness of line through which a triangular wedge of forehead peered.

"Come on, don't take it like that," La Bruja tried to cheer her up.

Clo-Clo moved her head at last, but not toward her com-anion. She turned it slowly, warily, the other way around, toward the half-visible street-level window of the shop, across the room from them, with its shutters already backed together behind it in closure for the night.

She writhed slightly, as if trying to throw something off. "I keep getting a feeling of somebody looking at me, somebody looking at me hard. I already had it once before, tonight, before I even came in here—"

"Maybe somebody just took a squint in, in passing, to see if Pepito is still open. I was sitting facing that way the whole time, and I didn't see anyone. Pay the guy and let's get out of here," La Bruja said, in reminder that it was her invitation. "You'll feel better outside."

Clo-Clo put on one shoe. Then she felt underneath the shredded inner sole of the other, dredged up a thin ten-centavo piece, and put it on the table.

La Bruja had opened the door and gone out ahead. "There's nobody out here," she called back reassuringly. "The street's empty!"

Clo-Clo came out after her. She drew her short elbow jacket closer around her as though she were cold. There wasn't another moving thing in sight but the two of them. Calle Quince de Mayo lay desolate in the gloom around them, a blue-black tunnel running through the night.

"The tailings of the night," La Bruja grimaced. "I always hate it. Well, until next—" She took a preliminary step away from her.

Clo-Clo grabbed her almost spasmodically by the arm. "La Bruja, walk part of the way back with me, will you? You can go my way as well as the other, it's just as near for you."

La Bruja jeered, "What's the matter with you all of a sudden?" She turned nevertheless and fell into step alongside her.

"I dunno, I've got a funny feeling I can't throw off."

"That fortune got you."

"No, I had it even before I met you, but not as strong as now. I was feeling leery already back at the Tabarin."

"I can tell you what's the matter with you," La Bruja told her, with the wisdom born of greater experience. "Don't go in too heavy for this distilled stuff, like brandy or aguardiente. It over-stimulates and then depresses you. I used to make that mistake when I was first beginning to go around, too. Don't let them buy you just anything they feel like. Stick to wine and light stuff. These cheap guys are only too glad to daze you, if you give them the chance. Unless you get some system into your drinking, you'll find yourself, at the end of a hard night, with the horrors."

They had reached the lower end of the street by now. "Well, here's where we split up," La Bruja let her know. "I'm not going out of my way for you, I've done enough tramping around already for one evening. Take it easy."

She turned sharply left, and the tap of her heels, for a moment or two, could be heard receding along the sidewalk. Clo-Clo continued on alone in their original direction. Just before the opposite corner line cut them off from one another for good, she called out, almost despairingly: "See you around tomorrow night."

"Maybe," came echoing back blurredly along the resonant, empty stone chasm of the street.

Clo-Clo went her way. To her surprise, she discovered she felt a little better after leaving the other girl, rather than worse. La Bruja had a sort of dampening personality, she was well known for that; maybe that was it. Or maybe there had been a lack of sympathy there. Not that she didn't hurry, and not that she wasn't still uneasy. Plenty of both. The way home was a long one, and it had never seemed longer than it did tonight. Her feet played chopsticks under her along the sidewalk, and the tubular street, like a megaphone, seemed to carry the sound far in advance of her. They went: tick-chock, tick-chock, tick-chock—And then suddenly they had stopped.

What was that?

It had coursed out swiftly before her, made a wide turn around her out into the middle of the road, before she could identify it. Then it fell motionless out there, poised for further flight, uncertainly looking over at her. It went "Miaow," in slurred remonstrance.

A thrill of horror surged through her. Oh God, no, not tonight, after that card—!

Black, inky black from nose to tail tip; not a white hair in its coat.

She started to draw warily backwards a step at a time, hand out to the wall beside her, trying to get out of the loop it had half drawn around her, before it had a chance to close it entirely. Trying to keep their two paths from crossing at any point.

Just when she had got abreast of it on her rearward way, it took further fright, trickled over the paving stones an additional length away from her. Still in the wrong direction, behind her.

She flattened her back against the wall and tried to edge past it without disturbing it further in its new halting place. Suddenly it sighted sanctuary, closed in again to the same side of the way it had originally emerged from, squeezed through some sidewalk-level vent and vanished, with a delayed withdrawal of its tail a moment or two after the rest of it. Behind her.

It had drawn a complete arc around her. She couldn't move now in either direction, backwards or forwards, without crossing its ill-omened orbit at some point.

She called upon her patron saint, sponsor of that given name she so seldom heard any more, except around the shack "Santa Gabriela, get me out of this!" She touched her shoulders and her forehead and her breast, to ward it off. It was worse, they said, even than breaking a mirror.

But she couldn't stand here all night upon this island of safety. The damage was done now, irretrievable. She gathered herself together, lowered her head defensively as though she were about to charge through a curtain of fire or water; even gathered up her already brief skirt higher still with one hand, to give her limbs more freedom of action. Then she drew a deep breath and went plunging through the cat's esoteric path and brought up short on the other side of it. Free, but tarred by misfortune.

She gave a look behind her, sighed, and continued on her way.

A few minutes later she had hit the straightaway of the Calle de Justicia, a wide diagonal swath cut remorselessly through the maze of crooked older byways, its corners a continuous series of wedges and acute angles due to its biased progression. Now all she had to do was keep on it to its outer reaches and she'd arrive back at the shack.

A streetlight pool picked her up momentarily, lost her to the darkness again. A short wait, and then the next one ahead did the same thing. Then the one above that. They were spaced about one to a crossing.

Still as it was, she failed utterly to hear the car until it was almost upon her. It must have been gliding after her with its engine turned down to inaudibility, its lights out, for several moments past. Probably he had sighted her ahead under one of those betraying light pools.

A slithering sound, light as a tape being dragged along the ground, was all the warning she had. She swerved, and it was only a few yards in back of her, pacing her. The lights must have been left off purposely, until the last minute, so that it could get close. They switched on now, drenched her from head to foot, photographed her, so to speak, then dimmed again to a dull glow at the touch of a switch. She faltered there blinded, the back of her hand to her eyes.

But the photographic proof had turned out satisfactory, the car had stopped, and a figure had alighted to the sidewalk beside it. All she could glimpse was a rakishly diagonal hat brim and a figure that was young, almost juvenile, in its symmetry. He must be some rich man's son, out trying to learn about life at first hand. The mere fact that he would alight and stand there waiting by the open door, instead of just sitting tight and calling her over, showed how inexperienced he still must be. They were veritable gold mines, if you were lucky enough to strike one.

"Hey, chica, how about a little spin with me?" Yes, she'd been right, the voice was that of a youth, and slightly nervous at its own daring under the man-about-town nonchalance it tried so hard to assume.

She had already taken a step over toward him to parley, both out of long habit and because of the special circumstances involved in this instance, before she realized what she was doing. She jolted to a sudden halt again.

"Wait a minute, what color is that car? It looks to me—"

"It's black," he said proudly. "Some beauty, eh?"

"Get outta here!" she shrieked in sudden unreasoning panic. "Get away from me with that thing! Ay, dios mio, don't come near me with it!" She fled full tilt down the street as if pursued by demons.

"It's a Hispano," he called after her in high dudgeon. She looked back to make sure he wasn't coming after her in it. He was standing there by it, looking from her to it, and from it to her, in outraged pride of ownership. He even backed one arm at her in resentment. She had evidently wounded him in a very sensitive spot.

She kept running, to get away even from the very vicinity of the thing. She didn't stop for almost a block, tapering off finally to a bedraggled scamper simply because she was completely out of breath. What a close shave that had been! The thing would have probably telescoped itself into a wall and burned her alive inside of five minutes after she'd gotten in.

Her stockings were loosening from her flight, and she had to bend over and tug them up. Her jacket and the blouse under it were all awry too, and she had to straighten them. Then she continued at a tottering walk, still panting from her efforts.

That got her home finally. That saw her the rest of the way to the shack. It was a one-story, two-room cabin of adobe bricks covered with plaster, and roofed over with broken tiles, out where the buildings were beginning to thin out, the land wasn't worth much, and nobody was exactly sure who owned it. It had a small patch of open ground out in front, with sunflowers struggling up through the discarded gasoline cans and broken water jugs, and usually the old lady's wash strung out. It was home. She liked it. She liked to come back to it. It was what she sat drinking at bars for. It was what she brought home a hundred and fifty pesos—or a peso and fifty centavos—to. She didn't take the money from here elsewhere, she brought it from elsewhere here. That showed where it ranked in her favor. Sure, they'd have a better one someday a little farther out, but the idea, the system, would be the same.

Their mongrel yard dog reared belatedly up from the ground at her passage and gave its usual vociferous, craven bark, while remaining prudently at a distance. "Quiet, Conejo, it's me," she said. Then it went to the other extreme of tail pumping and getting in her way until she had gotten inside and closed the door on it.

She had to pick her way among the pallets on the floor, but she knew where most of them were. The old lady always left a path clear for her from the door over to her cot. Once in a while she stepped on a hand, but that was because the sleeper had carelessly shifted position after the general retirement.

One of the younger kids had preempted her cot, she found when she got over to it. She didn't mind if they did that, until she was ready to use it herself. She woke it, remonstrated in an undertone: "Get off, now, palomita. I'm back. Go on, get down where you belong." The kid sidled off to the floor, went ahead sleeping. Clo-Clo sat down in its place, took off her shoes.

She stretched luxuriantly, arms high overhead, yawned, sighed blissfully. Gee it was good to be back here, to have the whole thing over with. She sat inertly slumped over there for a moment or two, half asleep already although still upright from the waist, while a jumbled kaleidoscope of the whole night fanned through her dimming mind.

"You'd like it in Copenhagen. I'd like to take you out of this . . . First you're here, then you're not here . . . Watch your manners in here, take the one on the end, none of that smoke-ring stuff, understand? . . . Papa, the car is waiting outside, what'll I tell Elena! . . . Five more minutes, I'm closing up . . . Hey, chica, how about a spin with me? It's a Hispano . . . "

One hundred and fifty pesos. If there'd only be a few more nights like this, she could cut it out, chuck the whole thing overboard. She shrugged off her jacket, let it fall down behind her. The cot gave a jolting creak. Suddenly she was erect, awake, appalled. Her hands were pressed flat against the center hollow of her bosom.

Gone!

She gave a choked exclamation that carried through the open doorway into the next room. Her mother stirred in there, called drowsily in: "You back, Gabrielita? What's the matter, have you been hurt?" They didn't call her Clo-Clo here, they didn't even know that was her name.

She found her shoes again. She was too stunned even to cry, to make any further sound. It was a solar-plexus impact. All she could do was breathe heavily, like when she'd finished running a little while ago—

That was it! That run from that car. That was when it must have happened. That was the only time she'd moved fast all night; fast enough to lose it, anyway. Her stockings had come down, her blouse had shifted around a little. It must have worked its way up over the neckline and fallen out.

She had the outer door open now. No four of spades could have stopped her, no black cat, no black car. Nothing now. Money, security, that was the strongest impulse; that was stronger even than fear of death. Her mother's voice sounded again, just before she got the door closed. "Are you going out again, my daughter? Take care of yourself, it's so late—"

"Just for a minute. Go back to sleep. I'll be right back," she answered inattentively. The breadwinner had no time for fear or explanations; let her dependents do the worrying for her, this was her problem and she had to solve it alone.

She was going back now toward the inner city, fast, all weariness postponed. Walking as though it were three in the afternoon. Her mind was grappling with it. She had a good mind: she would have had, if it had been trained at all. "I didn't lose it when I went spinning around the table there at the Tabarin. I know I didn't, because I felt for it after I left, and it was still in. I didn't lose it sitting with La Bruja; her hands were on the cards, didn't come near me. It was when I ran from that accursed car; then and then only."

She knew, fortunately, just about where that was. He'd come up to her just past Retiro, and she'd run all the rest of the block, up to the next crossing at San Marco. It was somewhere along that stretch, on the right-hand side of Justicia.

Here. It began from here on. She slackened, began a pendulum-like advance along the night-blue shadowed sidewalk, swinging from curbing to building base, from building base to curbing, head rigidly inclined. Every unevenness, every slight flaw in the paving blocks, that cast a deeper shadow than the rest of the surface, she examined by bending still further down over, or even testing with the tips of her fingers.

Minutes went by. The city slept, the night brooded, the broomlike shuffle of her feet, back and forth, and forth and back, was the only sound there was.

The curbing veered in suddenly, thrust a drop under her feet. She looked up with aching, stiff neck. Already? Had she reached the other end already? Yes, here, here was where the car had stopped and played its lights upon her.

Maybe he'd found it. But he hadn't come after her. He'd stood there by the car a minute, and then gotten in and driven off. And at this hour hardly anyone was about, hardly anyone was likely to have passed by here since. It must be still someplace around, it must be. Until daylight, until the first early risers were on the streets, it would still lie where it had fallen. She wouldn't desist, she wouldn't stop looking until she'd found it.

She'd made one complete round trip to the San Marco corner and back again, when hope finally gave up the ghost. When she finally had to admit that it was useless looking anymore, that if it had been there she would already have found it two or three times over. She wavered helplessly about there on the sidewalk awhile, crumbling inside. Then the tears came. Hot bitter tears, of a wrenching intensity that those who lived safely could never know.

She went over to the wall, there close by the corner, and pressed her face against it, under the overhanging splint of her arm, heels out behind her and clear of the ground, and with her other hand she beat the counterpoint to her strangled sobs against the heartless, unyielding, prickling stones.

The whole night for nothing. All those smiles, all that magnetic current, all those kilowatts of personality consumed, with nothing to show for them.

The sobs stopped first. Then the intolerable anguished pounding of her palm slowed to little pats, died away at last. She tried to console herself as best she could. It had been something for nothing. Now she was no worse off, at least, than she had been before she had received it. It wouldn't work. "It was mine," she said smotheredly against the wall. "I had it. Why should it be taken away from me again?"

She flung her shoulder around in defiance, turned at last to face the other way, still propped against the wall. She stared in glowering dullness out at nothing. The night owed her a return. She'd get a little something back, no matter how fractional a part of her loss. She'd stand here until she did. She wouldn't go home empty-handed. The fatal middle-class virtue of thrift. Something to show for it, if it was only a half-peso piece, only a cadged cigarette. She wouldn't leave this spot until she did.

Justicia had been cut ruthlessly through a decrepit, labyrinthine part of the town, on the bias. All the moldering little lanes and alleys that opened out upon it, opened as a result not rectangularly but slantwise. At the corner where she stood, San Marco, running in to join the newer thoroughfare, made an angle so acute it was little better than a fifteen-degree incision. The corner of this wall she lounged against was needle-pointed; San Marco was not around the corner from her but directly behind her back, on the other side of the double-flanged wall.

Now as she stood there in the Blue Hour, in the Deathwatch of the night, defiantly determined upon her recompense, the soft crush of a foot upon loose-packed earth, upon imperfectly bedded small stones, reached her from around this projection, from behind her own back. Somebody was coming along there, along the unpaved margin of San Marco, about to turn this razor corner and happen upon her.

Somebody, and no matter who it was, she wanted something of the night, she would not let him by without exacting tribute to repair her loss and assuage her shattered self-esteem. She dried her eyes by stabbing a knuckle into them, in quick succession. She opened her bag and started to redden her mouth with flurried urgency, the smile of gamine friendliness with which she intended to halt him in another moment already turning up its corners even as she did so, for the loose top layer of tiny stones and gravel was already shifting in sight of her, out there beyond the knife-like corner, like sluggish water riding outwards from an impact still unseen, the cause of it still hidden for a moment more.

In another instant they would be face to face, eye to eye. She could already have reached her hand exploratively backward around the stone screen and touched him as he sidled up.

The lipstick dipped. Her smile was ready now. She turned it up toward the night, eyes half lidded with expectancy.

They had taken her away by the time Manning arrived, at seven that same morning, in a taxi. The flatiron corner of San Marco and Justicia looked dainty in early-morning watercolors: peach pink and pastel blue. Pink sunlight in the faces of the men standing around, and light-blue shadows on the ground behind them.

There was one other color, on the wall on the Justicia side: as though somebody had been careless with some kind of overripe fruit.

There weren't many people around. A country Indian on his way to early market with a basket of persimmons on his head seemed to have become permanently rooted to one particular spot on his way past, stood there mouth agape in incomprehension, poised to go on but forgetting to. On the opposite sidewalk a street sweeper also stood looking on, resting on his broom of twigs. Occasionally he would make a couple of passes with it, then stop and look on some more. On a third-floor balcony on that same side a plump woman had come out to watch, but had brought her hairbrush with her and continued stroking her long black glossy hair while she did so. That was about all; the rest were all those whose business it was to be there.

Manning had not only not been informed this time, but could even tell he was somewhat persona non grata when he got out of the cab and joined them. Robles glanced up, greeted him uncordially with: "You again? We have work to do here. Please, no more suggestions from the sidelines, if you don't mind!" And then he added, "What are you, a mind reader? How did you know?"

"It's all over town already. The milkman told the mozo that brings my morning coffee to me from across the street, and the mozo told me. Who was it this time?"

"An habitué of the cafés known as Clo-Clo. A lady of the evening, poor creature. Mendez here knew her. Didn't you, Mendez?"

Mendez dropped his eyelids disclaimingly. "Only in the line of duty."

Manning had caught sight of several small objects awaiting removal, which had been placed, meanwhile, on a sheet of newspaper spread out on top of an opened campstool. "Where does the lipstick come in?" he asked.

"It was lying on the ground close beside her body. It fell out of her handbag, I suppose, in the course of the death struggle."

Manning took a while. Then finally he asked, "What else fell out?"

"Nothing else fell out."

"Was the bag open or closed when it was found?"

Robles was fair enough—and incautious enough—to hold finger up for the benefit of those around him. "Ah. He has made a good point there, the American. The bag was still closed when we found it. Therefore, it is true that the lipstick could not have fallen out, she must have removed it herself." He waved his hand blandly. "However, it is just a detail, it has no bearing on the matter one way or the other."

"Oh no, no bearing at all," agreed Manning treacherously. "Except to show that it was a man who waylaid her here on this corner. She would not have rouged her lips for a quadruped, I believe?"

Robles gave his arms a slight flip at his sides, said in a heroically restrained voice to those immediately around him, but excluding Manning as though he weren't there: "That again. What did I do to deserve this hornet buzzing in my ears? Mendez. Cipriano. Stand one on each side of him. Each of you take an arm. Yes, like that. Now walk him over to that cab over there, put him in it, and see that it takes him back wherever it is he came from."

Robles wasn't kidding. He was a little too white at the corners of the eyes and mouth to have been anything but serious. It might have been, partly, the early hour of the day.

Neither, for that matter, was Manning. "Your theory must be pretty shaky," he said witheringly, "if it can't stand a little honest difference of opinion. What's the matter, afraid it'll fall down flat? Take your hands off me. This is a public street. I'm entitled to stand here as long as I want."

It could very easily have been the starting point of actual ill-feeling, bad blood between them. Fortunately, an interruption occurred just then which took everyone's mind off all lesser matters.

There was a great commotion and fanfare at the curb, and the jefe de policia himself stepped down from a breathtaking Bugatti, one of the last to be imported before the war. Everyone fell silent, drew himself up where he stood at stiff attention, as he approached surrounded by a small group of subordinates.

He was a short, wiry, clerical-looking man, with an aggressive manner and a voluminous, resonant voice that must have been ideal for addressing large gatherings. He cast only the briefest of glances at the vestiges remaining on wall and ground, concentrated on the men before him instead. He stood there glittering balefully through his spectacles at them, like an infuriated owl blinking in the sunlight.

"You are in charge here, inspector?" he thundered after a dramatic pause.

"Sí, excelencia," Robles quailed in a small voice.

"How many more times is this going to happen? This fiend must be exterminated! I want its carcass shown to me within the next twenty-four hours, is that clear?" He included the others, turning his head to take them in. "Is that clear to all of you? The mayor and the ayuntamiento are showing concern, are having a reward posted to the general public, independent of your efforts. It is a reflection on my department. There is already a city-wide panic brewing. The tourist season is about to begin. This can do incalculable harm, people will avoid coming here!"

He strode back to the Bugatti, delivered the postscript from there. "There should be nothing complicated about this matter! If one animal has a better head on it than the best heads we have on the police force, then it is time there was a general reorganization, from head to foot!"

Robles sat at his desk dismally scanning a specimen of one of the municipal council's new posters, fresh from the printer's. It was so large it curled over the edge of the desk at both sides. It was a vivid yellow, and dozens like it were going up on every advertisement kiosk, signboard, and vacant wall in town.

At the top, in beetling black letters, it had: AVISO AL PÚBLICO. Then numerous lines of fine print. Then at last, toward the lower right-hand corner, again in heavier type: $1,000 REWARD.

Manning knew, by the very fact that he was being allowed to remain there in the office while Robles struggled with himself, that the latter intended eventually to give in.

"I still say I do not agree with you," Robles said, thumping the desk despairingly. "But when my official position, my job itself, is involved, I am forced to give any possibility a trial, even though it goes against my own beliefs. I cannot afford to pass anything by."

"Hold on a minute," Manning said quickly. "I'm not making an accusation, you understand? I haven't any proof against the man, none whatever. There's only this one incriminating circumstance involved: I've been inquiring around, here, there, the next place; privately, on my own account, you understand; and I find he has been in the habit of coming in to the city on overnight visits. Every now and then, every so often, at irregular intervals."

"There is nothing criminal in that. Hundreds of people come into the city every day and night, just as hundreds go out again."

"I agree with you," Manning said mildly. "Some have fixed days for it. Every Saturday night, say. Or every Sunday. Or twice a week, regularly. As the case may be. Then there are others who come in haphazardly, as he does. Just whenever the impulse hits them. As you say, there is nothing particularly incriminating in either of those habitudes."

"Well then?"

"Just idly, let me give you the three last haphazard dates on which he repaired to the city. They are authentic, you can rely on them; I obtained them from various disinterested sources: bus drivers on the line that goes out that way, cantina keepers, and the like. See if they interest you."

Robles looked down at the poster staring him in the face kept tapping his fingers rotatingly on the edge of it, with a moody sort of thoughtfulness.

Manning took out a scrap envelope, scanned the back of it. "May the fourteenth—"

Robles' eyes went up from the poster before him.

"May the twenty-sixth—"

Robles' head went up, as his neck stiffened.

"June the eighth—"

Robles' whole body went up, to a standing position before his desk chair. Then, leaning over, he brought the flat of his hand crashingly down on the desk, left it there for a long moment.

"Teresa Delgado met death on the night of May fourteenth. Conchita Contreras came to her end on the night of May twenty-sixth. The girl nicknamed Clo-Clo was found at daybreak on June the ninth." He glowered at the American. "Once, you would call a coincidence. Twice, you would call suspicious. But three times, what would you call that?"

"I'm not good at naming things," was all Manning said quietly.

Robles thumbed the lever of the voice conveyor on his desk.

"Bring me in Juan Cardozo, foreman of the ranch at Las Cruces. It's about fifty kilometers out, on the overland road. Just follow that and you'll come to it. No charges, just wanted for questioning."

He was burned a deep mahogany from year-round exposure to the sun. He had come in just as they found him: blue cotton work shirt open at the neck, a sort of poncho arrangement slung over one shoulder, corduroy pants, the embossed silver belt of the typical riding man about his middle, and a shapeless felt hat, wavy-brimmed from being continually soaked down and allowed to dry out again, probably right on his head.

He had a small but very stiff-haired black mustache. Occasionally, during the long hours it went on, they let him smoke. As if to let him remember what comfort and ease were like after all this time. The implication being he could have them back again at will if he would only admit the worst about himself. Whenever they did let him smoke, he would take a paper from his pocket and slowly, lovingly roll one for himself. It was almost a pleasure to watch him at it, he was so deft, so artistic about it.

"I found it when I was making my rounds on horseback one day," he was saying when Manning slipped unobtrusively into the room behind all their backs. Strictly speaking, he had no business there. But then, strictly speaking, they had no business holding the man Cardozo there either. Not as yet.

"Its mother had been killed, and it was shivering there by the body. It was just a little mite then, a cub, coal black. I picked it up and took it back with me to the ranch house and kept it there. For a while we kept it right in the house, like a kitten. Then when it got a little bigger, I knocked together a sort of pen for it outside and kept it in that. Then one day señor here happened to come out, and he saw it; he asked me if he could borrow it for twenty-five pesos, he wanted to have a lady show it off in her car with her."

"Who fed it?" Robles wanted to know in a dangerously minor key.

"I did."

"It knew you, then?"

"Claro. Any animal knows the one that feeds it."

"You spoke to it when you fed it?"

"Sure. Like you do, you know."

"You had a name for it?"

"Negrote."*

"In other words, it knew you, it was familiar with you. You could approach it more easily than anyone else, isn't that true?"

The ranchman sensed where he was being led. He shifted uneasily. "Anyone could approach it. All of us out there. The señor had no trouble, bringing it in to town—"

"Let us go back to dates, again," Robles said disarmingly. "You have admitted you were in the city all night the night of the fourteenth of May."

"I have already told you where I was. At the Cantina Estrella de Media Noche. Ask all the bunch who goes there; Hipolito, Benito Dominguez, they all saw me—"

"We have already, never fear," Robles said with the placidity of an idol. "There is no clock in the cantina. They saw you, yes; early in the evening. But then after, for instance?"

"After it closed, I was where one always is after a cantina closes: lying with my back propped up against a wall, outside in the street somewhere."

Robles scratched his ear perplexedly, as though at a loss, not knowing what question to ask next. A completely false impression, Manning knew, watching him from the background. "Let us leave the night of the fourteenth, it seems to be getting us nowhere. On the twenty-sixth, you say—"

Cardozo showed his teeth around at them. "I have already told you that too. They will be charging me for three visits, instead of one. Very well, I was at the house run by Doña Sara—"

"Tell me, were you planning to elope with one of the girls there?"

"The comandante is joking. One does not elope with—"

"The comandante is not joking," Robles assured him icily. "Why then were you seen to have a riata * coiled about your waist the night you visited the house of Doña Sara?"

Cardozo's jaw fluctuated up and down, but all that came from his mouth were two meaningless pronouns. "I—I—"

But Robles hadn't waited. He was asking them faster now. "Why then did you have pieces of raw meat in a bag with you the night you were at the cantina? Whom were you expecting to feed? Yourself?"

"No, I—I—"

"And what became of that raw meat? You had it no longer when you boarded the morning bus for Las Cruces. And what became of the riata? You had that no longer, either, when you made the return trip."

"The riata—somebody in the house of Doña Sara must have stolen it—they do that in those places, anything of value. The meat—maybe some dog or cat came along while I was sleeping on the sidewalk outside the cantina—"

"And what did you bring those things along for? Was it because you had something staked out, somewhere here in the city, that you wished to lead about with you for a while? Was it? Contesta! [Answer!]" His voice exploded. "Was it?"

Manning thought he had never before seen such a look of dawning fear and horror on anyone's face as began to peer out on Cardozo's. "I—I—oh, wait, no, don't think that! I did, I admit it. I did hope to save Negrote alive. I thought perhaps I might come across him just by chance, throw him the meat, sling the riata over him, find some way of getting him back to the estancia with me. It was just an idle impulse, a stupid thought that came to me—But not what you mean! Not what you are trying to say!" He looked from face to face, pleadingly. "Señores, what do you want with me? I know, I have known for hours past. I have not said so, you have not said so either. I have been in town other nights, besides the three you mention. Why don't you speak of them?"

"Very well," Robles said accommodatingly, "we shall." He consulted something. "You were in on the twentieth of May por ejemplo."

"Yes, yes!" Cardozo nodded almost avidly.

"Did you have a riata with you that night? Raw meat that night?"

The lack of answer was the answer.

"You were in on the thirty-first. Did you then, either?"

Cardozo shivered a little, and his head went over, as though he were peering closely at something out before his feet.

"Only on the nights on which something happened in this city did you come provided with the rather curious articles we have mentioned. Not on the others."

The man in the middle of all of them leaped to his feet suddenly. Restraining hands were immediately laid on him, but he stood there erect, facing his tormentors. Even though he was shivering spasmodically, there was a sort of innate dignity pulsing from him. Even Manning, the outlander, could feel it. For a moment it made of them, not policemen around a suspect; just men around another man. "I have killed, yes. I spent two years in jail for it, back in my native tierra. It was over a woman, any man would have killed. But not this way! One kills in revenge, to right a wrong. How can one be revenged on or wronged by individuals one did not even know existed; one never saw in all his life before? Or one kills to rob. At least some do. What other reason is there to kill?"

Manning had taken a small file out of his pocket, he was shaping a thumbnail with it while he lounged indolently back against the door. "One sometimes kills for the love of it," he remarked unexpectedly.

Their heads all turned to look around at him. He, in turn, had taken his eyes off the file for a moment. Something went wrong. He started violently, seized the fleshy bulge at the bottom of his thumb, bent over it, swearing softly in English. The file dropped with a plink.

He came forward into the light, holding the self-inflicted wound, as if to examine it better. Yet he went on completing the remark he made just before the accident happened. "For the love of it, for its own sake, because they like the sight of blood. Because it does something to them."

He uncapped his protective hand. A skin tear produced by the point of the file was revealed, not very serious, but lavishly blooded, as such things often are. It even dripped down free off his outpoised hand, which he had inadvertently spaded almost under Cardozo's nose, to keep from staining his own cuff with it.

Cardozo blinked twice, as one does in discomfort. Then he sidled his face sidewise, in uncontrollable repugnance at the bleeding wound's almost contact-point proximity.

Nobody said anything; they understood.

Robles let out a faintly discernible sigh after a moment. "Take him outside," he said. "We'll continue later." And to somebody else, as the door closed, "See if you can find some alcohol for the norteño's finger—"

"It was worth it," Manning said, blowing on it and wringing it out. "What are you going to do now, turn him loose?"

"Continue to hold him in custody," Robles said vindictively. "Give your theory rope, and rope, and rope—until it strangles itself!"

"I don't get you."

Robles smiled bleakly. "If these barbarities mysteriously cease to occur while he is in our hands, that is one thing. But if one should take place again—"

FIVE

sally o'keefe

IN THE Inglaterra Hotel on Corriente Street, Sally O'Keefe had the floor-length windows of their room wide open to a picture night that looked like something on a travel poster.

She was standing there framed against them, arms out in arrested ecstasy. She was short and slight, hair a reddish gold, eyes blue, and rosettes of freckles on each cheek gave her face an elfin piquancy.

"Marj, isn't that incredible? That can't be real. Somebody painted it outside our window for our special benefit."

Through a luminous dust composed of phosphorescent particles of greenish blue and silver, lines of incandescence had been traced, as though someone had drawn a radium-tipped stick through it that left glowing traces. These were the streets and avenues. Around and about was the low black undulation made by the hills against a sky that, where it joined them in the west, was still a glowing turquoise, as though reflecting a hidden row of low-burning gas flames strung out along its base. Up above in the center of its dome it had darkened to night, but the warm rich darkness of semitropic night, so lavishly scattered with stars they were like a blinding shower of permanently upflung confetti. Or the afterstages of a burst skyrocket.

"Now I can die happy!" the girl at the window rhapsodized.

Marjorie King, her traveling companion, more practical, smiled into the dresser glass before which she sat completing the final touches of her toilette. She was a brunette, with a sort of stateliness to her good looks that the other's pertness lacked. Even seated, she was obviously a good head or two taller than the other girl. The casting director of a stage production could have differentiated them more accurately than the ordinary layman; Marjorie was the showgirl type, Sally the pony chorus girl. Neither of them, as a matter of fact, was of the theater. Sally was the private secretary to a harvesting-machine-company vice-president. Marjorie was branch manager for one of a large chain of candy stores, known as "Handmaid," where everything was done by machinery but the eating. Both were on their first real vacation in years, a long-planned, long-saved-for, many-times-deferred sabbatical that they had practically had to blackmail their respective employers for. It was a freelance trip, they would have nothing to do with conducted tours and large, sardinelike cruise parties rushing about in military formation.

"That's Naples you're thinking of, isn't it?" Marjorie answered the remark. "And anyway, if it's all you say, why spoil it by speaking of dying in the same breath with it?"

"Just a phrase, just a turn of speech," Sally said, turning away at last and coming toward her. "When you feel as I do tonight, it has no meaning at all. I never felt so alive before in my life! This place certainly brings out the dynamism in you. What're we doing tonight?"

Marjorie stood up, ready to go. "This was your night for making the plans, haven't you got anything worked out? That was our arrangement, remember? One night I'm the boss, the next night you are."

Sally essayed analyzing herself, while her friend went around putting out the lights, a habit that they were not accustomed enough to hotels to have broken themselves of yet. "I feel sort of sentimental, romantic. It must be that out there brought it on. None of these jangling, brassy casinos or nightclubs for me tonight. I feel sort of pastoral—yes that's how I feel, pastoral."

"Pasteurized?" Marjorie teased, gathering up an outer wrap.

Sally gave her a push at the rear of the waist. "I heard somebody or other mention a place out in a park on the outskirts, where you eat in the open air under the trees," she resumed. "They say it's beautiful, all colored lanterns. Let's take one of these old-fashioned carriages they have around, instead of a taxi for a change, and drive out there and back in the moonlight. The taxis here smell so of gasoline, and they get you there so fast. Yes, that's just what I feel like," she concluded, "a slow, easygoing, old-style carriage ride in the moonlight."

"How far out is this place?" Marjorie asked her. "Isn't there some story going around about a man-eating something or other that got away from some zoo or animal farm and is supposed to pounce on you in lonely places? The maid that does the room was jabbering about it a mile a minute when you were out this morning. I wasn't able to get the story very straight; I only caught about every third word, you know how fast they talk."

"Oh, that. The man at the American Express told me not to listen to it, there's not a word of truth in it. I'm going to get my money's worth out of this vacation, and no hobgoblin story is going to stop me."

She opened the door and stood waiting for her friend to pass through. "Got everything? Don't forget to bring some catnip in case we run into the watchamacallit," she suggested flippantly.

Marjorie laughed as they moved toward the elevator.

Downstairs in the lobby she said, "Let's ask and find out at the desk."

The clerk bowed graciously, lowering his head to the end of his hair part, as they stepped over.

"We understand there's an outdoor restaurant in the big park outside the city. Is it worth taking in? My friend and I were thinking of going there."

His answer was indirect. "Have the señoritas tried the Tabarin or Select? I am sure they would—"

"But those are just nightclubs, aren't they?" Marjorie objected. "We have nightclubs up home too. What we're looking for is something a little different, something more atmospheric."

"I know the place you mean," he said somewhat reticently. "The Madrid, out in the Bosque—"

"What's the matter with it?" Sally cut in with characteristic bluntness.

"Oh, nothing, nothing," he hastily retracted. "It is just that it is leetle—how you say?—lejano; out of the way, far out. Are the señoritas going unaccompanied? I could perhaps arrange—"

"Oh no, we don't want any hired escorts," Sally grimaced. "I hate that sort of thing."

"The young man seems doubtful, for some reason or other," Marjorie smiled uncertainly at her.

This time he didn't trouble to deny it.

Sally O'Keefe reacted as Sally O'Keefe always reacted. Marjorie had known she would. "Well, people do go there after dark, don't they?" she demanded of the clerk. And at his nodding admission, she plucked her friend by the arm. "Then we are, too! Call us one of these old-fashioned carriages." And they went sailing out to the street to await its arrival.

Outside Marjorie laughed knowingly. "He was doing his best to discourage us, did you get it? But he wouldn't come out with the real reason; afraid we'd cut short our stay, I suppose. You always were that way; let anyone try to talk you out of doing anything, and you're surer than ever to go ahead and do it."

"Steamroller Sal," grinned the smaller girl beside her. "Here it is now."

They got in, settled themselves on the back seat, left open to the sky with the hood thrown back.

"What'd he say it was called, again?"

Marjorie gave the order to the coachman for her. "The Madrid." He turned and gave them a glance of brief curiosity, then flicked his whip and they started to roll down the street with velvety smoothness. Marjorie had noted the look in passing. It might have been elicited by their festive attire or their lack of male escort, but she was inclined to think not; she had an idea it was their destination that had caused it.

"Was I right?" Sally exulted. "Isn't this nice for a change?"

The gait of the vehicle was a lot more even and lulling than a car would have been, there was no denying that, and it gave them a much better chance to take in the sights around them. These carriages, although no longer used for practical purposes during the daylight hours, were far from being broken-down museum pieces. They were rubber-tired, their bodies kept in gleaming condition, and they were anything but an uncommon sight in Ciudad Real, particularly after dark and on Sunday afternoons.

After ten or fifteen minutes of slow coursing through the vivacious, brightly lighted streets, they came out finally upon a large glorieta, or rounded open space of pavement, ringed about with multiglobed lampposts. This was the Puerta Mayor, one of the city "gates," although it had neither wall nor gate to show for it. Facing them across it was the main entrance to the Bosque, a vast natural park in imitation of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, mute testimony of the days when Paris had set the style in cities as well as in women's clothes.

The main driveway of the Bosque, when they entered it, was filled with taxis, roadsters, and sedans. In fact, the stream of traffic was fully as heavy as on some of the city thoroughfares behind them.

"Now what's wrong with this?" Sally queried delightedly. "Do you see anything so lonely or scary about this? I'd like to give that clerk a piece of my mind!"

"It's lonely like Times Square on Election Night," admitted Marjorie with a chuckle.

"What a night!" Sally exulted. She lowered the bracketed seat opposite, put both feet up on it, and stared over head and rearward at a pomegranate of a moon which was beginning to work its way through the trees into open sky.

Presently innumerable colored lanterns, like toy balloons staked low above the ground at the end of taut, upright strings, began to peer out at them here and there. The carriage made a turn into a private siding, the trees thinned off, and a whole vast expanse of them, like a flower bed dangling upside down, burgeoned into view. Beneath was a sea of tables in the open air, centering around a pavilion, open at the sides, containing still others. And all alike, inside and out, were filled with a vivaciously chattering, typically Latin outdoor crowd. The nostalgic wail of a tango sounded disembodiedly on the night air, without seeming to have any source, and you could tell that those upright under the pavilion roof in a small compact cluster were dancing, and not just standing there between the tables, only because each two were turned to face one another.

"Now this," said Sally, when they had finally obtained a table far out toward the perimeter, "is what I really call something. You can have your stuffy city nightclubs. Look at that." She picked up a leaf that had fallen to the cloth from above, and held it out almost reverently for Marjorie to see.

"Sally, the hard-to-please, the chronic complainer," observed Marjorie, with reverse implication.

Sally was usually good company at all times, pleasant to be out with; that was why they had made the trip together in the first place. Tonight she was in especially fine fettle.

"Are we getting looked at!" she reveled presently, not in the least disconcerted. "Very déclassée, I suppose, coming out alone together like this."

"You know it isn't that," Marjorie teased her. "It's probably that carrot thatch of yours, and the funny little phiz that goes with it." She undulated her wristwatch toward her. "You're beautiful, my dear."

Sally squinted at one of the lanterns. "I must owe you money," she said. "Trying to recall if I do or not. It's the only way I can account for it. All right, you're beautiful too, so there. I'm beautiful, you're beautiful, what good does it do us? Two lonely old maids, twenty-four and twenty-five, all by themselves in the middle of the South American night."

"You shouldn't have said that," Marjorie said in a guarded voice, laughing silently down her chin. "Don't look up, but we're about to be accosted."

He was complete even down to white kid gloves. He bowed low between them. "Would one of the señoritas care to do me the honor of dancing?"

The corner of Sally's mouth was twitching in spite of her best efforts to control it. Close as he was, she managed to make herself audible to her friend without appearing to say anything. "Dare me?" she breathed. "Ow! what was that for?" she exclaimed, unabashed, a moment later as the point of her friend's toe found her instep.

Marjorie saw that she would have to answer for the two of them. "No thank you," she said with what gravity she could muster.

"Pardon," the canvasser said stiffly. He gave another bow and left them.

"You hurt the poor man's feelings," Marjorie rebuked, holding her napkin to the side of her own mouth to keep the contagious laughter she was getting from the other girl from being seen.

The two of them had fallen into one of those moods of giddy, causeless hilarity that at times sweep over two women alone; they were laughing at nothing, with one another, at one another, and incited by one another.

"I thought you were feeling so romantic tonight?"

"Yeah," said Sally, shaking her head, "but I don't like 'em with shoeshines on the hair."

This brought on another gale of risibility.

"Have they a union? They'll be picketing this table, the first thing we know."

"Say, wouldn't that look funny?" visualized Marjorie. "Three or four of them carrying signs and doing little dance steps back and forth in front of us—" The mental image she managed to convey sent them into still another spasm.

"Come on, we're going to have wine with these jokes!" Sally said masterfully, beckoning the waiter.

"Old P.J. should see his hardworking secretary now!" Marjorie gloated a few minutes later, tilting a ruddy glass toward her friend.

Sally turned and looked the other way, away from the crowd out into the marginal darkness, for almost the first time since they'd seated themselves. She decided to kid her companion a little. "It may be hiding out there right now, watching us through the trees," she said mischievously. "Do you suppose they pick out whom their next meal is going to be ahead of time and then follow them around? I heard a story once—"

"Brrh! Don't!" pleaded Marjorie. "I was just beginning to forget it. You had to remind me."

"Nobody else here seems to take it seriously, why should we? Look at the mob here tonight. That alone shows it's just some sort of an idle rumor."

Under those gay-colored lanterns strung from the trees, with music playing, glasses clinking, waiters hustling around, shoals of men and women in evening dress on every side of them, Marjorie had to admit to herself it was hard really to believe that there was violent death stalking somewhere about the city at that very moment, on four velvety, relentless paws.

By the time they were ready to leave, an hour later, they had both forgotten all about it once again. They returned in high good humor to where their carriage was waiting for them, still laughing intermittently and for as little reason as ever.

"I liked that place. Aren't you glad we took it in?"

"Wouldn't have missed it for the world," Marjorie agreed.

"Drive us around awhile, slowly," Sally told the coachman as they got in. "It's a shame to go back to the hotel so soon. Isn't it beautiful out here in the moonlight?"

"Don't let's run up too big a bill," Marjorie cautioned.

"Forget it, this is my night. What's a vacation for anyway?" An empty side lane had opened out beside them. "Turn up that way," she ordered the driver. "Take us off this main driveway, it's too full of exhaust fumes from all the traffic."

There wasn't another vehicle in sight on it. It stretched barren into the night, in a ruler-straight line before them.

"There, isn't this much better? We've got it all to ourselves," said the headstrong Sally. "I like to explore new roads, don't you?"

"I can take them or leave them alone," Marjorie had to admit. It was just a little too lifeless to appeal to her, but she didn't like to spoil her friend's good time.

It began to curve slowly around to the left presently, and as it did so, a sheet of burnished silver, glistening like a mirror under the moon, came into view through the trees.

"Look at that lake with the swans on it!" Sally enthused. "Did you ever see anything so exquisite?"

The horse was going at a slow walk. Presently the trees between it and them had thinned to extinction, and only a grassy, downward slope lay between the road and it. "Let's get out and walk down to the edge of it," was Sally's next suggestion. "Stretch our legs a little after sitting so long. I love to walk along beside water, don't you?"

"Not at this hour of the night," Marjorie said half-heartedly. "Let's turn around and go back where there are more people. It's getting late, and we're awfully far in—"

"Don't be that way. You're a big girl now. Nothing can happen to us as long as we stay in sight of the coach, don't go roaming too far off. I promise you we won't let it out of our sight." She already had one foot poised out of the carriage.

Marjorie gave in once more, but this time it was the coachman who began to jabber objections to them when he saw them about to descend.

"What's he saying?" asked Marjorie.

"Just about what everyone else has been, I guess. Advising us not to leave the carriage and go walking around on foot, most likely. I think it's a conspiracy on the part of everyone. These high-strung Latins!"

"They live here, after all," Marjorie pointed out.

But the impulsive little redhead hadn't waited, was already picking her way down the gently inclined sward toward the lake below, flashing blindingly in the moonlight. Marjorie turned to the driver, warned him with one Spanish word and a dozen English ones, her usual ratio: "Espera. Don't you dare budge from here, understand? We'll be back in a minute."

He nodded in disapproving acquiescence, but the horse, meanwhile, was pawing the ground uneasily and shifting about between the traces. He had to tighten his grip on the reins to steady it. She saw its ears standing stiffly erect, as though it heard or sensed something that the humans about it were still unaware of.

"Sal," she called down the slope. "I think we'd better get back in again. I don't like the way this horse is acting." But even the attempt to overrule her friend and bring her back again, in itself, was carrying her involuntarily down toward the water's edge herself.

Sally had already reached it, was crouched there on her heels, crumbling some after-dinner wafers she had brought along from the restaurant and holding them out enticingly toward a flotilla of magnificent black swans, who came streaking up from all directions. "Aren't they beauts?" she called obliviously over her shoulder. "C'mon down, what're you afraid of?"

Marjorie made her way down to her, still only to persuade her to come back. "Come on, Sal," she said reasonably. "Something's making that horse fidget up there. Let's get out of here."

"Oh, it probably just wants to get back to the stable, you know how horses are." She went on paying out crumbs. "Look at them fight one another. That's what you call muscling in!"

Suddenly they all began to reverse, dart out into the middle of the lake again as swiftly as they had drawn shoreward just now.

"What's the matter with them, what're they doing that for?" Sally asked blankly.

"Something's frightened them—and it wasn't ourselves. They were practically snatching those crumbs out of your hand a minute before. I told you we'd better get out of here!" She began pulling the other girl insistently by the arm to get her to come away. "This is just the sort of place we were warned to stay away from."

"Oh, all right," Sally said weariedly. She straightened her feet and brushed the front of her dress. "Don't be such a wet blanket."

They turned to face the roadway up above once more, just in time to witness the horse rearing violently upward on its hind legs until it was nearly vertical within its traces. It whinnied with shrill fearfulness. The coachman, nearly overturned, gave an alarmed shout. The animal dropped back again, sparks flashing out from its shoes, and then it plunged forward, bolting off under their very eyes while they stood there rooted helplessly to the spot. In another moment the rapid clatter of its hoofbeats and the driver's excited yells had both alike died away far down the driveway.

They came running up to the edge of it a moment later, stood there aghast, looking down its empty moon-speckled length. A little blue dust, slowly settling in places from the vehicle's headlong flight, was the only trace left of it.

Marjorie's hands struck her sides, rebounded again. "Now are you satisfied?" she said pointedly. "You would get out and leave it."

"How did I know that was going to happen? He'll get him under control in a minute or two and come back to get us. That's the only way he can get his money for the whole night's excursion."

Marjorie, however, wasn't taking such a calm view of it. "Well, we're not waiting around here until he does!" she let her companion know sharply. "There's something around here that there shouldn't be, and I know what I'm saying. First the swans, and then that horse—"

They started to walk briskly along by the side of the road, following in the same direction the runaway horse had taken. Even though they had no idea where the road led, to keep on along it was their only hope of meeting the carriage again on its return trip.

They were alternately in shadow and moonlight. The macadam surface was hard on their feet after a while, in the thin-soled evening slippers they were wearing. First one, then the other, changed over to the turf on the outside of the roadway, where the walking was easier. This brought them into single file, however, for trees, tree roots, and bushes impinged quite closely on the road strip in places. Marjorie was in the lead.

Their tread fell silently on the soft earth now. It was when they had been doing this for several minutes that they first became aware of something. A soft intermittent rustling sound, a sort of whispering slither, was coming from the foliage a little behind and off to one side of them. It seemed to be pacing them. It was very subtle, scarcely anything at all. It would stop and then go on again.

Marjorie hung back a step, so she could whisper over her shoulder to the girl behind her without raising her voice. "Do you hear that?" she breathed. "Something—or someone—is following us through there. I told you there was something around here there shouldn't be—"

They'd both stopped short, instinctively, in order to listen the better. But now the sound itself had stopped too, as if suiting its actions to theirs. There was an interval of throbbing silence. Then a twig snapped betrayingly, as if slowly crushed in twain under something's arrested weight.

All Sally's former nonchalance had left her by now. "Oh, why didn't I listen to you!" she whimpered. She gave her friend a push forward. "Don't let's stand here waiting for it, whatever it is! Run, quick! Let's get out of here!"

With one accord they fled swiftly down the side of the long, heartlessly empty road, again one behind the other. The moment they did, the rustling resumed again behind them, quickened in turn now. It was governed by whatever they did, that was easy to see. It was the pursuer, and they were its prey. It became a crashing at times, plainly audible above their slapping footfalls and hot, frightened breaths. A succession of lopes that cleared the ground and burst headlong through the impeding foliage at each impetus.

"Scream," Sally panted. "Maybe someone will hear us!"

Marjorie hadn't waited to be told. "Help!" she keened dismally, "Help!" But she was already too out of breath from their long run to be able to emit more than a thin, disjointed bleat.

The rustling and crashing were changing direction now, drawing slowly but surely in toward them, coming diagonally at them instead of merely keeping parallel. There were many places where the coverage between was so thin they might have been able to glimpse who or what it was, but that would have meant slowing to turn their heads, and they were both too frightened and too intent on getting away. Or perhaps they realized instinctively that the sight of whatever it was might so add to their terror as to rob them of all further use of their limbs altogether.

Marjorie was the better runner of the two. She was taller and longer-waisted. Twice she caught herself pulling slowly away from the other girl, without meaning to; first by a five-yard lead, then by ten, then by more. Twice she stopped, waited for the gap to close, tried to pull her along with her by the hand. Sally evaded the offered link, perhaps afraid it would hamper both of them alike. "I'm all right," she heaved valorously. "Just keep going—!"

They were both staggering now from exhaustion, wavering, ready to fall. And the road never seemed to end, help never seemed to come, the horror behind them never seemed to tire.

She was aware of Sally beginning to drop behind again. Her shadow, which had been bobbing over Marjorie's own shoulder until now, in the moonlit gaps, fell short somewhere behind her, she couldn't see it anymore. The sound of her harried breathing was no longer as distinct behind her either. But she couldn't go on herself any more, Marjorie. There was a knife in her side, and she found herself finally spent. "I can't keep up," she coughed. "I've got to fall down here. You go on—"

She swung around to let her friend go by, stood there swaying and weaving dizzily about in the road, like a drunk, from the long run.

The road was empty behind her, in moonlight and shadow, back as far as the eye could reach. Sally wasn't on it anymore. There was only silence, on it and in the thickets that bordered it. Silence and moonlight and shadow.

No, not quite empty either. At the roadside, peering out between the bushes, lay a wisp of something on the ground, back twenty or thirty yards from her. The edge of a dress. A corner of the bottom of a garment, inert on the ground,

Even as she looked, it was slowly withdrawn, this overlooked flounce, slowly dragged in from sight, in a way that showed its wearer's volition was no longer involved. A final whisk, and it had vanished.

Not a sound, not a cry, not a whisper.

She had never fainted before. Her senses were probably overcharged from the run, bringing on vertigo. She knew she wanted to get back there, to help her friend. Instead, somehow, she found herself flat on the ground, without any sensation of having fallen or of striking herself against it. Her eyes seemed to remain open, too. But all she could see was a pattern of spheres or disks of all sizes, big and medium and small, rising slowly before them in straight lines, like the bubbles in champagne.

A quarter of an hour later the coachman, returning belatedly for them with his curbed horse, found her straying dazedly along the roadside, near the place where he had left them. There were flecks of blood on her dress, it was tattered from brambles, her hair was straggling loosely down her shoulders, and she was holding a hand pressed distractedly crosswise to her forehead. She even made to pass him by, as if she didn't recognize the meaning of the carriage when she saw it.

He had to jump down beside her and take her by the arm to stop her. "Señorita, que le pasó?" he cried dismayedly.

"Take me to the police," she whispered, in an oddly quiet manner. "My friend's lying in there, torn to pieces."

Robles said on the telephone: "It would be easier if we had someone down here who speaks English. There is a police interpreter somewhere, but I cannot locate him. We have been giving her restoratives in the meantime and treating her for shock—"

Manning was at the comandancia within ten minutes.

The girl was sitting there in Robles' office. She was obviously not normal yet, he could tell that at sight. Yet she was not weeping or even noticeably nervous any longer. She seemed, continually, to be lost in thought. A strange icy calm seemed to have descended on her. She had a policeman's uniform coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape, to hide the blood spats and rents on the upper part of her dress. Her unfastened hair, without being recombed, had been pushed back behind her shoulders. It made her seem about sixteen. There was no other woman with her, the municipal police department not yet having any policewomen attached to its staff.

His first thought was anyone's first thought at sight of Marjorie King: what a beautiful person she was. But then he didn't think any further of it after that once—for the present. He hadn't gone there, naturally, to admire feminine beauty.

They weren't introduced. He just asked her a tactful question in English, and that elicited the story. Then he repeated it in his fluent, if somewhat raffish and ungrammatical, Spanish for Robles, and it was taken down stenographically. Even the repetition of it to him, he noticed, seemed unable to alter the numbness of mind that gripped her. It was as though she were speaking by rote, without the words having any meaning to her. It reminded him of cases of shell shock he had heard of, where the effects were delayed from twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

Robles and his camarilla of specialists were now ready to repair to the scene, which had naturally been already under police supervision long ahead of this, awaiting his arrival.

"It will not be necessary—" he started to assure the girl through Manning, but to everyone's surprise she showed a wish to go with them.

"It can't do anything more to me than it has already," she said, looking up at Manning.

He knew that she was addressing him and the rest of them without really seeing their faces, without differentiating among them as individuals at all.

"I don't want to go back to that room and be alone there. Not just yet anyway. I can sit in the car, without getting out."

In the end, because as she had pointed out she was no worse off in one place than in another, they allowed her to accompany them back. She sat in the rear, between Manning and Robles. The man that she had displaced rode outside, clinging to the top of the door frame.

The drive out to the Bosque was a grim and depressing one. They all felt heavy and sick and frustrated, faces broodingly downcast. Robles didn't even have a stomach for doing very much crowing to Manning about the error in the latter's whole thesis that this seemed to confirm once and for all, justified as he would have been in doing so.

"So I was right, you see," was all he said, in a curiously listless undertone across Marjorie's profile. "We've been holding Cardozo, and it's happened again right while he's in custody. I'll have to order his release at once."

"I made no direct accusation against him, if you remember," the American contented himself with remarking. "But the fact that it's not Cardozo doesn't necessarily mean that it's not am—"

He refrained from finishing it. This was no time to wrangle over points of view, in the presence of this girl's livid grief.

"Are you sure you're all right?" he asked her solicitously, as they swung around the glorieta of the Puerta Mayor in a half circle, and then in.

"I wasn't hurt at all myself," she answered simply. "These stains are from twigs and leaves that smirched me when I went in there—where she was."

Robles had caught the sense of the remark by following the gesture of her hands. "You went in there, immediately afterwards?" he gasped in amazement. "But didn't you realize it could very well have attacked you, too? It must have been still lurking nearby."

She looked at the two of them as though she didn't understand, when Manning had repeated it for her. "But she was my friend," she said. "I forgot about being frightened. You don't go off and leave your friend—even when it's too late."

"Es admirable" Robles commented softly, in an aside.

"Ya lo creo," the American nodded vigorously.

"You saw her?" They exchanged a look of consternation, knowing what it had been like three times before now.

"Enough to know that—it was over," she whispered. "It was dark, and I didn't have to see too much. It hadn't dragged her very far, just off the road into some ferns. I—I could see her foot sticking out through them."

Robles' own troubles came uppermost in his mind again. He bunched a fist against his forehead in despair. "I may as well hand in my resignation tomorrow," he muttered to Manning. "We were all warned, you heard what he said—"

"You've got something more to go by than you've had the times before, at least," Manning tried to encourage him. "For the first time you have a surviving witness to one of these attacks. Miss King may be able to help you in some unforeseen way."

“It isn’t that we need to be told anything about it!” Robles insisted heatedly. “What is there that we need to be told about it, anyway? This isn’t a human murder case that depends on such things as identification, witnesses, alibis, fingerprints. It’s that we haven’t been able to catch the thing so far, that’s all!”

“Stubborn jackass!” rasped Manning short-temperedly, turning his head away.

“Blind fool!” snapped the police inspector.

Somebody came out into the road ahead and flagged them with a pocket light to show that this was the place. The car drew up at the roadside and the men all got out. The girl remained in it, sitting in the middle of the spacious back seat, looking very alone there. She sat staring dry-eyed at nothing, Manning noticed, giving her a last glance as he followed the others down the road and into the thickets.

A tiny constellation of pocket torches, only a short distance in, marked where the advance guard were awaiting their arrival around the inscrutable ferns that formed the bier.

They went over one by one and had their look. It was the same thing over; an attack of ravening ferocity that hadn’t stopped with mere death, that had continued, insatiable, long past it.

“This thing must be suffering with the jungle equivalent of rabies,” one of the men shuddered. “To shoot it down is not enough, it should be cauterized over a slow fire.”

“It should be caught first,” Robles seethed.

He and Manning emerged and went back to the car. “Better get the girl out of here before they bring the stronger lights," the American suggested. “She has been through enough already without that.”

“Where are you stopping, Miss King?”

“Tell him the Inglaterra Hotel.”

“Hold yourself at our disposal for the next few days, that is all. You may go now.”

The departmental car turned and drove back with her. The two men retreated into the thickets again.

One of Robles' subordinates shouted out suddenly, "I have found a print! And what a one!" And as they all came converging upon him with a rush, Manning included, he added knowingly: "Maybe this will shut up your American friend, eh mi comandante?" He was holding his torch trained steadily downward on it. It was in a soft green bed of moss, not far from the body; the nearly perfect imprint of a gigantic cat's paw—somewhat like a three-leaf clover.

Robles turned on Manning almost savagely, as though taking out his frustration on him. "Now tell me that wasn't made by a jaguar, I defy you to!"

"It was made by a jaguar," acquiesced Manning glumly. But then a moment later he continued: "It is too late in the game to ask me to change my viewpoint. I have seen too much that supports it. Now this, for example: these two girls running along one behind the other, the second one nearly at the first one's heels. You heard what she said back at your office. She didn't hear a sound. She didn't even know the girl was missing until she had turned her head. Well? I don't care how swiftly it sprang on her, downed her right behind her friend's back, she would have had time to give her death cry at least, to gasp, to gurgle. The sound of the fall alone would have been heard by the foremost girl. Why wasn't it? Because there was no fall. She was lifted, not felled. And there is only one way she could have been seized quickly enough to prevent both those things: the fall of her body and the instinctive cry of extinction—and that is by prehensile human hands closing around her windpipe, cutting off sound, hoisting her off her feet into the underbrush."

Robles advanced toward him almost with personal menace. "Do you realize that one blow from those terrible paws could crush her skull like an egg, kill her instantly?"

"Not instantly enough to keep a dying gasp, at least, from getting out. Sound is formed in the throat, not the head. It can only be cut off by constriction at the windpipe itself. And then what about the muffling of the fall? One goes down under a blow. She was transported erect, I tell you. She wasn't felled by the leap of an animal, she was snatched bodily off her feet in mid-career—by something upright itself!"

"Do you hear him? He's still looking for a man in this." Robles motioned offensively toward him with a jerk of his thumb. Then he waved him off. "Don't waste my time. I respected you until now, but you get worse as you go along. You're making me lose all regard for your intelligence. We found hairs of the jaguar's pelt on Teresa Delgado. We found the broken tip of its claw imbedded in Conchita Contreras' throat. We have found prints similar to this one on the ground about all of them. The laboratory has even found traces of blood-poison germs in their lacerations, such as these carnivorous animals are known to carry about imbedded in their claws. Do we have to sit the thing upright in your lap to get you to agree to its existence!"

"Man alive!" the American burst out exasperatedly. "There are signs all around you, big as life, and you won't take the trouble to see them, you're so dazzled by that Crusoe-like footprint of yours! I don't even carry a badge, but I can see them; why can't you? For instance, look at that broken sprig there, bent down at right angles. That says what to you, gente?"

Robles curled his lip disdainfully at the naïveté of such a question. "It was swept aside and dislocated by the passage of the jaguar."

"Ah. And what was the jaguar doing, walking upright on its hind legs?" snarled Manning. "One of you stand over there alongside of it. Any one of you, it doesn't matter which. These ferns all around underfoot make the actual ground level hard to establish."

He fairly yelped his satisfaction when the comparison had been effected. "Look at that! It's even better than I thought. There's a depression there under the ferns, a trough in the ground! Your man's a five-and-half-footer and that dangling sprig is at the level of his shoulder. What a two-story jaguar that must be, to have broken it up there at that height!"

If he expected this to hold them, he was sadly mistaken. Robles didn't even pay him the compliment of having to think twice, faltering for an instant before he came back at him. "Y que?" he drawled. "Must it follow the contour of the ground? Is it a worm or snake? It wasn't crawling flat on its belly. Those two girls were in full flight and it was leaping headlong after them. What does any quadruped do in such a case? It vaulted over this hollow in the ground, its arched back swept that sprig aside, broke it."

Manning flung the undersides of his hands toward him. "You can have your jaguar! You're welcome to it." He took a few steps away, stopped long enough to deliver a parting shot. "Just trace its movements for a second. From the Callejón de las Sambras, where it originally disappeared, around to the Pasaje del Diablo, in the working-class quarter. From there, all the way around again to All Saints Cemetery on the southern outskirts of town. From there all the way across the city to the corner of Justicia and San Marco. And from there, back once more to the Bosque, here on the north side. All without being seen once! Here's another thing. All its victims have been women. Not old, not even middle-aged, but all young girls. That's a very precocious jaguar, caballeros. It seems to specialize." He turned his back on them with finality. "But there's no use talking to you. It's just a waste of good breath. I'm going home."

"I'm sure we'll be practically helpless without you," Robles called after him sarcastically.

SIX

black alibi

MANNING AT SIGHT suspected some of the luggage of being hers when he stepped into the Inglaterra from the street. It was in the center of the tiled patio, and a glimpse of a red "MK" on the corner of one of the pieces confirmed his suspicion. There seemed to be, however, an unusual amount of it, and more was being added to it every time the creaking lift came down.

He went over to the desk. "Is that the americana, the one whose friend—?"

"She and everyone else, señor," the clerk said dolefully. "We are being emptied like the—how you say?—epidemic is here. Twenty-three rooms in last two hours—"

Manning was only interested in one of the twenty-three check-outs. "How soon is she leaving, do you know?"

"She take the Santa Emilia from Val, on Tuesday." He shrugged pessimistically. "She cannot be blamed, señor, no?"

"No," Manning agreed, lowering his head, "she cannot be blamed. I guess I'd go, too." He took out a cigarette, looking down at it thoughtfully without using it. Then he looked up again. "I wonder if she'll see me."

"I try, señor. Whose name shall I say?"

She probably wouldn't remember his name, from amidst all that horror the other night. She wouldn't have salvaged it. He gave it anyway.

"Mees Keeng, is Mister Manning here to see ju." The clerk nodded. "The twenty-four, señor, on secon' floor."

Manning took the stairs. The lift was still busy disgorging luggage at every down trip. As the clerk had said, there seemed to be a mass exodus on.

In fact, as he passed the open transom of a door on the second-floor corridor, he overheard an unmistakably American voice, feminine, saying to someone: "I don't care, Harvey Williams, business deal or no business deal. I will not spend another night in this city with that thing prowling around loose! You can sign those papers just as well down on the coast while we're waiting for the ship to sail—"

Yes, the panic was on.

Manning knocked on 24. Her voice said, "Come in."

She was in the middle of finishing packing her smaller pieces, the hand luggage. Three or four of them were ranged around her. She was in a white corduroy wrapper, tiny at the waist, spreading on the floor. She looked as though she hadn't slept since that night, and he glimpsed several small bottles of nerve tablets or sedative ranged on the stand beside her bed.

Pallor and the darkness about her eyes only made her more beautiful. You had to be as young as she, he told himself, to suffer and still turn out looking beautiful. When you got to be a few years older, and suffered, it just made you haggard.

The first thought that crossed his mind, before he'd even opened his mouth to her, was: "What made me come here? I had no right to. I should have stayed away and let her alone."

"You don't remember me," he said tactfully. "I'm the fellow—well, I was with them the other night."

"Oh," she said. Even the recollection still made her wince. "I thought it was somebody from the Express, about my reservation and tickets. No," she admitted, "I don't remember you."

"I really had no right to intrude like this," he murmured tactfully.

"No, it's all right. I'm all alone here and—it's nice to have someone to talk to in your own language." She was not only sincere, she was almost pathetically grateful. "I was in bed all day yesterday. I only got up today because I had to—to complete the necessary arrangements for poor Sally." Her voice shook a little when she pronounced the name. "Sit down, Mr Manning." She removed a small fitted toilet case from the seat of a chair.

"Won't I be in your way?"

"Most of my heavy packing is finished. I'm taking the night train down; that doesn't leave until ten, I understand. There's plenty of time—as long as I make sure I get out of this place." A look of unspeakable revulsion flitted across her face. "As long as I make sure I get out of this place!" Her intensity made her almost wild-eyed.

"I can understand how you feel," he said sympathetically.

"It's been pretty bad," she went on in a more composed voice, sitting down and crossing her knees, but then robbing the attitude of all repose by plucking incessantly at the fabric of her white robe just over her kneecap. "I had all her things to put away. I could see imaginary rips and tatters on every—" She bit her lip, forbore going ahead.

He was acutely uncomfortable, as men always are in the presence of feminine emotion.

"And the trip up isn't going to be easy either. It's the same ship we came down on together and—well you know how it is."

He supposed not, he said almost inaudibly. He felt as though he had six hands and feet.

"She'd looked forward so to this vacation," she went on after a moment's quiet. "The last few weeks, before we left, she kept coming over to my house nearly every other night, to show me some latest addition she'd made to her wardrobe, to plan some new detail. She was even taking Spanish lessons, at the end. And to have it end like this!"

He thought maybe it was better for her to get it all out of her system instead of keeping it pent up, didn't try to change the subject.

"We've lived next door to each other ever since we were a pair of knock-kneed little brats with braces on our teeth. Went to school together, went to dances together. Her poor mother's waiting up there now. And I've got to go back and face her. Bring her back in a box." She did something to her shapely eyebrows with the fingers of one hand.

"Have you cabled?" he asked gently.

"Yes. I had to, of course. I didn't say what it was. I couldn't bring myself to. Not on teletype strips." She halted, went on thoughtfully: "There's something so unspeakable about what it really was."

If you only knew, he concurred unheard.

"I let them think pneumonia. Now when I do get back, that's another thing I'll have to tell them." Her voice trailed off, and in the silence he got up to go.

He really intended going without a word, without broaching what had been on his mind when he came here. Then unexpectedly, as he was already at the door, she gave him the opening he had no longer been seeking. "They haven't caught it yet, have they?" she asked.

"No, they haven't," he answered, turning and looking square at her. "And they won't."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because, Miss King, it's not a jaguar," he told her quietly.

She stared at him intently for a long moment. He could see her already wan face paling still more, before his very eyes, as his meaning sank in with terrible slowness.

"Oh no," she grimaced sickly at last, drawing the back of her hand across her lips, "I couldn't bear that thought. If anything can make it worse than it was already—that does."

"Shall I go ahead, or would you rather I didn't?"

But the question was superfluous, he could see the damage was done already. She just kept staring at him in a frozen, furrowed horror. If he shut up now, he'd leave her with that anyway.

He lowered his voice. "It's a man. No one else in Ciudad Real believes that but me, but I do. I say it now, and I'll keep on saying it—anytime, anyplace, anywhere. It had already happened three times before the other night. I don't know whether you know that or not; they may have tried to keep it from visitors because of the tourist season. But it's common knowledge among us here."

"I remember now, the clerk downstairs tried to warn us that night. But in a veiled way, without coming out openly with what he meant—"

"Do you think you can stand it if I—?"

"Yes, I think I want you to."

By the time he had finished, he had marshaled every argument for her benefit that he had ever presented to Robles at any time, from beginning to end; every detail, every piece of evidence.

"I'm sure I'm right, I've got to be!" he said, slapping his own thigh fiercely. "But I can't get them to listen to me. They're as sure on their side as I am on mine. And they're the police and I'm just—a loose guy."

She took a deep, shuddering breath. She'd stood it well. Even better than he'd expected her to. Perhaps because it had been presented to her objectively, and not introspectively. There was horror in her eyes, but something else as well; a glint of something steely that hadn't been there before. Call it hatred, call it fury. You don't hate irrational animals.

He couldn't tell whether he'd convinced her or not. She didn't answer for a moment or two. Finally she said in a muffled voice, "To think that a human being, a thing calling itself a man—" And that was the answer, there.

He strode over to the open floor-length windows that Sally had stood looking out of only two nights before at this same time. The city sprang to view below, bejeweled with twinkling lights. Silver talcum seemed to blur the long vistas of the main avenues, and the cathedral reared its graceful twin turrets black against the rising apricot moon coming up over the hills.

"Pretty to look at, isn't it?" he said, turning to her. "But out there on one of those lovely streets you see from here, some young girl is going walking tonight. Or is going to stand waiting for her sweetheart in some secluded, romantic spot. Or maybe is only going to stray away from a lively party for a few minutes, out onto a terrace or down into a garden for a breath of air. And you and I know the rest! A horrid thing on the ground will be all that's left of her. And something that thinks like we do will gloat, safe in his hiding place—while the damn-fool police go around looking for a jaguar behind hedges and under rose bushes! If it isn't tonight, it'll be tomorrow night, or the night after. But it'll happen again. Again and again and again!"

"And—?" she breathed fearfully. He could see she was steeling herself to ask it. "Why do you come here telling me this? I've already lost my own friend that way. I'm leaving here. Why do you tell me what'll happen to the next girl? What is it you want me to do?"

He gave it to her curtly. "I want you to be that next girl. Be the bait for him, it, whatever you want to call him."

Her eyes dilated. She drew back a step. "I think you're out of your mind. Do you know what you're saying? I can't get out of this hateful place quick enough, as it is! I can't wait to see the last of it! I can't sleep nights. My baggage has gone down to the ship already. There won't be another for the next thirty days. And you're asking me to stay on here alone, by myself, after losing my lifelong friend! You, a stranger, have the nerve to walk into my hotel room and suggest, not only that, but that I go out deliberately looking for this—this abomination, seeking him, trying to attract him. All to give you the satisfaction of proving some theory of yours to be right!" Her voice rose. "Will you please leave? Will you kindly get out of here?"

"I'm going, Miss King," he said acquiescently, without taking offense.

"Please do," she urged coldly. "I should think you would have had the consideration to leave me alone. To go to someone else, at least. But to come to me, of all people—" Her closing of the door behind him cut the rest of it off.

It was still going on behind that other transom, too, as he repassed it on his way out. "Well, then you'll just stay on here alone, Harvey Williams, I'm warning you now! I'm going to be on that train at ten o'clock tonight and nothing's going to stop me—!"

He didn't blame her, whoever she was. He blamed Marjorie King even less. The one he blamed was himself, for approaching her with such a suggestion in the first place; he should have had sense enough to realize the state of mind she was bound to be in, after such an ordeal.

He strode out through the tiled lobby. The luggage pile in the center of it hadn't diminished any, had augmented if anything. The clerk was nodding his head busily, with one of the spindly, nickel-trimmed Ericsson handsets held to the side of his face. Manning obliviously heard him snap his fingers in mid-conversation, but he had already gone past, thought it was meant for one of the bellhops.

He pushed out through the revolving door, stood for a minute under the glass entrance canopy, adjusting his hat. A dark-skinned bellboy hopped out after him, touched his arm. "Señor, the directión—"

Manning went inside to the desk again. The clerk said, "Mees Keeng, she call down just as you go by. She ask for to have you go up again a minute if you don't mind."

No, Manning's sudden hopeful grin answered for him, he didn't mind. He didn't mind at all. He took the stairs again, but this time by fives, a full leg-spread. The argument behind the ubiquitous open transom seemed finally to have been settled too. "Give me your pajamas, Harvey," the same feminine voice as before was cooing, "there's room enough left in my valise for them."

Marjorie King had opened the door for him before he quite reached it, then turned back into the room again. She began on an oddly aimless note when he stepped over the threshold. "A funny thing happened just now, after you'd left. I thought I'd packed everything of hers away, but I happened to go to the closet and I came across this." She was holding a small woolen vestee or half sweater, with exaggerated puff sleeves, aloft in her hand. "She was never without it. She knitted it herself, I used to watch her doing it. Every morning going down in the bus. The other night, that night, before we left, the last thing she said was, "Think I'll need this?'"

She wasn't being weepy about it anymore. There was a flinty decisiveness lurking underneath the quiet poignancy with which she spoke. "You see, Mr Manning, she was the dearest friend I had in the world. I don't think I'll ever find anyone to quite take her place. What I'm trying to say to you is, if a man did that, and you think by staying I can be of some help in—in settling accounts for her, well, I—I'm ready to be that next girl."

"I don't want you going into this blindly," he warned her. "I know it's asking a lot, and I know Robles would put a stop to it fast if he ever caught my trying such a thing. All you've got to do is say no, and I won't blame you." He waited, watching her.

"I've already given you my answer," she said with quiet determination. "If it's a man, I'm staying, I want to. If it's a jaguar, a force of nature, something that doesn't know what it's doing, that can't be called to account, then that's a different matter entirely."

"If it were a jaguar, you wouldn't need to stay, it would have been caught by now, probably within twenty-four hours after it bolted into the Callejón."

"All right, we begin." She moved briskly to the transom, shut it tight. She went over to the phone, said, "Send my baggage back upstairs, I'm staying." And then in answer to something that was asked, she snapped the one word, "Indefinitely," and hung up. On her way back to him again, she caught up her unbound hair and fastened it up the rear curve of her head, somewhat like a ship clearing its decks for action. It made her look a little more sophisticated, none the less beautiful. "Now!" she said. She sat down opposite him, head tilted attentively. The period of futile mourning was past, it was easy to see that. "Help yourself to those," she said parenthetically, "if they help you to think better," and motioned toward a pack of American cigarettes.

There was a moment or two of silence. She was the first one to speak. "To be the bait, he must be drawn to me next. Out of every girl and woman in this city. How are we going to manage that? How can I hope to succeed in attracting his attention?"

"You can't if we just leave it to chance. The law of averages would be too strongly against it. You could walk the streets alone at night, every night for the next ten years, and he might strike all around you, but never come near you again. It must be a setup. Now here's what my idea is. If he reads the papers at all, he's sure to read the rehashes of his own monstrosities, if nothing else. He must have seen there were two of you that night, he must have followed you from the time you both left the restaurant. I'm wondering if there isn't some way I can plant—but very subtly, so that he doesn't scent a trap—in the newspapers, along with the accounts of your previous experience, the idea that you would be foolhardy enough, scatterbrained enough, to go back again to some such place, unaccompanied, even after what happened the last time. And along with an even defter hint that you got a look at him, would be able to identify him. In that way, there'll be two powerful impulses pulling him toward you: his maniacal urge itself, whatever that is, and also his sense of self-preservation."

"But isn't it farfetched? Would even a deranged mind swallow such a probability?"

"It won't be easy to swing it. Let's see if we can hammer something out between us. To begin with, you must realize that they believe an American capable of anything down here, to them we're all half wacky in the first place. That'll help some." He tapped on the ends of his spread fingers one by one. "You have a passion for taking walks in the moonlight, you don't intend to let anything interfere with your habits—No, that's no good."

They both shook their heads in unison. "That wouldn't tell him just where to find you, even if he did fall for it," he added.

He glanced aside at the discarded sweater of Sally O'Keefe, suddenly brightened. "Wait a minute, I've got it—that gave me an idea. Something belonging to one or the other of you. Something of sentimental value, that you cannot bear to part with. You dropped it there that night, by the lake. A locket, say, that was given to you by your mother when you were a child. Or a good luck charm. Something that you are determined not to leave the city until you have recovered."

"It's better than the first one, but there are still things against it. Wouldn't I be expected to go back well escorted, even if I did go back to look for it? And why would it have to be at night? Why wouldn't I go during the daylight hours?"

"But he'll be watching for you, and he'll see with his own eyes that you have come back alone, and that you have come back at night. What more proof can he want than that? The thing is, his attention will be drawn to that vicinity a second time, and that's the main thing we want. Once he's lurking around, the rest will follow automatically. He'll see that you're alone, and he'll—" He didn't finish it.

"It just may work," she assented.

"It's flimsy, but it just may work; that's the best we can hope for about the whole thing anyway, there's no guarantee it will. Through my press-agenting I have an in at most of the editorial staffs in town, I can get the item in the papers without much trouble. And without letting them catch on, naturally. Just a personal interview with you here at the hotel, submitted to put a little change in my pockets. If it should come to Robles' attention, I can shunt him off by saying there's not a word of truth in it, I just made it up, you're actually scared stiff and taking the next train out of town.

"It must be very delicately done. It mustn't be overemphasized, that would give it away. Just a couple of words thrown in offhand. Just enough to give his warped brain the idea, without letting him realize where he got it from himself, if possible. After all, this will be a shortcut for him. He'll know ahead of time where to look for another prospective victim, alone and helpless. Before he had to roam around endlessly, waiting for the right combination of circumstances. That wasn't easy to get. I think he'll fall for it. I think his murderous ego must be sufficiently swollen by now for him to disregard minor drawbacks that would have been enough to deter him in the beginning. He must think he can get away with anything by this time. And then there'll be the added little spur that you may have seen him, that he'd better see to it he gets rid of you without further ado, to ensure the continuance of his own immunity."

"What about this police official and his men, aren't they likely to be buzzing around in that park as thick as flies for the next week or so, after what happened the other night? They might frighten him away. Hadn't we better make it some other place?"

He dug his fingers absently through his hair. "I don't know of any other that would serve as well. To shift the locale would do away with your supposed motive for returning, that is, to reclaim something you lost in there the first time. And then its size is an added inducement to him. The others are all pretty small, wouldn't afford enough cover."

"Very well, then, let's make it the Bosque. You probably know best."

"I think we have a better chance there than almost anywhere else, no matter how farfetched it may strike you at first. For one thing, he probably watched the two of you through the trees at the Madrid, singled you out, even before you got back into the carriage that night. If he has an opportunity to do that again, watch you at his leisure over a period of an hour or two beforehand, make sure that you are entirely alone, I think the temptation will be that much stronger. We will have a chance to get in a sort of buildup of his self-confidence, so to speak. That would be lacking if you were just to roam aimlessly around some small park inside the city. In fact, I think it would look suspicious, more than anything else. For another thing, I think the recklessness, the effrontery, the supreme cheek, of returning to the same place a second time will appeal irresistibly to his egomania, give him an added thrill that he won't be able to pass by." He put out his cigarette. "As far as Robles and his bunch of dimwits are concerned, I think there's an easy-enough way of getting rid of them. I'll phone in a false report to one of the genedarmerías of having seen the jaguar, big as life, in an entirely different section of the city. For a few pesos extra I can even get a handful of sidewalk bums here and there to confirm it simultaneously, on other public telephones. That will draw them all away from the Bosque, clear it beautifully for us."

"Yes, but will he know that? He may suspect them of still lurking—"

"He can find out for himself whether or not the Bosque is empty, without any added risk, can't he? Remember, they're looking for a beast in all this, not a biped. God knows how many times he has already brushed shoulders with them undetected, maybe even returned to gaze on his own handiwork from the outskirts of those morbid crowds that have gathered at each place. He can go into the Bosque in perfect safety, see for himself whether there are any stray details of police left around, for they are working openly on this jaguar job, not under cover as they would with human quarry, and when he is convinced that there aren't, concentrate on you unhindered."

A cord at the side of her neck stood out briefly, but she gave no other sign. "That's the way we'll do it," he summed up. She was silent for a moment. Finally she asked, with a flicker of a smile that swept by too soon to be able to take a very firm hold on her features, "What night will we pick for this—date with destruction?"

"Night after tomorrow. That'll give us forty-eight full hours to get everything ready. It's too late for me to make the morning papers with my doctored item anymore, but I can make tomorrow evening's in plenty of time. I'll arm you, of course, and I'll be close enough by to see that no harm happens to you. But I've got to get another man in on it with me. You've got to be fully protected, I don't want to take any chances on that score, and it may turn out to be something more than I can handle successfully alone."

"Whom will you get?"

He pondered the matter a moment. "I can't go to Robles or any of his outfit, they all think alike about it. It's got to be someone I can count on heart and soul. Wait, I think I know—that young fellow, what was his name again the Contreras girl's sweetheart, the one she used to meet in the cemetery. He ought to be all for it, if anyone is! That must have turned him inside out."

He stood up, and she accompanied him to the door. He turned there and looked into her face searchingly. "Now look, before we go any further. There's still time for you to back out if you want to. I don't want to frighten you, but it's going to be a grueling experience, as bad or worse than the first time Worse, in fact, because now you'll know what to look forward to ahead of time. You'll be under a terrific strain, and have to rely completely on your own judgment, for three or four hours at a stretch. We'll be watching every moment, from as nearby as we dare, but we can't exactly dog your footsteps or reveal ourselves to you once you're in there, if we hope to succeed; you realize that of course. So here's your last chance to say no, if you want to."

She looked up into his face unwaveringly. Her mouth was just a little taut, that was all. "I'm in it with you, I thought I made that plain from the beginning."

"Swell!" he answered warmly. "Shall we shake on it?" They gripped hands briefly. "I'll make all the arrangements. You get all the sleep you can for the next two nights," he advised her, opening the door. "The night after tomorrow is going to be a tough one on all of us. And try to keep from thinking of it ahead of time, if you can, Miss King."

"Call me Marjorie," she suggested as she started to close the door after him. "You mayn't have the chance for very long."

He got the address from the records of the inquest held over Conchita Contreras. It was a pleasant little one-story house, whitewashed a pastel blue, on the hilly Calle San Vicente. A serving woman let him into a patio that was a permanent explosion of vivid magenta from the bougainvillea trailing down its center from the tiled roof overhead. A couple of white butterflies were chasing one another endlessly around in the postage-stamp-sized square of open sunlight, and a dark-eyed little girl peeped shyly out at him from one of the room doorways, then drew back again. It looked like the perfect setting for a very happy home. Manning knew it wasn't, even before he had been shown into the room where the young fellow his own age lay sprawled indolently on one elbow on a cot.

The young fellow's hair was matted, he needed a shave, his shirt was soiled and open at the collar, and he had the red-rimmed eyes that came out of the cantinas at five in the morning. An unlighted cigarette, looped over in the middle like a piece of macaroni, was dangling between his lips.

He saw Manning's eyes go to the photograph that had fallen to the floor beside the cot. He squinted at him with jerky querulousness. "You see a photograph down there, don't you?" he said truculently. "A lovely face, a tender smile, soft beautiful hair. You're lucky, amigo. I don't! I'd like to swap eyes with you. How much'll you take? I see a horrid, nameless thing, a smear of blood, clawed rags in a huddle on the ground—"

Manning looked down at the hubs of his own shoes. "I know. I was there too."

"At night, sometimes, I hear a faint cry coming to me in the dark from where that photograph stands. 'Raul, Raul, get me out, I'm locked in!' Just as she must have cried unheard that night. I drink aguardiente to kill it. I still hear it anyway. It drives me out to roam the midnight streets—"

Manning put a hand lightly to his shoulder, turned and looked the other way. "Steady, muchacho, steady. That's what I came to you about."

Raul reached down, pulled a half-empty bottle of the stinging native brandy out from under the cot. He kicked the cork out with the thumb of the same hand that gripped the bottle's neck. He gave his mouth a preliminary wipe. "I don't know who you are or what you want, but have a drink. That's the best a man can do when his girl is gone for good. More tears for my poor mother, inside there in the other room."

Manning took the bottle, set it back on the floor again. "No, there is something better still that he can do." He sat down on a rickety straw-bottom chair, dislodging a battered hat that had been dangling from one of its uprights. "Look, I know what the trouble is. You are pent up, you are slowly strangling with your own grief, because it was an act of fate. You cannot fight back at it. I am here to tell you you can fight back at it; it was not an act of fate, it was an act of man." He watched the other's face. "That hurts, doesn't it? Like the antiseptic that cleans a festering wound."

It must have. The other man—he was only a boy, really—writhed there on the cot, from one side to the other, protective hands digging into his own face.

"Who are you to know?" he said through them finally.

"Just a guy like you. A guy who uses his eyes. It went back over the wall into the stone-built city again, instead of staying in the foliage, the open green place of the cemetery. Does a wild thing do that? Would its nature lead it to?"

The other's hands went down. He looked at Manning. His eyes were dangerous things. Not toward the American, toward the mental image the latter had managed to conjure up before him.

Manning went on speaking, in a low, unhurried voice; telling him about the other cases, telling him all there was to be told. "I may be wrong," he concluded. "I'm no mystic, I haven't second sight. But I don't think I am. There is no way of finding out except by putting it to the test."

"How? How are you thinking of going about it?"

Manning told him that, too.

"We need a girl."

The pronoun didn't escape Manning. "I've already got the girl," he said. "A very brave girl. A girl who has more courage than you or I have any right to expect any girl to have."

Raul gripped his upper arm in a vise of iron that belied his slender frame. "When do we start?" he said tersely.

"Right tonight," the American said. "And we keep it up—every night if necessary—until we find out one way or the other."

"Then what are we waiting for?" He sprang up on the cot with a suddenness that nearly buckled it. "Mama!" he bawled inside to the other room. And the childish epithet sounded oddly inappropriate coming in his husky, deep-toned voice. "Black coffee, for the love of God, to get this porquería out of my system! A clean shirt, and a razor, and a basin of hot water. You can stop worrying. Your son is alive again!"

Last paragraphs of an item, in identical language, in El Imparciál, La Prensa, Ultimas Noticias, and all the other evening papers:

. . . One left Miss King with a strange feeling that perhaps she really meant it, it was not just bravado; that she would return some night again soon to the lake in the Bosque, seeking this trinket that she seems to place such store upon. Perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow night, who knows? One can only admire such reckless disregard for ordinary common sense, even if one does not approve of it. The Americans are a strange race.

"We have a saying in our language," she said, as she accompanied the interviewer to the door: "Lightning never strikes in the same place twice." And then, with a smile that the newspaper representative found most baffling, she added: "I am not afraid of any jaguar. I have good eyes. Very good eyes, even in the dark. It has always been said of me that I never forget a face." One left with a puzzled feeling that she had not told all she knew—even to the police.

It was nearing sundown when they arrived at the Inglaterra. She said, "Come in," in answer to Manning's low, confidential knock on the door, and they found her standing in the middle of the room. Her arrested posture indicated they had interrupted her in the act of pacing agitatedly back and forth, waiting for their arrival.

"At last," she greeted them limply. "I've been dressed since four, and I was getting more nervous by the minute. I didn't know whether you'd changed your plans or not, and there was nowhere I could reach you. You said tonight, so I went ahead and fixed up for the Madrid anyway, in order to be ready. Is this all right?" She backed away a step in order to let them take in a white evening gown sewn with crystal beads.

"Good. Just the thing!" Manning said approvingly. "It'll glitter in the dark and make it easier for him to pick you out. Are you frightened?"

"I'm getting over it now by degrees," she admitted. "But you should have seen me a half hour ago. My teeth kept chattering every few minutes."

"Here's something I brought over for you." He took a small-caliber gun out of his pocket, handed it over to her haft first. "Put it in your evening bag. Do you know anything about using them?"

"I can't exactly say that I've been brought up on them, but I'll probably know what to do with it, if I have to, when the time comes."

"Just get rid of this, that's the safety, and tighten your finger, and that's all you have to remember. And, Marjorie, if you should have to, don't just threaten. Use it first, and then threaten; you're up against something that—"

"I know," she said, quickly blinking the thought out of her mind.

"Will it go in?"

"I've got a bigger one here, with drawstrings. It'll go in that. It opens faster than this envelope type, too."

Raul had been standing politely by, listening to their unknown talk.

"Excuse me, my manners," Manning apologized. "Miss King, Raul Belmonte. You two will have to communicate by signs."

They bowed to one another, as though it were some sort of social function and not a death party they were about to start out on.

"Have you seen the papers? It worked!" Manning went on. "Oh, I forgot, you don't read much Spanish. Anyway, they've swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I phoned Robles at his headquarters a little while ago, and he told me there's not a man left in the Bosque. They've all been sent over to the latest danger zone, over by the Hippodrome racetrack. He got six calls from there inside of twenty minutes, all reporting having seen it in broad daylight, under the racetrack stands. Not only that, there's a big shake-up impending, he couldn't dare afford to ignore this sudden flood of notifications. His own sense of duty wouldn't have let him anyway."

"Were those your six calls?"

"I paid for seven, but one guy evidently got cold feet and absconded with the peso gratuity."

"Did you get the other thing in?"

"It's been in since last night. He's read it by now, if he's going to read it at all."

He stopped, ground his hands together a little nervously, like a surgeon about to perform an operation or a dentist about to extract a tooth. "Now, Marjorie—"

"I know; zero hour," she said, with a facial shiver that was only partly a parody.

"You'll have to leave here by yourself. Belmonte and I are clearing out right now, as soon as I run over this with you, so we can get set out there by the lake before dark. We can't start out with you, because there's no way of knowing at just what point freedom from observation stops and surveillance sets in. It may be right downstairs at the door of the hotel. It may be out at the Madrid. It may not be until you reach the lake itself. You leave here about half an hour after dark. Take an open carriage like you did that night. At the Madrid be sure you're given an outside table, at the very edge of the pavilion, so he can ogle his fill at you. Insist on it. Keep your eyes away from the dark, don't try to look for him, you won't be able to see him anyway. Take all the time you want dining and sitting there. Try to avoid giving an impression of tension or restlessness. Above all, don't let anyone tangle with you while you're there. If he sees anyone sit down with you even for a few minutes, it may frighten him off. This is a psychological buildup as much as a visual one."

"And then?"

"The lake and the swans, like with Sally. That's the target range."

"Won't the coachman's presence be an obstacle?"

"Was it the last time? He did something to frighten the horse away. Give him rope, stray away from the horse and carriage, down below by the lake's edge."

She swallowed, held her own throat. "Manning, I'm not trying to back out, but your mention of that detail makes me wonder. The way those swans and that horse were frightened—they must have scented something rather than heard or saw it. Suppose there really is a jaguar in it—what'll I do? It'll be a little harder to save me from that."

"There must be a jaguar in it somewhere," he told her bluntly. "Too much of Robles' evidence points to that. But my contention is, it's a jaguar and a man. In other words, a jaguar under control, directed by a human intelligence in some way."

"You mean he—takes it with him, sets it loose upon the victims? But how can you do anything in time to help me, in that case? Those things spring like lightning."

"I don't know what it is or what he does. I only know it's not a random beast. That's what we're trying to find out tonight. I'm asking you to have confidence in me, Marjorie. Belmonte and I will both lay down our lives rather than let any harm come to you. As long as there is a human agency involved, I feel confident we can outmatch it. I realize it's a terrible ordeal to ask you to go through. But we've got to have a girl in it—it doesn't attack men—and there isn't anyone else I know of we can ask to help us."

"There isn't anyone else you have to ask," she told him. "I'm not going to lie to you and pretend I'm not scared; I'm scared sick. But it's been understood since two nights ago that I'm going to do this, and that still goes." Her lips were tight and thin. He touched her clenched hand and found it ice-cold. He liked her all the better for that somehow.

"And how long do I stay down by the lake in case nothing happens?"

"Until you've found the missing locket."

"Oh, there really is one there?"

"Yes, I bought one at the five-and-ten and planted it there myself this morning. It's right at the water's edge, under a few loose stones. Smoke a cigarette, for good measure after you've found it, if you want to time yourself. Meander along the lakeshore for a short distance, and don't forget what I told you, make sure you stray out of the coachman's sight while you're about it. If, by the time you've finished your cigarette, nothing has happened, you can be sure he's not around, won't show up anymore tonight. Simply get back into the carriage and return here to the hotel. We'll follow you back in a few minutes' time ourselves."

"The sun's getting low," Belmonte warned in Spanish, glancing toward the window. "It's hit the cross on the cathedral. We'd better get started ourselves if we want to get there while it's still light enough for us to pick our own hiding places."

He bent gallantly over Marjorie's hand, murmuring, "Homage to a very courageous lady."

Manning took it in turn, shook it encouragingly in American fashion. "Here goes. Now keep cool, and put your faith in us. I looked that gun over for you myself, it's in hair-trigger readiness. Remember what I told you: just flick off the safety and tighten your finger. And if it's a case of real emergency, don't take time to draw it out, fire it through your bag and all."

Raul, unemotional for a South American, perhaps because he was so tense, stood waiting for him in the corridor outside. "Come on, Manning, we'll never get there," he urged in a matter-of-fact voice, as though they were going to the corner for a drink.

She had reseated herself at the glass, was touching a glass perfume rod behind each ear, as he closed the door after him. "See you back here later tonight—I hope," was the last thing she said.

"See you back here later tonight—I know," he answered confidently.

The last glimpse he had of her face it was white as marble, even in the pink sunset glow, with the dread anticipation of what lay ahead of her. She was staring tautly at her own reflection, as at a death's head.

The lake was deepening in the twilight, from ultramarine to indigo to licorice black, as though ink were being poured into it little by little at some unseen source. The Bosque was sinking into darkness all around it as silent and as lifeless as though it were an actual wilderness instead of a great natural park on the outskirts of a big city. All the little harmless things that sounded in it in the daylight hours, the birds and insects, were stilled now. A breathless hush hung over everything, awaiting the arrival of the greatest killer of them all: night; remorselessly tracking down day and slaughtering it, every twenty-four hours, over and over again. The eternal murder, unpunished, unprevented.

Manning squatted low on his haunches at the water's edge, invisible from the higher ground above, tossing small pebbles in while he waited for Belmonte to rejoin him. They had separated to scout the perimeter of the lake, and he was the first one back at their point of departure. A little rounded figure there in the twilight, unimpressive; an ex-beachcomber, a discharged press agent, a do-nothing from the downtown bars, come out of the city to this place to battle the forces of death. No figure of a hero, no figure of a hero at all. Anymore than the man who first submitted to the bite of a yellow-fever mosquito.

The swans hung motionless on the water, like dark floating clouds, heads tucked within their wings in sleep, disdainful of his pebble ripples after their first investigation had showed them it wasn't crumbs he was pitching in.

Belmonte returned noiselessly along the water's edge, bent forward so that his form wouldn't show too much from above. He dropped down beside Manning in a similar squat.

"Find one for yourself?" the latter breathed.

"See those reeds there? I've chosen them. They seem to be growing out of the water, but there's actually a flat stone in the middle of them I can squat on. I'll be hidden on all four sides, even the lake side. How about you?"

"I've found a low forked tree, a peach. The trunk splits up into four elbow branches. It's almost cup-shaped in the middle. All I need to do is pull down a few of the outer leaves around me. Made to order."

"Can you get down in a hurry?"

"At a single bound. It's low, it grows out crooked, slanting from the slope toward the lake. See anyone just now?"

"Not a living soul. I went halfway around to the other side."

"No one around my way, either," Manning answered guardedly. "I think we better get in now, without waiting any longer, while we have this in-between darkness before the moon comes."

"Do you still think it's a good idea to separate?" Belmonte whispered. "Once we do, we won't be able to communicate with each other again."

"It's the only sensible way. We can protect her that much more effectively if there's one of us on each side of her. Here—midway between us—is where she will come down to the water's edge. She is bound to. It is the only place where the lake comes within easy reach of the roadway above. The road slowly curves off again from here on. And finally, this is the only strip of the shore that is smooth and grassy and easily accessible. It is where she and the other girl came the last time. He knows that, and it is where he will expect her to come again, if he believes she will come back looking for something she lost. We have her protected on three sides, this way. You up that way, I down this way, and the lake itself all along the third side. The waiting carriage up above seals up the fourth way. To get to her at all, he has to come up from behind one of us and go past. Probably from behind me, because the Madrid's over my way. The thing to do is not jump him at sight; to let him get in between the two of us, and then we'll have him coming and going.

"So it's as important for us to be hidden from the back as from the front, where she is. Otherwise he'll be frightened off before he comes within reach, and we're liable to lose him. Now don't leave anything on you or around you that will show. Remember, there's going to be a moon in a little while, and one little glint in the wrong place and at the wrong time will give us away. Fasten your coat lapels up under your chin, to black out the white of your shirtfront. Don't leave anything shiny exposed anywhere on you—a collar pin or cuff links or even the clip of a metal pencil fastened to the outside of your breast pocket. Careful of any loose coins jangling in your clothes, too, at the wrong moment."

They each took out a large, square pocket handkerchief and, without opening its folded layers, deposited their accumulated small change on top of it, twisting the ends over and repocketing it that way, in a sort of soundproof cornucopia.

"No smoking," Manning warned. "Can you control yourself?"

"Of course; this isn't a date with a girl. I could wait forever, I could go without food or drink, if I thought it would bring this—"

"Got your gun handy?"

Belmonte parted his coat with a single move and it peered out in his hand.

"Fast enough," commented Manning. He held his wrist nearly to his eye, peering at his watch. "Five to eight. It's going to be a long pull. She's only just about leaving the hotel now. We'll have to give it a good two hours, maybe even three." He unstrapped it and dipped it into his pocket. "The moon may catch the crystal."

Belmonte took his own off, after first setting it back a minute. "I have four to, but I may as well go by yours. One watch, one purpose, one hope between the two of us."

"Well, we'd better break."

"All right, so long," Belmonte said curtly, gripping his hand.

"Take it easy," the American breathed.

They turned their backs on one another, sidled in opposite directions, blended at a yard or two into the impenetrable gloom.

The reeds hissed a little, over one way, stilled again. The leafy branches of a tree rustled a little, over the other way, as Manning hoisted himself up among them, shifted about for a moment or two, settling his weight. Then they too became silent, motionless.

There wasn't a sound about the shadowy lake. The Bosque all around it was as silent and as lifeless as though it were an actual wilderness, instead of a great natural park on the outskirts of a big city. A breathless hush hung over everything, awaiting the arrival of the greatest killer of them all—

It was the going-out hour, when Ciudad Real answered the call of nightlife heart and soul. She stepped out of the hotel entrance, looking so glittering, so frivolous, in her crystal-beaded white gown, a silver poppy in her hair, a looped silver evening pouch dangling from her wrist, pulled a little out of shape by something heavy resting in it—perhaps opera glasses—that it was obvious there could be nothing more serious on her mind than dancing and champagne. People passing on the sidewalk turned and smiled a little in sympathy as they saw her emerge, she looked so festive and so carefree. They may have even envied her, some of them.

Lights were flashing everywhere, and she was one with them, and with the mood they conjured up. A fiery monkey high against the night sky kept disappearing and returning again, once with its eyes covered, the next time with its ears, the next with its mouth, proclaiming, "Anis del Mono." A rooster with green tail feathers, more steady, urged without interruption: "Cinzano Vermouth." The sidewalks were like noon under this flashing, blinding, man-made constellation. Every table at every café was taken, and taxis swarmed through the streets with a furious twittering of their horns.

The going-out hour; now let's relax, now let's have fun, now let's forget there's such a thing as work and care.

She stood there, the tiny silver wedges of her slippers poised at the brink of the curb, and stopped the hotel doorman as he was raising the looped whistle about his neck. "No, not a taxi. Carriage with a horse. Caballo, understand?"

He ran down to the next corner to get her one personally, came back poised on the step of it, one leg swinging free.

She got in. "To the Madrid."

The coachman and the doorman exchanged a glance. Indistinct Spanish phrases passed between them.

"You tell her."

"No, you tell her."

The doorman leaned solicitously into the carriage. "Excuse me, is the señorita going there alone? No disrespect intended, but—" He smiled placatingly, as if not knowing how to go ahead. "It's—it's that it's a little far out for these nights."

She knew what he meant by "these nights." He was evidently unaware that she was the identical girl who had been out there with a companion only a few nights ago, and whom it had last happened to.

She put a small coin into his hand, to show that she had taken no offense. "To the Madrid," she repeated firmly.

The grizzled coachman touched his cap. "Sí, señorita."

"And drive slowly, I want to enjoy the air before I dine." She said it over in her mind. Dine? Die? They sounded so much alike; in English, anyway.

She saw them look at one another again and shrug helplessly, as if to say, "What can you do with these Americans?"

The hotel starter closed the carriage door for her. He glanced curiously at her face, as though it struck him she had on too much powder. It probably did look chalky white, she realized, but not from powder.

She sank back on the upholstered seat; the hotel and the safety it offered glided slowly backwards, like a lighthouse on a receding shore, and the ride began.

It came to her that, somewhere else in the city, at about this same time, perhaps at this very minute, somebody else might be starting out too. Somebody whose path, evil, horror-laden, would slowly, surely draw nearer to hers through the hours, until at last the two would cross—and after that there would only be one, hers would have ended.

Strange rendezvous! Yes, somewhere, in some noisome alley, from some hidden unguessed lair, a cloaked form, faceless to the night, was emerging, to keep an appointment with her: lady in a white and crystal dress, silver-shod, raven-haired, wafting scented traces of a perfume whose trade name was, ominously enough, "Je Serai Seule à Minuit," on the soft evening air about her, as her carriage took her from her lighted hotel. And no one's heart, going to any other rendezvous, had ever beat any harder than hers was now, as she lolled there in the back of the carriage, so gracefully at ease. Silver-tipped feet crossed before her on the floor, the curve of one arm negligently resting on the curve of the seat around her; the hand of the other—down out of sight—clenched into a tormented little lump close at her side that no instrument could have pried open, it had frozen so solid.

Slowly the peaceful, resonant clop-clop of the horse drew her toward the Puerta Mayor, the main outlet into the Bosque. And, as they went along, it was like leaving the stratified reflections of a vast central bonfire, with the street shine dimming progressively the farther away they got. First the holocaust of the downtown nightlife district, bleaching everything with noonday brilliance, then the soberer luster of the intermediate sectors, with just their shops and occasional small electrified signs, finally the gloomy austerity of the outlying residential districts, streets lighted solely with the cool white of their own lampposts and the occasional yellow square of a window.

And then the Puerta Mayor, and darkness closed in, complete, triumphant, on both sides. Everywhere but overhead, where a long line of lonely center lights marked the double-laned main driveway that led back into the depths of the Bosque, toward the Madrid.

The long talcumed vistas of the city's periphery avenues fell behind them, finally blotted out. The air became damper, cooler with a penetrating quality. An odor of ferns and foliage and dank wood crept up, worsting the gossamer perfume that still clung about her.

The main driveway was anything but empty, however. A constant procession of cars, some closed and lighted, others topless and open, went past her, going the other way. It was only being used in one direction tonight. "These nights," as the hotel doorman had expressed it. Everyone was coming out, leaving. In to town—and safety. No one was going the opposite way. No one but she. Her coachman had his lane all to himself.

They had very little to fear, these others, seated in their lighted limousines in twos and threes and fours. But their machines didn't loiter along the way, just the same. They all went by fast, maintaining a general level of accelerated speed that was not lost on her. As though, now that they had proved their courage to themselves and all their friends by dining early at the Madrid, they couldn't wait until they got out of here, to continue their revels somewhere else with greater peace of mind. Even though it was general knowledge by now that it was no longer in here, had last been seen all the way across town by the Hippodrome race track.

So she went slowly by, counter to the stream, in lonely grandeur. A sheet of coruscating white flame licked over her form each time the carriage passed beneath an overhanging arc light, then dwindled again until the next one came along.

At last, through the darkness ahead, the lanterns of the Madrid began to show, like a bed of luminous, multicolored confetti lying scattered about under the trees. The ghostly echoes of accordion and violin notes seemed to drop down on them from those same trees like a fine, impalpable rain, as he turned in the short looped spur that led in toward the entrance and then out and around again.

An attendant helped her down and she stepped through the low box hedge that bordered the outside dining place.

"You'll wait, of course," she ordered the coachman. There was a depleted line of cars still standing there along one side of the drive-in.

"But not too late, señorita," he pleaded cravenly, "it's not advisable these days."

"You'll wait until I'm ready," she said severely. "See that he does," she instructed the attendant.

A headwaiter had come forward to greet her. They were all inside the main building, an octagonal pavilion raised several steps above ground level. There were still people here, but in vastly diminished numbers. Last-standers, either trying to show how daring they were, or having had too much wine and too good a time to care very much any longer one way or the other. Even so, the few there were banded together in large table groups, as if for mutual protection. So much the better, she thought; he can pick me out more easily this way than if the place were crowded. One or two couples were moving about on the black glass dance floor in the slow languor of the tango, each with its complementary pair reflected upside down, so that there seemed to be twice as many as there were.

"Is the señorita expecting anyone?"

She concealed the shiver this succeeded in eliciting. The señorita was, but not anyone to look forward to.

"No, dinner for one." Then, as he started to precede her toward the entrance steps of the building, "I want a table outside here. All the way over, by the hedge."

He gave her a look. "Are you sure you want to sit that far out?"

"I'm sure," she cut him short. "I don't like crowds."

There was no one out here at all, in all this sea of tables, as she took her seat. The hedge that ran beside her was low; even seated she was visible almost from the waist up, for the tables were set on a platform in order to assure an evenness that the natural ground lacked. The trees, and the impenetrable darkness below them, looked uncomfortably close, close enough for someone to reach out through them and snatch her bodily away, in an unguarded moment when everyone's back was turned. Suppose—suppose something happened right here, where he and Belmonte weren't expecting it to, couldn't help her?

She turned her eyes away, remembering what Manning had warned her: not to show strain or awareness; studied the bill of fare. A bill of fare that vibrated slightly in her hand, so that the printed words on it all showed double, as if seen through the beveled edge of a thick slab of glass.

"You recommend?" she said in a smothered voice.

"The purée of mango."

"Very well, the purée of mango." How could she get anything down her throat, the way it felt now? To swallow, something inside the throat had to open, didn't it?

"And at the end, an ice and coffee."

She had been in many restaurants. She had never yet been anything but slightly relieved to have the ordering done with and the headwaiter take himself off, viewing it as a minor annoyance at best. Now she found herself regretting having reached the end of it so soon, reluctant to see him go in and leave her there alone. She even deliberately held him there a moment or two longer beside her, repeating a redundant instruction or two.

Her eyes followed him all the way in when he finally left. She felt so alone, so cut off out here. True, there was a chasseur over there by the break in the hedge, to open car doors for arrivals, but he looked awfully far away, and these trees immediately about her were awfully close. She opened the little bag on her lap, pretended to fumble for a handkerchief, and touched the butt of the gun Manning had given her. She felt a little better after that.

Just as she finished her soup, a vermilion lantern directly over her, hers in view of the table she occupied, went out without any warning, and a pall of gray shadow was cast over her in its place. She closed her eyes dismayedly. Was that some kind of omen?

As soon as it had been noticed, two of them came hurrying out with a short stepladder, one of them climbed up on it behind her chair, fitted a new bulb into place, and in a moment it went on again brighter than before, so that was all right.

It was hard to eat. And when not eating, it was even harder still. She kept her eyes away from the direction of the trees by sheer willpower. Sometimes she was sure she could feel other, malign eyes boring steadily into her from the shadows beyond the hedge. Sometimes she was sure it was just her imagination.

Once a small animal, perhaps a squirrel or a chipmunk, scurried along the ground on the outside of the hedge. Luckily her napkin happened to be in her hand at the moment. She got it up to and partly into her mouth before the scream had a chance to come. She dug the nails of her other hand into its palm, nearly piercing the flesh, until she had conquered the spasm. The next time the waiter approached after that, she said a little breathlessly: "Ask them to play a little louder. I can't hear them very well out here."

"Certainly, señorita. Any favorite selection?"

She felt like saying, "Nearer My God to Thee," but it would have been in earnest, not in jest, the way she felt, so she didn't.

"And bring me some champagne," she added. "It's dull here."

If she was being watched—and she was almost certain by now that she was—that would create a desirable impression. Of nonchalance and celebration. What she really wanted it for was to keep from fainting here in her seat.

They brought it and the cork popped and it foamed out in cheery beaded strings. She raised her brimming glass high up over hedge level, so it couldn't fail to be seen. She felt like turning toward the trees and holding it out in an ironical toast—"Here's to you and me"—but it would have been too ghastly.

She touched it to her lips, set it down again. A mouthful or two was enough, to warm the lining of her throat. She didn't want to dull her senses, they were the only armor she had tonight. After a while she surreptitiously emptied it out on the floor, on the inner side of the table, where she couldn't be seen doing it, and conspicuously refilled her glass.

Her request for champagne and louder music must have misled the management into thinking it had been remiss in attentiveness. A tall young fellow with a telltale white carnation in his jacket came down the steps and over to her place of exile. He bowed ingratiatingly. "May I have this tango?"

"Thank you, I'm not dancing."

He wasn't easily discouraged. "Then does the lovely señorita mind if I sit down and keep her company?" He had already drawn out the chair opposite hers.

Manning's warning came back to her: Don't tangle with anyone, you may frighten him off. "No, don't!" she cried, so alarmedly that he drew back a step. "Please! Please don't stand here, please leave this table—"

He was persistent. Business must have been rotten these nights, with everyone staying away. "Just one small dance the señorita refuses?" he coaxed.

She gave in finally, as the quickest and easiest way of getting rid of him. After all, of the two evils, it would look less suspicious—to out there— to be seen dancing with him than to have him stand parleying beside her table for any length of time.

She got up and he led her back inside on his arm like some kind of a living trophy. There were three others of his kind sitting disconsolately around the dance floor, one to a table. Probably they worked on a percentage basis.

She'd never tangoed before. She didn't have to now. He tangoed for both of them. He was good at it, as one should be at one's livelihood. Even the scissors step she found herself doing without realizing it. Over his shoulder she could still see the trees out there. Whichever way she turned, they were waiting, on three sides of her, out beyond the hedge, as if to say: "We'll get you. You're coming. We'll get you."

Even a gigolo, a gigolo to cling to, was better than being alone with the darkness lying in wait all around.

After they'd gone once around the black glass, she said: "What's the name of that they're playing?"

He had to hum the words over to himself first in Spanish, to marshal them for translation.

Adios muchachos, compañeros de mi vida,
Se acabaron para mi todas las jarras—

"I do not speak the English very well. It is of someone whose life is soon to finish. It say, 'Goodbye, boys, my life companions, For me is ending—' "

Even the music. "Please don't go ahead," she said in a sick voice. "Will you excuse me now? I'd like to go back to my table."

"I have displeased the señorita?"

"Not at all. I have a headache. Would you mind telling me how much I owe you?" They were back at the table by now.

He wasn't in the least dismayed. "The señorita is too generous. She did not complete her dance—"

"Take this anyway," she said, to get rid of him, and touched his hand briefly.

Then she was alone again, a motionless, doomed figure sitting passively under a blood-red lantern. She sat on for half an hour after she'd finished her coffee. That sense of being watched kept growing stronger all the time. Her very skin felt it, kept trying to crawl away from it. She had to keep fighting, not to turn her head and look. Once she almost had an impression of something luminous, phosphorescent, glowing out at her through the bushes. She had to throw down a spoon and then stoop for it, the impulse to turn and see was so strong. When she had straightened up in her chair again, she could resist better. By then it was gone anyway, whatever it had been; the corners of her eyes no longer felt it.

It seemed so silly, somehow, expecting to meet violence, perhaps even death itself, face to face within a short while; expecting to have to claw and rake at it with your bare hands, in defense of your life perhaps; and yet to be sitting here now dipping those same fingers into a bowl of tepid water with a gardenia floating around in it. If she lived, she knew, she'd never be able to look at finger bowls again without thinking of this night, living it over again, if only for a moment or two. At some gay dinner party years from now, in the midst of the wine and the chatter, her face would suddenly pale and her laughter freeze as the dark memory came back, and people would wonder why and ask her. If she lived.

The last thing she did before leaving was to crumble up a roll, gather the pieces in a napkin. "For the swans," she smiled at the waiter as she paid her check.

"At this hour?" The terrified, unspoken warning on his face was plain to read.

"I like animals," she said. ("But not jaguars," she added to herself.) She stood up, turned, walked slowly out toward the break in the hedge. The carriage glided up. She put her silver shoe to the step. "Here I go," she thought sickly.

Then she was in, and the lanterns were withdrawing through the trees. One last one, a green one, lingered on longer than all the others, seen through a break in the trees. Then that snuffed out too, and the Madrid was gone into the night.

He started to whip up his horse, anxious to get out of the accursed Bosque as fast as he could.

"Drive slowly," she ordered sharply. "It's too nice a night to rush." Then when they came to the side road, "Turn down this way."

"Ah, no señorita," the old fellow almost whimpered. "Not down there. That is exactly where it happened the last time."

I ought to know if anybody does, she thought dismally. Aloud she said, "Don't you read the papers? It's on the other side of town now. It's not in here anymore!" This in English; then in her capsule Spanish, and with gestures to complete the thought: "No here. Otra parte."

He understood, language not being the barrier between human beings that is commonly supposed. "They may be mistaken," he whined.

"In, in!" she insisted.

He headed his horse around and reluctantly turned in where she had told him to. It was a long leafy tunnel in the moonlight, tree meeting tree above. A greenish black tube, freckled with silver. Infinitely beautiful, infinitely dangerous. The horse's hoofs resounded along its empty length like a knell.

It was lifeless. The public was giving the Bosque a wide berth these nights, all but the one main driveway that led straight out. It stretched on for a while, straight as a ramrod. Then it started making that leisurely turn at last that told the lake was coming near.

The moon wasn't as bright as the other night, was waning now, but the lake still flashed out beside her like a sheet of hammered silver when at last they had reached that place where the road drew nearest to it and it could be seen. That unforgettable place. The screen of trees drew back, like a curtain parting for the last act of a tragedy, and there was just a grassy slope left between her and it.

She could hardly breathe anymore, she was choking with rigidly suppressed yet steadily mounting terror. "Stop here," she managed to articulate.

He either didn't hear her or pretended not to, as an excuse for going on past with the least possible delay. She had to strike him lightly and repeatedly on the back, as if she were knocking on a door. "Para, entiende? I said stop here. Wait for me. I want to feed those birds a minute."

"Ah no, señorita, válgame dios!" he wailed almost in falsetto. "That is the very way in which it happened to that other—"

"Did you hear what I said?" she snapped. "You won't get a centavo that's coming to you if you don't do as you're told!"

The carriage fell motionless. She rose up in it, stepped down to the ground. The stillness was unearthly now that the horse had stopped. It was malign in itself, it was so unnatural. One foot forward, the next forward, the first forward again. The roadway changed to turf, but the ground remained level the first few steps. Then it started downward, in a gentle, grassy decline. It wasn't hard to manage even in high-heeled silver slippers, it wasn't steep enough for that, but it was all she could do to keep walking in a straight line, she felt like reeling unsteadily from side to side. She was almost drunk with terror. "I must keep my head clear; if I don't, I'm a goner," she warned herself.

The carriage was slowly going up over her head, behind her, as the roadway rose. She could never be so frightened again for the rest of her life. She had to keep talking to herself inwardly. "Manning's somewhere around you, you know it, even if you can't see him. Look for the locket first. Then stray out of sight of the coachman. Smoke a cigarette. Shoot through your bag, without pulling it out, if you have to—Is it that bush there, over to the left, coming up toward you? No, that's just a bush."

The carriage had gone up as high as it could now. It was starting to sink from sight behind the top of the rampart.

The gleaming water was coming slowly up toward her. The swans, already detecting that she had something in her hand for them, were starting to course gracefully in to meet her along its moon-burnished surface.

For over three hours now those same swans, floating asleep, had been the only signs of life around Manning, inert as they were. The rest was just a piebald still life of moonlight and shadow. Not a stir came from the reeds where Belmonte crouched concealed, and if he hadn't told him where he was going to be, Manning wouldn't have known anyone was in them.

The circulation had long ago begun to leave his own extremities. He pinched and kneaded them from time to time, in preference to shifting his position to ease them, but it was a losing battle. He could scarcely feel the pinches themselves after a while.

The moon was waning now from the full that had witnessed Sally O'Keefe's death, but it was still large enough to cast an aluminum sheen where it was unobstructed. He looked down along his own curved length carefully, to make sure none of the coinlike disks of it that splattered through the leaves struck him in anyplace that might be revealing from the ground: the white of his hands, the dull sheen of his silk socks, the glossy toecaps of his shoes. The slightest thing like that might have been sufficient to indicate, to a wary antagonist, something that didn't belong up in a tree.

The strain had become almost unendurable. He wondered whether Belmonte was feeling it as much as he. Worse, probably; he had nothing to rest his back against. He didn't bother looking at his watch. That was a fool's stunt, which always made time seem to stretch out longer than it was. When she came, that would be the right time. Until she came, they'd wait—even if it meant staying up here in this tree until he fell out of it from numbness. They weren't in this for fun.

The slow clop-clop of a horse sounded far off in the distance somewhere, and sound had come back into the world. It was like something carried through a hollow tube or bore, it had that sort of blurred resonance to it. It died out again, then came back once more, clearer, nearer, than before. Was that she, now? It must be, who else could it be? A carriage alone on the Bosque at this hour, and coming this way. Nothing else had traversed that road up there since he had taken up his position. Pleasure drives were a thing of the past in the Bosque these nights.

The hoofbeats were clear and ringing now, bell-toned almost, for there was nothing in the vast stillness around to compete with them, and approaching more closely every moment. Manning caught himself taking deeper breaths than he had a minute ago; that was his body instinctively trying to store up oxygen for possible approaching action. On they came, jewel clear, so calm, so unhurried—in the evenness of rhythm that is nature's gift to the horse, clop-clop, cloppetyclop. In other circumstances there would have been something almost soothing in their cadence. At last he could even make out the slight creak of the axles, the whisper of the rubber-tired wheels along the roadbed.

A woman's voice said something. The hoofbeats faltered to a stop. There was a slight protest from the carriage step, weighted down, released again. He could hear her next remark plainly, for she had raised her voice slightly: "You won't get a centavo if you don't do as you're told!"

He couldn't see the vehicle itself, for there was too much overhanging foliage in the way obscuring it, but a moment later the white of her gown came into full view, coruscating in the moonlight, up there on top of the rampart, and she started to walk slowly down the open grassy slope under his very eyes.

If she felt fear—and she must have—she gave no sign. Her bearing was matchless. Her grace, the fluid dignity of her carriage. To him, at any rate, there was nothing strained or rigid in the way she moved. Just the precautionary hesitancy of a woman dressed in her best, picking her way delicately in order not to soil her shoes or gown.

He narrowed his eyes in admiration of her poised self-control. It took a woman to put on a show like that, a man never could have, never in the wide world.

She came abreast of the tree that hid him, passed on down without a glance over at it. She couldn't, of course, know exactly where he was. All she had to rely on was his assurance that he and Belmonte would be watching from somewhere close by.

The swans were gliding in to meet her, each leaving a spreading fan of ripples in its wake. They'd already spotted the little white ball the napkin of crumbs made in her hand.

She reached the water's edge at last. Manning was now roughly midway between her and the carriage. He was watching the terrain around him on all sides, now, more than he was her. Nothing could get at her from in front, across the water, and to reach her from the rear it would have to pass his tree first. Belmonte's position protected her on the right, and his tree, again, did as much for her on the left.

He saw her looking for the locket. With her free hand she had lifted the hem of her skirt a little to avoid wetting it and was picking her way along the water's edge, head attentively bent. The hungry birds, meanwhile, were banked nearly solidly around her on the water side, jostling and nudging one another aside, and the whole body of them moving first up the shore, then down it, in company with her own slow coursing.

Behind her heroically oblivious back, nothing stirred, nothing moved. There wasn't a rustle from the dark feathery masses of bush and underbrush all about. Not the snap of a twig.

She'd found it at last. He saw her dip suddenly, draw something from the outermost inch or two of water that winked in the moonlight as she straightened with it, holding it semi-aloft. She hovered with proprietary delight over it for a moment or two, in clever pantomime. Drying it, turning it this way and that. Then she put it in the bag on her wrist. Now she began her feeding of the swans. Her arm went out toward them, in toward the napkin; held back a moment, then out toward them, in toward the napkin, while she slowly strolled along, a bountiful lady on the banks of the Styx.

Manning's position had changed slightly when she had first come into view. The one alteration was: his forearm was up now, holding his gun motionless at belt-buckle level, butt against his body. His head kept swiveling slowly from side to side, covering every inch of ground within a 180-degree arc.

Suddenly he heard the horse, unseen up there on the driveway and motionless until now, whinny uneasily. Its hoofs shifted about a little within the confines of the traces.

His head was instantly pulled tautly around the other way—toward her. The swans were streaking out away from her like so many black rays across the silvery lake surface. In a moment more she was standing there alone at the water's edge, hand extended uselessly with offered crumbs.

Manning drew the gun up higher, to the level of his bottom rib, froze it there.

She was standing still, facing the receding swans. A shimmering line of brightness coursed down her motionless back. Was she trembling at the imminence of danger, or was it just the moonlight rippling on the beads sewn to her dress? He couldn't tell.

The horse's forelegs struck the ground sharply, as though its full weight were behind the impact, and the carriage joints groaned and strained protestingly. It must have reared and then dropped down again, Manning realized. It neighed rebelliously. He started his own leg downward out of the tree socket, let it dangle to within a foot of the ground in readiness, on the water side, where the trunk hid it.

And still the space between, from up there where the carriage was to down below where she was, remained blankly inscrutable.

She didn't look around, although she must have heard the telltale sounds from the driveway as plainly as he had. She was bending slightly forward above the waist now, pretending to try to coax the recalcitrant swans back within range. They refused to come. Finally, with a studied gesture of impatience, she flung the napkin holding the remainder of the rejected crumbs away from her, as if disappointed at their lack of interest.

She fumbled in the small bag looped to her wrist, he heard the crackle of wax paper, and a match flare glowed before her face as she lit the test cigarette he had told her to. All without turning her head.

It was the height of courage; he had never seen anything like it before. For, for all she knew, something might be creeping up behind her at that very moment. He was in a position to see that nothing was, but she wasn't.

The horse took an abortive two or three rapid steps forward, as if about to break into a headlong run, then was quickly reined in, backed up again, with further creaking protests of the carriage joints and a jiggling of the wheel rims.

A halo of cigarette haze about her head in the moonlight, she was following his instructions to the letter. She began to saunter aimlessly still further along the lake margin, well out of sight of carriage and driver—but fortunately over toward the side on which the reeds lay, although she could not have known that there was a safeguard in their midst. She stopped about halfway to them, well out of sight of the carriage, and stood there as if idly contemplating the lake, arms folded tight across her chest. The red mote of her cigarette made an occasional spiral out from them and up to her mouth and down again. Manning could barely see her anymore at this distance, she was just a white blur in the gloom over there, for she had stepped out of open moonlight into the shadow of some trees. It was up to Belmonte now to guard her, over on the side where he was.

There wasn't a sound, except for an occasional pawing or clump from the horse up above, whose restlessness had become chronic by now but apparently was being kept under strict control by the driver. The animal's whole demeanor showed there was some unseen danger close at hand in the shadows of the Bosque, but it stubbornly remained concealed, failed to materialize. The tableau of palpitant tension protracted itself almost unbearably; the two hidden men and the visible girl, the magnet midway between them, smoking down by the water's edge as if lost in thought.

At last she finished it. Its red dot described an arc and went out in the water. She turned and began to make her way back. Once she stumbled slightly, and he knew it was in sheer terror, but to someone else it might only have seemed as if her toe had caught in a root.

She came out into the open moonlight again and started up the slope. She passed the tree where Manning was, as unseeing as the first time, and went on up the rest of the way, over the lip of the declivity, onto the level where the roadway was, and out of his direct line of vision.

He let his tentatively suspended leg reach down the remaining foot or two to solid ground, and let the other one trail down after it. The blood came rushing back into them in excruciating repossession.

Her voice carried clearly to him as she reached the carriage once more. "All right, now you can take me back." The footrest creaked as she mounted it. The coachman didn't even have to click his tongue or use the whip to start the horse, Manning could tell. At the first slackening of the reins he had been pulling in so tightly until now, the terrified horse instantly broke into a rapid trot that soon became a headlong gallop. So anxious was it to get away from the threatening spot.

Manning sidled noiselessly out from under the tree and stood waiting for his companion-in-hiding to break cover and join him. The reeds failed to part at his whistle. When he had repeated it a second time and still no sign of Belmonte, he made his way over to them himself, a strange sort of foreboding beginning to chill him.

"Raul!" he whispered urgently, picking his way into their midst across the waterlogged stones. The reeds were empty. He could see some of them bent flat, around where his companion had been crouched, but there was no one in them anymore.

He emerged, went back, and started up the slope alone.

The road was empty in the moonlight when he reached it. He had hardly taken a preliminary step or two along it than he became aware of some sort of disturbance, off-side to him. On the side away from the lake, that is. He stood rigid, listening. It came again, a muffled scuffling or threshing sound, as of a large animal caught in a trap or incapacitated in some way and trying to free itself.

He veered toward it, moving warily. It came a third time, unmistakable now: a violent, frantic agitation against leaves or plants, an attempt at extrication. He drew his gun, plunged in off the road toward it, warding off branches and briars as he went.

The thrashing accelerated, as though driven to a frenzy of haste by his very approach.

A moment later he went down flat and his gun crashed deafeningly, set off by the fall itself. Something or somebody lying tied up in his path had tripped him.

He groveled around rearward, wiping a smarting powder smudge off his cheek, found his light, and thumbed it on. It revealed a huddled human form lying face down, hands bound behind it with a knitted necktie evidently taken from its own attire.

Manning turned him over and it was a grizzled man of fifty, with bedraggled walrus mustaches. A mass of rumpled linen had been compressed into his mouth to gag him. Manning pulled it out, and it seemed to keep coming endlessly. It turned pinkish toward the end. He'd been badly bludgeoned about the head; thin but numerous streams of blood were crisscrossed all down his face.

He was only barely conscious, the whites of his eyes rolled expiringly as Manning propped him up. He shook him urgently.

"Who are you? What happened? Who did this to you?"

"I don't know," the dying man said faintly. "Somebody—from behind—down off the box—" He went limp, with a sort of convulsive spasm.

Manning let go of him, jumped to his feet with a hoarse cry of horror that went crackling through the trees. This must be Marjorie's coachman, who had brought her here. And if he had been struck down, left trussed up here like this, it could only mean one thing—!

The very Thing he was out to trap had hold of her at this moment, had driven off with her to finish her at his leisure!

He burst out through the underbrush, sprinted down the road, pocketing his gun as he went. He veered off-side into the small tree-surrounded clearing in which Belmonte had left his car, hoping against hope, almost praying—he found what he'd dreaded to find all along; the place was empty, the car was gone. And no one could have taken it but its owner; Manning himself had seen him pocket the keys when they both got out.

He emerged again, went staggering down the long desolate tube of silver and black that was the road, forced to go on afoot now. The odds were hopeless this way, he could never hope to overtake her in time.

Just before the desolate road turned in to unite with the main driveway once more, something came sidling toward him along its surface. Something that glinted as he approached. He recognized it as he stooped to pick it up. It was the revolver that he himself had handed her at the Inglaterra only a few hours earlier. He put it to his face. Odorless. She'd never had a chance to use it. His chin was puckered into a weazened expression as he went trotting on.

Didn't this road ever end? And while he asked himself that, it did. The main driveway was empty under its lights. No one was leaving the Bosque now anymore; they all had, long ago. He padded on. Ahead a wan glow began to brighten, fan out. The Puerta Mayor, the entrance to the city.

Suddenly lights gushed up like illuminated oil seeping out of the ground, and the periphery of the city lay spread before him. He stopped with sudden hopelessness; partly because of his pounding lungs, mostly because he didn't know where to go any more from here on. He was confronted by six radiating avenues that branched out from the Puerta Mayor like spokes on a half wheel. To follow one through to the end was to slight the other five. She was lost for good now, buried alive somewhere in that wilderness of stones and buildings that stretched before him as far as the eye could reach.

The expression on his face was that of someone trying to retch. The third largest city of South America. Three quarters of a million people. Minutes to find her.

Finally, still breathing heavily, he cut across the glorieta. Sweat was running down his forehead. He was still unable to make up his mind which street to choose. The odds were too heavy, the stake was too high. Six to one, a girl's life. He felt as helpless as when he had first come here, in the days when he didn't know his way around town yet. When it was just a blur of strange streets with strange names, all leading in strange directions.

He passed one of those direction finders that he used to have to rely on. He hadn't paid any attention to them in years. City maps with an adjustable indicator, that you found at some of the busier corners. Copied from Europe, they weren't known up in the States. He remembered they used to straighten him out each time he got balled up. You set the indicator for where you wanted to go, and also for where you were, and it would show the straightest line between the two points.

Suddenly he flung around, went back to the one he had just passed, as a thought struck him. It was set at chest level for the convenience of passersby. He reared one leg up and rammed into it. The glass protecting the map trickled off. He wanted it to be able to take pencil marks for what he had in mind; the indicator wasn't enough.

He poised his pencil over the denuded chart, began marking off the locations of the attacks, mumbling to himself as he did so.

"One, Teresa Delgado—Pasaje del Diablo." He ground out a black swirl of penciling to mark it clearly. "Two, Conchita Contreras—All Saints. Three, Clo-Clo—at the corner of San Marco and the Calle de Justicia." He moistened the pencil tip. "Four, Sally O'Keefe—beside the lagoon in the Bosque." Tonight's didn't count, it was simply a repetition at the same spot as the one before.

He had four black marks on the map now. He drew a line from each cross to its opposite. They made a slightly irregular X, one arm a little longer than the other.

He peered closely at the finely printed diagram, to see where the two axes crossed, to determine where the focus was. He drew an arbitrary circle around it, to identify it still more plainly. It encompassed the Alameda district; roughly the section between there and the Plaza de los Mártires. And dead center through this ran an almost indistinguishable thread, marked minutely on the map—Callejón de las Sombras.

In other words, the place where it had originally disappeared was still the one locale in the city equidistant from all four of the attacks. Somewhere around in there was the base of operations. Somewhere around in there was the lair.

True, that alley had been thoroughly searched once already. True, there was no guarantee that he necessarily covered an equal distance away from his starting point each time. But it was all Manning had, it was the best he could do. And it was still a whole lot better and quicker than having the whole sprawling city to comb over. At least he knew which one of those six radiating avenues to take from here, now. The stake was still as high as ever, but the odds had come down a lot.

He sighted a cab in the distance and bayed to it at the top of his lungs. Five minutes later he had alighted at the mouth of the Callejón. The cab drove off, left him there alone. It was black as the mouth of hell; not a light showed along its entire tortuous length, from where he was through to the other end.

He plunged in, to begin a one-man search from doorway to doorway.

Half an hour later he had dead-ended in the roofless chapel. His torch moved up and down the walls in a series of scallops as he clambered up and down the varying mounds of debris. His face looked gray in the pallid reflection of its small glow, and there was the shine of sweat, the sweat of failure, in the pinched indentations at the corners of his eyes and mouth. After his third time around, he turned and moved back toward the entrance.

There was a small click, and his light went out, just as his hopes had long before this. He let the door flap idly to and fro behind him on the slight current of his egress, sat soddenly down on the worn steps outside, his spine a bow of dejection. There was no place else to go from here.

Minutes went by. He looked up once, at the patch of black over him. It was still night. How long a night lasted—sometimes. But not when you are dying.

He rose to his feet at last, began hobbling painfully along toward where the inset rejoined the main part of the alley. A piece of gravel had got into one of his shoes, climbing around inside there, and was half killing him. He had to stop finally, brace his foot against the wall, and strip off the offending shoe. He shook it out, felt along the sole of his sock to make sure the irritant was not imbedded in that. It was, and it rolled into the hollow of his hand.

The dangling shoe dropped with a clump, and he flickered on his light, turned it into his palm. Something winked there in its creases. A diminutive oblong, tiny but bright. A microscopic tube. A bead. One of those things from her dress.

It had only been hurting him since he'd come out of there.

He shoveled his foot back into the shoe, ran up the short steps and inside once more.

He only found it at last because he knew there was something there to be found now and he wouldn't quit looking until he had. It was a lead trap set into the floor and indistinguishable in size or color from the massive paving blocks set around it. He'd missed it because he'd been chiefly occupied with the walls until now, not the littered flooring underfoot, which had seemed solid. His quest had been for a gap, an orifice, not anything of this sort.

He was squatting down by it now, getting excited. It had a flattened ring nose through it. He pried that up and pulled, and the whole thing tilted up quite easily, on a sort of chain-brace arrangement on the underside.

He shot his light down into it, to reveal a narrow oblong pit, with breakneck stone steps leading down, but from the side, not lengthwise. On the lowest step of all there was another of those tiny winking points of light, like the one that had rested in his palm awhile ago, outside.

"This is for me," he told himself with grim conviction.

What it was, where it went to, he didn't know; only that she'd come this way, so he was going to come this way, too. A cold long-buried air arose in his face, like something from another world, as he disappeared down into it by sections, like someone being swallowed in a quicksand: first his legs, then his thighs, then his middle. Finally it closed over his head.

There was a tunnel stretching before him, almost to infinity, it seemed. It was shored at the sides and top by age-blackened beams, like a mine shaft. As he moved along it eating up distance, he almost received the impression of standing still. There was always still more empty blackness out there ahead of the furthermost limits of the beam of his light. Once his light swam over the droppings of some animal, weeks old and half dust.

So it had been down in here—at one time.

A few paces farther on he shied suddenly, gave an instinctive quirk to the gun he was holding in readiness, as something white gleamed out at him unexpectedly. It was a bodiless skull, nestled there in the angle of one of the shoring beams, grinning teeth to ground as if biting it. It was ivory smooth with centuries of fleshlessness.

Then just when he thought this passage was never going to reach anywhere, never end, his light head suddenly foreshortened, deflected upwards by steps before him again.

Up over them was the same type of chained trap that had admitted him just now at the other end. He put his foot to the lowest step, and then stopped for a moment. Something made him put his light out and sheathe it in the waistband of his trousers, before he reached upward to open the enclosure. The gun he retained. He knew he was getting near the end of the trail now.

It lifted without any more recalcitrance than its complement at the other end, showing, if nothing else, that both had seen frequent use lately. It was not, though, nor could it be expected to be, completely noiseless. It whined as it went upward, and the chains jangled as they stayed it.

As he came up into the dark, he was uncannily aware of some other presence near him. Some bated presence that had detected him first, and was holding itself craftily motionless. He could feel the skin across the back of his neck tighten, and he began fanning his gun warily against the sightless gloom that faced him. He took a cautious step away from the topmost step. Then another.

A current of air set in flux by some unseen movement near him reached him too late.

The bore of a gun ground into his backbone with electrifying lack of preliminary and, as though it were the nozzle of a powerful vacuum cleaner, seemed to draw him from behind into paralyzed motionlessness.

A hand, as cold with tension and deadly purpose as his own, suddenly came to rest on his, took away the gun. A surly voice breathed close to his ear, "Quieto!" Before he could identify it further, there was a snap and a light flashed on full in his face, blinding him.

Belmonte's voice suddenly sounded, full-tone. "My God, it's you, hombre! I nearly—"

"What did you run out on me like that for?" the American railed angrily.

"Sh, keep your voice down!" the other cautioned. He handed him his gun back. "My instinct told me to follow that carriage. I had no time to warn you. Even so, he nearly gave me the slip. When I finally caught up with it, three blocks away from the alley, it was already empty—"

"How long have you been in here?"

"Only a few minutes ahead of you. I was only beginning to look around when I heard you coming up through the trap —"

"What is it? What is this place anyway?"

"It's the old underground dungeons of the Inquisition. That must have been a secret passage they built in the old days. There's dozens and dozens of little cells, it's honeycombed with them. Come on, I'll show you how far I'd gotten when you interrupted me. Don't make any noise, he's somewhere down around here."

Although they had been anything but noiseless, there was no indication that anything around them in the dark had heard—or was there to hear. A cautious spurt or two of Manning's torch showed him what Belmonte had presumably already discovered for himself before his arrival: that they were in a crumbling vaulted corridor, squat stone pillars every few yards supporting the succession of arches that roofed it. Between each two were grim-looking iron doors.

"You take this side, I'll take the other," Belmonte breathed.

They separated, were immediately lost to one another in the gloom. From then on a brief flicker of torchlight every few moments, quickly doused again, alternating from side to side, marked their progress. Occasionally there was a querulous whimper of hinges, but many of the iron plaques were already askew from age, didn't need to be moved at all. One or two were gone entirely. Behind them in every case, were mortar and packed-earth cubicles, most of them little bigger than the delayed-action coffins they had eventually proved to be for their inmates.

The endless succession of niches holding these vents unexpectedly right-angled, cut across to meet Belmonte's side. Meaning this catacomb had ended here. In its lateral face there was but a single iron door. Manning reached it first, having outdistanced his companion in the forward search. The cartwheel of his light lapped over it momentarily, then quickly dissolved again.

He shot it briefly downward at the floor, in a signal to Belmonte. The latter came up beside him in the dark. Manning's voice was less than a whisper. It had to be guessed at. "Don't make any noise. Put your hand to this one."

"Warm."

"Warmer than the rest, anyway; they're all stone-cold. Something going on behind it—"

He started feeling along it tenderly with splayed fingers for the old-fashioned staple grip his light had shown him before. Before he could complete the gesture, Belmonte had elbowed him aside, his own hand was on it instead. There was a dangerous sort of quietness about the South American all at once, as though he'd been waiting a long time for this approaching moment.

The thing swung out past them on its appointed arc, and a flash of unreality, of fantasy, exploded into view.

It was that their minds, conditioned to the realistic, couldn't assimilate what their eyes were trying to show them. This must have been the torture chamber of this whole cruel place of correction and exorcism. Against the wall were strange outlines that the modern mind had no names for: things well forgotten, left behind, as the race progressed away from its childish delight in pulling wings off flies. Chains hanging like fungi, and iron girdles riveted into the wall, and a thing like a hand printing press, to cripple the straight bones nature had formed.

They seemed to have been carried back four hundred years. Beyond that, even, into the never-never land of demonology and medieval allegory. The place was in use again.

Again, as in the long ago, the lurid red of fire glowed within the stone kiln at the end of the enclosure, with its open flue above; once used for turning iron bars red-hot or melting dipperfuls of lead. And again, as in the long ago, the subject lay senseless atop the thick, curved-top block, somewhat similar to a butcher's chopping block. A subject, this time, in a twentieth-century beaded evening gown, or the tatters that were left of it. Legs dangling down over the end of it, one silver slipper fallen off and lying on the floor. Her head fell back the other way, neck arched, hair streaming free and seeming to move in the moving firelight.

Between her and it was poised a grotesque silhouette. Something that belonged on a feudal coat of arms. An upright animal. The lion, or leopard, rampant. The outline of the cat head could be seen, two small triangular ears thrusting up.

The two feline claws were poised over her in striking position, about to descend, to stroke, softly, gently at first, just tearing the remnants of clothing, just scratching the smooth white skin below. Then faster, faster, deeper, deeper, as the frenzy mounted—and the life-tide welled forth.

Manning could feel his senses trying to darken out, in some form of vertigo or dizziness, because this thing wasn't there, wasn't real; so that when his faculties cleared again it would be gone. Just the empty unlit chamber would be there, the way it probably was. He also wanted to get sick for a minute, because animals don't stand upright, and men—who do—don't have short pointed ears and spade-shaped feline heads, as this apparition did.

A voice screamed something unintelligible, but not from over there, from somewhere close beside him. A revolver shot cracked, and he thought it was the cleanest, loveliest sound he'd ever heard. The thing, whatever it was, reared up even higher than before, claws threshing the air, then started to go over backwards.

The revolver exploded a second time. The thing in the background went down faster, rolled over with an air of finality, lay there inert; jaguar, or man, or jaguarman.

Manning could feel himself stumbling forward; he lurched to his knees beside the trestle, picked her limp form up in his arms, held her protectively clasped to him, but more in a state of bewilderment than active helpfulness. Presently he became aware of a heart beating somewhere close to his own, and he knew she wasn't dead.

The revolver kept crashing out, meanwhile, and a sort of chant of vengeance accompanied it. "That's for Conchita." Bam. "And that's for Conchita." Bam. "And that's for all the others." Bam. "But this, this one is for Conchita all over again!"

Brief flashes kept flickering over Belmonte's face, lighting it momentarily from below each time.

"Belmonte, quit," Manning remonstrated at last. "Pull yourself together. The thing's dead ten times over."

But the revolver kept on clicking emptily, over and over again.

After a while, he took the empty gun away from Belmonte, and said, "Take care of the girl." Belmonte took the girl from him and carried her out of the place. Manning went over closer to the huddled form lying on the ground, and stood looking down at it. It had fallen face downward. He turned it over with his foot. He bent down for a moment, just once, then straightened up again.

When Belmonte came back presently, Manning was standing beside the kiln, thrusting a small deep-curved shovel down into it. Before Belmonte knew what he was about, he had tipped it up again, overturned it. A freshet of live coals spilled down over the exposed face on the floor, forming a glowing puddle, blanketing it. They only darkened momentarily, then almost immediately they had brightened again as fiercely as ever. Dank steam struggled up between the livid nuggets, like thin snakes.

Manning threw down the shovel and they both came away fast.

They sat sipping small stinging brandies in the morning sunlight, at a little café on the Alameda. A shoeshine boy was crouched at Belmonte's feet. All around them life was going on as usual. It was hard to believe that just a few hours ago, not a stone's throw from here—

"If you hadn't lost your head the way you did—" Manning began.

Belmonte tossed the bootblack a coin to get rid of him. "I lost my head?" he smiled. "On the contrary, I kept my head very well. There is no capital punishment down here. The most they could have given him, by statute, is twenty years to life." He shrugged. "Do you see what I mean?"

"I see what you mean," Manning assented.

"One thing I don't understand," Belmonte mused. "How did it get into the chapel in the first place? The entrance was locked tight; the police had to take crowbars to it themselves when they were looking for it that first night, you remember?"

"The chapel is roofless, just four walls and open sky. My conjecture is it ran into the doorway of the house immediately adjoining, came out on the roof, or some projecting ledge, of that, and seeing its escape cut off, jumped from there down into the opening offered by the ruined chapel, unseen by anyone against the surrounding blackness. A leap from such a height wouldn't be prohibitive for an animal of its type, particularly spurred on by fear.

"He got hold of it in some way, anyway, we know that much. Your revolver, last night, deprived us of ever finding out the exact details. Probably stunned it with a big rock and dragged it back through that tunnel, that he'd already been using for some time past."

He waited until the waiter had put down their new jiggers, gone away again. "He was ripe for murder, anyway. The tinder was there, waiting. The jaguar was the spark. The spark came along and bang! all over the place. Every large city has dozens of his kind. Fortunately, most of them never blow a fuse. One in a hundred gets started off, and then you have it! Jack the Ripper in London. Bluebeard in France. That ax killer—what was his name?—in Germany.

"He got hold of it, anyway, and kept it for a while. They found its grave last night, in the earthen floor of one of those cells, before we came away, remember? And you heard what they told us they found after they dug it up." He made a slicing motion. "The forepaws had been amputated, and the head skinned—"

Belmonte quickly hoisted his brandy and cleaned it out.

"But I don't think he did that right away, that curing and fashioning of the gauntlets and the mask. I think the first time he found some way of transporting it, under his control and still alive, to the vicinity in which the attack on Teresa Delgado occurred. In some car, or in some hamper, who knows how? Held it there by him in that pitch-dark tunnel under the viaduct, waiting for the first likely passerby to come along, and when she did—unleashed it to see what it would do. Probably he had starved it into a state of ferocity by then."

"Then why didn't it turn on him and not the girl?" asked Belmonte.

"He probably had something along to cow it with. He must have, to be able to recapture it immediately after its foray."

"Que barbaridad, hombre!" Belmonte inhaled shiveringly.

"But that wasn't enough for him. It was too brief, too vicarious. He couldn't approach close enough, nor linger to gloat. It was too complicated. So he didn't repeat that. But his blood was up now. He would be the jaguar instead. So he killed it, and from then on he was. With gauntlets that retained the death-dealing claws. He found some way of manipulating them, making them emerge and recede just as in nature—by tiny springs or wires, who knows just how?"

Belmonte passed his hand quickly across his eyes as if to shut out some too-insistent sight. He went on hastily, as if to get away from that particular phase of the subject, "How could he go around rigged up like that, though?"

"He didn't, of course. You noticed that loose, enfolding overcoat with big pockets we found there last night. He probably muffled himself in that, took out the paraphernalia at the last minute."

"How is it he didn't leave footprints?"

"Rags wrapped around his shoes would take care of that. But this is not really a police matter we are discussing, this is a case history in abnormal psychology. A case history that unfortunately did not come to light until too late. He needed, not policemen, but a doctor."

"My revolver was the doctor," Belmonte said, hardening his eyes.

"Yes, the best, and by that time, the only possible one."

"How can anyone like that be detected?" Belmonte wondered aloud. "Could a person tell just by looking at him?" Then he answered it himself, "No, I suppose not."

"Sometimes you can," Manning mused. "If you're smart, if you know what it means when you do. And you usually don't. Sometimes you'll catch an unguarded gleam in the eye for a moment, a glitter, a fervor, where you wouldn't in anyone else's. Oh, nothing much, and you're not expecting it anyway, you're trustful, you say to yourself you imagined it."

"Did you ever see a telltale look like that in anyone's eyes?" Belmonte asked him curiously.

"Yes, once, I remember now that I did. It was in a room at police headquarters. A room crowded with people. They were questioning a suspect. I was fiddling away with a file, listening. I hurt myself, here—" He ran a finger thoughtfully over a cicatrice still visible in the bulge below one thumb. "I came forward into the light, close to the suspect. All were repulsed by the bleeding, messy sight. But in the eyes of one man, and one man alone, I detected a certain unhealthy interest, a look that was almost an ogling. I thought I was mistaken at the time, and like a fool I let the impression go; it left me. But that was it, that was it, then and there, if I'd only realized."

"And who was it, the suspect—of course?" Belmonte asked interestedly.

Manning took a moment to answer. He turned his empty brandy jigger upside down. "No, the man who was there to question the suspect. Police Inspector Robles."

Belmonte's face was a pucker of sudden white shock.

"And now you know," the American said quietly. "As you're entitled to. But that look on your own face right now is the look that will be on everyone else's, when they hear it. It'll be bad for the police, and worse for the public. So I think it's better if we keep it where it is now: just between you and me and the shovelful of hot coals."

He stood up and stretched himself in the healing, cleansing sunlight slanting down under the café awning.

His voice trailed off as if he didn't want to talk about it any further. "Something that will never be mentioned again—but will always be there—between you, and me, and the bad dreams of our nights."

"It's beautiful now!" she exclaimed. "Come over here and look."

He came up behind her, where she was standing, before the open full-length windows. She was gazing out with all the rapture attending a first discovery. And it was a first discovery in every sense of the word; she had never seen this place before, a cloud had darkened it until now.

They stood looking out in silence for a while, he at her shoulder. The lucent evening sky, the wavy black hills against the hidden blue gas flares left behind by the sunset. And nearer at hand, those streaks of luminous talcum, stretching away in narrowing perspective, that were the streets and bright cafés poor little Clo-Clo had known so well.

Her ghost must still be ambling along them right now, down there; but a pert, friendly sort of ghost, not a terrifying one, smiling and flipping her handbag jauntily at the passersby she met.

"So you're going back?" he said finally.

"I guess so. On the next boat. But that's not for thirty days yet. What're you going to do?"

"I don't know. Stay down, I guess. Things seem to be opening up a little more for me now, since that happened. Belmonte and I are to share that reward offered by the municipal council, I told you that, didn't I? And His Nibs the Commissioner has even offered me a job as a sort of special investigator without portfolio on his own immediate staff. And just to round out things full circle, I had a letter this morning from my old client, Kiki Walker, hinting that a little misunderstanding shouldn't stand between friends and she'd be very glad to have me do publicity work for her again. What I'll probably do is open a little agency of some sort, now that I've got capital. Typewriters or shaving cream or something very undramatic like that."

"You should get yourself a girl and settle down."

"I have already, but she doesn't know it yet."

"When are you going to tell her?"

One of his four or five cumbersome hands made vague motions behind her back, but without actually touching her. "Pretty soon now. Sometime within the next thirty days, before that boat leaves."

THE BLACK ANGEL

ONE

angel with whisk broom

HE ALWAYS CALLED me “angel face.”

That was his name for me when we were by ourselves. That was a special thing, from him to me. He’d bring his face down close to mine and say it low. He’d say he wondered where I got it, that angel face. And things like that your husband says to you.

Then, all at once it stopped. And before I knew it, it was weeks since I’d heard it. I waited for it to come again and wondered why it didn’t. Then that stopped too.

His blue suit was missing from the closet, and that was strange. That was my job, to send things to the cleaner. I worked my way a little deeper in along the hangers. To the left, his side of the closet.

His gray one was missing too, and that was stranger still. Two suits at once? That was all he had, except the one that he was wearing.

If there hadn’t already been one or two little things before this it would have been different. It would have been just a case of a couple of his suits gone from the closet. But there had already been one or two little things before this. And that made it something else again.

A lie now and then where there was no reason for a lie. There was the evening he’d spent with one of the fellows, had a few beers too many. No harm in that. I’d told him so. I’d said, “I didn’t ask you, Kirk. You’re the one is telling me.” Then, only a week or so later, when his companion of that particular night happened to be up in our apartment and I laughingly referred to the incident, why did he develop such a blank, puzzled look and give such a cagey, noncommittal answer? Until Kirk gave him a little signal on the side, which I pretended not to see, that seemed to work wonders with his powers of recollection.

Then there was the powder compact. He’d picked it up on the street and left it in the pocket of his overcoat. He saw me looking at it and he told me how he’d happened to find it. People do lose compacts. Even solid gold ones inscribed “To Mia from Craig.”

But then, on the very next day after that, no compact anymore. I asked him what had become of it. “Oh, I got rid of it,” he said offhandedly.

But it had been gold, hadn’t it? I tried to suggest.

“Nah,” he disabused me. “I thought so too, but I had a jeweler test it for me. It was just gilt metal. So I left it there.”

But would they be likely to stamp the symbol “14K” on anything that wasn’t gold, as they had on this? I wondered privately. I didn’t tell him that I’d glimpsed that on it. I don’t know why. When you have an uneasy feeling that happiness is beginning to slip through your fingers you hang on as tightly as you can; you don’t give it an added push away from you.

Little things like that, they made this matter of the two suits something else again, at sight.

But more than anything else, no “Angel Face” for weeks now. Only Alberta, that formal Alberta, never previously used, when he had anything to say to me.

They say everyone has to go through it at least once. They say the best is to let it ride, seem not to notice, and it will work itself out. They say. Try and do it sometime — when you’re twenty-two and it’s your first experience with it.

I’m a coward, I guess. I didn’t tell Kirk I’d been to the jeweler where he said he’d left the compact, to try to reclaim it or at least make sure that it wasn’t gold and he wasn’t cheating Kirk. “What compact?” the jeweler said. “Nobody’s been in here with any compact.” He might have been lying; I couldn’t tell. Maybe I didn’t want to know for sure.

What an odd name, Mia, I thought on the way back.

I saw her later. I couldn’t tell for sure that it was the same person. It might have been somebody else with the same first name. But it was such a rare name. It seemed impossible that there could be more than just one person in the entire city with just that name. It was a publicity picture on the theatrical page of the evening paper. You know, that sort of thing they use at random to fill up space and not because of any intrinsic news value.

I remember I clipped the thing out, with the sort of morbid curiosity that makes you do those things, and slipped it under the lining paper in the bureau drawer, where no one but me was ever likely to find it.

It mightn’t have even been the same person, for all I knew. But that was such an unusual, such a seldom encountered first name.

I didn’t try to talk to him about it. I was afraid to risk it. I buried my head in the sand like an ostrich, hoping it would blow over, go away, I wouldn’t have to face it.

And now this business of the suits, and here it was anyway.

I turned away from the closet, white in the face. I went to the storage one in the hall, where he kept his valise empty and unlocked between business trips. I crouched down beside it, and the latch tongues wouldn’t open; they were locked. I put my hand through the grip and tried to lift it clear of the floor, and it nearly pulled my arm out of joint, it weighed so much. Everything in it already, ready to go.

I let it down with a clump. It seemed to swim around a little, like a big leather boat, on the lake my eyes made. I said to myself: “It’s not what you think. It’s just a business trip for the firm.” But then why hadn’t he told me? He always told me. He always let me do the packing for him.

I wondered when he’d found the time to do it. Probably that very morning; I’d found him up ahead of me. But more than that, even, I wondered how he’d found the heart to do it.

Something I’d once heard came back to me: “They’re all cowards about having a parting scene. They’ll grapple with an armed burglar barehanded, but there isn’t one of them that won’t slink out sooner than face a final goodbye with a woman.”

I found myself by the phone, and I’d just finished dialing his office number. That whispered plea you heard in the waiting silence, that was me. “Make it a business trip. Oh, please, don’t let it be anything else.”

I asked the big boss’s secretary. She was nice. I’d met her once or twice. And, luckily, Kirk didn’t happen to be in just then; that gave me the excuse to ask her instead.

“You don’t happen to know just how soon he’ll be going away again for Mr Jacobs, do you? I forgot to ask him before he left this morning, and I happened to be going over some of his clothes just now and wondered if I should put them away in tar paper or wait a while in case he needs them to take with him.”

I wondered if that sounded as lame to her as it did to me.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” she said. “He won’t be going out again for months to come. Not until late spring. Everything’s dead right now. I heard Mr Jacobs say so yesterday.”

It was like something cold trickling into my ear from the receiver. I said a thing or two after that, but it was only sheer momentum that kept me talking; there wasn’t really anything more to say.

I didn’t even say goodbye. She did, in a way. A way that showed she was no fool. Just before she hung up I heard her murmur almost compassionately, “Don’t let it get you too much, honey.”

I don’t remember what I did for a while after that. I think I just sat there on the telephone bench. Then outward movement came back again, slowly at first, in spurts and starts that finally worked themselves up into a flurry of action ending in a crashing exit.

I went in and opened the bureau drawer. I turned back the dust-paper lining and picked up that thing I’d taken out of the papers weeks before.

I knew what she looked like by heart by this time. That scrap of newspaper she was on should have been worn ragged by now, the number of times I’d pulled it out and looked at it when I was alone in the place.

She looked as lovely as only a publicity photograph can make them look. Probably one and a half times as lovely as she really was. She was brunette, as the Rachel powder in the compact had said she would be. Her eyes were wide and languorous, and her lips had a sullen, pouty look. She looked good to stay away from, but then I’m not a man; probably it worked in reverse with them. She was indicating a rose on her shoulder with one slender, upcurved hand. What supported it, the rose, was uncertain. There wasn’t a sign of anything, until the lower frame of the picture cut across her just a moment too late. The caption below it read: “Mia Mercer, one of the attractions appearing nightly at Dave Hennessy’s Hermitage.”

This time I didn’t put it back. I hung onto it. I didn’t want to hang onto her photograph; it was him I wanted to hang onto. I took it out to the kitchen with me and propped it up against something. I reached blindly all along the upper-case cupboards until I’d located and toppled down that bottle of ceremonial gin of his. I didn’t know very much — yet — about the procedure of using it. That was his province, not mine. He was very good at fixing it with things like mint and lemon, but I didn’t want cordiality now; I wanted courage. I let out a little into the jigger glass and gulped it down. I thought some plaster had fallen off the ceiling and hit me on the chest for a minute.

I sat there staring at her picture and hating her hard. I let a little more out and gulped that. The plaster didn’t hit me this time. I started to feel a slow glow inside me instead. I sat there and stared at her some more.

I guess it was the gin made me decide to do it. It must have been. The gin made everything seem so easy, so plausible. I would have shrunk from it, unstimulated. It would have seemed like something out of East Lynne or Camille. The gin made it seem logical, perfectly natural, and by no means a futile thing to do.

I went in and started to get dressed. Dressed for calling, that is. I took more pains dressing for her than I ever had dressing for him. And yet he was the one I was dressing for, in a roundabout way. I had to be careful. Enemy eyes.

Finally I was ready and I got out fast. I knew if I didn’t go quickly I’d never have the nerve to go at all. The two jiggers of gin were wearing off, so I stopped just long enough to gulp a third and last to see me through.

Then I went out and closed the door behind me, and for the first time in four years I didn’t give a damn what there was going to be for supper.

TWO

visiting angel

THEY'D TOLD ME over at that Hermitage place that this was where it was. It was one of those remodeled private residences that have been converted into apartments. But of the expensive, not the cheap, variety. It was the type of place that offers extreme privacy. No attendants in the lobby, an automatic elevator. The door was the self-locking kind. Yes, I thought bitterly, she’d want extreme privacy.

I went into the small forward vestibule and found her name beside one of the small door buttons, but before I could put my finger to it a delivery boy bearing an empty box came out. He politely held the door for me, so I got in without having to telegraph my punch and run the risk of being refused admittance from below.

A moment later I was standing before her inner door on the second floor. And now that I was there I wanted to be back home again; I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. By that time the false courage of the double jiggerful of gin had had time to wear off, and I saw this for the preposterous, unlikely to succeed thing it was again. The only reason I didn’t turn around and scuttle off again before she had time to come out and confront me was that, now that I was right there outside the door, it seemed senseless not to wait long enough at least to find out if I had the right person or not. I was almost certain I did have by now. I didn’t like a remark they’d let drop at that Hermitage place when I’d been there just now. Miss Mercer had turned in her notice only two or three days ago. She was going away on a short vacation, she’d said. Yeah? I thought bitterly. On whose time?

The hopelessness of the thing I was trying to do came over me again. I put my hand distractedly to my forehead and thought, “What do I expect to get from this? What good will it do?”

She was taking a long time to answer. My courage was oozing out of me by the minute. If I had to wait much longer for the showdown I wouldn’t be able to open my mouth at all. This was one of those things you had to do at white heat. Once you stopped and let yourself cool off you couldn’t go through with it anymore. I rang again, longer, harder, louder.

She wasn’t in.

I gave the knob a twist only as a symptom of frustration. The door wavered loosely inward an inch or two. It must have been off the latch the whole time. I widened the gap and put my face to it. I could see a strip of room about a foot wide, splashed with a lot of vivid turquoise-blue color.

I cleared my throat. I even spoke aloud. I said, “I beg your pardon?” No one answered.

Not finding her in at the moment emboldened me. I forgot about my recent inclination to retreat. I stepped inside, closed the door softly behind me, stood there for a moment like that, with my hand resting on the knob. Then I lingeringly took it off, and entry was complete.

Enemy territory, I thought.

I took it all in. I thought: “So this is how they live when they — live like this.” It was a decorator’s job, that outside room. Almost like a stage setting. Swell to look at, from the door like this, but no good for living in. Too florid. It was flooded with this acutely vivid turquoise-blue color: upholstery, carpet, drapes, lamp shades. Either she or the decorator had a passion for it. Then all over, like flecks of blood, there were dabs of vermilion.

I shook my head, not so much in moral condemnation as in common, ordinary, everyday sense of value. It wasn’t worth it; it was no bargain; she was being overcharged. My way was the better way of the two; worry about a bill now and then, but at least be able to usher your company out when you felt like it, lock the door after them for the night. Every room, I felt to myself, looking around, ought to have at least one ugly or dilapidated piece of furniture in it. That makes an honest room of it, not a bandbox like this.

I moved a little deeper inward. My own reflection glided unexpectedly across a mirror I hadn’t noticed and gave me a guilty little shock, until I’d swerved and recognized myself. I looked out of place here, even in a mirror. The suburbs trespassing on the bright-light belt. Washington Heights taking a peek in on Sutton Place. “Angel Face,” he called me. Well, maybe, but a sort of insipid, timid angel right then. Those eyes couldn’t have looked mysterious if they’d tried, only sort of — guileless, I suppose you’d call it.

An arched opening into the next room came slipping toward me as I slipped toward it. Through it I could see a section of boudoir, and if the note in here was turquoise blue, the note in there was a sort of lush coral pink. It was drenched with it, even the satin-quilted walls.

I could see the foot of a coral satin chaise longue sticking out, with a rumpled coverlet on it and a discarded bedroom slipper or mule lying under it toe-up. She must have dressed in a hurry.

I shifted back and forth outside there, without going any nearer at first, until I could scan both of the side walls from where I was. There was no one in there. This was just a reflex precaution; I knew I would have been heard and challenged long ago if anyone had been in there.

I lingered outside a moment or two longer. For some strange reason it seemed less reprehensible to be caught trespassing in her living room than to be caught trespassing in the sanctum sanctorum of her boudoir. I roamed aimlessly around, looking over at the door by which I had entered every other moment. I strayed here and there, touching this, tapping that, poising three fingers in tripod formation on something else as I passed by. That was the only outward sign of the tension I was under.

Everything was monogrammed. That seemed to be another fetish of hers. There must have been a time she hadn’t had much of anything, and now that she had plenty of everything she had to show whom it belonged to; she couldn’t let the observer take it for granted. She’d thought up a symbol of two Ms overlapping one another, so that they looked like a single capital with four downward stems. She must have stayed up all one night to arrive at that brilliant inspiration, I reflected. A sixth grade schoolkid could have rigged up something more original in ten minutes flat.

It had been sprinkled around wholesale. My only surprise was it had been left off the steam radiators and windowpanes and such. It was on cigarette boxes and on the cigarettes inside them and on matchsafes and worked into the corners of cushions and —

Suddenly the telephone began to ring someplace right there in the room with me. They use the expression “jumping out of your shoes.” I didn’t jump out of mine, but if they weren’t actually clear of the plushy carpet for a moment they felt as though they were, with the frightened heave I gave.

I stood perfectly still for a minute, waiting for it to quit. It didn’t. It kept on and kept on, until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. What made it worse was I couldn’t locate where it was at first, even by the sound. It was someplace near by, right in the same room with me, but there was no sign of it.

I went looking around high and low for it, with furtive, trembling haste. It seemed to grow clearer over in a certain corner where there was a turquoise-lacquered object that might have been a chest of drawers. I clawed at the midsection of it, and a little slab came down in desk formation. There it was behind that, lacquered turquoise to match everything else, and bleating like something smothering to death. Beside it was a little address book, with its pliable leather cover dyed the same inevitable color and stamped with the same inevitable monogram.

I lifted the receiver finally, to try to silence it in that way. Then, because I already held it in my hand, I put it to my ear, stood quiet with it like that.

A man’s voice said instantly, and with a sort of hurried intimacy, “Hello, Mia?” And then over again, because there was no answer from my end, “Hello, Mia?”

That voice. I would have known his voice anywhere. I put my free hand down on the desk slab and braked myself against it while I curved over weakly above it, like when you have a pain in your stomach.

“Hello?” he kept saying. “Hello, Mia?”

The colors in the room ran a little; a drop or two of turquoise seemed to swim around in my eyes. In this damn place you even shed turquoise teardrops.

I didn’t have the heart for any cheap surprises, for any punishing triumphs. I didn’t want to be cruel to him. He was being cruel enough for the two of us. I put it down again quietly, almost tenderly.

I didn’t have to worry about whether I had the right person or not now anymore.

Crazy thoughts without logic took turns slashing at me. “Why do they get you to learn to love them, if this is how they’re going to treat you after you do? Why do they come around you when you’re seventeen and aren’t doing anything to them, are just minding your own business, getting along all right without them, if this is how they’re going to act when you’re twenty-two? Why don’t they leave you alone?” I sobbed deep inside where it couldn’t be heard. “Why don’t they leave you alone if they don’t mean it?”

I walked haphazardly back toward the arched opening leading to the next room again. I think I thought it was the outside door. Then when I noticed what it was I stopped, to turn and go the other way.

But in there, on the vanity table in a crystal frame, I could see her picture smiling mockingly out at me, as if to say: “You see? Aren’t you sorry you came around here now? If you hadn’t you still wouldn’t have been sure.” And hate came on, and bitterness came on, and I strode forward, to go to it and pick it up. I suppose to smash it, or some other equally childish thing.

I didn’t watch where I was going and I stumbled over something as I made my way around the foot of the impeding chaise longue.

A foot, a leg, projecting from the other side of it. What I had taken to be a discarded boudoir slipper until now. Even from where I was standing at the moment, but for the hideous clarity of that one unmistakable silk-clad limb, it still looked like a tumbled mass of boudoir pillows, perhaps a discarded negligee and a chaise coverlet, all intermingled and allowed to fall in a neglected heap to the floor, there in that one place.

I suppose I gave a smothered scream. I don’t remember. I got down waveringly and edged aside one of the pillows. Coral sateen it was, and so soft, so harmless. But someone had smothered her to death with it.

Though no man was the breath of her life, one of them had taken the breath of her life away, and she was dead.

I was sorry I’d tampered with that concealing pillow. For that grimacing, suffused mask with the protruding tongue didn’t look at all like the photograph in the crystal frame over there any longer.

I got up again, cold and sick and frightened. I’d never seen a dead human being before. I couldn’t seem to turn my eyes away. I retreated stealthily backward, a step at a time, as if afraid that if I dared to turn my back on her she’d rise up and come after me.

When I had regained the archway between the rooms and had at least a head start, then panic came on briefly. The panic of any young, unversed, not very bright thing. I made several confused half turns, this way and that; then I located the door and sped for it, my frightened mind screaming: “Let me out of here! I want to get out of here! I don’t want to stay in this place — with her! ”

Then at the last moment, just as I’d reached the door, the thought of Kirk came to me, and some sort of protective instinct — I don’t know what it was — brought me up short, held me there a moment.

They mustn’t connect him with her. They mustn’t know he’d known her or — I turned and saw the phone standing there across the room with the slab let down before it the way I’d left it. And next to it that little private address book of hers. I went running over and picked it up and leafed through it. There it was, on the M page, big as life. His name and office number.

First I was just going to tear the page out bodily and leave the rest behind. Then I realized that maybe they would notice that; it would look too incriminating. So I thrust the whole booklet into my handbag intact and snapped it closed on it. They weren’t going to find his name around here, not if I could help it.

I looked around questioningly. There wasn’t anything else out here that I could see that might involve him, and not even for his sake could I have gone back into that — that other room a second time.

I told myself I’d better get out of here fast myself. Somebody was liable to come along at any moment and —

Even so, I knew enough not to bolt out without reconnoitering first and thereby running a risk of blundering head-on into someone on the outside. It’s uncanny how quickly your instincts, if left to their own guidance, will adapt themselves even to the most bizarre, unlooked-for situations, as though you were used to meeting those situations every day in your life. Accordingly, instead of throwing the door open forthwith, I stood there listening intently beside it for several moments before making any further move.

It was because I stood there motionless like that, and with my head tilted at just a certain angle, that I had a chance to become aware of this fleck of color against the creamy expanse of the door. It was in the seam, the opposite one where the hinges were located, and it was just over the lower one of these, as though it had sidled downward until the hinge had blocked its further descent.

Even after it had caught my eye it meant nothing; there was not enough of it to convey any meaning in my present state of tension and anxiety to get out. Only, as I turned the knob and slowly drew the door inward from its frame, motion, the motion of a dab of color, caught my eye back to where it had been again, and I saw that it had fallen out with the reverse widening of the seam at that end and now lay on the floor, a postage-stamp-sized square from where I stood. I reached down and picked it up, and it was only then that I could make out what it actually was.

It was simply the pasteboard cover of a match folder, or rather half the pasteboard cover of a match folder, torn off, then folded still again to smaller size and thrust into that seam to serve as a wedge. Its purpose obviously had been to retard the swing of the door slightly so that, though it might give the appearance of being closed, the latch tongue would fail by a fraction of an inch to meet and thrust into the socket meant to hold it. In other words, it could be reopened later and at will from the outside, simply by turning the knob, as I had done myself.

It had clung to the seam during three entire passages, I felt sure: the entrance and exit of whoever had done this to her, and then my own entrance just now, only to be finally dislodged when I disturbed the door a fourth time, to leave. Until now, apparently, it had simply slid lower down within the seam until the hinge blocked it off.

To my novice’s mind it seemed for a minute a great, a dazzling clue, but then as I breathlessly unpleated it my excited hopes died again and I saw that it was nothing, told nothing, except what was implicit in its being there in the first place.

It was one of hers. It had the ubiquitous M on it. It was blue, but of a darker shade than the turquoise she favored so. It must have been a leftover from some previous color scheme that had preceded the turquoise deluge. I was about to throw it back again where it had been, let them find it for themselves, make what they could of it. And then the thought of fingerprints occurred to my unversed mind, and because I had already handled it generously and had a layman’s typical awe of that mystic science, I thrust it instead into my handbag with the address book.

I peered out through the eye-width gap I had made ready in the door. There was no one in sight. I stepped quickly outside and closed the door after me. There was a staircase beside the elevator, and I chose that in preference to the car, as being both quicker and more secretive. There was no one below either. It was a tactfully serviced building.

I opened the street door and came outside, and with the first fresh air a sense of unreality that I had been where I had been, had seen what I had seen, came over me overpoweringly. I walked quickly away from that bad place without looking back. I was frightened and sick and all the things you are after such a thing, but over and above everything else there was a persistent refrain running through my mind: “I have him back again now. She can’t take him from me ever, ever again.”

For a moment I was glad he wasn’t there yet when I got home. For a moment or two only. I needed time, a little time to myself, to get over this thing, to pull myself together after it. I had the creeps. My hands were cold and clammy, and every few minutes I’d tremble uncontrollably, then stop again as suddenly. I took off the carefully selected outfit I’d worn and put it away out of my sight. It hadn’t been appreciated.

I began to feel better, grow calmer, as soon as the outward vestiges of the horrible expedition had disappeared from view. And then suddenly, just as I was about to brew myself a cup of black coffee to complete the restorative process, fright struck again. But this time full-fledged, direct, and personal, here in the place where I lived, and having to do with me and him. Not the childish fright of some stranger’s dead body in a strange place into which I had had no right to venture in the first place. Suddenly I realized what the real thing was to be frightened of.

He might go over there and become hopelessly enmeshed. I must get hold of him, warn him not to go near there, to stay away. He had already tried to reach her on the telephone right while I was in the place. He might have repeated that again, since I’d come away. And then, that failing, he might go there himself in person.

Even while I dropped what I’d been doing as suddenly as though I’d been burned, fled out to our telephone, I couldn’t understand how I’d failed to take this into account until now. I had even taken the precaution of removing her address book with his name in it, yet it had never occurred to me to take the greatest precaution of all: to forewarn him. My mind must have somehow slipped a cog. Just because I was aware of what had happened to her I seemed to have taken it for granted that he was too. How could he be, until he’d gone there and stumbled on her, just as I had myself?

I was dialing so fast the slotted wheel made a blur beneath my hand. I shouldn’t have waited this long to try to reach him. I still couldn’t understand what had made me overlook such a glaring necessity. I should have called him the moment I was out of there, from the first corner drugstore I’d happened upon.

The office girl down there got on again.

My voice was a spasm of sound that had no words in it, only a thought transfer. “Kirk — Mr Murray — quick!” At least she got it.

She said, “You just missed him. If you’d called only a minute sooner! He passed me on the way out just a moment before you —”

I let my eyes fall slowly closed, sipped in my own breath.

My voice came back again, frayed uncontrollably. “Frances, go after him; see if you can get him back! It’s desperately urgent! I’ve got to speak to him before he leaves that building!”

I knew that place down there; there was a long walk out to the elevators.

She took fright from my fright. “Wait, maybe I can still catch up with him out in the hall!” I heard the clatter she made getting away from the switchboard, even heard the diminishing patter of her footsteps across the floor. He must have still been in sight outside as she flung open the outer office door, because I even heard her call his name. It came back hollowly and from a distance, as something does echoing down a long, empty hallway. “Mr Murray!”

There was a wait that I thought was never going to be over. The hell with mutual embarrassment; the hell with diffidence; we were down to essentials now; we were down to bedrock, he and I. I’d say, “Kirk, stay away from that woman! Don’t ask me whom I mean or how I know! Listen to me now, if you never listened to me before. Don’t go near there! ” And then I’d have to tell him, “She’s dead — something’s happened to her!” And then, because he’d have to have some direction given to him in that first moment of shock, gently, understandingly, without reproach: “Come home to me; come home where you belong — I’ll have some supper for you, and we won’t talk about it.”

We wouldn’t, either. No, we wouldn’t. Just bring him back to this phone for me now, and I wouldn’t talk about it again, even in my heart.

Her steps came back. I could hear her breathing fast from her efforts even before her voice sounded. She was going to say, “Here he is, Mrs Murray. I just caught up with him in ti—”

She said, “I saw him getting on down the hall and I called to him, but he didn’t hear me in time. And before I could get over there the operator had closed the door. It must have been an express car; they won’t come back for you no matter how you pound on the glass afterward.” And then those oh, most inadequate of words, when spoken to someone in her death throes: “I’m sorry, Mrs Murray.”

There was no way I could reach him in time now. He was going there to that place, and there was no way I could stop him. The slender thread had snapped. I’d been given my half an hour’s grace, from the time I left there until the time I got back here, and I’d thrown it away. And thrown him away with it. And thrown myself away with him.

In the twilight I stumbled around there, like a dimly focused figure moving through the steam room of a Turkish bath. That was what it was like inside me, anyway, no matter what it was like on the outside. More terrible than anything else was the knowledge that while I floundered here helplessly, dying by inches, unable to interfere, to prevent, he was moving steadily through the streets — on foot, or in a cab, or on a subway — toward that grim destination. And in my overheated fancy I could see a grinning death’s-head waiting for him behind that boudoir door, bony arms stretched out to clutch him in a more terrible embrace than hers had ever been in life, to twine about him and never let him go.

Once it occurred to me I might have saved him by reporting it to the police myself, if I’d only done it in time. Then at least he would have walked in there after them, not ahead of them. I could see why I’d shied away from this until it was already too late, though. I’d been afraid of bringing on the very thing I wanted above all to avoid: his involvement. And now it was too late; I daren’t do it now anymore; it might only succeed in bringing them there right on his heels.

Dusk had inked into night now, and I still didn’t light the lights. What for, what did I want to see? Lights are to see something by, and the only thing I wanted to see was his face. They couldn’t show me that because it wasn’t here.

A light green circle with twelve slanting eyes, like a kid’s outline drawing of a face, peered at me from where the clock was. And all it did was hurt, and hurt, and hurt some more. For a little while there’d been a slim chance that he might have intended coming back here first after all; even if only to pick up his packed valise, even if only to say, “Alberta, I’m leaving you.” But that slim hope was long since gone now. The eyes on the clock had killed it. It was long past his time for coming home now. He hadn’t intended coming here first. It was already the hour for me to do the dishes. It was already the hour for him to tune in the Bob Hope program and sit in there laughing with that choked sound he made when he was laughing to himself.

And the rooms were dark. There was no laughing sound in them, no odor of cigarette smoke. I was alone, a lost, frightened thing straying around, my whole world crumbled away all around me like the shell of an egg.

Once I took the clock and lifted it and squeezed its cold round shape between my hands and shook it as if to wring some pity into it, pleading with it: “Oh, make him come — please make him come! Give him back —”

It just tittered, “Tk-tk-tk.”

Sometimes I stood by the window, cooling my heated face against the glass. Sometimes I sat still, pressing my eyes against my hands. Sometimes I got up and moved around from room to room, in and out and in again, but never going anywhere. Sometimes I would go to the door and swing it wide and stand there looking for him, as if hoping the draft would sweep him in to me. But it never did; he never came.

It seemed to have been going on for so long. This couldn’t be the same night, could it? This must have been some trick arrangement of a week of nights, a month of them, lumped solidly together without any days in between.

Then finally, like an unmistakable warning inside me, came the point at which I knew I couldn’t stay on in here any longer. Oh, I’d said to myself I couldn’t stand it a hundred times over already, but that was just saying it; this was the real feeling now. This was the strange calm, the lull, that precedes hysteria. I knew if I didn’t get out, even if only to roam the streets, I’d begin screaming his name out in another minute, and the neighbors would all open their windows and —

I jammed on my hat in the dark — the first, the last, the only time I ever did it that way. I found my way to the door; I wrenched it open — and there he was, standing right on the other side of it, nearly filling the narrow frame.

It was uncanny; it was almost like mental telepathy. I put my hand up and I touched him where the necktie went down into the vest. He felt so good. So good and solid and warm and present. I’d never known that gladness was a lot like gin; they both burned like the dickens inside you.

Hysteria deflated into a couple of bedraggled whimpers that crept out and slunk off, as if ashamed of themselves, and that was the end of it.

I reached out with my other hand and threw the switch and lit him up. Lit him up from in front, from inside our place, as well as from that dim light way down the hall.

He’d been standing there like that, in that funny way, looking for his key, I supposed. He almost never could find it at the moment he needed to use it. I could even hear the faint clash of metal as he fumbled for it in his pocket.

He’d been in a fight. As if I cared! He could have been in ten, so long as he’d come back to me now. His lip was split, and there was a cut over one eye, and a strand of his hair hung down in a dank fishhook over his forehead. The only thing that was strangely missing was the whiff of alcohol to go with it.

I reached up and fondly pushed the fishhook back in place, but it came right down again. I put both my arms around his neck, tight, and hid my face against him and took a great big deep sigh.

I kept waiting to feel his arms close around behind me, but they didn’t. “He’s still off me a little,” I thought ruefully.

But I didn’t care; he could be sore at me all he wanted, if he’d only stay with me while he was being sore.

He shoved me unexpectedly back before him, and when I looked up in surprise I saw it wasn’t he but the two men who were with him, one on each side, who had shoved him.

I hadn’t seen them until now; the doorway wasn’t terribly wide — and then there’d been him to look at. There was a glistening little chain from his hand to one of theirs, even though he was holding it in his pocket, trying to hide it from me. And his other one — well, the second man was holding that down at his side, with the cuff all twisted around like a wringer.

But it was that chain; I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It hurt; it was wound so tight around — my heart.

He said to me quite gently, “Don’t be frightened, Alberta. It’s all right.”

One of the strangers close beside the two of us said, “It’s all right, is good.”

But we only had eyes for one another, even after they were inside with him and the door was closed. We stood there, the two of us, in a frightened little world of our own, with nobody else around.

He said, “They think I —” He stopped and started over again. “Well, look, there was a —”

“I know, I know about it. It wasn’t you. Tell them. Kirk, not you. Tell them.”

“Yeah, tell us, Kirk,” one said.

We didn’t hear them; we didn’t even know they were there. One had wandered off, anyway, to look around the place.

“How did you know? The radio —?”

“I was there,” I said. “I was right there when you —”

I saw the start of surprise he gave. He reached out with his free hand and touched the extreme corner of my mouth in a sort of caress. But one finger lay across both lips at once, the upper and the lower, so I knew what the caress was for.

A voice from somewhere outside the two of us said, “What’d you just say, lady?”

Kirk said quietly, “She didn’t say anything.”

His foot slid out a little along the rug, unnoticeably, and touched mine warningly. I had sense enough not to look down.

“She said she heard it on the radio,” Kirk said.

“Tell them, Kirk,” I kept repeating futilely. It was the only thing I could think of to say.

He smiled at me a little. “I have been, for hours past. It doesn’t seem to help.” The point was he was coming back to me, more and more every minute; I could feel it. Not from this police business, from her, I mean.

“You don’t think so, do you?” And when my swimming eyes had told him the best they could, he said: “Well, I have that much at least.”

I had him back again.

I turned to the one who had stayed right beside us. He’d had to, because of that little steel chain. “He couldn’t have, don’t you see?” I even plucked at the chain, childishly trying to get rid of it, but that only brought both their hands up at once in a double gesture that was somehow horrible. “He couldn’t have,” I kept on saying. “He was at his office. He was at his office until after six. I phoned him there; he’d just left; the girl’ll tell you —”

It was like talking to stone. Even his eyes were stone. They were fixed on me, but they gave no sign of mobility.

The other one came in from the hall. He was carrying Kirk’s packed valise with him. “Yeah, here it is,” he announced quietly.

The one with us said, “We better let him go, Flood. She says he couldn’t have done it.” He didn’t even crack a smile. He had refined cruelty down to a science. Or maybe he didn’t even know he was being cruel at all.

Flood said, with a touch of lazy compassion, a sort of passive tolerance at best, “Aw, don’t rib her, Brennan. I’ve got one of my own at home. I know how they are.”

“Yeah,” Brennan marveled, as though I wasn’t within hearing of them at all. “Ain’t it wonderful the way they’ll go to bat for these guys? They don’t even know what it is, where it is, or anything else about it, but right away it couldn’t have been him because they say so.” He sucked something and it made a pop inside his cheek. “All right, ready? Let’s go.”

I flung my arm convulsively around Kirk’s neck, as if to hold him there with me. Across his shoulder I pleaded to the one called Flood, in whom I thought I’d detected a soft spot: “But he was still at his office after six, don’t you see? I was over there myself at her place; I was there, I tell you, around five, and she was already —”

Kirk’s cuff mate gave me a withering look; he was plainly disgusted by such a transparent prevarication; that was an insult to their intelligences. “Sure,” he said dryly, “you were over there. You had tea with her, I suppose. They were going away together tonight, and you dropped in for a sociable farewell visit. Or maybe to help her pack.”

And even the one called Flood — I could see by the way he looked at me he didn’t take it seriously either — just felt sorry for me. He tried to let me down as gently as he could. “I’m sorry, Mrs Murray,” he said, “that wouldn’t help much even if it were so. You see, she — it happened between one and two in the afternoon. We have experts who can give us the time on these things. And Murray here” — you could tell by the tightening up when he pronounced the name and glanced aside at him his feeling sorry ended with me, didn’t extend to Kirk — “Murray here may have been back at his office by the time you phoned around six, but he admits that he was over there at the Mercer place just around that very time. In fact, he was seen leaving the building at a quarter of two, so there’s no virtue in his either admitting or denying it.”

Kirk’s breath said, soft beside my ear in rueful tenderness, “Don’t say that anymore, about you going there. Please, for me, won’t you? Thanks just the same.” I saw that he didn’t believe me himself, now that he’d thought twice about it, any more than the other two did. Masculine minds seem to run in the same groove in certain situations.

“I couldn’t get in; she didn’t answer the bell,” he went on. “So I waited a minute or two, and then I went away again.” But this was to them, over the top of my head, not to me. He was ashamed to address me directly about it because of the implication.

Brennan suddenly raised his own hand. To show me Kirk’s hand, by bringing it up automatically like that along with his. There were a number of varying red streaks on the back of it.

“Her cat did that,” Kirk said, continuing to address them. “I’ve told you where those came from over and over.”

Brennan said to Flood: “She wouldn’t let him in, but her cat raked his hand.”

“It was outside in the hall; it had gotten out in some way. When I tried to grab it, it slashed at me and ran away. It acted like something had frightened it. But it was always running out like that, beating it up to the roof and places, so I let it go —”

“Good alibi, that cat,” Brennan said. He let their hands drop again. “But not good enough. Come on.” He gave his wrist a directional jerk that tautened the links. Kirk had to turn in answer to it. It did something to me, to see him turn in involuntary obedience like that. The way a dog does on a leash.

I tried to draw his face down to mine, press it to me, but his cheek slipped away and was gone; I couldn’t hold it.

They were taking him out the door. “Ah, wait,” I pleaded. “Won’t he need something? Let me give him something to take with him.”

I ran into the bedroom, looked around blindly, snatched up something at random from underneath one of the bed pillows. I think it was a pair of striped pajamas; I’m not sure.

I know, I know; it was a silly thing to do, but I’d never had my husband taken away from me for murder before; I hadn’t learned the proper decorum.

I ran back with them, and when I got there the door was standing open and the hallway beyond was empty. They hadn’t waited; they were gone.

I stood there in the open doorway, and the rolled-up pajamas dropped disconsolately to the floor at my feet and lay there.

THREE

announcement of widowhood

ICOULDN'T BELIEVE IT was all over and done with already as I sat there in Benedict’s office waiting for him to come back. The long dragging months seemed to have flashed by like minutes. I had a childish notion that they’d left something out, that they’d rushed things through more than they had a right to, more than they did with others. Benedict said no, and the calendar said no, but it couldn’t be that this was the last of it, that there was nothing more after this. Why, it was only yesterday that he was still sitting there across the table from me, grumbling: “Gee, what d’ye do to this coffee? You could plant geraniums in it!” Why, it was only last night, wasn’t it, that they’d taken him away from me, and I’d come running to the door a minute too late, and a pair of his rolled-up pajamas had fallen to the floor and remained there at my feet?

And now it was over already. It had been since that hideous day last week. This, today, was just anticlimax, the finishing touch. That was why Benedict had been able to persuade me to wait here in his office instead of going down there and being present in the chambers. He’d wanted me to stay home altogether, but I couldn’t have endured that. At least here, at this halfway stop, I could hear it a little sooner — what I knew already.

Benedict’s office girl was a sympathetic young thing. She sat there beside me on a hard little wall bench in his reception room with her arm around me, offering me a drink of water from time to time. I guess she didn’t know what else to do for me. She kept talking away a blue streak, trying to be encouraging.

“It’s just a technicality. I know it frightens people so, but it isn’t final; it isn’t irrevocable. It’s just a legal phrase that’s automatically spoken in all these cases. Honey, I’ve seen Mr Benedict get more people off on appeals and reversals. Haven’t you, Mort? How about it, Mort?”

Mort was a young law clerk who worked in the office. He was sympathetic too. He’d go away and then come back again at intervals. He wasn’t talking quite so much and so sanguinely, I noticed. Maybe he knew more law than she.

“He wouldn’t even let me take the stand. Don’t you think maybe that would have helped?”

“But, honey, what could you have done? What could you have said? Don’t you suppose he would have been the first to call you if it would have helped any? He never overlooks a witness that he thinks will help a case. And he never uses one that he thinks will weaken it. Does he, Mort? Mort, does he? Nobody saw you come or go there that day; that was the unfortunate part of it. The jury wouldn’t have believed you any more than the arresting detectives did. They would have thought you were just making it up to try to shield your husband, and the sympathy that you aroused for yourself would have worked in reverse; it would have alienated them against him even more than they were already. That’s why he tried to keep you away from the proceedings as much as possible and made you wear a veil and sit far back in the courtroom where you wouldn’t be noticed. You see, you’re too appealing, too attractive, honey; and you have to admit he was mixed up with this other woman, was going away with her, even if it was only for a spell. You were a bad risk; you would have hurt our side more than you helped it, just by being who you are, looking like you do. You were the injured party, but the — forgive me for saying this, honey — the injury was done you by the very man my boss was trying to defend.”

“Let him injure me some more,” I thought dismally; “I only want him back. Let him injure me to his heart’s content.”

“And then even if Mr Benedict hadn’t felt that way about it himself,” she went on, “Mr Murray particularly asked him not to call you unless he had to; that was his wish. He didn’t want you to get all smeared up in it if it could be avoided.”

That was true. Kirk had told me the same thing himself.

I kept watching the door, watching the door, waiting for it to open. “Shouldn’t he be back by now? Does it always take this long?”

“He’ll be here any minute now, honey. Just be patient.”

Finally it did open, and there he was, carrying a brief.

I tried to read his face from all the way across the reception room. My eyes fastened on him in mute appeal and followed him as he came on toward me, and then past, and swung out the little gate in the partition railing and passed through. He avoided my gaze with an air of studious preoccupation. He didn’t seem to see me until I had risen and he couldn’t pretend not to anymore. That alone should have been answer enough.

Then he said, “Come inside; come into my office.” And to the girl, “Why did you let her sit out here, Ruthie? Why didn’t you have her wait inside?”

The girl said, “She didn’t want to be alone in there, Mr Benedict. She asked if she could sit with me, and I had to be out here to answer the switchboard.”

He held the private-office door for me and I went in. I felt a little bit as though I were going to my own execution here and now. There wasn’t very much doubt of what he was going to tell me. It was just the word itself that was so awful. And the attaching of a date to it.

He couldn’t look at me at first. He fussed around with the papers he’d brought back with him as long as he could. I just waited, with my eyes burning at him.

He sighed finally and said: “Now don’t take it hard. The other day was the real test, and you stood it like a major; you were wonderfully brave.”

He wouldn’t have said that if he could have seen me afterward, at home by myself, with the corner of the pillow stuffed into my mouth, I thought.

Wasn’t he going to say it ever? Was he just going to stand there like that all afternoon? “Is it —?”

“I’m appealing it, of course.”

“He didn’t give him — the other?”

“He couldn’t; there was no recommendation of mercy.”

“Say it. I can stand it. Only say it quick and get it over with.” But he still wouldn’t name the word; I had to myself.

“The chair? The electric chair?”

He looked down at his desk in assent.

It exploded in my mind. My husband has been sentenced to death. That thing we all obey, all live under, the law of the state, has decreed he shall be taken from me in full health, and his body attached to —

I closed my eyes briefly, opened them again. Because what there was to be seen on the outside was less fearful than what there was to be seen on the inside.

He was worried about me. I was sitting down, so he must have thrust forward a chair. He tried to take out a bottle of liquor he kept for such emergencies in one of the desk drawers. I motioned to him not to. “Don’t be afraid,” I murmured half audibly.

“It isn’t over yet. You’re taking the typical layman’s point of view,” he tried to say. Or something like that.

I motioned that aside too. Of course it was over. The damage was already largely done. The sentence had already been partially carried out on both of us. In our hearts, if nowhere else. How could we both be ever quite the same again? What good would his appeal be by the time it was finally submitted? They’d never give me back quite the same man that had gone up there to that place where they kept them. They’d never give him back the same wife that he had left behind.

After a while, in a carefully controlled voice that wasn’t like my own at all, I asked: “How did he take it?”

“With his head up, looking him straight in the eye.”

“I should have been there, somewhere close by, at such a time. He was all alone in that room, poor boy.”

“He said he was glad you weren’t there to hear it. He thanked me as they took him out for not letting you come.”

A moment or two went sluggishly by. “I guess I’ll go home now,” I said forlornly. “There’s nothing to wait here for anymore.”

He got up and came outside with me. He said, “I’ll take you downstairs and put you in a taxi. Do you want Mort or the girl to ride home with you to your place?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be all right. I’ll have to get used to going around alone from now on, I guess.”

After he’d closed the cab door on me and given the driver my address, and just as he was about to turn away, I reached out quickly through the open window and clutched him by the sleeve. “When? Tell me the date.”

“Now, why do you want to — ?” he protested.

I wouldn’t let go his arm. “I’ve got to know. Please tell me.”

“The week of May sixteenth.”

I sank back against the seat. And all the way home the thought that rode with me was: “I’m only twenty-two, and yet they’re going to make me a widow in less than three months.”

FOUR

farewell scene

IT'S HARD TO SAY goodbye for good at any time or any place. It’s harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss. And nothing should come between the kisses of a man and his wife.

He said things that went right through me. “Everyone’s entitled to be forgiven at least once. Even a dog; they give a dog three bites —”

“You are, you were, you have been, long ago, oh, long ago.”

“That was just — well, it must have been one last wild oat left over. I would have been such a good husband from — then on. If they would’ve only let me. I would have been the best-behaved guy anyone ever had around her. I would have brought you candy or flowers every night when I came home and I would’ve never kicked about the coffee anymore.”

“Don’t,” I sobbed. “You’ll bring me flowers; you’ll bring me candy; you’ll kick about the coffee all you want, all you want. You will, you will again, you’ll see.”

He smiled as though he had his doubts. “But in case, in case I don’t, afterward, after it’s over — Angel Face, you won’t let anyone else bring you flowers home at night or kick about the coffee, will you? Don’t let anyone else — I know you’re young yet — but that belongs to me.”

“Never,” I panted despairingly, “never anyone else but you. It’ll be you or no one at all. Kiss me again. Again. Again. Oh, just once more. Another. They don’t stay on. Kirk, how can we make them last?” Forever is such a long time.

“There’s something else I want to tell you. I’ve always wanted to, ever since that night. This is my last chance; I have to now; there’s only a minute left. You remember that night?”

How could I ever forget it?

“I only went there to tell her I was backing out. That the trip was off. Even the first time, at two. Before I knew what had happened, before I knew it had been taken out of my hands. I’d been thinking it over. I knew it was you, had always been you, would always be you. The other thing was just a weekend spree, a binge, no different from a kid playing hooky from school for one afternoon — and coming home all rashed up with poison ivy afterward, so he don’t do it again in a hurry! Only, I was supposed to meet her at the station, and I couldn’t just let her stand there waiting and not show up. I didn’t want to do that to her; she was a woman, after all. So I went over there to try to break it to her ahead of time. No one answered at two, the first time I was there. I went back to the office and I tried to reach her on the phone a couple of times in between. Then when I still couldn’t get her I went back again at six, when I left the office. What I’m trying to tell you is I went over there — to tell her it was off.”

He ran his thumbnail ruefully along the wire, like harp strings. “I don’t expect you to believe me; I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. It must sound like sour grapes at this late day. But, Angel Face, it’s true. I wasn’t going with her. That’s all I can say.”

I leaned my forehead tenderly against the wire toward him. “Darling,” I said, “I’ve always been able to tell when you were lying. And I’ve always been able to tell when you were telling the truth. And I still am, now. So don’t be afraid. I believe you.”

“Thanks.” He sighed gratefully. “That’ll make it a little easier.”

They came over to take him inside again. So this was it now, and words became just empty sounds. “You’ll be back. This isn’t goodbye. Now remember that — I’m just saying so long to you for a while. Take good care of yourself, darling — until — until I see you again. Oh, wait, just let me kiss him once again —”

“Get ready with some more of that bad coffee, darling, so I’ll have something to growl at when I —”

“I’ll be waiting with it.”

“So long for a while, Angel Face.”

Isn’t it pitiful how two people can kid themselves when they know they’re both lying?

The wire stencil that had framed our kiss was empty; his lips were gone. The murmur of his voice hovered about it for a moment more, as if I were still hearing him say it, though I wasn’t anymore. “So long, Angel Face.”

I had that much back again, at least. He always called me that. That was his name for me when we were by ourselves. That was a special thing, from him to —

FIVE

revery by matchlight

THE FLAT WAS GONE now, and in its place there were the four cramped walls of a furnished room. I wouldn’t have wanted the flat any more, even if there had been money enough to hang onto it; I would have run into him a thousand times a day, from every chair, from every corner of it. I would have heard him wheezing in the shower, howling for the towel that was never there; I would have heard him chuckling over there in that corner where the radio used to be; I would have heard him snoring over in the other bed, late at night —

Life was simpler here in this place. Life was a shot of novocaine. Life was carpet slippers all day long, and a bathrobe, and hair that wasn’t combed. Life was a rickety iron bed that wasn’t slept on, just was wept on. Life was a can punched open maybe once a day, not from hunger, just from a sense of duty. Life was a knock on the door and an “Are you all right in there, lady? This is the landlady; I ain’t seen you in three or four whole days now, and I just wanted to make sure there wasn’t nothing the matter.”

“I’m all right. Sure, I’m great. Don’t worry if you don’t see me or hear me, even for a week at a time. I’m still here; I’ll still be sitting in here.”

“Do you want me to get you a paper, help you to pass the time?”

I screamed it, but she didn’t hear it because I screamed it inside of me. “I don’t want the time to pass! It’s going too quick already! I want it to stand still! I want it to freeze! ”

“No, thanks, there isn’t anything I want to read about or know about.”

Life was like that.

I reached the low point of the whole thing, the bottommost dip of the graph, the night someone from the Police Property Clerk’s Office came around to return his things. They give them back to you, it seems; they give you back everything but the main thing: who was in them. That they keep; that’s theirs, to plug into the lighting system and then throw away.

This was just routine, the usual procedure when they send them up to that place, but I didn’t know that, and at first sight of them hanging over his arm, empty, it gave me a horrible twinge, as though — it was over and he was gone already. I took them and I signed something and thanked him and closed the door. And if I let out all the stops afterward, that was just between me and those clothes of his.

I knew, though, as I lay there, face burrowing into the folds of his jacket, that I could never be so utterly, heartbrokenly, abandonedly forlorn again as I was there in that little room, with just the light bulb overhead to see me. From then on, whether there was hope or not, whether there was a chance or not, the curve was bound to be upward. Things could never look so dismal to me again. You can only cry like that once. Once and for one man. I gave him that. That was my testament of love.

Afterward, I remember, I was sitting dully on the edge of the bed, stroking the empty sleeve of his coat across my lap and slowly pulling myself together after the recent drenching outburst. The things that had been in his pockets that last night were in a couple of little manila envelopes, fastened to a buttonhole of the coat. I detached them and emptied them out. The money he’d been carrying and his wristwatch and his key holder, and even his seal ring, were in one. And less valuable things in the other. A chromium pencil (that had always been out of lead) and a business letter or two and a laundry ticket with a Chinese character on it, standing for shirts that were still waiting for him somewhere and that he’d never call for now.

It was like a poignant rosary of the commonplace, to pay out these things one by one before my eyes.

And a battered package of his brand of cigarettes, with still the same two leftovers in it that must have been in it that night. Oh, they were so honest, these police! They wouldn’t touch a convicted man’s last two cigarettes. But they’d send him, for something he hadn’t done, up to meet his —

And a pair of those lucky-number counterfoils from the last time we’d been to a show together. You know the kind. You detach the stubs and drop them in a box on your way in. And then a week from Thursday, if that particular number happens to be drawn — The remark he’d made that night came back to me: “I never had any luck with one of these stunts yet!” He hadn’t been lucky in more things than that, poor boy.

The envelopes were empty now. The pitiful collection was all spread out on my lap.No, wait — one last thing. It came sidling out at a shake of the envelope.

Nothing. The ultimate in valuelessness. A folder of matches. Even that they’d conscientiously returned to me. Everything, everything but him himself they’d seen to it that I got back.

It was one of hers, in the bargain. I recognized it by the turquoise cover, the inevitable double M. One superimposed on the other, so that it really looked like a single M with double outlines.

That, I couldn’t help thinking, was rubbing it in a little, although most of the sting was gone at this late day. He must have picked it up to use the last time he was there and then absentmindedly put it into his own pocket instead of returning it to wherever it had been lying. As anyone might be apt to do. And here it was now, in my palm. About all that was left of her pitiful, ephemeral glamour. That had expressed itself, thought the quintessence of elegance was to stamp initials wholesale all over everything — on match covers and highball glasses and, I supposed, lingerie. I didn’t hate her. I found, tonight, I never had. I’d been badly frightened for an hour or two that day. And ever since I’d just been sorry for her. Still, I got a peculiar mordant satisfaction from shredding the remaining match or two that were all that still clung to this battered token. Striking them, to flash transiently for a moment, like she had. And then — she was gone now. She was gone like this: Phwit! And there it was, on the floor, something to be thrown out.

A little thing came into my mind. I don’t know how or from where. And as I thought of it, dwelt on the thought of it, it grew bigger and bigger, until it was crowding everything else out. I had seen one of these match covers up there myself. It had been wedged into the seam of the door, to keep the latch from closing fast. I had noticed it as I was standing there waiting to slip out, and I had picked it up, unfolded it, thrown it down again. It was just like this one it had an M on it, and the pasteboard was blue on the outside.

But here was the little thought that grew bigger and bigger: It wasn’t just like this one.

It had been blue, but not turquoise, a far deeper shade. And the M on it wasn’t a double-lined, it was single-lined.

Why would she go to the trouble of selecting a certain trick monogram — naïve though it was — and then have it scattered around on everything in sight, if she was going to allow a variation of it, a symbol that didn’t quite match, to appear on one item? It wouldn’t have been in character. To her, monogramming spelt chic, and not to have carried it out identically on everything at once would have been a flaw.

Besides, this very cover in my hand now showed she had carried it out on her matches as well as on everything else. Therefore, that other cover that I’d seen up there was not hers.

That initial was somebody else’s. It stood for somebody else whose name began with an M. And that somebody else had killed her.

There was a triple coincidence there that had kept me from realizing that fact until now. Both names, hers and her killer’s, began with the same letter. Just as Kirk’s own did, for that matter, although it would never have occurred to him to go around carrying his initials on match folders and things; he would have laughed at the idea as it deserved to be laughed at. And, secondly, this unknown seemed to have the same crass flair she did for having his things personalized with an initial. And, thirdly, it happened that the piece of pasteboard involved was blue, though of a quite different shade from the tone she had seemed to dote on.

And in my excitement of mind that day, following the shock of the discovery I had just made, these discrepancies hadn’t made sense to me.

They did now. Somebody whose name began with an M had been to see her that day, had detected something he didn’t like, had fixed the door so that he could return and catch her off guard, and when he had —

Oh, if I only knew all the people she knew whose names began with M! Wait, there had been a book. Hadn’t there been a list of names, an alphabetical calling list, I’d snatched up and taken with me that day, at the last moment, in my flurry of panic-stricken departure? I hadn’t thought of it since; I hadn’t seen it since. But that latter fact alone argued that, if I had taken it, it was still around somewhere.

I got out my handbag and started plumbing its depths and crevices. The woman never yet breathed who could be absolutely certain, at any one given time, of all that her own handbag holds. There is always some overlooked thing, some mislaid thing that she has lost track of, to be found lurking in its myriad compartments and zippered slits.

There was in this one too. But not what I was looking for. And yet I was certain I had brought that thing away with me. I could remember its soft leather turquoise cover, its stepped page margins, as well as I could that single-lined M on the match cover. I had all but torn the lining out of the bag, and there was no use kneading it any further. I sat there with it dangling disheartenedly over my knee.

Then I remembered that I’d gotten myself together rather carefully that day, to try to create a certain desired impression on her. I must have carried the other, the special, the dressy one. I’d forgotten I owned it. I hadn’t used it since. That had been the last time clothes, accessories, meant anything to me. I’d been down to elementals from then on.

So I got it out and looked in that. And at the first touch of my fingers, as I unsheathed the mirror, turquoise flashed up at me like a patch on the black lining.

I opened it at the M page. My fingers had stopped being steady any more. I thought: “Someone in this book killed her. The name is in this book. On this very page I’m holding open here. It’s looking right at me, staring me in the face. And I’m looking at it. But I can’t tell which one it is.”

“I’m looking at it,” my mind repeated, “and I can’t tell which one it is.”

But I was going to find out.

I didn’t even know his first name, or rating, or which precinct house he was attached to. So if there’d been more than one of them by that last name I might have got hold of the wrong one. In fact, I didn’t know anything about him. Only that he’d been a little less brutal, a little more human, that night that they’d brought Kirk back to the apartment. And I had to have someone to turn to; I couldn’t go the thing alone.

So I walked into the precinct house that was the nearest to where she had lived and I asked for him. “Is there a Flood here?”

“Wesley Flood, on Homicide, that who you want?”

“I — I guess so.”

“Name, please?”

“Just say a young lady.”

They showed me into some room at the back, and he saw me in there. It was he. He couldn’t place me for a minute, I could tell. Then he remembered. “You’re Murray’s wife; that’s it!”

I told him wanly, yes, that was it.

He looked me over surreptitiously, I guess to see how I was taking it, standing up under it. I caught a flicker of sympathy in his eyes, though I suppose he didn’t realize it showed. I really didn’t want that; I wanted advice and coaching.

I told him what I’d found at the Mercer apartment. I told him what I thought it meant and what I intended doing about it.

He heard me through. Just sat and listened attentively. There was no mistaking his expression, though. Finally I had to say, “You still don’t think I was up there that day, do you?”

“Possibly you were —”

“Well, here’s the book. Look, right here. Her book!”

He leafed it, tapped it a couple of times against his thumbnail, handed it back. His attitude was unmistakable: it was over; it was water under the bridge. Whether I had been up there or not didn’t matter any longer. Hadn’t in the first place. The case was closed.

He tried to talk me out of it at first. “Look, even taking your point of view, even granting that Murray — that your husband — isn’t guilty and that there’s someone else still at large who is, don’t you see you may be starting from a wrong premise altogether in basing something on this book and on that match cover you say you saw? There’s no hard-and-fast rule that the name of everyone she knew had to go into that book. It could work the other way around, couldn’t it? Those she knew well, those she knew best, mightn’t be in it at all. She’d be so familiar with their numbers she’d know them by heart, wouldn’t have had to write them down. Only those she knew less well would be in the book.”

I thought of Kirk’s name. She’d known him well enough to try to vamp him into going away with her, and his name was in the book. I didn’t tell him that; there was still an ache in that old wound.

“There have been murders committed before, you know,” he went on, “by people having no telephone numbers to their name at all. What I’m trying to tell you is this: there’s no certainty —”

“But nothing’s ever certain, is it? Only that you people have the wrong man.”

He lidded his eyes deprecatingly. “Ah, you’d only get all muddied up. You’re too nice a person, Mrs Murray. Don’t try it. You’re not her type; you won’t know how to handle half of these people.”

“I’ll have to learn.”

Maybe it showed on my face. Maybe he saw what he’d be doing to me by dampening, taking away this one incentive I had left. Maybe he thought it would be kinder after all to let me start out on a hopeless, foredoomed quest than on no quest at all, to just sit counting the days as they went by, crossing them off one by one on the calendar of my mind until that red-letter date, sometime during the week of May sixteenth, was reached.

All I know is he suddenly changed. For no apparent reason, because of nothing that I had been able to say to convince him. “Try it, anyway,” he consented abruptly. “Go ahead and try it.”

I’d intended to anyway, whether with his benediction or not. But I did need someone to angel me, even if against his own convictions.

“Will they — do you think I’m running any risk of being recognized from the trial?”

“Well, I didn’t know you at first, and I’m supposed to have a mind trained to remember faces. You didn’t take the stand, and you were kept pretty much in the background. I’d say if you change yourself around a little you’d have a pretty good chance of not being recognized.”

“Now, what sort of evidence will I need for it to be any good? Documentary, or will it just be enough if there’s some slip made in the course of conversation, or what sort of requirement will there be from the police point of view?”

“There wouldn’t be any documentary evidence in a case like this,” he let me know. “You don’t find murders written down in black and white, like bank statements. If you can get anything you come to me with it, even if it’s only a rumor, a piece of idle gossip. That’ll be enough from this policeman’s point of view. If there’s anything to it at all we’ll see that it gets turned into something documentary; you leave that to us.”

He saw me to the door. “You go ahead, and luck to you. Keep in touch with me; you can always find me around here.” But then at the very last he couldn’t resist adding, out of sheer kindliness, I suppose: “Will you do one thing for me, though? Don’t get your heart too set on it. Don’t take it too hard if it doesn’t — work out the way you expect it to.”

I knew he didn’t really believe Kirk hadn’t done it. He didn’t expect me to uncover anything, because he thought everything there was to be uncovered had already been uncovered. Pity was making him seem to abet me. He thought it would be easier on me if I had some will-o’-the-wisp to chase than just to sit still waiting for the switch to fall.

I knew that as I left him; I could read it in him, on him.

“I’ll show him too,” I vowed. “I’ll show them all.”

“I stayed up all night rubbing soap on my finger,” I told the pawnbroker, “but I can only get it up as high as the joint, where it is now. It won’t go over it.”

He tried it a couple of times with his bare hand. “You could have it filed off,” he said.

“I know I could, but I don’t want that done to it. I thought maybe you have a pair of pliers or some sort of instrument handy you could get it off with. I don’t care how much it hurts; it’s got to come off.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. He came back and put a drop or two of oil on my finger just above it and then got a good firm grip on the ring with a pair of nippers. Then he braced my arm by holding it pressed tightly under his own and started to tug away at it.

It made it; it came off and flew across the pawnshop, and he had to go after it.

It looked so funny and raw there where it had been until now. It had left a little circlet of pink behind at the base of my finger. It was the first time it had been off since I was seventeen.

He polished it and examined it and said: “You want to sell it outright or just pawn it?”

“I’d rather just pawn it. I — I’ll want it back someday.”

“Five dollars,” he said.

“But it’s pure gold; it’s —”

“I know, but how much gold is in a wedding ring? Seven-fifty. And not because of the ring, because I’ve got a heart where I got no business to have one.”

I held out my hand. “Just let me look at it once again before you take it.” I tilted it so that I could see the engraving on the inside.

K. M. — A. F., 1937.

My brother-in-law pretended not to know my voice at first. Well, maybe he really didn’t recognize it at that. I hadn’t seen them for over three years, since they’d moved out to Trenton.

I said, “This is Alberta. I’m speaking from the city.”

His voice dropped still further, became wary. “Oh —uh — yes,” he said. “Alberta, how are you? We got your note and —uh — been meaning to answer it. You see, how we’re fixed here is — well, the house is rather small, and on account of the kids, I don’t see —”

“But you don’t understand. I didn’t ask to be taken in. I thought I made that plain in my note. I don’t want anything done for me; I’ll look after myself. All I’m asking you to do is lend me a sum of money. I’ll pay you the usual rate of interest on it, and you’ll get it back, every penny of it —”

“Is it for —? Are you still trying to help him? ” The way he said that, you had to hear it to know what I mean.

“Is Rose there? Let me speak to her a minute.” I’d never liked him much anyway.

“She —uh — just stepped out to the store.” The timing was faulty; there was too much slack in the answer. As when you turn your head to confer in pantomime. I could see the signs going on, as though I were right in the room with them. Signs of interrogation and signs of refusal.

My own sister. No, because I was the wife of a condemned man now. I might bring notoriety into their home. They had their children’s welfare to consider, their friends, their standing in the community.

I said with a sort of passive, low-wattage dignity, “All right, Harvey. Never mind. I’d better get off now.”

“You can reverse the charges,” he said patronizingly.

I needed that money bitterly, even the little the call was going to cost. I knew it was a foolish thing to do. And yet it wasn’t pride or sulkiness. It was a compulsion of the my blood itself. I could no more have accepted that small sop from him now —

“No,” I said with calm firmness. “It’s been worth it to me. The experience alone —”

I hung up. I never saw either of them, or spoke, or heard from, or thought of them again.

SIX

crescent 6 4824............marty

IT HAD A LINE drawn through it, and I wondered why. It was the only one on that whole page to have a line drawn through it. I’d noticed a name here and there, on other pages, with a line drawn through the number and a new number superimposed — and that was understandable, a change of location. But never a line drawn through both name and number alike, as with this one. Wherever they went, though they changed numbers, they carried the same names with them; those remained unchanged.

Then what was this?

It could be death, I knew. And I dreaded the thought of tracking down a dead man. Or it could be a severance of relations. I hoped, of the two, to find it was that. One thing was sure: that line meant something, was there for a reason, had not just been drawn through it idly.

It came due at its appointed time, and its appointed time was now, five-thirty of a porcelain-blue evening. Hours had gone by in the preparations leading up to it, preparations that could not be seen by the eye, gave no outward sign, could have been mistaken for silent pondering or absentminded reverie, but were active within me nevertheless.

At the very end, as the moment for it drew nigh, I drew nearer to it by degrees. The telephone, I mean. I walked back and forth before it, murmuring to myself, memorizing a lesson under my breath. Sometimes looking up at the ceiling, sometimes down at the floor, as I did so. Turning every few paces and retracing my steps. Back and forth, back and forth, whispering under my breath.

“If the voice is young, sort of vital, resonant, the opening wedge is: ‘You don’t know me, but I feel as though I know you; I’ve heard so much about you.’ Then go on from there. The key is flirtatious, coquettish.

“If the voice is dry, lifeless, worn out, the opening wedge is: ‘I have some information which I feel may interest you.’ The key is a suggestion of pecuniary or personal advantage.

“If the voice is brisk, businesslike, impersonal, then the best approach is likewise direct, impersonal, without shadings or overtones. ‘My name is so-and-so; I would like to speak to you personally for a few moments.’

“If the voice is indeterminate, cannot be analyzed, fits into none of these categories, then the third approach, the direct, businesslike one, is still the best.”

I had stopped parading now. I had it memorized.

I sat down before the instrument and braced myself, one hand stiffly to each end of the small table it sat on.

I thought of him, as I did each time. “Wish me luck, darling; maybe this will be it.” I took a deep preparatory breath. The dial wheel oscillated beneath my finger, and my thoughts oscillated with it. “If the voice is young, vibrant — If the voice is dry, reserved — If the voice is businesslike —”

“Hello?” There wasn’t enough to tell by.

“Is Marty there?”

“Marty who?”

“Just Marty.”

“You’ll have to give me the last name.”

I’d known I would; I’d been afraid of that, but I didn’t have it to give. I parried evenly with the question I’d prepared myself. “Who is this I’m speaking to, please?”

“This is the desk of the St Albans Hotel.”

“Oh —” So all the rehearsal had been wasted. “Well, I have no second name. I’m trying to reach someone whom I know only as Marty. Couldn’t you help me just from that? Couldn’t you tell me if you have anyone registered with you whose first name is Marty?”

“I don’t see how,” he said rather ungraciously.

In this, from beginning to end, there was to be no acceptance of defeat. I knew already it must be that way. My mind was made up. There would be no such thing as a refusal, a slight, a rebuff. Or rather, they would have no power to hinder me.

“I don’t see how I can help you. I’m rather busy at the moment.”

I made my voice pleasantly reasonable. “This is important to me. It’s not a frivolous matter. It’s a serious matter. If I come down there myself, instead of taking up your time on the phone, won’t you please try to help me trace this person?”

His own voice relented. “If you drop in I can have someone look over the registers for you.”

It was a pleasantly prosperous-looking place, a residential-type hotel. Just under the upper brackets of ultrasmartness, perhaps, but spelling a sort of solid, substantial, middle-class affluence. That was likely to prove a point in my favor, I realized immediately as I stepped in. This type hotel attracted a very small percentage of transients. It would have a far slower and less continuous turnover than an ordinary commercial hotel, and the guests individually would be far more likely to be known personally to the management and to be recalled by name even after they had gone.

They were courteous to me. Sight at firsthand evidently improved my status. The assistant manager himself came out to me.

“I’m sorry, Miss —?”

“Miss French.”

“I’m sorry, Miss French. As the desk already told you, there is no one registered with us at the moment whose given name is ‘Marty’ or Martin. I’ve had someone go over the register. Are you sure that’s all the information you can give us?”

“I’m afraid that’s all.”

“Could you give me an idea of what the person looks like?”

“I’m afraid not,” I had to admit. “You see, the person is not known to me. But it’s very important that I get in touch with him. And this first name and the address here are the only clues I have.” At least I was able to impress him with my earnestness, if nothing else; I could see that.

“I’m sorry, I’d be only too glad to help you.” He stroked his immaculately shaven jowls. “But I don’t see how I can.”

I did, and I didn’t hesitate to make the suggestion. “I don’t like to impose, but if I wait out here, couldn’t you have someone go back through your back registers — just for a short distance — and see if such a person was here formerly?”

“Well —” he said. “Well —” And then, “Just a moment.”

He left me sitting out there while he went in to give the order to someone. So I knew I’d won that point, at least.

It took quite some time, and while I was sitting there I tried to form a composite impression of this mysterious “Marty” by piecing him together from the other habitués of the place. Not, I knew, that there was any guarantee he need necessarily resemble the others just because he had formerly dwelt here; he could have been a different type altogether who simply had happened to live in the same building for a while. But there is a degree of truth after all in the old saying about birds of a feather, and I felt he would not have lodged here at any time if he had not had a certain something in common with those I now glimpsed about me here and there passing through from the elevators to the street and vice versa, stopping for a moment at the desk or to chat with an acquaintance in the lobby.

This, then, was how he would be if he ran true to form: a man already past the financial hazards of the twenties and entered now upon the prosperous calm of early middle age, when money, if it is to be made at all, has already been made. That is to say, not that the process of making it is discontinued, but the system of making it is set, runs more or less under its own momentum, releasing the individual from a great many of the earlier strains and stresses. He would be jovial, complacent, a little self-assertive (and entitled to be). Beginning to round a little at the waistline, but not enough as yet to worry about it overmuch. Hair beginning to thin a little, but that would still be a secret between him and his barber. He would stroll about, preceded by an expensive Havana cigar, and he would have an appreciative eye for the female stranger that would grow stronger as time went on. Not one of them failed to look me over, though not in a blatant, disconcerting manner.

Well, that would be about him. A little of all that would enter into his personality, and then there would be other elements, of course, particular to him as an individual.

The assistant manager had come out to me again. He had something jotted on a card that someone had evidently transcribed from the register at his behest.

“I wonder if you could mean either one of these?” he said. “I had them go back three full seasons. Unfortunately — or perhaps I should say fortunately — we seem to have had a scarcity of guests with the given name of Martin during recent years. Now there’s a Martin Ebling who was with us some time ago. He left as his forwarding address Cleveland; that was at that time. Whether it’s still valid, of course, I don’t know. Then the other is Martin Blair. He left as his forwarding address another hotel here in the city.” His lip curled in a sort of professional disdain. “The Senator. I think you’ll find that farther downtown.” He sounded as though it were some sort of blemish that was liable to erasure from one day to the next.

I took them both down and I thanked him and left.

It was only when I’d reached there and gone in that I fully understood that lift of his lip.

“I wonder what happened to him?” I thought. “From the St Albans to the Senator.” It was more than a step down; it was a vertical drop.

They didn’t look you over here; they practically disrobed you optically. With them the process of not making money was all that had carried over from the twenties, continuing all the earlier stresses and hazards. In partial compensation they had retained youth’s slimness of waist and, on the average, their hair was thicker. Why this last should be, I don’t know, unless it was because they couldn’t afford to have it cut and singed and treated preventively as often, and therefore lost less of it. Or perhaps only with peace and perfect security comes the beginning of decay. They stalked around sucking cheap cigarettes, and there was something lean, avid, wolflike about their movements.

Not that they were all carbon copies of one another, you understand; it’s just that that was the general atmosphere of the place. They were even more self-assertive than the other group, but with this difference: no one listened.

The clerk had a badly decayed front tooth and eyes that had looked on everything vicious there was under the electric lights.

“Marty Blair,” he said. “Yeah, I remember him.” The memory was unwelcome. His eyes creased at the corners, and his mouth did too.

“Is he still here?” I asked.

“He was put out a long time ago. We got tired of carrying him.” He chuckled scornfully. “Once wasn’t enough. We had to keep putting him out over and over. He kept trying to sneak back in again each time, even after the door was locked. Finally we wore him out.” He gestured with his hand in dismissal. No pity there, no mercy.

I wondered what he’d been trying to hang onto so desperately, to keep coming back like that each time. Respectability, I guess; even the tattered shreds of it that were still to be found in this place.

“Then you don’t know where he went?”

He eyed me bleakly. “Wherever they go,” he said, “when they’re down and out for the tenth count. The Bowery, I guess.”

“The Bowery?” I said helplessly. “How do you look for them along the Bowery?”

“Once they hit that,” he said, “they’re usually not worth trying to look for any more. Nobody bothers. That’s a living graveyard.”

It was just the words of a song to me; I had so much to learn about everything. “I’ll never go there any more,” something like that.

“But suppose he still was worth trying to look for, then what would I do?”

“Just go in one smokehouse after the other until you see him in one of them — if you can recognize him any more.”

I didn’t even know what he’d looked like to begin with.

“Lady, you’ve got yourself a job,” he said when I’d told him this. He was too world-wise and weary to even ask me what I wanted him for, what I was trying to find him about. It was bound to be just a variation of some tale he’d heard before. For him there was nothing new under the electric lights. And I wondered if I’d ever be that way myself someday.

“He was just an ordinary guy, a dime-a-dozen guy,” he said. “Gee, this is going to be hard. But I helped put him out myself two or three times, so I think I can — Thin and tall, kind of. Light hair, light brown hair. That’s about all I remember.”

Thin and tall. Light brown hair. He was right; I had a job.

They were looking at the backs of my legs from all over the place; I could feel them, and I wanted to get out. “Thanks,” I said.

“Lots of luck, lady,” he said mournfully.

Nothing new under the electric lights. It must be terrible, I thought to myself, to know as much as he did about the less appealing aspects of human nature.

Flophouses, they were, I guess. They called themselves hotels; their signs offered rooms at twenty-five or thirty-five cents a night, and there were scads of them along there. The entrance was always one flight up, never on the street level. And in the background you would see a long bare room with these hopeless figures sitting around, reading papers, or just rocking back and forth, rocking themselves slowly into their graves. Figures that had once been human beings.

It wasn’t a matter of outward appearance, of the clothes they wore. This was a thing that came from inside. A living man could have been in worse rags than they wore, and he would still be a living man. One of them could have been put into the swankiest apparel to be found and he would have still remained — what he was. A lamp with the wick burned out. A bulb with the filaments worn out. Something still intact but that no longer gives off light.

There were so many of them along there. End to end they were placed. Because, after all, that is the one thing that must continue, even in this twilight world — sleep. At first, when I’d come back again each time the following night, I was never quite sure of where I’d left off the night before; they all looked so alike. I found myself overlapping a little. So I brought along a little piece of chalk and I marked a little check, a pothook, on the doorway of the last one as I was quitting for the night. And then when I came again the following night I knew where to begin. At the next one after that.

Over and over and over. Up the dimly lighted stairs to the little niche or cubicle with a slab before it that served as a payment desk. And then the wordless gasp that always followed when they looked up and saw who it was that had been making that toilsome ascent. And then the inevitable blanket dismissal before I was even able to open my mouth. “Sorry, miss, we don’t accommodate ladies.”

“I know, but I’m looking for someone. Marty, his name is Marty. He’s tall and thin, light brown hair. Blair’s his other name, Marty Blair.”

Yet I found, for one thing, that it was easier along here to ask for him just by his given name. This was a place where the second name dropped away again. Whether it was that they were ashamed and kept it to themselves, or that there was no longer any need for it now that they had all reached this common level, they seemed to be known to one another more by their first names and, more than that even, by nicknames that the Bowery had fastened on them.

He’d look through the haphazard, pencil-scrawled book of admissions they kept, and sometimes he’d call to someone sitting nearby for information: “Is Porky’s real name Martin, any of you know?”

They’d scratch their heads and finally someone would say: “No — Marvin, I think I once heard him say. He ain’t who the lady wants anyway; he’s a short, fat little guy. Don’t you ’member him? He was in here only a couple nights ago, had the bed right across from mine.”

Over and over, over and over. While the el rumbled by and you had to wait until it had finished passing before you could make yourself heard.

“We don’t take women.”

“I know, but I’m looking for someone. Marty, his name is Marty. Tall and thin and light brown hair.”

Down the stairs again, around into the next doorway, up the stairs.

“No dames. We only got dormitories here, so you may as well go on down again.”

“Marty, his name is Marty; light brown hair.”

Down the stairs, around, and up.

“Marty, light brown hair —”

One of the newspaper readers over by the window looked up, cackled: “I bet I know who she means, Haggerty. Heartbreak. That guy that’s always talking to a dame that isn’t there.”

I stopped, came back a step or two.

The man behind the slab looked around, asked the “reading room” in general: “Anybody here know his right name?”

“Blake or Blair, something short like that; I think I once heard him tell it to somebody.”

“Blair.” I nodded. “It’s Blair.”

He shuffled forward, offering his services. But indirectly, via the clerk, afraid to address me personally. “I can show you where you’ll mostly find him. Down at Dan’s place; it’s only a little way from here.”

The clerk had had a better look at me by now. “You better not go there, miss. I’ll send one of these fellows for you, have him bring him back here.”

“No, it’s all right; I’d rather go myself.”

I’d never been in a Bowery drinking place before. I’d heard the phrase “the lower depths”; I don’t remember where. I think I’d read it once. This was it now. The lowest depths of all, this side the grave. There was nothing beyond this, nothing further. Nothing came after it — only death, the river. These were not human beings any more. These were shadows.

And there was one thing more pathetic than themselves, more eloquent of what had become of them. It was the hush that fell when I went in. That bated breathlessness. I went into many places after that, but never again did that same thing happen in just that way. Men in a barroom will often fall silent when a woman comes in. This was not that. This was not admiration or even covetousness. I don’t know what to call it myself. It was the memory of someone in each man’s past, someone like me, long ago, far away, come back to mind again for a moment as his blurred eyes focused on me. For just a moment, before the memory darkened again and went out — forever. It was life’s last afterglow glancing off the faces of the dead as I brushed by them.

I went up to the bartender. “Is there someone in here named Heartbreak? I’m looking for someone called Heartbreak.”

His jaw hung slack. He forgot to go ahead with what he’d been polishing. He just looked at me and looked, as though he’d never get through. I didn’t get it at first. He just worked there; he just catered to the dead; he wasn’t one of them. He shouldn’t feel that way.

“Heartbreak?” he said half incredulously.

“Yes, Heartbreak.”

He murmured something to himself that sounded like “So there really was, after all —”

Then I got it a little. What was it they’d said back at that flophouse? That he was always talking of or to a woman who wasn’t there. They hadn’t believed there was such a woman until now. Now, seeing me, they thought I was she. They thought I was his dream come down to the Bowery to seek him, to take him back to life with me.

They were wrong; I wasn’t she. But I had an idea of who she might be.

He’d found his voice at last. He pointed. “That’s him, back there. See him, all the way back against the rear wall?”

I saw a head, inert on one of the plank tables. One arm half folded around it. The other dangling lifeless, straight down toward the floor. I saw two empty thimble glasses, one before him, one before the empty chair beside him.

I turned to the barman uncertainly. “Do you think I can —? How do you wake them up when they’re like that?”

“Want me to go back and shake him a little for you?”

“No, I — I’ll see what I can do myself. Just keep the rest of them away from that table.” I fumbled in my bag, handed him a coin.

“What would you like, miss?”

“Nothing. That’s just for coming in here and sitting with him for a while.”

I made my way back toward where he was, that hush following me like the wake of a boat. Those who were in my way sidled aside to let me go by, then closed in again behind me. Every head in the place, probably, was turned to look after me. I didn’t know about that; I didn’t care. I reached him, and I stood there for a moment looking down at him, feeling a good deal of uncertainty within me. I didn’t even know for sure that he was the one; I only had another nondescript’s guess for it.

I sat down gingerly on the chair beside his, turned sideways toward him. He didn’t move. You wouldn’t have known he was alive at all. Even his breathing didn’t show.

I touched him on the shoulder finally, waited.

That was no good.

I tapped him on it, pressed down heavier.

That was no good.

I tried to shake him.

That was no good either. His hand that was on the table fell around the other way, open side out; that was all.

The bartender came back to my assistance at this point, unasked, bringing a mug of cold water. He must have been watching.

“Stand up a minute, so you don’t get any of it on you,” he counseled. He pulled back his shabby collar a little, baring the nape of the neck. Then he expertly let the water trickle in a thin but continuous thread down on it. The effect must have been needlelike to be able to penetrate those layers of unconsciousness.

He stirred a little finally, grunted, rolled his head unwillingly out of the way of the annoyance. He blew his breath out flatly along the top of the table with a sort of hollow, snorting sound.

The bartender drew his head up and back by the hair, held it that way, leaned around in front of it. “Open your eyes, Heartbreak. Someone here wants to talk to you. The lady here wants to talk to you.”

They remained furrows, plowed deep into his face.

The barman passed the head by the hair grip to one of the men standing gaping around us. “Here, hold him like that a minute till I get back.” He returned behind the bar for something.

The man held the head aloft, but it was I he kept looking at the whole time with a sort of owlish gravity, not the patient.

“I get that way meself quite often,” he offered tentatively. I don’t think it was the content of the remark itself that mattered to him as much as the mere fact of having addressed me at all; he wanted to save that, like they did string and bottle caps and this and that. Things that other people don’t value, but that helps fill up the emptiness of having nothing for them.

The bartender came back with something cloudy in a tumbler. Spirits of ammonia, maybe; I don’t know.

“Here’s a drink for you, Heartbreak. One on the house.”

The eyes flickered, tried to open. They never quite made it, but at least they did flicker valiantly in the attempt. My mind said to me: “This man would be better off dead. Why do we think death is so cruel? It’s life that is cruel. Death is man’s greatest gift from Nature. Animals don’t have this happen to them.”

The bartender got it down him, apparently. I couldn’t see — his back was between us, but the tumbler came back empty.

He held his head a moment longer, then he let go of it. The head fluctuated, weaved in a halolike orbit, but it stayed up.

The bartender withdrew, driving the gallery of onlookers that had hedged us in back before him. “Go back to your own places now, you men. Don’t nobody come near this table, understand? This lady wants to sit here.” And to me in parting, “I’ll keep my eye out. Just call me if anybody crowds you or tries to put the touch on you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I sank unobtrusively into the chair beside that erect, unseeing head, and the place and all the faces faded from view, the noise and the smoky haze, and we were alone together — me and the crossed-out line from somebody’s book. Not just a cheap woman’s book, the book of the recording angel himself. The Book of Destiny.

I waited for him to look around at me and see me there beside him. I wanted the reaction to come from within him, unforced. He was staring straight ahead into the nothingness that faced him. That always faced him day and night. What was he seeing there, I wondered; murder?

She had done this to him; it must be she, of course. The thing was, had she done it living or dead? Which had come first, the descent or the crime? The descent, almost certainly. She was only dead months. He’d already left the St Albans, started on the downward way a year or two ago. He’d even been dispossessed from the other place, the Senator, the last rung of the ladder over the pit, well before it had happened. Then, perhaps, had he gone back, sought her out, and wreaked retribution on her for what she’d done to him? It appeared plausible.

He moved slightly, and I saw him looking downward at the floor around his feet. Looking around for something on that filthy place where people stepped and spat all day long. In a moment more I had guessed what he was looking for and I opened my handbag and took out the cigarettes I had provided myself with and held the package ready, with one protruding, as my first silent overture.

His eyes stopped roaming suddenly, and they had found the small arched shape of my shoe, planted there unexpectedly on that floor beside him, and the tan silk ankle rising from it.

I watched, breathless, afraid to move. He stared steadily, and then pain clouded his eyes, and he turned his head aside toward the wall, but still bent downward as it was. The dream was too old; it had fooled him too many times for him to believe in it now.

Then he turned back again to see if it would be gone, that hallucination on the floor. It wasn’t. I could see a cord at the side of his neck swell out as he kept himself from looking up to where the face should be but, he knew, wouldn’t be. He was afraid to look up. He shaded his forehead with one trembling hand for a minute. I heard him murmur: “You’ll go away if I do.”

I edged out my forearm, with the cigarettes in my hand, a little farther along the rim of the table toward him, and that caught at his eyes and he saw that. He closed his eyes to give it time to vanish. He opened them again, and it was still there.

“Ah, Mia, don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t kid me like this!” And he ground his hands into the sockets of his eyes to rub the apparition out of them.

Thus he gave me her name, and I knew that the quest for “Marty,” at least, was at an end. The quest if nothing else.

I spoke to him softly, reassuringly, as to a child, as to someone very sick who must not be frightened, whose confidence must be gained. “Yes, I’m here,” I said. “I’m real. I’m really here.”

The voice, I guess, disabused him. He made a confused turn of the head, and we were looking at one another at long last. The bum and the widow.

He pawed out toward me tentatively and still half fearfully, without quite reaching me.

“You’re Marty, aren’t you? Marty Blair.”

I saw, by the little start of remembrance he gave, that he hadn’t been hearing the name for a long time past; it had just come to him it was his own. Or rather had once been his own.

“Here, have one of these,” I said soothingly. I even had to put the cigarette to his mouth, strike the match for it. He seemed too dazed, incapable of moving, of doing anything but just looking incredulously at me.

Then finally he said, “But you’re in her seat.” His eyes went to the empty jigger glass that had been before it on the table the whole time. “And what’d you do, finish off her drink? I always buy one for her every time I come in here. Even when I can’t buy one for myself I always see that she gets one at least. Then sometimes she don’t feel like it, and she lets me have it afterward.”

I didn’t know what to say. “She won’t be here tonight, Marty. She couldn’t come. That’s why she sent me instead. I’m a friend of Mia’s, Marty. I’m a very good friend of Mia’s.”

I waited to see what the name would do to him. It did plenty. The pain was livid, like an incision made across his whole face.

I gave him a little time. I would have sent for another drink for him, but I was afraid it would send him off into the dark again. Finally I said, gently as I could, “You think quite a lot of her, don’t you, Marty?”

He smiled at me in a pitiful, helpless sort of way. Gee, that smile was an awful thing to behold. It was — I don’t know how to say it; did you ever see a dumb animal run over and crushed out in the middle of the street, so that its hind part is paralyzed? It no longer feels any pain, but it drags itself up on the curb to expire, and it offers a convulsive, fanged grin just before it does.

I said to myself, “He could have done it. It could have been he very easily.” It was in that smile just then, that terrible smile he gave. Pain, festered love that no longer knows what it’s doing, no longer can distinguish between the rights and wrongs of murder.

Then after the smile came the answer to what I’d said. Totally unexpected, like something bursting in my face. He said quietly and without inflection, “I was her husband; didn’t she ever tell you that?”

Even in the first shock of discovery my mind found time to note the tense he’d given it. “Was,” he’d said.

I didn’t have to be so careful with him as I would have with a normal person; his faculties were still tinctured with smoke. “Yes, I know that,” I said demurely. I looked down at the table to try to keep his suspicions allayed. “Weren’t you ever — was there a divorce, or something like that?”

“No,” he said, “I just got left behind — after she started having friends and all —”

“When was the last time you saw her?” I kept looking down. I traced an imaginary line along the soiled table with the tip of my finger. Then I traced another one over the other way.

“I see her every night. The smoke clears away and there she is. She sits next to me, and I buy her a drink. She comes with me into every one of these places —”

“Yes, but when was the last time you really saw her?” I urged with gentle persuasiveness. I smiled a little, trying to show him that I didn’t refuse to accept her on his plane; it was just that I wanted to know a little more about her on the other plane.

I waited, but he didn’t answer.

“You used to go up and see her sometimes, too, didn’t you, as well as having her come down here to see you?” And to make it stick I added: “She told me you did.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I used to. I used to lots. It hurt too much, though. So mostly I didn’t go in; she didn’t know about it. I just watched her windows from across the street in the shadows, in the rain and in the snow —”

I kept drawing that imaginary line over and over. His eyes were on my finger now, hypnotized.

“And then when they went away I’d go away — kind of happy — because she was by herself again.”

“They?” I breathed, scarcely stirring my lips.

“Whoever it was. I couldn’t see him; I was never near enough. But you could tell by the way the lights would go out, and then a little while later somebody would come out of the doorway.”

“And then you’d go away happy.”

“I had her back again.”

He stopped. I kept tracing that line, as though I were slowly drawing something invisible out of him. “Only mostly,” he resumed abruptly, “they didn’t come out again. I had to go away first. The cops would make me. And that hurt.” He pushed in the side of his stomach. “The smoke would take care of that, though.”

“And murder?” I thought.

I couldn’t talk to him any more there. The stuff was too fresh in him. I’d made a good beginning. But I had to get him back on my plane again, where I could gauge his reactions better.

I said, “Marty, I want to do something for you. Would you like to sleep in a bed tonight and not just in a doorway or on a bench?”

He looked at me and said, with a pathos that was wholly without artifice, “Some people do, don’t they?”

“You can, too, tonight. Would you like to, Marty? If I buy you a bed in a room all to yourself, will you promise me not to drink until — until I come down and see you tomorrow?”

He was able to walk without any noticeable convolutions. He’d learned how to; he’d had so much practice at it. By keeping his feet close to the ground, scarcely lifting them at all, he was able to make his way along, both straight and fairly steadily, at a sort of hangdog shuffle, head and shoulders bowed somewhat forward; that was all.

I took his arm. We must have made a strange-looking couple, leaving that place. A woman and a dead man.

I appealed to the barman on the way out. “I want to take him someplace to sleep where — where he’ll stay put until tomorrow morning.”

He didn’t make the mistake of misinterpreting, at least; but then, sizing the two of us up side by side, how could anyone have very well?

“Try the Commerce, over on Broome Street,” he said. He let a little spurt of beer into a glass, added something to it I wasn’t quick enough to identify, and swished it around surreptitiously. “Here, give him this to drink a minute first.”

In the place on Broome Street I paid a dollar for a room for him and then went upstairs with him, at least as far as the door. I told him to take off his things and get some sleep and waited outside in the hall for a few minutes. Then I sent the boy in, quietly, and had him bring out his shoes to me. They were almost unidentifiable: shapeless slate crusts. I had him take them down below with us and wrap them in a bit of paper and told him to hold them there. Not to give them back to him under any circumstances, even if he should try to claim them before I could get down there.

“I must find him here when I come back tomorrow, and without any liquor in him.”

“I don’t know,” the man behind the desk said doubtfully. “I’ve seen some of them that wouldn’t let a little thing like bare feet stop them.”

“Then if he tries to get out tell him that the room hasn’t been paid for and he’ll have to wait for me to come down and bail him out. Whatever you do, keep him here.”

I went uptown again, back to the other world. I lay there all night long without sleeping, thinking about it, thinking it out, thinking it over.

Had he done it? Hadn’t he? That fanged, hideous grin he’d given at one time. Why, that had been almost a replica of the death grimace I’d seen on her own face that day in the apartment. Was that the brand of murder, the symbol of it, transferred to his own countenance from hers? No, that was metaphysical nonsense.

He was her husband. He’d been mad about her in the colloquial sense first. And now he was mad about her in the literal sense. Set out a chair, a drink, for her each time he sat down himself. They called him Heartbreak down there in the nether world. There’d been a line drawn through his name in her book, and he’d waited outside in the rain, in the snow, watching her windows, to claim her back again each time somebody left. Until one day, that day — hadn’t it occurred to him there was a better way of claiming her forever, with never another vigil necessary, with never another dispute about his title to her?

It must have been that way. It was as plain as this hand that I held out before my face in the blue pallor of the early dawn.

“Marty, I know what you did to Mia.” Suddenly, like that, in the middle of something else. No, that was no good. He’d deny it; that was only to be expected, even from someone in his condition. But what was the best I could hope to get, even if it were true and I’d hit the nail on the head? A frightened, furtive flash across his face. Why, for that matter, even if it weren’t true I might produce the same thing simply by the mere fact of making the accusation at all. No, I had to have more than that to go to Flood with.

I already had for him a splendid motive, an exquisite motive. I already had for him an incriminating vigil outside her windows that the police had never brought to light or even suspected so far. Now all I needed, I felt, was a guilt reaction of one sort or another from the suspect himself, but a substantial one, one that would hold water, something more than just a frightened look or a stammered denial; given that, and I had enough to go to them with, they could go on from there.

Suddenly, in that clarity which sometimes precedes sleep, I thought of another way of eliciting this reaction I was after, a way preferable and more reliable than a mere verbal trap. The accusation or denial must come from him, naturally, but it must be unforced, unsuggested; he must not realize that he was presenting it. Then it would be valid; then it would be substantial enough to hand over to Flood.

I would accuse somebody else and watch and see what he did.

And on that note my eyes finally dropped closed, their linings carmine against the rising sun.

I carried the wrapped shoes up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, and for a moment I got frightened and thought I’d lost him all over again. But I remembered there was no fire escape outside the window, they’d told me. I opened the door and looked in.

He was there. He was dressed. He was sitting on the bed with an inert sort of resignation, his hands dangling down between his legs. I closed the door after me and put the shoes down next to him on the floor and then stood there looking at him a moment. He looked at me in turn.

“Then there was someone like you sitting talking to me last night,” he said finally.

“Yes, there was. How’d you sleep?”

He looked back at the mattress, as though to inquire of it rather than of himself. “I don’t know,” he said lukewarmly. “I’m sort of used to angles, like benches give you. I kept missing them.”

“You better put those on.”

He didn’t ask me what I’d wanted of them; he didn’t seem interested. “I wondered what become of them,” he said indifferently.

I looked at him closely. I was seeing him for the first time in the daylight now. And although I was there to kill him myself, the full impact of what she’d done to him only came to me now as I got this better look at him. She’d killed him a thousand times to my one. He’d been a fine-looking man once; you could still make out the traces of it here and there in the shape of his head, particularly the back of it, the proportion of his features, a turn his head gave now and then. He’d been intelligent too; his eyes told that. No longer by what was in them, but by their lingering outward characteristics of color, size, and width.

She’d done her work well, all right. She’d gutted him. I couldn’t help crying out to myself as I beheld what she’d left of him: “Out of all the thousands and thousands of fine constructive women in this world, what evil star made him pick her out? What got him about her? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he tell —?”

And the answer, of course, was self-evident. What gets any of us about any of them; what gets any of them about any of us? The image in our minds. Not the reality that others see; the image in the mind. Therefore, how could he see, how could he tell, how could he free himself, when the image in his mind all along, and even now, was that of a lovely creature, all sunshine, roses, and honey, a beatific haloed being, a jewel of womankind? Who would even strive to free himself from such a one? Watch out for the image in your mind.

He straightened from the lacing of his shoes at last; it was a difficult job, because the punctures the laces were to go through were warped and askew and all but obliterated, and he had to coax the lace tip through each one by moistening it and drawing it to a point; he straightened, and then he got to his feet.

I said, “They’re sending us up two cups of coffee and some rolls. I told them to.”

He drew his finger uncertainly across under his nose and mumbled: “Gee, you’re being pretty nice to me.”

I let him be for a while out of common, everyday humanity, until at least he had some coffee in him. I didn’t know why I should give quarter like this, unless I may have felt that I was aiding my own purpose by waiting until his system had become stabilized at least.

The coffee came, and we busied ourselves with it for a while: he sitting slumped on the edge of the bed, holding the mug clasped between both hands and down low almost over the floor; I standing taking mine from the top of the derelict object that passed for a bureau.

It came to me how strange the picture must be that we made, had anyone been there to see it. The huntress and hunted, for that was what it amounted to, eying one another watchfully across this dusty, shabby, sun-blinded room, while we silently sipped at the nauseous contents of the thick mugs. The ravaged man he was; the strange, inscrutable woman I was. The silence in the room. The distance maintained between us. The eyes that watched their opposites gravely, even over the top of the thick crockery. It made what should have been an act of amenity into a sort of wary deadlock, where neither moved, waiting for the other to move first. By that I don’t mean physical movement, of course.

He put his mug down to the floor empty. I thrust mine aside, three quarters full. I passed him cigarettes that I had brought with me.

Then I returned to where I’d been, put my elbow to the bureau top. I said, “Would you like a newspaper? Do you ever read the newspapers?”

He shook his head. I wasn’t sure whether the answer was meant for both questions, so I repeated the one I was actually interested in having answered. “Do you ever read them much?”

“No, I never bother. There’s nothing in them that has to do with me.” He looked at me some more. Then he asked in a passive, detached sort of way, “What do you want with me?”

“I knew Mia, you know.”

A hunted look came over his face; he turned it aside for a second. Or maybe it was a haunted look; I didn’t know.

He wasn’t going to go on, so I had to.

“She meant a lot to me. I thought maybe there was something I could do for you.”

“What?” he asked. It wasn’t said challengingly. Just inertly.

I shifted unobtrusively around until I could watch his face in the dingy mirror, and yet, in looking at me, he wouldn’t guess at once that my eyes were on him.

“When I last saw her — oh, about three or four weeks ago — she asked me to —”

His face hardened, took on a sort of brutal aspect, especially about the mouth. “She’s dead,” he said.

I went on in the same quiet voice, as though he hadn’t spoken. “I know that. But how do you know it? I thought you didn’t read the newspapers.”

No guilt appeared, though. Only a shuttering of the eyes, an expression of blank groping, as though he were trying to remember himself how he’d come to know about it without reading it in the papers.

I gave him time. “I thought you didn’t read the newspapers? Then how did you know?”

He looked at the wall opposite him, and it wasn’t to be found there. He looked at the ceiling, and it wasn’t there. He looked at his empty hands, and it wasn’t there.

I gave him time. “You said you didn’t read the newspapers. How did you know, then? How did you know?”

He felt his forehead with the back curve of one hand, and it wasn’t there. Wasn’t in there.

“How did you know, then? How did you know?”

“Don’t,” he moaned in a helpless sort of way. “Each time you say that it drives it away again. I’m just going to get it and it drives it away again.”

“Did you go up there, maybe, and see her lying there right after it happened? Don’t be afraid; there’s no harm in that.” I shoveled my hands toward him in ingenuous protest. “Isn’t that it, Marty? You happened to go up there and found her lying there just the way she was, with one of her own silk stockings twisted around her neck, choked to death; isn’t that it?”

“No, she was — smothered to death with a pillow.”

I said, without making the tactical error of altering the unexcited, casual tenor of my voice: “You see, you did go up there; that’s how you knew. That’s all right; there’s nothing to be nervous about in that. You opened the door and you saw her lying there the first thing, right from where you were, on the floor in that front room of hers, so you quickly closed it and went away again. Nobody’s blaming you for —”

He said with a sort of childish querulousness, “She wasn’t in the front room; she was in the room behind, the one she slept in.”

“You see, you know the whole thing,” I said quietly. I began treacherously touching up my hair via the mirror. “You say you don’t read the newspapers, so you must have gone up there and seen it for yourself. By the way, how’d you get in?” I tried to make my voice sound admiring, flattering to his dexterity.

He began to shake his head, imperceptibly at first, then more and more confirmedly, but with a puzzled expression continuing on his face. “I didn’t go up there,” he murmured. “I didn’t do that, because she wouldn’t-a wanted me to. The last time I did she threw me out; she told me never to come around again. She was ashamed, I guess, on account of I looked so dirty and — well, you know. She said she’d call the cops if I ever came near her again. She said, ‘Go to the Salvation Army, you bum!’ I just watched from across the street after that.” He sighed, but he kept on shaking his head.

The denials and retractions were starting in now, I said to myself. But he’d said enough already, more than enough.

I looked in my bag, at the cigarettes that were still there, and pretended not to see them. I closed it with a definitive snap. “We need some more cigarettes,” I said. “I’ll go down and get them in a minute.” I was going to phone Flood. I had enough for him now. It was a job for him from here on. He’d warned me not to look for any documentary evidence. Well, what more could there be than this? He’d said he never read the newspapers, yet he’d known she was dead, and he’d known more than that: he’d known the exact method and even the very room she was lying in. He admitted he’d maintained an endless vigil across the street and been tortured by a cancerous love. What stronger motive could a man have ever had than what she’d done to him?

Flood would know how to get the rest of it out of him in short order, where I didn’t. By this time tomorrow, maybe by tonight even, it would all be over.

“You want me to wait here for you?” he asked in that chronically helpless way of his.

“Just stay here where you are; I’ll be right back.” I opened the door.

The blast of a cheap, defective little radio in one of the adjacent little cubbyholes came welling in from outside.

He quirked his head almost idiotically and blinked. He started to shake his head again imperceptibly as before. This time up and down and not across. “That’s how,” he murmured cryptically.

“What?” I said from half over the threshold.

“That’s how I heard. I remember now. I didn’t read it in the papers and I didn’t go up there. It came in over the radio at the Silver Dollar place. They got a radio there by the cash register, and there was some kind of a fight that night they wanted to get, so they had it turned on, waiting for it. I just about got there, and I didn’t have any soup in me yet, so I understood the words that was coming out of it. I can still remember ’em by heart too. I only heard ’em once, but I can say them right through to the end, just like they came out. Sometimes they say themselves over, without me doing it myself at all. They’re coming now, and I can’t stop ’em. ‘An attractive young woman was found murdered in her apartment by the police late this afternoon. The victim was Mia Mercer, a brunette about twenty-eight years old, who had recently worked as an entertainer at the Hermitage — ’”

His face puckered into a white cicatrice and went slowly over and downward out of sight, but the words continued to well from it unchecked. That voice. You had to hear it to know what grief can really do. No sobs, no huskiness, nothing so warm and alive as that. The monotonous singsong of Chinese children reciting their lessons, meaningless, arid, a parrotlike duplication.

“‘— She was last seen alive Thursday night, when she returned rather late, but it has been established that the murder did not take place until one or two o’clock today. The police are already holding a suspect, whose name is being withheld for the present, and they expect to —’”

I closed the door and came in again. I went over to him and placed my hand across his mouth and sealed it up, silencing that terrible, unbearable, mechanical flow of misery that was pouring from it like from a machine, a machine without intelligence or awareness of its own. I said to him what he’d said to me before: “Don’t.” I was a woman after all.

Acting can reach great heights of persuasiveness. But sincerity, when there is no acting at all, can reach even greater.

He’d got himself a stay, but not yet an acquittal.

Many hours had gone by. We were still there in the room together. It darkened early, that room, earlier even than the grubby world outside. It was dim already with imminence of dusk, while the afternoon sun still rode high elsewhere.

His voice was a lazy thread stitching through the silence.

“She was in a little blue dress that night; I can see it yet. It’s funny how you go someplace and never think you’re going to meet someone there who will change your whole life around from then on. You go to some dance or party, just because you’ve got nothing better to do, and you think by the next night after you won’t even remember about it any more. And here ten years later you can still remember everything about it as clear as if it was just the night before. You can’t remember any of the other nights around then, or even the months or years, but just that one night; you’ve saved it whole, the way it was.”

His voice stopped. I waited without using my own, afraid if I did he would become too aware of me, wouldn’t go on again. He was talking to himself more than to me. I was just the sounding board against which his voice projected itself. Presently he’d gone on again.

“In a little blue dress that sort of swung out wide from here down. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and I just stood there looking at her.”

Like me, I thought, like me. I’d first met Kirk at a dance like that too.

“And I can even remember the piece they happened to be playing just then too. ‘Always.’ Every time I’ve ever heard it since, it meant her in a little blue dress, the first time I ever saw her. It was our song, hers and mine, while we were together, and now that we’re not, it’s just mine, I guess.

“I guess I would have stood there all night like that, just looking. That would have been enough for me. But then the fellow that had taken me there, he came back to me and said: ‘What’s the matter? What’re you going to do, just stand there? Don’t you want to dance or nothing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but only with one girl. That one over there.’ And I showed her to him. He was one of these fellows don’t stand back about anything; he laughed and said, ‘That can be arranged easy enough,’ and grabbed my arm and hauled me over to her then and there, without paying any attention to who she was with. And I went on from there under my own —” He couldn’t find the word.

“Evil destiny,” I supplied silently to myself.

“So that’s how you first met her,” I said. “That’s how she was when you first met her.”

The room was getting cloudier all the time. He was sprawled diagonally on the bed, back on his elbow, picking at the covering as he spoke. I was seated there on a chair drawn up close beside him. Its back was toward the bed, and I was straddling it in reverse, my arms folded along the top of it and my chin resting on them.

He and the bed were between me and the door. It would have been impossible for me to get out of the room in time, in case anything —

I’d been downstairs just now, a few minutes ago, and I’d told them to send somebody up and have them knock on the door in ten minutes’ time. No sooner, no later. Seven minutes of the ten were up now.

The two pillows on the bed, pillows such as she’d been smothered with, were lying there undisturbed. They were within easy reach of him, the way he lay. The window looked out on a blind surface of shaft wall, and we were alone in the room, cut off, isolated. He didn’t know someone was coming up to knock on the door outside in three more minutes. For all he knew, no one was coming near here for the rest of the night.

I dropped my wrist a little on the inside of the chair back, glanced at it. Two and a half minutes.

“I know who did it, Marty,” I said quietly.

His eyeballs rolled upward at me like marbles, stayed that way, peering from under his upper lids. Finally he said uncertainly, “Yeah, that guy they’ve got up there now; everybody knows.”

“No, no, I don’t mean him. I know who really did it.” I kept my lashes inscrutably down. “I’m the only one who does. Here’s something that no one knows, no one but me, and now I’m telling you. I was there at the time it happened. I was in the place. I saw him, and he didn’t know it; he didn’t see me.”

A pulse in his cheek started to throb. I saw it begin, and then I kept my eyes off it from then on. A cord running down the side of his neck stood out more distinctly than it had a minute ago, I thought, but I wasn’t quite sure.

I knew what he was going to ask next, but I had to wait for him to ask it before I could answer it. He took quite a while, as though he had a hard time getting the words to come.

“Why didn’t you — tell someone sooner?” He swallowed in the middle of it. I saw the obstruction go down his throat.

“Maybe I didn’t want to get mixed up in it.”

“Are you — sure you really saw him doing it?”

“I saw him crouching over her, right in the act.”

“Why didn’t you scream or holler, try to save her?”

“I was afraid he’d do it to me too, if I did; I was afraid of my own life. I stuffed the corner of a towel in my mouth to make sure he wouldn’t hear me.”

“How’d you happen to be up there? How come he didn’t see you, if you were right in the place when it happened?”

Tension was suddenly in the room with us, crowding the air in it, like a slowly expanding gas, making it resist when we tried to breathe it in. And yet we were both so quiet, almost motionless. He plucking at the counterpane. My face brooding over the chair top.

“I’d dropped in on her. That was nothing; I’d often done that before. For no particular reason, just to kill time. We were pretty chummy, you know. We were fiddling around there, doing nothing, like two women will at that hour of the day. She wasn’t even dressed yet.”

I remembered that much from firsthand observation.

“It suddenly occurred to me I wanted to take a shower. I don’t know why; I just felt like it. She said go ahead, help myself. I went in there and left the bathroom door open just about an inch; I took off my things and got behind that thick green glass door. I left that open about an inch too. But I never got to turn the faucets on the wall. I was standing there strapping on one of these rubber caps that we women use, without making any noise, I guess. I had a little trouble adjusting it — it was hers — and that took several minutes. All of a sudden I thought I heard a man’s voice out there where she was. I tiptoed out of the closet to close the bathroom door, so he wouldn’t be able to look in. Before I even got over to it, it was already happening. I heard her fall to the floor in the room outside. I grabbed a towel and put it around me, and I stuck my eye to the crack of the door and looked out. It was only wide enough for one eye. I saw him pressing down hard at something on the floor there, and I knew what he was doing. I hid way back in the shower closet, where it was dark, for a long time afterward, until I was sure he’d gone.”

“And you saw him?”

He said it very low. As close to him as I was, I could hardly hear it. His lips just moved a little. About a minute was gone now; about one and a half were left.

“I certainly did. I saw him right in the act. I saw him from head to foot.”

“And you’ve never told anybody?” This time even his lips didn’t move; the air in front of them just vibrated, that was all.

“I’ve never told a living soul. I’m the only one who knows it.”

The hand that had been plucking the counterpane flattened on it in a directional pat. “Come here,” he said. “Come a little closer, over here by me.” His eyes stayed down, didn’t look up at me. “Get on the bed here next to me.”

My heart hurt as though a surgeon were taking stitches in it. Those two harmless-looking pillows there, side by side — His hand gave the bed another persuasive pat, and then another.

I forced myself up from the chair by pushing my arms against the top of it, and then I moved around it toward him until my knees brought up against the edge of the bed.

His eyes stayed down. He repeated that flat-handed pat atop the bed. Meaning “Down; down here beside me.” I glanced at the pillows and then back to him. I put my knee to the bed and sank down on my side.

Our heads were very close together now, though our bodies lay extended in opposite directions, his form overlapping one side of it, mine the other.

His hand reached upward toward the head of the bed and drew one of the pillows out of position by its corner, and he started shifting it down toward me like that, flat along the surface of the bed.

I looked steadily up at the ceiling. I thought: “In another minute a great white mass will drop down over me, obliterating everything.”

“And you’re sure you saw him?” his voice murmured close to my ear.

“I saw all there was to see of him. What do you want? Why did you ask me to come closer to you like this?”

And now the pillow would leap up and then come hurtling down.

Instead he inserted it under the back of my head and took his hand off it; left it there, as a partial support for my head, a resting place. Perhaps it was a form of bribery; I don’t know. “Tell me who he was,” he said in a husky whisper. “I want to know. I’ve got to know.”

And if it had been he, he wouldn’t have to know; he would know already.

The tension slowly siphoned from the air and left a sort of vacuum behind it. I felt all limp and starchless. My forehead was damp. I closed my eyes in momentary exhaustion.

The knock on the door came while they were shut like that. The test period was over. Marty just turned his head, not understanding. This was to have saved my life. “Yes,” I called out weakly. A hotel boy looked in, and I told him to get some cigarettes or something; I don’t remember.

I tried to analyze my own feelings. He stood acquitted now. What further, what greater certainty could there ever be than this? And yet to my surprise, along with the sense of disappointment, of frustration, that was rightly there, there was a sneaking, almost shamefaced sense of relief. I thought to myself with wonderment: “My God, I must actually have developed a liking for this poor devil to feel the way I do about it.” Or maybe it was just a sense of sportsmanship, a repugnance at the idea of delivering the final blow to someone who was down already.

I got up presently and went over toward the tarnished glass framed over the bureau. My legs were still a little rocky under me from my recent crisis. “I may as well go now,” I reflected; there was nothing for me here any more. I had as much proof as I could hope for.

I was forgetting him. I was forgetting I’d left him in mid-conversation, so to speak. I was forgetting that what to me was a topic over and done with to him was a topic broken off short. He got off the bed in turn, came up behind me. I felt his hand on my arm, but I didn’t turn; I continued adjusting my hat.

“Tell me who he is; tell me.”

“Why? What satisfaction is it to you to know? There’s a man in jail for it already, and they’re going to execute him for it soon —”

“That isn’t enough; that’s no good to me. I’m not the state. Whaddo I care who the state kills for it? I’m the one who loved her. I want to know who really did it, whose hands really did it! You can’t transfer a thing like that from one guy to another. The one who really did it stays the one who really did it, no matter who the state takes it out on!”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you did. You said you saw him.”

“I just said that.”

“You’re trying to back out now. You think I’m just a Bowery bum, not worth telling it to. I want that one thing from you, d’you hear me? That one thing. I want to know who that guy was that you saw kill her.”

I went toward the door. He came around the outside of me and got there first, got between it and me.

“I’m not going to let you out of here. You know, and you’re not getting out of here until I know too.”

I tried to paw him aside. He didn’t actively raise hands to me, menace me; he just bore my hands down, stayed there. I’d conjured up this tatterdemalion jinni myself out of a bottle of alky, so to speak, and now I couldn’t exorcise him again.

“I wasn’t up there, I tell you!”

“You said you were, and I believe you the first time. You knew her place too well, even that green glass shower door she had up there! Now who was it you saw? You’re going to tell me.”

He reached around behind me and caught my arm at the wrist. He started bending it up toward the shoulder, the wrong way. It’s painful. It’s a method little boys are fond of. It’s effective, nonetheless.

We were struggling full-tilt now, even if still only passively. He’d retained a good deal more vigor than I’d suspected, and it occurred to me even in the midst of my present preoccupation that if he’d reacted positively to that other previous test a while ago I would have stood very little chance, knock on the door or no knock.

“Don’t! Let go, you’re hurting me!” I winced. “You fool!” I could have screamed, but I had more to lose than he by raising a great clamor, attracting attention to the two of us.

I couldn’t stand it any more, and just saying I didn’t know was no good; he wouldn’t take that for an answer.

“You going to tell me? You going to tell me?” he kept breathing into my averted face.

I couldn’t think of a name; I couldn’t think of an address.

“All right, I’ll tell you where you can find him; I’ll tell you where he is. It’s on the third floor at —” I gave him a name and address at random. “Now let me out of here!” There was water in my eyes from sheer physical pain.

He stood aside, and I clawed the door open and ran out into the hall. As I hurried along it, rubbing my numbed arm to bring the circulation back and glancing resentfully back a couple of times, it occurred to me that it was just as well that the name and address I’d given him just now, under stress of improvisation, were my own. Under the circumstances there was no telling what he might take it into his head to do.

It’s hard to sit waiting in the dark, waiting for a doorknob to turn stealthily, waiting for a blurred form to come creeping in on a death-dealing errand. The night outside was very quiet, and the room within was quieter still, and the only sign that I was there at all was the red bead of my cigarette, brightening and dimming, brightening and dimming, while a clock close by me ticked away.

This, in a way, was the third and final test he was being subjected to, though I hadn’t intentionally planned it. The first had been his familiarity with the details of the crime; a firsthand familiarity. He’d neutralized that by his claim of having absorbed them over the radio. But that was just a verbal statement, and there was no way of checking on its truthfulness. So the burden of that test still lay more against than for him. The second had been his failure to make any attempt to silence me, when presumably I alone held knowledge damaging to him. Ergo, the knowledge I presumably held had therefore not been damaging to him, had nothing to do with him. So he had passed that one with flying colors. But the score was still one for, one against. Now, quite fortuitously, a third and final test had come up, and this would cinch it. Two out of three. Now he had the definite knowledge of who had killed the thing he valued most. Someone named “French” — he would see that name downstairs in the entryway — who lived in this same house I did, who lived on this same floor, who lived in this same room I was in now. He’d wanted that knowledge badly, badly enough to brutalize me in order to elicit it. The thing was, what had he wanted it for? What did he intend doing with it?

I had my own ideas about that, and that was why I was sitting huddled in a chair now, at three in the morning, instead of occupying the bed where I rightfully belonged. A chair drawn into a corner as far from both bed and room door as I could manage to get it, and with its back turned outward to serve as a screen for my lumped, tucked under body.

I’d already been undressed and in bed for the night, lying there in the darkness, over two hours ago, when a sense of disquiet, of impending danger — call it a premonition if you will — began to assail me more and more strongly. Why had he wanted the exact name and whereabouts of her killer so badly, once I had convinced him I knew them? It wasn’t just for the morbid satisfaction of it alone; it wasn’t just so he could lacerate himself still further as he sat the nights away in smokehouses with “her” by his side. He didn’t have to have an actual name and address for that; the pronoun “somebody” would have done just as well.

I’d pulled the light chain beside me and sat up at this point. I’d thought: “I better get up out of here, not lie here in this bed; otherwise I’m liable never to wake up in it again in the morning.”

That was it, of course; that was what he’d wanted it for.

I put something over me and sat in a chair for a while with the light on. But then I realized that in that way I was only postponing it until some other night, some future night, when I would no longer be on guard. It was better to attract it at once, get it over with, while I was expecting it, was it not? And finally, it was the definitive test. If he came near here on a bloody errand he exonerated himself once and for all, beyond any lingering shadow of a doubt. Surely if he had done such a thing himself he would not attempt to wreak retribution on someone else for having done it. Even madmen didn’t do that. Even they retained awareness of the parentage of their own crimes.

True, he couldn’t get up here from the street. But that would only delay him a night or two; eventually he’d succeed somehow or other. And I didn’t want this thing to be postponed. So I crept down the two flights of stairs and reversed the latch plunge on the outside door so that it could be opened from the outside. If he tried it now, tested it in any way, it would open for him just as any ordinary door.

I went up again to my own place and carefully closed the door without locking it. From a hook on the back of the bathroom door I unslung a laundry bag full of soiled articles of apparel. I carted it over to the bed and put it there where I had been lying myself a short while before. It was squat and lumpy in its natural contour, but I kneaded it and stretched it and its contents into a longer, more columnar outline that more closely approached a torso. Then I carefully arranged the coverings over it and put out the light, and in the dark it looked like someone lying there.

I knew there was still some risk attached to remaining in the place at all, no matter how well I secreted myself; yet I must be an eyewitness of whatever took place, for the test to be a valid one, and I couldn’t sit crouched on the upper stairs all night peering down through the banister rail. So I drew a chair over into the far corner and got down behind it and took up my vigil — waiting for the love that had turned to death.

He might be lurking down there in the shadows of the street right now, watching these windows as he had once watched hers. He’d seen the light go out behind them, and now in a little while he’d venture forth and creep up to the door and suddenly vanish within, like something whisked away.

It was very quiet inside and out. There was a half-moon, enough to dust the air with pollen without bleaching it. I had the shades drawn down to three-quarter length, and the oblong boxes of light that came in below them reproduced themselves just high enough on the door, slantwise to them, to take its knob. The knob was glass, and when it turned it would blur, create a momentary pinwheel of light. And then another way of knowing would be this: the third step from the top on the stairs outside was faulty; it would creak. I’d learned to skip it whenever I ascended them myself. But he wouldn’t know.

It was four o’clock now, and I’d been sitting like this ever since shortly after one. I thought about them, the two of them. And, for that matter, the two of us: Kirk and myself. What a strange way for their love story to end up. A harmless, fluffy little girl of eighteen on a dance floor one night ten years ago, waltzing to the strains of “Always.” And a boy comes in and looks at her, takes just one look, and from then on he’s in love. And another boy and another girl, somewhere else, a thousand miles away, maybe, who didn’t know either of them at the time and didn’t even know one another yet. The girl, as a matter of fact, still a child in a middy blouse and bangs, probably chewing her pencil nightly under a lamp while she pored over her algebra homework. And now, ten years later, the first girl is already dead; murdered and infamous and vile. And a derelict, a stumblebum, who was once the boy, is about to creep up the stairs of a strange house, to murder someone he has never seen before, in the depths of the night. And the second boy is a shaven-pated, hollow-cheeked inmate in a penitentiary, awaiting execution for something he didn’t do. And the second girl, the “little” girl, is hiding behind a chair in the dark in that same strange room, waiting to watch, to look on at a murder that is to be no murder, that is to be the act without the deed.

How strange, it came to me then, are the patterns of human experience! The meaningless life lines that start out singly and so simply from here, from there, draw slowly toward one another over a period of time, until finally they come together, mesh, to form into a design that never could have been guessed at, foretold, by what had gone before. And the completed fabric is the sum of all the threads that have gone into it.

If another boy hadn’t gone to a dance one night and seen a girl there, floating in a blue dress to the strains of “Always,” the boy I’d married would not now be in a cell under sentence of death, and I would not now be hiding here in the dark, my cheek pressed to the back of a chair, listening, waiting.

The clock went tick, tick, tick.

Outside there, past the door, the third step from the top snarled all at once, as when you nudge a sleeping cur lying in your path. That was the sound it habitually made, a canine simulation. Then its queerly warped surface relapsed into silence again as the pressure quitted it.

I flung out my hand quickly, struck out the red ember that had been held in it against something. Then I drew myself together, made myself smaller, cowered there, and watched the telltale knob from low down around the side of the chair back.

Nothing happened for a while. For a while that seemed much longer than it probably was. Tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick. Hundreds of them, it sounded like. If there was anyone out there at all, he must be standing with his ear close to the door seam, listening to hear if there was anyone astir in here. Or perhaps exploring the door, gauging its surface with stealthy fingertips. He would not think, at first, that it would open at trial, and yet the instinctive thing to do was test the knob; that would show him when he did.

I was frightened, for I knew violence was at hand, was coming in here with me.

Tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick. Oh, was it that loud always, or did it just seem so now? Like a small-sized trip-hammer hitting against something.

Suddenly the knob gave a warning flash, a coruscation, as its facets slowly began to revolve and the light glanced off each successive one. He had been out there and he was coming in. It turned so slowly, and yet somehow so remorselessly, as though there were no power on earth could keep it from completing its appointed orbit. With not a forewarning sound to go with it. If I had stayed in that bed, if my eyes hadn’t already been wide open and fixed on it, there would have been no way of detecting that entry was being gained. I would have gone from sleep to deeper sleep with scarcely a fluttering of eyelids, and our story, Kirk’s and mine, would have had an ending not very dissimilar to theirs after all.

I couldn’t even tell very accurately when the door parted from the frame, slanted inward. By the time a sluggish current of air, a displacement, had eddied toward and reached me, to show that something, someone had come in, the door was back in place again and there was a shadowy, blurred outline between myself and it, so that I could no longer see the knob.

This blur, this new darkness against the old darkness, stood motionless for a while, then gradually started to shift over toward the bed. As it sidled in that direction the knob behind it came clear again, but that no longer held interest for me. Motion could only be detected in this shadowy mass by the contrasting motion it seemed to give the things around it that were not moving. As when you look from a train window and the things beyond seem to be moving. Thus the white plateau of the bed seemed to sidle forward and cut it off below the knees, but it was not the bed that had moved but the figure in the background.

Again it fell motionless and stood looking down now at close range. Breathing was beginning to be audible, the strained, harsh breathing of slowly mounting, slowly unleashed rage. Deepening, thickening, strangling, until it began to approach the catarrhal. My own had stopped, or seemed to have.

Tick, tick, tick —

Suddenly, in the smoky dimness there was a flash midway down the vague form and close in against it. Oh, not a bright flash; the flicker of a tongue of ghostly gray flame. And a burnished blade had sprung into being, with a small wooden tick.

I bit my lip and heaved soundlessly against the padded chair surface.

It went up overhead, catching more light as it did, blurring into a low-toned silvery flash; poised there, foreshortened to a point. The strained breathing choked, formed into a sob. I could hear words all run together in a bated paroxysm of torment and fury. “You dirty devil! Why couldn’t you leave her with me?”

The silvery radiance slashed down and vanished, and there was the crunch of steel puncturing tight-packed layers of fabric; the bed quivered. The shadowy form crouched low above it, then straightened again, took a heavy, sodden step or two toward the door.

He’d killed the nothingness in the bed because he hadn’t killed the woman. This was the final test; there could be no greater test than this.

I pulled my face from the chair back, reached out without thinking, and tugged on the chain pull of a nearby lamp. Light bloomed out, dazzling as a sunburst after the preceding gloom. I don’t know if he saw me clearly or not. I must have seemed like an apparition over there in the corner in that sudden welling up of light.

He cast a single explosive look over that way that seemed not to strike me at all, only to verify that there was light there and someone there who’d seen what he had done. Then he floundered out through the door opening as I reared up to my full height behind the chair.

I thrust it aside, tried to go after him. “Marty!” I called. “Wait! Don’t run like that!”

He was already lunging down the stairs like one possessed. He must have taken my voice, too, for a hallucination of his overheated mind. It only stung him to an added frenzy of flight. I reached the head of the stairs and could see his leaping shadow glancing from the walls below. There was no light up here, but there was one down at the foot. I kept calling down, “Marty, come back! Wait, you haven’t —” I was afraid to scream too loudly; I was afraid it would rouse the entire house. I don’t think he would have heeded even if I had.

The street door gave an empty slap, and he had gained the open night. Something touched my foot, and the knife was lying there on the topmost step with its blade still out.

I turned and ran back into the room and across it and flung up the window, hoping I could head him off from there. I could see him flitting along down there, making a scalloping detour of each successive doorway. I leaned far out, calling, “Marty, wait! Come back and listen to me a minute! Don’t run away!”

I saw his arms go up, and he put his hands over his ears as he ran along to keep the sound out. He must have taken me for an accusing voice of his own conscience resounding against the night. He darted over to the other side, where the shadows were even thicker, and was lost there. In a moment more the street was empty.

I turned slowly back into the room. The knife lay on the bed where I’d thrown it, atop the punched-in mound of clothes. If he’d only taken time to look at it, I thought ruefully, he could have seen there was no blood on the blade.

The night was empty and quiet again, just as it had been before. Inside the room something was going tick, tick; tick, tick; tick, tick.

I had to find him and I had to tell him. So I went back there to that place of the unburied dead to seek him out, to sit beside him for a moment or two, to say: “You didn’t kill anyone in that room last night; don’t be frightened. I lied. No one knows who did it, Marty. We’ll have to let it go at that.” I had a ten-dollar bill with me. I was going to touch his hand in parting, leave it behind. At that, it seemed a paltry enough thing to do. But what could I, what could anyone, do for him? Give him back his love, give him back his life?

The barman looked up when I came in, and I could tell he remembered me, knew me from the time before. But he was busy just then, so I made my own way back through the place unaided, looking for him among the wan, hopeless faces that were raised to me as I went past. There was that same strange hush as when I’d come in here the first time. Life walking amid the dead. Empty eye sockets looking up at me with no light behind them. A hand, a hand that didn’t belong to a living man and therefore couldn’t be resented as such, even reached gropingly toward me as I moved by, fell short, dropped back again. Asking some sort of help; it knew not what.

I found myself all the way at the back of the place at last, beside the same table he had been at the time before. “His” table, I suppose, that he always sought out when he came in here, for habit is a strange thing, surviving even reason. There was a clear place there. Two empty chairs and an empty jigger standing before each one. His drink and hers. I knew then that he’d only recently gone.

I stood there looking down in silence, two fingers touching the table top, the frustrate ten-dollar bill still held tucked under my palm by my thumb.

The barman had come down and was standing beside me. “You looking for Heartbreak?” he said. “He was here and he went away again. Just a little while ago, not very long before you got here.” He adjusted one of the chairs, picked up the two jiggers by the fingers of one hand. “Yeah, I seen him get up and go out.”

He wanted to make conversation. I was as close to being carriage trade as this place would ever see. “He did a funny thing. I couldn’t make him out tonight. He only had two bits left on him. I know for a fact it was his last two bits, because it’s what I gave him back myself after the last two drinks. Then on his way out he stops and has me break it up into nickels. Four of them he hands to the four guys that are standing nearest to him, without even looking to see who they are. Then the fifth one, he goes over to the jukebox and stands picking out a tune. Takes his time until he’s found just what he’s looking for. They never do that around here, you know; the house has to feed them things. He puts it in and starts it up, and then instead of waiting to hear it out, he goes on out right while it’s in the middle of playing” — he swept his arm toward the darkness out before the entrance — “walking real steady, much straighter than usual, and with a kind of a halfway smile on his face. Like he got good news or was going to meet somebody who had good news for him. We was all looking at him by that time.”

“And the song?” I murmured quietly, staring at the table without seeing it much. He didn’t have to tell me.

“‘Always.’”

I knew then.

I remembered what I’d thought to myself the first night I’d come in here searching for him. The lower depths, this place was. The lowest depths of all this side of the grave. There was nothing beyond this, nothing further. Nothing came after it except — the river.

The girl was dead, and now the boy was too. That story was over, the story that began on a dance floor ten years ago to the strains of “Always.”

“He may be back a little later on,” the barman tried to suggest. “They come and they go —”

I knew he wouldn’t be back. Anywhere. Ever again.

I turned and walked slowly back toward the entrance again, the scene around me fading out as my thoughts turned inward. The thing that preoccupied me was this: Did I kill that man? Was it I, by what I did last night?

And the answer was obvious, undeniable. I shook my head slowly and without hypocrisy. No, I was kind to him. I gave him something to die for. That was more than he’d had before. It is better to die for something than to live for nothing. I gave him completion, vindication. He did not hear me call out to him there in that room last night. In that bed lay the assassin of what he held most dear, brought to justice by his own hand. I gave him that much to take with him: the kindly illusion that he’d requited her loss.

No, I did not kill him. All I did was give him something worth dying for.

I stopped beside the jukebox and took out a nickel. I searched the slots and found the one that I was looking for. I dropped the coin in and stood by there, waiting for the strains to come. Then when they had, his song and hers —

Not for just an hour, not for just a day
Not for just a year, but
Always —

I quirked my finger from the temple in a parting salute to someone they could not see.

“Goodbye, Heartbreak. Better luck some other time, some other where —”

I turned and walked slowly outside into the dark while the cheap music, the costly, precious music, softly ebbed away behind me.

SEVEN

atwater 8-7457......mordaunt

THIS ONE WENT easy; this one took care of itself. I found out all my self-rehearsing had been superfluous when a young woman’s voice, immediately upon answering, said pleasantly: “Dr Mordaunt’s office, good day.”

He was a doctor, then. Her doctor. She hadn’t had it that way in the book, though; “Dr Mordaunt,” the usual way of putting down one’s doctor’s name. Just “Mordaunt,” like any other man she knew.

For a moment, because he was a doctor, I was almost tempted to hang up without going any farther, without speaking at all. Saying to myself, “A doctor cures his patients; a doctor doesn’t kill them.” But, I reminded myself, he may not have been her doctor in that sense; he may have been just a doctor whom she knew. A doctor who was a friend. A doctor who was even — something else.

A doctor is a man, after all. A doctor loves or hates, fears or avenges himself, just as anyone else.

All this within my mind in the space of an outward second. And meanwhile the young woman’s voice was waiting.

“May I speak with the doctor?”

“Are you one of his regular patients? May I have the name, please?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then I’m sorry, I can’t put the doctor on. I can give you an appointment, if you’d like. Would you care for an appointment?”

I’d have to do it that way then. I told her yes, I would.

“Thursday at four?” This was Wednesday. I said that would be all right. It gave me twenty-three hours’ grace. “The name, please?”

“Alberta French.” French had been my name before I married Kirk. And now, thanks to the state, I was once more as I had been then. So why not in name as well?

“Miss or Mrs?”

She wanted to know everything, it seemed. I chose Miss, for obvious reasons. Mia Mercer had been unmarried too.

“Can you tell me who recommended the doctor to you?”

I had known that was coming. I could have said she did. I intended to eventually. But not to her. I wasn’t going to waste any possible surprise value it might have on a third person over a wire. I was saving that for him, direct and to his face.

I said, “I’ll give the doctor that information personally when I see him.”

I was afraid she might argue the point and even end up by canceling the appointment, so to forestall her and keep the appointment valid by default, so to speak, I hung up on her without further ado.

I sat and thought about it for a good long while there by the phone. Trying to map out something that would at least carry me safely past the preliminary consultation. This was not going to be as easy as the Marty matter, for instance. There was an arbitrary limitation imposed here. I had to work within the framework of a single visit, little better than half an hour, forty minutes at the very outside. Within that I might possibly find some means of extorting a second one; from the second one I might extract a third, and so on. But you had to have some surface reason for going to a doctor in the first place.

There was nothing the matter with me that I knew of. I had a badly wrenched heart, but that didn’t show. Since I had no legitimate symptoms to offer I would have to produce some ersatz ones.Yes, but if he were any kind of doctor at all, wouldn’t he see through them at once? It might put him on his guard. If there were only something I could swallow to derange my system for a while without permanently impairing it. If there were only something I could rub onto my skin that would cause an irritation, produce an evanescent rash. I even thought of holding my hand for a moment or two under the hot water tap to scald it more or less sufficiently to require treatment, but with clouds of steam already rising from the drain vent my courage failed me. The stray drop or two that leaped upon it stung so vengefully.

I was still pondering the problem unsolved twenty-two and a half hours later when I alighted from the bus around the turn from my destination and struck out the remaining short distance on foot. It was too late now; I would have to rely on improvisation, summoning up my symptoms as he explored for them. And yet perhaps that would be the best way after all, I now realized; an intangible something that he could not immediately pin down might give me more stay with him than some minor blemish that could be cleared up at a single prescription.

I rounded the turn, told off numbers — nearly faltered to a halt for a moment. I was stunned at my first sight of the place. The telephone exchange covering this entire district had fooled me. I had expected a swank, towering apartment house on one of the avenues, or a smaller but still ultrasmart one just off them at the very least. Instead, it turned out, it was an old-fashioned, high-stooped brownstone house. Badly weatherworn, and not even very clean at that. People like her, when they had a doctor at all, had one of these modish, bedside-manner practitioners, I had always thought. It occurred to me there was an anomaly here: a showgirl, a woman in nightlife, with an old-fashioned family doctor. Well, I still had no proof that he was her doctor. He might have been a friend.

The whole aspect of the place was that of one of these houses forgotten by time, even to what might be called the details of everyday occupancy as they showed themselves from the street, let alone the structural signs of age. The very curtains on the parlor-floor windows, which was what they had called the first floor above the street in the days of this house, ended in a row of ball fringe.

There was no brass plate affixed to the doorway, nothing like that. A small black-lettered placard thrust into the rim of one window, inside the pane, gave his name: “J. Mordaunt, M.D.”

I climbed to the top of the stoop and I rang the bell. How strange, I thought, to go into a house like this, at what to our modern eyes really amounted to second-story level. To stand there waiting admittance as I was now, as on a perch, well above the heads of passersby or the roofs of passing vehicles, looking down on the street from above.

A flicker of motion snagged my eye, and I turned to look along the face of the house to one side of me. Someone had just been watching me through a gap between curtain edge and side of window. I was too late to see them. It was the fall of the curtain back into true, after the figure was already gone, that had caught my notice.

It struck me as a rather untrustful way to be admitted to a doctor’s consulting room, where, at least during visiting hours, the door is usually open to all comers.

The inner door behind the vestibule had opened, and a stocky, better-than-middle-aged woman of Finnish or some similar northern Mongoloid descent stood looking at me.

“Is the doctor in?” I asked deprecatingly.

“You got an appointment to see, yas?” she said surlily.

“I have an appointment for four.”

I must have neglected to nod along with the remark, thinking it unnecessary. She heightened her voice: “You speak louder, yas? I cannot hear goodt.”

I spoke louder. “I have an appointment for four.”

“So, come in. I tell.”

At first glance her hair had seemed white. It was whitening, but the process had not completed itself; what gave the all-over impression, I saw, was that its former natural color had been a straw blonde, almost white in itself.

I wondered what had become of the assistant; this was definitely not the voice that had spoken to me yesterday.

She ushered me into the front parlor with a rather browbeating sort of imperiousness. “Go in. I tell.” She went toward the stratified dimnesses at the back of the hall, herself dimming, tone by tone, as she drew away from me, until she was all gone. But whether upstairs or down, I couldn’t tell.

The place was stale with that stale smell that only old houses can attain. It was not a question of dust; it exuded from within the very walls themselves. It was the ichor of the dwelling’s bones. This room where I sat waiting was, decoratively speaking, a sort of port of last call. It was filled with flotsam and jetsam of bygone eras, all mixed in together, a piece from this one, a piece from that one, but even the most recent items stopped well short of the first Great War.

I saw things that I recognized only by hearsay, had never seen with my own eyes before. For instance, on a center table there stood a platter of wax fruits under a glass dome. Then there was a phonograph with a crank handle protruding from the side and a great tulip-shaped horn rearing over it and threatening the middle of the room. Against a shield on the wall hung two mallards in high relief, complete with natural feathers, under convex glass. At the small of my back, until I dislodged it to find comfort, was a lumpy, battered mass that had once been a leather pillow with a decorative motif burned into it.

What had she had to do with anyone like this? What had been the connection between them?

He must have had to come down from above. I heard a fairly audible masculine tread coming down a staircase, although at some distance to the rear. Then it approached along the hall toward where I waited. Slow and unenthusiastic, as though finding in the summons only a wearisome, unwelcome task. It stopped short of the room I was in, however, and a door opened and closed to admit it close by.

He had gone into the next room. An unsuspected seam that had lurked unseen until now down the center of a pair of sliding doors glowed silver with high-powered examining light, and there were vague sounds of fumbling preparation from the other side of it. Disquietingly audible to me.

What sounded like an enamel panful of loosely rolling instruments was shifted sleazily aside to make room. Water ran, and there was even the suck of soap, produced by the suction between two hand hollows.

I found the whole thing terrifying. Had I been a bona fide patient, I suspected, I should have run forth into the street without waiting to be accosted by this wretched sloven.

The floor kept creaking as he moved back and forth; I imagine he was drying his hands on a towel. Evidently it was too tedious a process to pursue through to the end. A moment later there was a patting sound against starched linen or some similar stiffened fabric. He was completing the act by patting his hands down his sides!

The woman, the housekeeper, must have looked in at him. I heard the other, lateral door creak slightly and suddenly heard her voice in there with him. “You liff you glasses oppstairs.”

I heard him say, “What’d she do with that appointment pad of hers?” He had to speak loudly because of her deafness. I heard him quite clearly out where I was. At least there was no conspiratorial whispering.

The housekeeper answered with that same congenital surliness she had displayed toward me: “That I godt nodding to do with. You ask her. You don’t ask me.”

It was the assistant’s day off, apparently. Or else she only worked for him on a part-time basis.

It might have been an unfair test I was subjecting him to, judging him by his surroundings and by sounds overheard through a door; he might very well have been a genius, a savant of medical science, unrecognized and unrewarded, in spite of all this, but I found myself insisting: “This man is no good. He is no good as a doctor.”

And the inescapable corollary to that, of course, though I failed at the time to take sufficient note of it, was: “Because he doesn’t want to be. Because he’s not interested in being.” But then, if you don’t want to be a doctor, if you don’t care, why be one?

The doors parted with a grunting and wobbling; the seam of silver became a four-square flash flood pouring in on me, and he was ready for me at last.

He stood there, and I looked at him and he looked at me.

Antagonists for a coming duel, though only one of us was aware of it yet. He was lumpy and yet powerful with it. Bent at the shoulders and neck, but not from weakness, from lack of regard for holding himself upright, straight, all his life through. His hair was dark, and there was that most objectionable type of baldness to be discerned through it; the strands brushed straight across the scalp from side to side, with pink interstices alternating with their pitiful attempt at concealment.

His by-courtesy white jacket had stains of iodine on it, some of them worn to faint yellow by age, and his bared ankles were thrust into crumbling leather house slippers.

I said, “How do you do, Doctor?” and rose warily to my feet.

He said, “Come right this way. By all means. Come right this way.”

Even that bit of phrasing smacked of the musty, the old-fashioned, somehow. Why “by all means”? That was what I was there for. It was as though there had been some imponderable objection and he were effacing it. Had there been — in his own mind?

I stepped past him, and he smelled a little. Doubly. Of some old-fashioned antiseptic, carbolic or something; it might have been the soap he’d just used. And the other component was bodily uncleanliness.

A thrill of repulsion ran its course through me and spent itself again as the broad table intervened between us.

He said, “My assistant has mislaid the record of your appointment. Do you mind giving me your name again and all the rest? I have to do this, you see.”

Yes, I thought, you have to. “Alberta French.”

“I believe I have never treated you before, Miss French?”

“No, you haven’t. I’m not often ill.”

He left the notation on the desk before him. It was obviously uncompleted. He hadn’t come to whom it was had given me the recommendation yet. And I knew he surely would before I was through.

“Ah,” he said about my seldom being ill. “And what do you complain of now, Miss French?”

I’d decided upon a fairly vague symptom. That is to say, one that could not be easily disproved, centered upon any particular cause at sight. “Doctor, I’ve been getting spells of dizziness lately, more and more often, and I don’t like them.”

“Hm,” he said. Which might have meant anything. Which probably meant nothing.

“The other day I was coming home, and the whole street got black; I had to hold my hand out against a wall and stand still for a minute until it passed over.”

“How long since you first began to notice this?” He was looking at me, but somehow the expression on his face matched the tempo of his tread as I had heard it before: complete disinterest in this case. And all other cases as well. “That,” I thought, “will change at mention of a name presently. I hope.”

“For quite some time now. Several months. At first I didn’t think anything of it —”

He took something out of a balky drawer beside him that he had to wrench open — he curled his underlip; he stood up.

“Take off your coat, please. Roll up your sleeve. There, that’s high enough. No, just that one.”

I wondered why his simplest instructions, such as this, seemed to quicken a little current of fear in me. Maybe it was the atmosphere here. Or something about his own personality.

“Make a tight fist.” He was dangling a rubber tube.

He tied it excruciatingly tight and took my blood pressure.

I kept watching his hands while he was about it. They were strong, sinewy; the veins on the back stood out like whipcord. Those filthy, yellowed nails. Those brutal, lumpy fingers, almost looking swollen with their own bulk. They could have smothered someone to death under a pillow so easily, those hands.

It seemed to me he was doing it unnecessarily — yes, even vindictively — tight, as though not he but his hands themselves, autonomously, detected my dislike and unspoken accusation. As though his brain were down there in those two lumpy pads.

I drew in my breath, cold, and closed my eyes.

Finally he unwound it. The blood burned, struggling to get back into where it had been.

I didn’t ask him and he didn’t tell me.

He resumed his seat, made a steeple of his hands. “You sleep well?”

“No, very poorly.”

“You eat well?”

“No, I scarcely eat at all.”

A sudden little gleam of interest lit up his eyes at this point that I failed totally to understand. It was the first interest he had shown throughout the entire proceeding.

“Tell me.” He stopped, as though arranging the way he wished to phrase it. “Do you eat poorly because you have no appetite or because —” He slowed a little. I wondered what he was going to say; what other reason was there for not eating well than lack of appetite?

He finished it. “Or because your circumstances will not permit you to eat as well, as fully, as you would like?” But why that mischievous little eye glitter with it? Was that funny?

I didn’t answer, feeling that there was a fork in the road here and, rather than take the wrong one, preferring not to take any.

He seemed to accept the silence for an answer. He looked down again at the form or whatever it was that he still had before him. “I see here that I have not yet completed — Tell me, who recommended me to you? In what way did you hear of —?”

“Here it comes,” I said to myself.

I got a grip on the lower leg of my chair with the turn of my instep. “A friend of mine. Mia was the one who told me.” Then, as though in recollection that her given name might not be enough, that he might not recognize her by that alone, “Mia Mercer,” I expanded. A trick of speech to suggest the closest intimacy.

We looked at each other a long time, long and hard, both of us. I said to myself, “The duel is on.”

He said, “She’s gone now, isn’t she?”

He seemed not to know, said it as if he had heard it vaguely somewhere or other, wanted me to confirm it.

“Yes, it was in the papers.” I said it vacantly, distrait, as if still mildly sad about it even this long after.

“By some man named —”

“Somebody she knew, I guess,” I said, looking down, still saddened.

“Some man named Murray.”

There was something almost obscene about it, having my own name thrown at me like that in a place like this. It was good he didn’t have his stethoscope to me just at that minute; he would have heard it jump.

“Did you know him?”

“I didn’t know anyone she knew. I just knew her.”

He nodded, thought awhile.

“Those she knew, in any case, are scattered to the wind,” he went on. “The fabric of her — how shall we say it? — acquaintanceship is all tattered and no good any more.” I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say to me, except that he was looking at me quite intently.

Then he said, “Tell me, how did she come to speak of me? Were you ill at the time?”

“Well, I suppose I must have been feeling — low, depressed.”

“And she said —? Tell me, what were her exact words? How did she —?”

There was something here. I had to be careful; I had to be vague; I could sense that without understanding why. “Well, it’s quite some time past. She said, ‘Why don’t you go to see Dr Mordaunt? He might be able to do something for you.’”

The choice of phrase seemed to be satisfactory. His eyes enlarged, then became their normal size again.

“But it’s quite some time since. Were you working in the meantime?”

“Oh yes, I —”

“But you’re not at the moment?”

I took the cue offered for what it was worth. “No, not just now —”

“Yes, and when one doesn’t work one’s appetite — suffers,” he said in sanctimonious reflection.

“And then these dizzy spells —” I began, to lend a little plausibility.

He waved that aside, as though we were both too intelligent, knew too much, to waste any more time with that. That was the translation I got from the flip gesture.

“You live alone?”

I said yes, told him where.

He danced the point of his pencil awhile. “Have you ever taken anything to steady your nerves?” he asked absently, upending it and looking at the lead closely. I moistened my lips, uncertain of direction. “Not that I —”

“Not yourself? I see. Many people do, you know.”

From a consultation this had long ago become a rambling conversation. Or was it as rambling as it seemed? Now even that dwindled; from a conversation it became just meditation.

He seemed to be looking down. I received quite a shock, suddenly, when I saw that he wasn’t, that he was looking at me from under his thick, creased lids without seeming to.

He leaned forward again, this time did look at the paper below him on the table. “Come back — let me see, this is Thursday — come back Saturday, two days from now.”

Then he sort of died out, looking down.

“At what time, Doctor?”

“Oh, any time after dark. Ring the basement bell. In case Sophia — in case my housekeeper — is out that night I may not hear you if you come to the upstairs door.”

So he was going to be alone and he wanted me to come after dark, when no one would be likely to see me enter! What had I said that was wrong? What had I done? What trap had I fallen into, unknowing, during that long, rambling, seemingly innocuous conversation?

He pried apart the sliding doors with a horrid grating sound.

The last thing he said was, “I’ll see what I can do for you then.” He gave a funny glance over one shoulder as he did so, as if to see whether anyone was around.

I carried that away with me, memory of that self-betraying little backward look. That and a grisly, unclean sort of fear, as unclean in sensation as his office and his instruments and his person had been in contemplation. And this unshakable conviction, reiterating itself continually in my mind: “If you go back into that house again the doctor’s name may not be Mordaunt the second time; the doctor’s name may be death.”

So I wasn’t going back, and oh, I wasn’t going back, and no, I wasn’t going back, and in between each recurrent resolve not to go back I’d see his face, Kirk’s face, or think of him, or say his name down in my heart, and when nine o’clock on Saturday came I was back; I was creeping, inching, down the darkened side street toward that darkened, waiting house. Frightened and helpless and alone, yet moving steadily forward, slow as it was; mincing, as though feeling of the ground first each time I brought my foot forward to set it down, yet getting nearer, nearer all the time.

It never occurred to me that there was someone, somewhere in a hollowed-out concrete block, could have been proud of this. I had no leisure to think of it that way.

There, it was three away now. There, it was two away. There, it was the next one. This foot was trying not to move, to stay back where it had been. Now the other one was trying not to. Smart feet. But they weren’t married to Kirk Murray; just my head and heart were.

Oh, it was so dark along this street. Just that hooded, half-dimmed light on the other side, too far behind me to do any good any more. Looking downward into the little pool of its own reflection, like a discreetly retiring eye refusing to see what happened to me. And that little cross of punctured green pinpoints down the other way at the corner below, like a spark floating a little above the curb, that sometimes turned red and then came back to green again. A car passed once in a while, but even that was nothing, just a swift black shape hastening along on the black tide with a glint of silver at its prow.

I was up to it now, and there it was waiting: black eyes in triple rows, protruding teeth formed by the stoop steps, seeming to say, “I knew you’d come; I knew I’d get you.”

I hadn’t even told Flood; I don’t know why. I hadn’t even taken that most elementary, most ordinary precaution — to let someone else know I was coming here; I was going into this place. So that in case I didn’t come out again —

Because I had nothing definite to tell him as yet, I suppose, other than that Mordaunt had told me to come back a second time after dark. Because I was afraid of ridicule, I suppose, and would almost have rather faced this thing, whatever it was to be, alone than have him turn up the palms of his hands and say: “Almost every doctor you go to see asks you to come back a second time.” Or shrug and say: “Then if you’re afraid to go there don’t go there. No one’s making you. Why come running to us? We can’t give you a police escort to every doctor who makes evening appointments or happens to look across his shoulder as he’s seeing you out the door.”

Now I was here, and the time for what I should have done and what I shouldn’t have done was over; this was how I was going to do it.

The parlor floor and the two above it were dark. But now that the impediment of the preceding stoop was out of the way, I saw that the double window in the basement, deep within the areaway, niched within the projection of the two stoops, was showing a sullen brown-orange through a thick, almost opaque, shade. So he was waiting down there, as he’d said.

I didn’t even have anything on me to — well, in case anything happened. The lack was only relative, after all. A protective knife, for instance, was only as strong as the wrist behind it. A gun? I had no gun. A whistle, perhaps. Yet what chance would even a whistle have of reaching out here to the street from the deeps, the unsuspected recesses and keeps, of that jealously sealed house? Less chance than my own unaided scream, and that had little chance enough.

I played a forlorn game that kids know well, procrastinating, marking time, saying: “As soon as this next man coming along on the other side goes by I’ll go down the step and ring the bell.” Then, “He didn’t count; he passed too fast. Well, as soon as this next one goes by, then I surely will.” And then, “He didn’t count either; he turned in somewhere before he got here.” Until, in sudden helpless discovery, “There’s no one else coming. Now I have to go!” And through it all a grown-up voice, the voice of me grown up, scoffing in my ear, “Coward! Coward! Then why did you come here at all? Why didn’t you drop the whole thing when you got safely outside the other day?”

I forced myself down into the coal-black sunken pit of the areaway at last. “Kirk, look after me. I’m going in.” I knew he was helpless many miles away, buried in steel and concrete, but I had to have some talisman to see me through.

When I’d found the bell I rang it in such a strange way, had anyone been able to see me through the layers of dark. Collared my wrist with my other hand and thrust it home by that means, as though in itself it were atrophied, had no power to move.

Yes, it was childish, I know. It was the last lingering childishness in me giving up the ghost. There would be no more of it left in me after this. This was Alberta Murray, growing up as she stood before this house waiting to go in. Making her debut into an adult world such as she had never dreamed she would enter, such as she had never dreamed existed: a world of jungle violence and of darkness, of strange hidden deeds in strange hidden places, of sharp-clawed treachery and fanged gratitude, where compunction and conscience were just other words for weakness and used as such. Strange debut.

It made a faint sound far back inside, not the usual sound of a bell, a sort of angry, wasplike buzzing. These basement entryways in New York had, or have where they have still remained unaltered, a single common feature: a grilled iron gate giving in under the stoop structure. Then within that, at right angles, comes the wooden house door itself. This, I suppose, was to make access more difficult in the old days. The gate itself is a full-sized door in every sense of the word: it reaches from top to bottom of the embrasure, save that it is slit, can be seen through when it is daylight or when there is a light within the inner passage.

There was no sound of the inner door opening or of anyone coming out. He must therefore have already been in position, standing there concealed in the dark, watching me through the grille the whole time. His voice when it sounded, though it was low and meant to be reassuring, was so close to my face just the other side of the barrier and came so unexpectedly, it made my heels go up. “Good evening. I’ve been wondering how much longer you were going to take.”

Then, and then only, there was noise enough as he unfastened the heavy obstacle and swung it back for me. A little carbolic, a little uncleanliness came out unseen in the dark.

“You should never do that,” he said. “For fully five minutes you stood up there on the sidewalk, as if you couldn’t make up your mind. It — it doesn’t look right, gives a bad impression. When you are coming anywhere, especially when you are coming here to see me, go right in, don’t stand around like that outside.”

So he’d been watching me the whole time, probably had been on the lookout since before my arrival, like — like some sort of anthropoid lurking behind those iron bars.

I couldn’t help commenting to myself, “Where would you have been now if Flood had sent someone with you as an escort, for instance, and you had parted from him within sight of the house? Or even exchanged some unobtrusive signal with him from a distance?”

I dredged up what I thought a plausible enough excuse to cover the hesitant behavior that he didn’t approve of, though whether he believed it or not, I couldn’t tell. “Oh, I’ll tell you why that was, Doctor. I found out from a clock that I passed on the way over here that I was five minutes ahead of time, and I didn’t want to be too early. I’m funny that way. I like to keep an appointment to the minute, so I waited outside to —”

“Well, as a matter of fact, you’re five minutes late.”

“Then the clock must have been slow.”

He had not, meanwhile, stood back to admit me. He had instead come out past me to the sunken rim of the areaway and peered out over the two upright brownstone slabs that formed a sort of guard for it, first up the street in one direction, then down it in the other.

It was done with an assumption of casualness, even inconsequence, as though he were no more than an ordinary householder who, once summoned to the door, takes the opportunity of savoring the fresh air for a moment as long as he is out that far. But it didn’t mislead me. He wanted to make sure that my ingress should pass unobserved.

“Go ahead in, don’t stand there.” In itself the remark was innocuous enough; it was the way he uttered it without turning his head toward me, keeping his gaze steadily forward on the street, that made it a conspiratorial something else again. Everything he said and did, he did so — I didn’t know what the exact word was myself. Sinisterly.

I would have to go in in another moment anyway, I knew, so long as I was this far, but I grasped at any delay, no matter how fleeting. “But I don’t know where the light is, Doctor. I can’t see my way.”

“Go in without it. It’s just a straight hall; you don’t need it. I’ll be right there.” Again he didn’t turn his head. He wanted to be sure the street was sterile.

I knew. Oh, I knew; any fool would have by now. What doctor receives his patient without a light, scans the street after her as she goes in? The Finnish woman was out of the house, as he had known she would be, as he had planned she should be, and there was something grim going to take place here.

I was too frightened to back out of going in any more. I was too frightened to do anything but go ahead. There are times when that is no figure of speech. I was afraid if I balked now he would overpower me and drag me in with him by main force. And I had at least that little slack left yet to my rope; I was still a free agent for a moment or two longer, provided my direction was forward and inside.

I sidled in backward, feeling of the wall with my hands, shifting my body along it under the stoop embrasure like an ebony portcullis that blacked still further the already seemingly impenetrable blackness there had been beyond it. Through the second door opening, until my feet found wood under them instead of cement. The carbolic was stronger in here; he had lingered so long and it was so confined.

His tread scraped the gritty areaway, returning; the iron barrier creaked, clashed into its frame, and riveted closed, and all further freedom of choice in the thing had been taken out of my hands.

I was in now. Good and in.

His foot came down heavily on one of mine in passing. It felt for a minute as though several of those brittle little bones out at the end of it had been pulverized. He didn’t apologize, though he must have felt it.

“It’s so dark, Doctor. I can’t see.”

He was already ahead. “Just follow me,” he said ungraciously. “You can do that much, can’t you?”

I moved after him along warped wooden flooring. I thought from footfall to footfall he’d stop and turn without warning and I’d feel those cruelly powerful hands closing in a pincers movement at my —

The shaft wall of an enclosed basement stair sidled past to one side of us. I could feel the lathe and plaster encroachment it made on our right of way and guess what it was by its shallowness and yet continued length.

“Aren’t we going up to your office, Doctor?”

“What for?”

That clipped “What for?” sent a redoubled chill through me. He wasn’t even making a pretense of continuing the other day’s consultation, sketchy as it had been. Whatever was to happen to me was to happen down here, safely belowstairs, where no marks of struggle — or accomplishment — would as readily meet the eye of the Finnish woman or anyone else.

Suddenly the passageway was at an end; we had arrived. I had a single moment in which to notice a difference in texture of the flooring underfoot — the foot can be wonderfully acute in the dark. It was as rotted as before, but perhaps the planks had been laid in a different direction or there was a thin layer of worn-out oilcloth covering them. Without any further warning than that a light suddenly flashed on, and his hand came down again to his side, leaving it swaying restlessly to add to its blinding effect.

A protector of ordinary brown wrapping paper had been rigged around it, and this helped temper its devastating suddenness still further, once the first shock on the eyes had worn off. But it also created a curious tidal mark of shadow evenly around the walls, at about half height, giving a macabre overtone to the scene. Above all was gloom, and we were as in an illuminated pit or fish tank. Then, too, unless we stood directly centered under it, it cut off our heads and upper parts at varying lengths, so that I had the additionally terrifying experience of confronting a half being with a pair of disembodied eyes glimmering wanly in the dun oblivion above the rest of him.

We were in a windowless room at the back of the basement, used either for storage or debris originally and now both. It was impossible to tell which purpose had preceded the other, since there was an equal amount of both categories in sight. There were cans and small sacks of provender, empty glass jugs filmed with dust that must have once been receptacles for the more common medicinal ingredients and solutions, rusted-in tin olive-oil drums, broken chairs. I noted, among other things, a discarded sewing machine rusted to a spiny reddish skeleton that once must have made leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts that trailed along the floor under the diligent fingers of some long-gone feminine dweller in this place.

“Close that,” he said tersely. “Where’s your head?”

I drew the door after me and shut us in.

There was a small table there, grimy with age but apparently still reserved for use down here where it was, for it was placed right side up and stood clear. He made several short, swift trips to the outer dimness, so that the shadow severed him like a guillotine knife each time, returning with what looked like a shoe carton, which he placed upon it. And then a slip of paper, which he retrieved from some safekeeping place known only to himself in the surrounding litter and too quickly for me to detect where it was, had I been intent on doing so. And finally, moving between me and the table briefly, but in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether it had come from his person or from some shallow drawer beneath, as it cleared into view again it suddenly bore a revolver where there had been none before. It lay at his cuff’s end as he seated himself, and, perhaps by accident, its vicious snout was pursed directly at me.

He saw the rotary swirl of panic the pupils of my eyes gave, then glanced at the gun as if identification of the cause were necessary to him. “I always have that in here,” he said. Which, if intended for explanation, was no explanation at all.

He shot his sleeves back to more comfortable length. “Now,” he said. He said it flatly, as though: “The preliminaries are over; now we begin.”

“Sit down on something. That packing case.” The shoe carton, if that was what it was, had descended to his lap, out of my sight. The small oblong of paper he held in one hand; tattooed it diagonally on one point, as though seeking to blunt it against the tabletop.

“Do you know anybody?”

I moistened my lips, unable to answer. It might have seemed, though, as if I were racking my memory.

“Anybody that would be any good to us?” he added.

I still couldn’t find my voice.

“Well, you said the other day that you didn’t know anybody she did. I simply wondered if you had any — any contacts of your own.”

This time he answered for me. “No, you haven’t.” Then, “It doesn’t matter. I can keep you busy.”

From the unseen shoe carton, apparently — though I had no direct proof of this — he took a small envelope. It was the diminutive size that a visiting card or a gift card would be enclosed in. Or perhaps a doctor’s prescription, written on a once-folded leaf from a small tab. It had not, however, been left open. The flap was sealed. And so firmly sealed that the mucilage had rippled the edges of the flap a little in drying. It was lumpy with some uneven content, the envelope, so that it was rather bloated at the bottom, squat, but at the top paper-thin, flat, as it was meant to be. Yet as he tendered it to me its gravity of weight shifted so that, receiving it upside down from him, in my hands it became clogged at the top, paper-thin at the bottom, with a sensation of granular shifting.

“How often should I —?”

Sometimes you are saved by the slightest things. He answered me too quickly; that was all that saved me. I had been about to ask, “How often should I take this?”

“As often as you conveniently can.” He was already extending a second one to me.

Simply to free my hand of the first I opened my handbag and mechanically prodded the packet in.

“What’re you going to do, carry it in there?” His tone was irritably uneasy, I thought.

There was a semihidden compartment in it, as in many bags, controlled by a zipper running along under the frame on the inside. I drew the zipper across to show him. “Will this be all right?”

“Let me see it.” He took the bag from me, probed with four fingers down within this newly provided orifice. Then he removed the entire bag from my sight, lowered it to his lap in company with the carton. I saw his upper arm moving slightly in its socket, as though its lower extremity were engaged in some transaction. Then I heard a familiar snapping sound I knew by heart, as if the jaws of my bag were being closed by him.

A moment later he had returned it to me, inscrutably shut. “There,” he said, “that’ll do for now.”

When my head came up from replacing it on my own lap he locked eyes with me. “Two hundred fifty dollars, understand?”

I didn’t. I looked at him.

He said sharply, “Well, don’t look at me! Two hundred fifty dollars, understand?”

My mouth said, “Yes, Doctor.”

His fingertips left the slablike handle of the gun; it was only as they quit it they first revealed to me they had been on it, so deftly had they sought it.

He handed me the slip of paper. “Now memorize this list a minute and then burn it.” I righted it and looked at it. I heard him say, “After a while you won’t need it.”

He waited. “Got it? Now say it back.”

I cleared my throat, recited uncertainly like a kid in school: “Spotless Cafeteria on Canal Street, between eleven and twelve, shredded wheat, the last table against the wall as you go toward the back —”

“You know how to eat shredded wheat, don’t you?” he interrupted. “You crumble it up between your fingers until it makes a little pile of crumbs on the plate; don’t dig into it whole with your spoon the way some people do. Now go ahead.”

“The Oregon Bar on Third above Forty-Ninth, around twelve-thirty, answer a call for ‘Flo Ryan’ in the second pay booth.”

“Go on. No, don’t look at it.” He pinned it down to the table.

“Ladies’ room of the Mimi Club over on Eighth, near Columbus Circle, ask the attendant if she knows Beulah —”

“You left out something.”

“Any time from two on.”

“Just one more. Come on, get some speed into it.”

I groped, finally recalled it. “The Gem all-night movie house on Forty-Second, from three o’clock on, last row in the balcony to the left-hand side; ‘Did I drop my scarf under this seat?’”

I drew a deep breath.

“You didn’t mention the total,” he said with something like a baleful threat in his eyes. He’d summed up the amounts.

“One thousand,” I said.

“Well, keep that in mind. I wouldn’t advise you to show up here short —” He didn’t finish it.

I was supposed to come back here with a thousand dollars; I was supposed to get it at these various places. That was the most I knew; the sight of the gun there at hand, imminent, even though he didn’t touch it again after that once, its reptilian little bore pointed at me from first to last, drove all coherency of thought beyond those two points out of my mind, wouldn’t let my faculties mesh them into any sort of consecutive meaning.

“Give it to me.” He took the piece of paper from me. He struck a kitchen match and burned it to a crisp, shifting his hold on it as it flamed so that it was all consumed. Then he crumbled it between his hands, rolling it like a sort of black meal, until there was nothing of it, just the streaks it had left on his palms. Then he cleaned these by spitting into them and stroking them down his sides.

Some doctor, I thought, controlling the grimace that tried to distort my face.

My eyes sought the gun in veiled speculation. True, it was so close to him he had only to shift his wrist, and I was at the far side of the table, but if I distracted his attention to some distant point in the room and made a quick grasp for it —

Suddenly it had sidled over the edge of the table, was gone, without, however, dropping of its own free weight to the floor, and his hand came up again, empty, from wherever it had withdrawn to, drummed there where it had been.

It wouldn’t have done me any good, anyway, I realized; I couldn’t force what I wanted out of him simply at gunpoint. As the gunpoint left him it would simply be retracted again. It had to come by some more valid means.

“Doctor, I —”

I didn’t finish it, because I didn’t know what I’d wanted to say.

He seemed to, however. “All right, here,” he said grudgingly. He handed me a filthy-looking ten-dollar bill. “That comes off,” he said.

He rose and his arm went out toward the paper-dimmed light. “Now hurry up and get out.”

He let me open the door and cross the threshold. Then the light was gone, and the scene had never existed at all; everything that had been said, everything that had been done, the way it had all looked became a bad dream, badly remembered.

His footsteps sounded after me as I groped my way down the long, Stygian passage, thrusting it behind me with a continuous motion of one arm. I was frightened of those close-at-hand footsteps of his, fully as frightened again as I had been on the way in; I wanted to break into a run, to fly from them, but I curbed myself, telling myself there was a barrier ahead that would only block me if I did and undo me, to be brave and keep my nerve up a moment longer and then it would be past. Just a moment longer and then it would be past; it would be over; I would be out.

And behind me the footfalls crunched, stealthily surly, at my heels.

It came at last, and he opened it at last, and then as my body almost tried to lurch out, it was in such an ecstasy of impatience, he stayed me with a curt downward chop of his arm and looked carefully about first.

Then finally the brake of his arm dropped and I was free to go. “Monday night, same time,” he said gutturally. “See that you don’t forget to show up.”

I clambered up the two steps to sidewalk level.

The last thing he said to me was, “Watch it.”

It was said without compunction, without any fellow feeling of risk shared in common whatever; in a harsh, cruel, calloused sort of way; almost, it was a minor threat in itself. As if: “Be careful of yourself; you’re to be the means of bringing me money; that’s all I care about.”

I was hurrying up the street now on curiously stiff legs. And as the numbness wore off, for that was what it was, I knew they were going to become weak, refuse to hold me any more. I must get a seat on a bus before that happened. One came to the stop without much delay, fortunately, and the two things blended: the end of my own nervous energy and the thrusting under me of a leather-covered tier to sink back on. So that momentary collapse was averted.

I’d come out of there alive. Nothing had happened to me. That was all I could realize at first. Almost, that was all that mattered. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. I levered down the bus window beside me to breathe it deeply. Passengers around me turned their heads, annoyed; to them it was a draft, chilly, uncomfortable. To me it was free, grateful, restoring.

That was a dangerous sort of relief. It blurred the memory of many details. It cast a film over the issue. Above all, it made only that one house the focus of danger and construed all current surroundings as thenceforth innocuous, not to be questioned or looked at askance.

It made a man who happened to be waiting for the same train underground that I was the following evening and eyed me once or twice as he roamed about the tunnel platform just what such a thing would have always been to me, no more: a man who happened to be waiting for the same train underground that I was.

For danger was now foolishly locked in a watertight compartment, a cell, at Mordaunt’s house and could not be anywhere else. Just a man in a nondescript suit, wearing a nondescript hat — I think it was brown; no, gray; no, I didn’t know what it was — who stood before a mirrored chewing-gum purveyor clamped to a post and eyed his own face. Only his face was a little too far over to one side to be contained entirely within the mirror, and I was in the distance beyond, seated waiting upon the bench, so that his range of vision must have automatically taken me in.

He disappeared when the downtown train came fuming in; there were many cars to choose from, after all, but this was post factum in any case. He had already disappeared from my thoughts some time before; in fact, had never entered them.

And if, on changing over to the East Side line to get down to Canal Street he materialized a second time, in the closer confinement of the shuttle train, my quarantine of all danger within Mordaunt’s house made this nothing, made it just a coincidence. Hundreds of people a day, every hour, changed from the West Side to the East Side lines. Why shouldn’t he?

There were more cars to choose from again, once the shuttle was done with, and again he disappeared.

My decision to go down there, to carry out the unsavory expedition that had been assigned to me, was predicated upon the following line of reasoning: I needed at the very least another interview with Mordaunt, if possible several more. I had obtained nothing the first time, and yet I had obtained the promise of everything. He had known Mia Mercer; he had not acted in the capacity of personal physician to her but in some illicit relationship. There was every hope of a motive lurking there if I was just given time to unearth it. A motive, and perhaps even proof itself. A man who would interview an intended accomplice with a revolver bared upon the table would almost certainly not hesitate to smother one to death who had crossed him or jeopardized him in some way. Very well; I could not hope for a second interview with him unless I first discharged his errand. Therefore, I was on my way to discharge it this Sunday night, this night of peace and rest in New York.

Oh, I was under no illusions as to its basic nature. And yet I was curiously naïve, even after the lengthy scene that had passed between us. I realized perfectly that it was some sort of criminal enterprise; the sums of money I was to receive told that, and, above all, the elaborate precautions taken to preserve anonymity both on the parts of those I was to contact and on the part of myself. And yet, difficult as it is to believe, I was still unsuspecting of its exact category. I thought it must be money owed to him for some sort of unlawful services rendered — and this could have been anything from falsifying records to performing criminal operations — and that he could not safely collect otherwise than in this indirect manner. My mind, in the torrent of other details, had developed a curious blind spot; it glossed over those packets that had passed between us as a meaningless stopgap offered by him solely to make our interview plausible. In other words, should he be brought up short and queried, ever, he could say he had treated me only as a doctor treats a patient, had prescribed for me, had given me some sedative, headache powder, strengthener, or whatever it was, for my spells of dizziness and would have my word to corroborate his and perhaps some office or desk jotting to show for it as well.

Wise, therefore, and yet blind at the same time, I neared the Spotless Cafeteria. I looked in as one who takes a moment to decide what food she will select before entering.

It was surprisingly well filled with people at this hour; all the choicer tables near the front had their occupants, and though many seemed to have finished their collations long ago they lingered on, chatting in groups of two and three. It seemed to be used, like many such a place, almost as much for social purposes as for eating purposes.

I thought: “He wants me to go in here. I’m to get money in here.” I swung the circular door around and pulled a pasteboard tab from the dispenser that stood like a tollgate just within. A bell reverberated shrilly, but no one even turned his head to look; it pealed like that every time anyone entered.

I took a tray and trucked it along the rail before the counters. The paper that he’d burned had said “shredded wheat.” I couldn’t see any. When I had reached the end I even retreated back the way I had come for some little distance to make sure I hadn’t overlooked it. Finally I had to call over the attendant behind the counter and ask him if they hadn’t any.

“No,” he said, “but I can open a package for you; we got some inside for the morning turnover.”

He came back in a moment from their larder or whatever it was with two of the familiar little oblong cakes on a plate.

He said while he was punching my ticket, “We used to get calls for this late at night. A customer used to come in and ask for it like you every once in a while, but he hasn’t been around in a long time now. It’s really a breakfast food.”

I wondered if he knew that it was a signal. I looked at him and he didn’t seem to, seemed to be talking just out of friendliness, but I couldn’t be sure.

I put it on my tray and went over and sat down at the very last table against the wall.

The bell chimed and a man came in and went over and drew himself a cup of coffee from the spigot in the wall. His back was to me, but he looked vaguely like the same man I’d seen twice before since leaving my own place tonight. I decided that must be just a mistaken impression; coincidences don’t run in threes like that.

I’d finished crumbling the substance, and it made a little mound, like dried leaves, in the middle of my platter. I wondered whether I was supposed to eat it. I wasn’t particularly anxious to. Although I may not have been gripped by fright as I had been at the doctor’s house, I was fairly tense and wishing it were over.

The man with the cup of coffee had submerged into the crowd of heads. However, remote as he was from me, there was a diagonal passage of clearance still left between us, so that I could still see him where he now sat, and he could have still seen me had he cared to. But he refrained from looking in my direction, became intent on his own immediate concerns, so that all I could see was the downturned crease of his hat crown. However, it occurred to me that there was a striking similarity in general vagueness, between him and the person I had already glimpsed twice on the trains coming here ton —

Before I could pursue this speculative train of thought any further a newspaper had suddenly opened before me across the table, and there was someone sitting there. No bell had rung, so he must have been in the place already.

He was scanning a headline fixedly. It only takes a limited time to read a headline, but his eyes remained upon it steadily, never dropping down to the further matter below.

I could feel my heart quicken a little.

He was sitting sidewise to me, the way most readers do at confined little tables like that. I could see a segment of his profile in the gap between newspaper screen and the wall at the back of his head.

“Got it?” he slurred without twitching a facial muscle. For a minute I almost thought he was mumbling over something he’d read to himself, the way some newspaper readers do, it was emitted so deftly.

Before I could answer he had already tired of waiting.

“What’s matter, didn’t he tell you about me?”

“Yes, but I don’t know who —”

Before I could finish speaking he had again tired of waiting.

“What’s matter, ain’t you got nothing? Didn’t he give you nothing?”

“Well, he only gave me —”

He was conditioned to a hairspring tautness.

“Don’t take so long. I can’t hold this paper like this all night. There’s other people in here. You new?”

“What do you want me to do?” I said helplessly.

“Push your bag over this way.” He raised one elbow from the tabletop to allow it passage underneath without disturbing his newspaper.

Mesmerized by the strangeness of the whole thing, I prodded it forward until it had overbalanced on his side. His legs scissored together and arrested it, still without fluctuating the outspread newssheet.

One hand left its margin, letting the table support it at that end. Though it wavered a little and threatened to crumple, it remained upright, stiffened by its own bulky width.

I heard the smothered sound of the catch snapping open. There was a sense of stealthy activity that remained invisible, was more in his breathing than anything else. Then suddenly, with vicious recoil, “Where’s what he gave you?”

“He only gave me something for my — Pull that zipper across.”

The catch snapped closed again. His nostrils were pinched with the receding fury that had choked them for a minute.

The bag was suddenly back where it had been; his finger grip was back at the margin of the newspaper again. The two phenomena, black and pink, reappeared almost simultaneously, so swiftly was it done, though one must in the nature of things have preceded the other.

Before I knew it the enshrouding paper was gone; he was gone with the swiftness of a dream. Only the winged doors were spinning around empty, showing black night through them where he’d flitted out a moment ago.

I drew the retrieved bag down to my own lap and examined it under shelter of the table line. One of the packets the doctor had given me was gone. There was a bone-shaped crush of money down in its depths, tight at the waist, as if from long, convulsive hand pressure. Two hundred and fifty dollars, when I had paired and counted it.

I looked sightlessly up in a sort of belated terror only striking now. There must be something in those — “You knew,” I said to myself accusingly; “you knew all along, but you didn’t want to admit it to yourself. You wanted to keep your conscience from hindering you in carrying through your own purpose, to which this is a necessary preliminary. So you stamped the thought down. You wanted to make it some crime you could disassociate yourself from, such as a fee for some illicit operation.”

I looked around me appalled, far more frightened now that he’d gone than I had been while I was still sitting scarcely two feet away from him.

No one in the place was looking at me. The busman behind the counter was busied at his duties, eyes down. The cashier within his little glass cubicle was reading a paper while he waited between departing customers. That man with the cup of coffee was holding it very steady, looking down into it, as though he had detected a speck in it. Not at me, into his cup. Then he went ahead and drank, completing the movement he seemed to have arrested for a moment. Detected. Arrested. That was simply my mind, using the first thought expressions that came to hand without stopping to examine them.

I got up and I made my way out in turn, sick and shaken and feeling a thousand years old; my shoulders clammy and weighted down, as if all the filthy, disinterred evil there was in the world had been dumped out upon them.

My resolve not to go on to the next place, now that I knew, was short-lived. Various factors played their part in canceling it, like snatches of inner voice, rallying me each one in turn. “I’d go ahead doing even this for you, Kirk.” “I’ve done it once already; there can be no greater harm in repeating it than there was in doing it the first time.” “I can’t go back unless I do.” “These people are not the victims of it; they are the professional distributors, retailers, so to speak.” And lastly, there was a sort of glimmering of enlightenment that seemed to come of it, this hesitancy of mine, that did more than anything else in sending me onward. She had refused to go to the next place — metaphorically speaking, for she hadn’t tramped from place to place afoot; she had been a luxurious lady — but she had refused to go onward at some point or other, and a pillow had come down over her face, to blot out any retained memory of that “next place,” to stifle any future revelation of it.

And if the very act of what I was engaged in produced the motive itself, intact, like that, so that all that was still needed was proof of the deed, how could I refuse to proceed? It would have been the grossest treachery to my own aims.

The Oregon Bar, then, on Third above Forty-Ninth, in the first half hour after twelve that same night. It was deep and narrow, like an alcove piercing the building it was situated in. It was dark with a sort of colored darkness that was the tint of it. Although there were lights, and they were dusky orange, copper-rose, and other similar feverish hues, it was the darkness you were conscious of more than them; its overall cast was dimness, a confetti-like twilight.

It was not an unduly prosperous place, even of its kind. Though I was no connoisseur I could sense in its atmosphere something static, stagnant, as of an establishment keeping its head above water, no more, the moment I put my foot across the threshold.

There were only men at the bar, but on the other side of the narrow aisle that was all it provided for ingress or egress there were tables set within head-high partitions that came out from the wall like the teeth of a comb, though far fewer, naturally. At one or two of these sat women of the type, I supposed, you would find in a place like this. Shell-like and brittle and empty inside, where they were young; like those celluloid dolls they used to sell, weighted at the bottom, so that they reared upright again no matter how often you pushed them flat. Lumpy and doughy and filled with a sort of resentful despair, where they were less than young. They were not, for one thing, young or old, of the outright demimondaine type. One bloated, stringy-haired woman was obviously drinking beer with her own husband, and they would finish up the night by beating one another around the walls of their tenement flat until the police were called.

The last of these tables, in this case, was already occupied, though I had not been definitely instructed to seek the last in here as I had in the cafeteria, to the best of my recollection. The one before it, however, was vacant, and I sidled into the rather difficult crevice between fastened-down bench and clamped-down table. The rather bovine, stupidly protracted looks from the sitters at the bar that had formed a necklace of ogling strung out the entire length of the place dropped off one by one like beads falling away, until at last I had been accepted within the establishment without further visual inquiry.

The barman had a helper for the tables, and he came over to me. I said, “I’m waiting for a call,” and he turned away again without resentment.

A moment after I found out I’d forgotten the name I was to answer to, and a brief flurry of fright came over me. Then I quickly reassured myself that wouldn’t be crucial in any case; I would be reminded of it when the call came, and it was hardly likely there would be two such calls in a single night to an unaccompanied woman in a hole-in-the-wall such as this. And as I relaxed from the hunched-over position across the edge of the table that I had inadvertently thrown myself into it came partially back to me of its own accord, as is often the way with the mind when tension is relieved. It had been something with an R, hadn’t it? Rice, I thought. Yes, that was it.

It was very hard to know where to look, for on one side of me there was just the blankness of the wall, and if I looked out on the other side I might meet one of their looks and invite intrusion. There was nothing but the shellacked pine-board panel opposite me to direct my eyes at. Over it would occasionally peer a little blue haze, from a freshly lighted cigarette, drifting slowly over to my side. And once a curious object, like the black triangular fin of a fish, thrust briefly above it, was gone again. I knew what it was; the uptilted wing on a woman’s hat. On it presently, the panel, I made out a faint tracing, still visible though it had been shellacked over. Somebody, some long-forgotten night ago, had once gouged out his or her initials with the point of a knife or the tine of a fork or perhaps even the point of a pin. Like children do on tree bark. These were older children, though; infinitely sadder, wiser children.

Where was he now, or she? Dead? Still living? Richer? Poorer? Probably not. You don’t change; only in the storybooks. Did he guess that some night a woman would sit here, in the same place where he’d been, carrying something in her bag that, though it was death to everyone else, she hoped would help her gain her husband’s life back?

The bar assistant was standing beside me again, having grown impatient, I supposed, that I was taking this long to order anything.

He leaned over confidentially, said: “Excuse me, are you Flo Ryan?”

That was the name; now that I’d heard it I remembered it, as I’d known I would.

I told him yes, I was.

“There’s a party calling you in the second booth. Straight back at the end there.”

I hadn’t even heard it ring. These partitions might have helped deflect it. I sidled outward as inconspicuously as I could and straightened once I was clear of the bench and table and went back there.

There was somebody already talking in the first booth, through some unfortunate mishap of coincidence, and this propinquity made me uneasy; I remembered only too well how highly audible everything is through those lathlike inner partitions. I glimpsed the turn of a neck, the back curve of a hat brim as I passed the glass.

The bar helper had left the receiver off, waiting for me. I drew the slide closed and picked the receiver up with five sticks of ice that would scarcely bend at the middle.

There was no sound. I didn’t know what to say. “This is Flo Ryan,” I said smotheredly. I used my free hand to contain the sound still farther.

A man’s voice said, “Is the light on in there with you?”

I looked. It was so pale I’d hardly noticed.

“If it is, reach up and give it a turn.”

I reached up and twisted it and it went out. I wondered how he’d known; then I remembered they went on automatically as you closed the door in most pay booths.

He said, “Okay, that’s all. Put what you’ve got in the coin-return slot. Then hang up and go back to your table. You know what to do. Count ten and come back after something you forgot. Don’t let anyone beat you back to the booth.”

I hung up. I opened my bag and put one of the packets into the coin-return slot. Then I came out. The adjoining booth was still occupied, but I hadn’t said enough at my end to give anyone who was listening an inkling.

I slumped back at my table. I counted, and with each numeral there came a sort of shudder, as if it had been a death knell. Then I fumbled in my bag and pretended to miss something, a coin or a lipstick or a handkerchief. I got up and went back a second time.

The first booth now yawned open and empty too. And yet no one had followed me back into the bar. I went into the one I’d been in a moment ago and probed the coin slot with two fingers. The packet was gone, but there was one of those same layered wedges of spongy currency, this time with a rubber band about it, as I’d received at the cafeteria.

I closed my bag on it, and then I came out and looked around. The narrow lane the booths looked out upon widened a little just past where they were, then ended as it widened. There were three doors there, two the doors of comfort rooms and a third one that had no designation to it. I went to this, hesitated a moment, then reached out and opened it, as if I had lost my bearings and mistaken it for one of the others.

There was darkness outside and the bite of open air. It was a walled-in alley that ran up to the street.

I turned back the other way. An odor of cigar smoke, only freeing itself now at last, hovered about the vacant booth adjoining the one I had been in. I shivered uncontrollably, as though there were some sort of malign miasma to be detected in it, as I hurried past.

I didn’t stop at my former table when I had reached it; I kept on toward the front, my frightened steps quickening all the time until I had emerged from the place almost at a terrified run.

Not too quickly, though, to catch the diagnosis offered by one barman to the other as they stared after me curiously. “He musta changed his mind about where he’s meeting her.”

I kept running for several doorways afterward, as though the feel of the air as I coursed through it were cleansing me like a tide. Then I forced myself to slacken and bridled my instinctive repugnance to a quick walk carrying me away from there.

My emergence, had anyone been watching or waiting for it, would have been sudden enough to take them by surprise. In one of the nearby enshrouded doorways, as I hastened obliviously past, I caught the lumpy outlines of two men who had been standing there as if conferring. The little red dart of a cigarette was quickly shifted rearward out of sight, as if behind someone’s person, but not soon enough to strike out at my eye in passing.

I looked back once, from beyond the next crossing, simply to reassure myself, but neither one had come into view, so their being sheltered there had had nothing to do with me.

Dancers were wavering in a tight, lashed-together cluster on a small mat of floor with a colored spotlight bearing down at each end to light it, and the rest was a zone of murky dusk. They undulated like a form of marine life seen through rippling apple-green and mollusk-purple water. None could displace the others; they were so tightly packed together, and each in the same order as before would come around again in due course, but long after. It was like the turning of an infinitely slow, clotted wheel pushed by droves of chained slaves.

I came in. I went toward this pyre of green and magenta flaming in the darkness.

There is something abysmally sad about all such group dancing late at night; it is like a publicly performed ritual to mortality, and I found it grimly melancholy over and above the grim melancholy of my own errand. A bacchanalia at fixed prices. The never-ending, never-succeeding attempt to hold pain, despair, death at bay for a little while. A little while longer.

I remembered, for some strange reason, that night clerk at one of the hotels to which I’d gone looking for Marty, and the macabre cast of his eyes. “Oh God,” I thought, “there is such a thing as seeing too much. As seeing too much and too clearly.”

I lurched soddenly into the first vacant chair at hand, and a woman who had been sitting there with her shoulder to it turned and said, “There’s someone there.”

She meant it belonged to one of the dancers.

“I know,” I said, without even looking at her. I shaded my eyes with my hand, but ripples of green and purple crept through the seams of my fingers nevertheless. “Just let me rest a minute. I’ll get right up again.”

The music stopped, and the laboring wheel stopped with it. They clapped, holding their hands up over their heads, for there was no room to clap them down below at body level. And the music began again, pushing back their fear of dying for a few minutes more.

I got up and I skirted around the outside of them, having to squeeze my way through between their backs and the nearest tables, they were so compressed. A seated man reached out to catch my hand as I brushed put him, but I threw it forward and he was too late.

I opened the door and went in.

It was deathly quiet for a minute, with the suddenness of an inverted explosion. I saw myself coming forward in a warped mirror, so that I shook a little in the middle. There was an effluvium of cheap perfumery in the air but a degree above the rancid. There was a bulky colored woman sitting on a chair, her skin the color of dark maple sugar. She had been looking idly at the fingers of her own hands, inert in her lap, when I first came in. Telling them off against one another but without mathematical purpose. She rose beside me with a sort of easygoing laboriousness as I stopped before the mirror.

“Get you something, child?”

There wasn’t a mean line in her face. And yet how reliable is a face anyway? And she spoke in the softest, most dulcet, most lulling tones I’d ever heard from a human throat. Benign was the word for her. Benign and motherly and comforting. Showing that nature sometimes does copy art. For here in New York, and of New York, and probably having never been out of it in her entire life, she was par excellence the broad-bosomed, yearning Southern mammy of the songs and the farina posters.

I said, “Are — are you Beulah?”

“I’ve heard myself called that, child. ’Tain’t rightly my name, but you just go ’head and call me that if you’ve a mind to. There’s been others that have.”

My other hand roamed to the handbag I already held in one. “Well, I was — I was told to ask for —”

She said as though she were soothing some fretful pickaninny tugging away at her skirts, “Not out here, child. That door opens straight in. Here, you come in here. Beulah’ll show you.”

She took it from me and went out.

I heard her opening something: her own clothes locker, most likely. I took a step forward that she must have sensed rather than heard, for I was scarcely aware of doing it myself. “No, don’t come out, child. You just stay there a minute more. Beulah won’t be long.”

The locker closed again, and keys jingled lightly, blanketed under a skirt.

I went back to the mirror again, still quivering at the middle. But now quivering in other places as well that didn’t reflect. She had placed things on the glass slab below it that I might want to use. The money was there between comb and soiled, pancake-like puff. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it for a minute, just ran a little cold water and kept trying to wipe off one hand under it, as though it were —

She said, “Don’t leave nothing behind that belongs to you, child. So many folks are always doing that.”

I caught her studying me with a sort of indulgent fondness. She placed one hand on my shoulder maternally, the other on the fritter-like puff. “My, you’re a pretty little thing. You must be just a baby. Here, let Beulah fix you up; she’ll show you how.”

I squirmed suddenly from under her hand and struck the puff aside, so that it exploded into a cloud of white haze. I backed all the way across the place, still shaking in the middle in the mirror, this time with aversion. “Don’t touch me! You’re — you’re a monster! You ought to be — !”

She didn’t show any resentment. I don’t think she knew what it was to feel anger. She stood there looking so benign, smiling after me so indulgently. “Bless your little heart,” she kept crooning, as though she were pronouncing a benediction; “bless your little heart.”

I effaced her with a single back sweep of the door, like you wipe a smirch off glass.

There is nothing more horrid in crime than the failure to regard it as crime.

They were still dancing, turning slowly from green to purple, from purple back to green, like sloppy colors that run into one another. They were chanting in unison now as they danced, and that made it even more horrible.

“Dance, dance, dance, little lady,
Life is fleeting to the rhythm beating
Through your mind.”

I beat my way out around their massed fringes, actually beat with flailing arms and fists, and they scarcely noted it. The music was a local anesthetic, numbing their backs and shoulder blades.

“Oh, Kirk, what am I doing here?” shot up through me like a rocket of dazzling sanity that went right out again, but while it lasted it sent me running full-tilt down the entryway to the sanctuary of the open.

There was a man there, reading his paper, to one side of the entrance as I rounded the turn, so close I almost grazed him. He was holding it up very high and very close to him. I had a strange optical illusion of just-then-completed motion, as if he’d been holding it lower, had just raised it that very instant to where it was now; I don’t know why.

The light wasn’t very good, and at another time I might have wondered why he’d choose such a place. But I didn’t then.

He must have heard the little sob of gratitude I gave, I passed so close to him, but he was too intent to notice.

I hurried down the street, and the intermittent sign back there behind me kept getting smaller each time it flashed on. Like this:

MIMI CLUB
Mimi Club
mimi club

I could tell because I kept looking back repeatedly, almost in synchronization with it each time it flashed on, as though fearful the spirit of disembodied evil itself would materialize and come after me out of that place.

But it didn’t. Nothing did. That casual bystander stood motionless there to the last, lost in his newspaper, unable to tear himself from it. That was all.

Once I thought I heard a faint whistle somewhere back there behind me. Not a mechanical whistle, one pursed by lips. I couldn’t tell from where, to where, for what reason, or what meaning it had had. Nor even if there really had been one at all. It didn’t come again. A thing like that didn’t alarm me. The night is full of such sounds. I had my own private terrors to contend with.

And this they called the Gem Theater, and it had a history, a past, I suppose, like men and buildings all do. Once tight-waisted ladies in ostrich-plume hats must have stepped from high-bodied, square-topped limousines to attend opening nights here. Then later, for weary seasons, lines of indifferent, underdressed girls had pranced back and forth across its stage, four, five, six times a day. Then it had outlived even that. Now it was senile, nearing the death that awaits even piles of stone.

Now homeless strays wandered in here to sleep and have the soles of their feet kicked awake by the ushers at regular intervals and sleep again until the next time they came by.

It never closed. Continually, throughout the night and throughout the day and around to the night again, lines of hissing, spitting, bluish motes given off by the livid screen ran downward in the darkness like rain, and cracked, mechanical voices, sounding just like voices talking outside in a rain, echoed hollowly through it. This was the conversation of ghosts in every sense of the word, for even the photographed lips that uttered the phrases were never even with them, moved long after or long before.

I stopped and bought a ticket for twenty-five cents. They had a man in the booth. They weren’t allowed to use girls this late at night. Another man took the ticket from me at the inner entrance, and that ended the formalities of admission.

I went into the dark and glimpsed the pale blue opening the screen made in it, like a window, ahead of me, and a scattering of somnolent heads, buried low among the seat backs. Then I turned aside and went up the stairs that led to the balcony. The branch on the left-hand side, for there were two, facing one another. He’d said the left-hand side of the balcony.

The carpeting was still on them from former days of glory but worn to a pulp and clinging to the feet almost like something spongy now. The stairs turned, and just past there I met an old woman feeling her way down. She looked like a charwoman. She came very cautiously, holding to the rail and exploring the turn of each step well with the toe of her foot before she would trust herself down. She left a tracery of alcohol hovering behind her all the way to the top.

I heard a knell-like sound just as I gained it myself, and when I looked back she had stood an empty bottle very primly, very tidily, in the exact corner of the turn, out of harm’s way. I saw her moisten her fingertips, touch them to the side of the bottle, as if in affectionate farewell, and then go on.

I came out on the balcony floor at the back of the seats. The “window,” the flow of ceaseless-falling light lines, was below me now, and a stout shaft of fuming white light, swimming with dust spirochete, was slanted downward over my head from a glowing eye at the rear to strike at it.

The majority of the scattered heads up here were in the first few rows. The last row, at least on the left-hand side, held no one in it. It was divided, like all the others, into two segments by the center aisle, and the strip I had to do with was completely vacant. Two rows below a man sat audibly sleeping. Then no one else for several more rows. I sidled into it, stood over the third seat in for a minute, then changed my mind, shifted back to the second. Why, I couldn’t have told.

I looked around me, toward the stairs where I’d just come from, and saw no one. I looked forward and watched the window into the world of make-believe for a dulled, unhappy moment or two.

A man far down in the first row got up from his seat and made his way up the terraced aisle. He seemed not to look at me, however, and after the first quickly inquiring glance I took him for somebody simply on his way out of the theater.

For several more moments I sat looking forward. Then suddenly a tendril of smoke drifting close to me made me turn my head, and he was standing directly behind me, almost at my shoulder, arms propped on the wooden bulkhead that walled off the seats from the open transverse beyond. He was, or seemed to be, unaware of me, eyes directed downward at the screen. He’d posted himself there so subtly that I hadn’t even detected his presence.

I didn’t know which of us was to speak first; I hadn’t been told. The non-existent scarf could have belonged to either of us. It wasn’t late enough in the year, however, for men to be wearing scarves yet, as a general rule, so I took my cue from that.

“Did I drop my scarf under your seat?” I mumbled half audibly.

“That’s right,” he said and deftly made the turn of the aisle gap and settled himself in the seat beside me.

He didn’t remove his hat. He sat leaning outward, away from me, rather than in toward me, and still kept his eyes on the screen with a dissimulation that must have been second nature to him by now, I reflected queasily.

I fumbled in my bag and removed the last of the things Mordaunt had given me. I balanced it on the spindly seat arm between us and edged over as far away from it as possible. When next I looked it was gone, and I could have sworn he hadn’t moved at all. His arms were folded across his chest, but they hadn’t stirred.

“I hope I never, as long as I live, set eyes on another of those little white pa—” I was thinking with devout intensity, when suddenly an unscheduled interruption took place.

There was a single quick, muffled footfall directly behind us. I never saw who it was, for he must have remained crouched over there where the bulkhead opened into the aisle beside us. The whiteness of a hand suddenly spawned over my seat neighbor’s shoulder from behind; a voice whispered with hot urgency: “Blow! She’s a plant! I just spotted ’em coming in below!”

Then the hand and the voice and whoever they had belonged to all disappeared alike as swiftly as they had descended on us.

The man next to me was suddenly standing erect, his face, turned my way now, an almost luminous grimace of incandescent rage. I didn’t see his hand coming in time. It struck like a snake. The only lucky thing was he didn’t have time to close it himself; it lashed against me open. The slap echoed all over the silence like a firecracker going off, and all the somnolent heads came up higher and turned one by one. A scalding wash of pain spread out all over my face and even down my neck on that side, and my eyes watered and made me lose him for a minute.

“Wait, give me what you were supposed to!” I cried blindly and tried to grasp at him.

“I’ll get you for this!” I heard him hiss. And then he, too, went. The row lay empty. After a second or two of time lag my eye caught a flurry of motion, something dark against the dark, ricocheting down the tiered outside aisle, far over against the building wall itself. A door giving onto a fire escape squeaked a little, scarcely seeming to move inward at all, then settled heavily still again.

And then nothing happened. A slap must have been a commonplace in that milieu, even against a woman’s cheek. The heads slowly turned away again, took up once more the thread of the more public drama being presented in that direction.

I crouched there uncertainly a moment longer. Then I was on my own feet and out on the carpeted passage behind the seats, not knowing which way to turn. A plant, a plant, what was that? They? Who were they downstairs?

I was afraid to go down those stairs now. I was even more afraid to go out the way I had seen him go, down the outside fire escape — afraid of what I might find waiting for me when I got to the bottom of it, in the dark alley it probably descended to.

I stood there at the head of the stairs a long time, my eyes alternately on them and on the balcony seats I had left behind. No one came up. No one came near me. That bottle was still standing down there where the crone had placed it.

I summoned up courage and started down them at last. I felt my way down almost as she had. Step by step and with both hands to the rail beside me, one following the other. How quickly you learn. How quickly you become part of the scene, fit into it.

I was at the turn now and I must either quicken my descent or not go down at all. I mustn’t creep down like this, for I could be seen from below, from here on down.

I found myself almost wishing there had been something left in that bottle, so I could nerve myself with it. But I had to go the rest of the way on cold courage. I braced myself and struck out. The lower floor slowly opened into view. Those same somnolent heads, like raisins studding a dark pudding. Would one or more of them suddenly rise up, come after me, as I gained a level with them?

The steps were ticking off under me now in a quick, rippling, final descent. It carried me off them and over to the main center door. No one moved. I got out slantwise through the door, keeping it to its narrowest possible seam in order to let as little light in as I could and avoid attracting attention to myself.

Nothing happened. No one came out after me. No one was there before me, waiting on the outside. No one at all. Not even a man reading a newspaper this time.

No one seemed to be looking, only New York and the night and me.

The thought that it might be dangerous to go back was slow in coming, but it came finally: dangerous to go back to where I was supposed to. Mordaunt’s house.

In the lawful world what I had to tell might have been believed. I wasn’t in that world any more; I wasn’t dealing with it now. In the jungle they didn’t believe you. Where money was involved they would have lied to you, and they knew it, so they acted on the supposition you were lying to them. No allowances were made, no quarter given.

But then if I didn’t go back —

No, I had to. He’d have to believe me.

There was nothing left of that ghastly night by the time I tottered home and barricaded myself behind the door. I couldn’t have slept if there had been. I was afraid of whom I’d meet in my sleep if I did. “Let Beulah fix you up, child; she’ll show you how.”

I sat there holding my head in both hands — it seemed to throb and burn so with remorse — an untouched glass of water with a few drops of spirits of ammonia sprinkled in it standing beside me. After a while the world switched over to sunlight again, and that made it better, made it more bearable. I drew up the shades and hooked back the curtains; I couldn’t get enough of it into the room. It seemed so healing and so cleansing. It was like God’s own soapsuds, sparkling on the panes and lathering the walls, rinsing my face and tired eyes.

After a while I dozed, sitting there like that, fully dressed in the chair and with a pillow packed behind me, and when I woke up was when I first started to be afraid to go back.

It would be tonight, and tonight was coming soon. Awfully soon.

“He won’t do anything to you if you go,” I kept reassuring myself. “It’s if you don’t go that — something’s liable to happen to you.”

And again I was overcome by the same argument that had proved so effective outside his house the second time I went there. “If you’re going to give the undertaking up now, then why did you begin it at all in the first place? You mean all last night’s terror of soul is to be for nothing? No, you’ve got to go ahead with it now, finish it out to the end, come what may.”

Night came down like a series of curtains one behind the other. First transparent, simply filming the daylight, then deeper, so that it could scarcely peer through any more, finally black with accumulated density, blotting it out altogether.

It was nearly time now. I couldn’t eat, and the pits of my hands were cold.

I rose and crossed the room in the dark, and I went over to restore the curtains and shades to their normal position now that the sun was gone. Then I stopped in the act and looked intently out. I knew the look of the street by night so well already; that was the only reason I saw him there. I knew that doorway down there should not have a darkened curvature to it. It should be a straight up-and-down line, not go in and out and in again, like a projecting shoulder, then waist, then hipbone. There was someone standing in it.

It brought back last night too vividly to mind, and perhaps for that reason rather than any current logic of disbelief I forced myself to turn away from the window. If there was someone there, it had nothing to do with me; why should it have?

“You know it does. You and no one else. You alone, of all the dwellers on this street.”

I sat for a while in the depths of the unlighted room, curbing continual impulses to go back and stealthily pry again.

Someone sent by Mordaunt, to make sure I kept the appointment, didn’t abscond with the rest of his profit? It must be that; who or what else could it be?

I said to myself, “Sometimes a car turns that lower corner down there on too wide an arc, and if its lights are on high enough their beam will flicker along that entire side of the street, wash over the walls and doorways as it swings into position. I’ve seen that happen myself. He doesn’t know that, isn’t expecting it. I do.”

I went back to the vicinity of the window again and waited, sheltered off side to the frame.

They seldom came. One did at last, but its lights had no force to speak of, just a dull glow.

Then one of the kind I’d been hoping for slewed abruptly into view. It was a small truck or commercial vehicle of some kind, and it had its beams powered far above regulations. In the act of turning they threw a parabola of reflection glancing along that side. It was gone again in a moment, but it had been sufficient. It was the same principle as sheet lightning on a stormy night. It threw everything into high relief for an instant. The figure in the doorway was trapped. He stood out for a brief second or two like a leaden soldier, then was gone into the dark again.

I turned away with a mental shrug that was insincere. I had wanted to know; now I knew. There was someone down there, and he hadn’t wanted to be seen. I’d caught the convulsive recessive movement he’d begun just as the darkness rescued him again.

There was no other way out of the house.

I saw that it was already past the time for me to have started for Mordaunt’s house. To put off any longer was to have the appointment lapse by omission. I was going and I knew I was. I was dreadfully afraid, but I was going.

I thought, “I should take something with me this time.” I looked around, but I didn’t know what to take. There wasn’t anything. Then I thought, “What good would anything be, anyway, in that basement trap buried all the way back there under the house?” In the end I left as I was, empty-handed.

I was acutely conscious of that doorway as I came out. It showed in the straight line now that it should have all along, but too late to convince me. It wasn’t directly opposite my own building entrance; it was some little distance down. My way took me past it, though the width of the street over.

It was so deserted-looking now, so patently lifeless. Somehow I knew, though. All its pretended vacuity availed it nothing. I knew there was someone still in it. Deep within it, all the way back to the rear of it now, where he couldn’t be seen.

It was hard to keep my face looking forward as I came abreast, then passed beyond it, but I compelled myself to. If he intended coming out at all he wouldn’t come right out at my heels. From the turn below I shot a quick glance back and over. It still showed empty. It refused to betray itself.

I could see a bus coming in the distance, and I ran the rest of the way. Still no sign of anyone or anything. I boarded the bus, and if I was sure of nothing else, I was sure no one boarded it with me. So if any attempted trail had been in the forming it had been broken off short.

At the other end I went down the street toward his house, and though outwardly I may have walked far more steadily, far more surely than that last time, I think if anything there was a greater fear within me. It was a different kind. No longer the half-childish fear of a dark house and a possible maniac attack without provocation. A deeper, because more plausible, fear of the rancor I might meet with on the part of the thoroughly vicious criminal whose accomplice I had made myself and whose task I had failed to perform satisfactorily.

I turned aside and stepped down into the abyss of the areaway with the feeling of treading a quicksand whose action was delayed, was withheld, purposely to lull me — until I had crossed a certain distance over it.

His voice struck through the basement grating at me without preamble, as it had the last time.

“You took your time.”

I didn’t answer.

His hands fumbled, and the grating came undone.

“I was about giving you up. And I would’ve hated to have to do that.” There was a humorless threat in it.

I didn’t answer.

He said a third thing as he stepped forward to reconnoiter. “Go ahead. You know your own way now.”

I traveled blindly along the tunnel-like basement bore like someone pacing in a dream. A dream whose foreknown outcome is doom but yet which must unfold itself without reprieve to its appointed climax.

I couldn’t find the light, that macabre shaded light I’ve spoken of, as readily as he had. Once I thought I had it, but it glanced away again.

Suddenly it went on, and he’d done it. He was in there already, and so close to me I jumped spasmodically and I suppose my face showed it.

“You’re nervous, aren’t you?” he said unkindly.

He motioned to the same packing case as that other night. “Sit down.” It was still said unkindly.

He sat down himself, opposite me, crouched sleepily forward on his elbows. Though I didn’t see his lips move I received a mental impression of his tongue licking over them; I don’t know why.

“Did you go to those places?”

“Yes, I went to those places.” I’m not sure, but I think this was the first thing I’d said since I’d entered.

I put one of the crushed nuggets on the table. “This was given to me in the cafeteria by a man who sat down —”

“I know, I know.” A sweep of his hand stifled the details.

“This was given to me in that bar.”

Each one disappeared as the next appeared.

“This was given to me at the nightclub.”

He waited a second or two. “I think there was a fourth place, wasn’t there?”

“Something happened there. You’d better let me tell you what happened there first.” I was starting to be frightened already before I had received any cause to be. I could feel it while I spoke. My own voice had a sort of resonance to it within my chest.

His expression didn’t change, and if anything I liked that less than if it had.

“You made delivery, and then somebody whispered to him; he jumped up and ran off.” He sounded as though he were mulling it over. He shook his head slightly, as if there were some flaw of motivation there. “He’s no fool; he knows what would happen to him if he —” he started to say. Then he changed that, said: “He wouldn’t do that —”

“But he did; I even tried to hold his arm.”

He kept looking at me. I couldn’t read the look. “About what time was this?”

“Around three this morning.”

His lips formed into a thin, compressed line. “Let’s go upstairs, shall we? We can talk better up there.”

He rose and held his hand to the light, and, I suppose, because the act of darkness would have resulted if I stayed, I moved trailingly through the doorway ahead of him, my head turned his way and my eyes clinging to his face until the switch snapped and blotted it out.

I groped my way up a darkened staircase enclosed within a shaft, more by dint of trying to remain ahead of him, clear of his oncoming tread, than through any deftness of my own. I palmed into a door standing closed above, and he wrenched it out for me, and there was the feeling of his thrusting me curtly through, though his hands failed to contact me.

This was the back of a first-floor hall, and there was a dim light to show it.

He opened the nearest of three doors that broke it, touched something, and it lighted to an equal duskiness with the hall. But at least darkness was banished.

“Stay in here a minute. Don’t go out of here.” He closed the door and separated us.

It was an inscrutably fitted place, so that it was impossible to tell just what its purpose was. There was an iron cot frame in it, but this bore no bedding. It was just a room, perhaps, situated behind the so-called examination room in which I had consulted him on my first visit, on the reverse side of it from the parlor in which I had waited that day.

I listened for a moment, and he seemed to have drawn away, though I hadn’t heard any retreating footfall.

I tried the knob, and though it circled its socket the door wouldn’t give.

He’d locked me in there.

Panic flurried over me, and my first instinct was to batter frenziedly against it for outlet. My clenched hands were already backed to strike, but I held them frozen. “Wait, don’t start anything. He hasn’t done anything to you yet. If you don’t provoke him you may yet be able to —”

In the silence I could hear the dial of a telephone creaking, but then after that stopped I couldn’t hear what he said, he spoke so low.

Each breath was drawn from me as by a pulmotor.

I turned my head swiftly, thinking of the other door I’d seen and should have thought of sooner, the one giving into the consultation room beyond. And even as I did so I was too late; a white line sprang up around it like a ray, and a tiny white nick took the place of where its black keyhole had been until now.

The turning on of that highly powered light in there was the first inkling I had that he was no longer at the phone. I heard the slight clatter of instruments as he shifted aside the enamel pan that held them. I remembered that same sound from the first day.

I changed to the new direction, crouched down, and tried to look through the livid keyhole.

He was at the washstand, but he wasn’t washing his hands this time. He was holding both hands down, seeming to draw something up through the one by means of the other. Some sort of plunger; I couldn’t tell what. I thought I saw the shimmer of glass, like a tube or rod, glint through the intricate play of his fingers, but I couldn’t be sure.

Then his figure changed focus, blurring as it came on toward the keyhole.

I reared, felt my way backward step by step, the ability to turn my body cataleptically denied me. I found the other doorknob, the first one, with my eyeless hands and, back still to it, pleaded twistingly to it. It still wouldn’t open. I ran toward the cot. There was no other place to go. No other barrier, no other impediment, in the little foursquare rabbit hutch.

I flung it away from the wall and cleared a lane behind it and waded in there, covered only as high as the knees. The door was opening — the door had opened — the door had closed.

His face told nothing. His voice was guilefully moderate, matter of fact. “There’s something coming to you. Here’s your part of it.” He was holding a bill or two in his carelessly extended hand. Lettuce for the rabbit about to be inoculated.

I breathed hissingly.

“Well, take it. Don’t you want it?”

“Wait a minute. Why are you holding your other hand behind you like that? You’ve got something in it. What have you got in it?”

He spoke as quietly as when he’d gone out; it was just the text that had altered, not the tone of voice or the expression of his face. “You cuddly little rat. You baby-faced little squealer. Come over here a minute. Come over here to me.” He actually beckoned at such a time and under such circumstances, beckoned me with fingers of his free hand in a mock-cajoling sort of way!

“Show me your other hand. Show me what you’ve got in it.”

He came on toward me, and I widened the canal I stood in by thrusting the cot out toward him. “Don’t come near me. What are you going to do? Stay away, do you hear me? I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You haven’t and you won’t. I’m going to see that you don’t.”

He moved into the channel at one end. I moved out at the other, balancing on my two hands planted against the cot frame.

“I haven’t done anything, I tell you!”

“No. Rocky was picked up within ten minutes after you’d fingered him at that theater last night. I just got word about it now.”

My voice was all over the place. He was the quiet one. “I don’t even know what you mean by fingered, so how could I —?”

“And now I suppose you’ve come here to poke it on me. Well, get this, you little she-louse. I’m in the clear. You’re the only link between me and all of them. I can be out of here in ten minutes flat. I’ve moved fast before, and I can move fast again if I have to. But I’m willing to give nine of them up to —”

The needle was out. You couldn’t see it; you could just see the V-shaped stance of his fingers, index toward point, thumb to plunger. A low scream sobbed from me, not very shrill, more of a moan. He’d left the lane of clearance again. I re-entered it at the other end an instant after. He reversed; I did too, and this horrible Virginia reel of death took a new direction.

“You won’t even feel this. But it’s a sure cure for your trouble. That’s what you came to me for, isn’t it? Well, I’m prescribing for you now. Sleep is what you need. Here it is here in my hand.”

“They’ll know you did it!” I gabbled. “You’re only incriminating your —”

“They won’t even know what was done. Morphine poisoning, my dear patient, leaves only one trace. Dilated pupils of the eyes. A drop of belladonna in each one before you’re quite gone, and even that will be taken away. Death from an unknown cause. Suppose it did take place in my house? What they suspect and what they’re able to prove in court are two different things.”

I suddenly crouched low, shoved the entire cot frame back upon him with my entire strength. He was caught in mid-channel, equidistant from each end. It pinned him against the wall, at that most awkward point of leverage, just under the break of the knees, so that he couldn’t use them to prod it back; they were held fast. He had to bend to it to use his own hand for a minute, easily as it shifted. And the blow must have stunned his leg bones, cramped them for a minute.

I used that minute for all it was worth. He’d locked the original opening, but there was still the door into the brightly lighted office from which he’d just come. I flung it out of the way and got in there.

From here there was only one other way out now. Those sliding door panels giving beyond into the front room. I wrenched at the finger sockets, splintering my nails. They gave with balky resistance, and before I could widen them sufficiently he was entering at the rear behind me.

There was that pan of instruments teetered beside me on the washstand rim. I picked it up and heaved it at him. Most of the things were light little things, short wands and whatnot. They sprayed out all over his chest and dropped without hurting him.

I gave one more wrench, and there was enough space to bolt through. The minute was compressed to thirty seconds now, to less. It was dark in there. I couldn’t see my way, but I tried to remember. You went over to the left, and there was a door into the hall. If you got out through that, then the front door to the house lay straight ahead to your right.

I did something wrong. Turned toward it on too wide a sweep. He got over to it first and slammed it, and I was trapped. The minute was up now; the minute was gone. Our forms even brushed together lightly there at the door, then separated again for the last brief time. He would have caught me even sooner, I think, except that he spared his one arm, was only grasping for me with the other.

Something caught at the back of my leg as I twisted and turned to get away from him, and I fell floundering back on the sofa. He came down partly across me a minute later, pinning me there.

I didn’t know how to defend myself. There was no defense. You can hope to deflect a knife; you can even manage to ward a gun aside. But this was like fending off a snake, a one-fanged snake. One strike and there was no use in further struggle.

Dimly, in the back of my own mind, I thought I heard a whistle blow. As I had that night, walking along the street, doing his errand. This one was swifter, sharper, shorter, directly outside the house somewhere. I knew it wasn’t so; it wasn’t real, just some trick of returning memory churned up in the midst of this death struggle. There was a sudden lisping surge of leather scuffing on stone, as if feet were trooping up the stoop outside. Then blows against wood.

He desisted just long enough to listen. “Well, I’ll still get you first. They can’t prove anything on me without you. They never have been able to. They never will.”

I had my hands locked in the side fringes of his hair, one on each side of the semibald crown, as if trying to tear his skull apart by main force, but it did no good.

He wanted to make sure of where he — He deliberately pulled down the shoulder of my dress, clawed at it until he’d forced a bare spot for his purpose, the turn of my shoulder.

I heard the door go in. The outside one, beyond in the hall. It thudded like a wooden drum.

“They still can’t —”

I could sense his arm go back in the dark. I didn’t know where it was coming from, up, or down, or straight. Nor how soon, a second, two seconds, three.

I twisted my shoulder, flung it over, narrowed it toward its opposite, as in a last convulsive shudder.

His hand slapped up against it in a sort of raking blow. I heard something puncture the taut stuffing of the sofa with a little pock! Something wet seeped out of it, traced a stray tickling line or two over the unbroken skin of my shoulder where it met the sofa back.

A light glowered fiercely in at us, very hard-cored and round and silver-backed, poised down at full arm’s length. It cast a pale aura all over the room. I lay there in it, and he lay prone athwart me, slowly starting to turn his head and face it with a sort of crafty, evasive delay in timing.

My eyelids began to blink more and more rapidly, and the light blurred, swirled smaller, went out.

I’d never fainted before. I never did again.

In a moment I’d come back again. Not to any rescue, not to any salvation, but to an unreality as bad or worse than the nightmare that had just preceded oblivion.

So little time had passed that it was as though a tiny segment of a progressing film had been snipped off and the continuing action had taken a short jump forward from where it had left off. Mordaunt was leaving the room, head dangling over as though his neck had been broken, though it was his own feet that supported him. There was a glint of steel from his wrist as his arm was held back for a moment by the projection of the doorframe and stayed behind him. Then it was drawn around after him and followed him out, drawing after itself in turn the arm of the man behind him that it was fastened to.

The room was lighted up now, and I could hardly place it. It was as though I had awakened in a strange place I had never been in before. The tulip horn of the gramophone was there in the background; the same mallards were under glass on the wall. Some vintage magazine or other, of a number that had been in here for his patients to read, had fallen to the floor and fluttered open. And as someone’s foot trod unknowingly on it in passage it kicked free one of the leaves, carried it before it a short distance along the floor.

There were men in the room, on their various faces no sign of any compunction or solicitude for me. They were all stony-faced, truculent. One stood looking at me, waiting for my eyes to find him.

“Get up,” he said gruffly when they had.

I forced my back away from the vise of the sofa joint. I righted my dismantled dress there where he’d wrenched it down.

“Your name’s Alberta French,” he said curtly. He was looking at a loose-leaf memorandum pad he held in his hand that opened horizontally.

“Yes,” I breathed low.

“And you live at — West Sixty-Eighth.”

I said yes again.

“Get on your feet,” he jerked at me.

I staggered upright, thrust myself out from the sofa on one stiff arm.

He took hold of the other in two places, at the break of the elbow and at the wrist. He held it that way, like a lever. His grip wasn’t gentle. I had to go in whichever way he went to avoid wrenching it at the arm socket.

“Now walk straight ahead. Out through that door in front of you.”

I said, planting unwilling feet before me staccato, at his pace, not my own, “Why are you doing this to me? Where are you taking me? He — Didn’t you see what he tried to do to me?”

His voice was harsher by far than Mordaunt’s had been at any time from first to last. It was the impersonal harshness of official retribution, not personal animosity. “You’re under Federal arrest for the transportation and selling of narcotics.”

I went out with my own head dangling over, as though my neck were broken, just as he had. The fox and the chicken had been caught in the same trap.

Immediately following the last of the many times I’d been brought up before them for exhaustive questioning — or I should say the latest, for I hadn’t known then that it was going to be the last — instead of being returned to the detaining cell, I was transported from there over to the police headquarters building by car.

I was brought into an office, and when I saw Flood there I knew he’d had something to do with this change in the previous days’ routine.

They turned me over to him, left me in there in his hands.

He was rather grim about it, like a man who has performed a thankless task at no little trouble to himself and is still not entirely convinced of his own wisdom in doing so.

“You’re being freed; did they tell you?”

I was too numb to react much at first. I’d been in custody four days by now. “No, they didn’t. I noticed their line of questioning took a different turn the last time or so; that was all. It was more about Kirk’s trouble and what I’d been trying to do for him than this — this other thing.”

“Well, that’s why you were brought up here. I interceded. I had a hard time convincing them. I’m no one, you know. I have no particular influence. It was just that I happened to be acquainted with certain factors in the background, in your particular case, and I put them before them. Put them before them for all I was worth, I might add. You’re not freed technically, but you’ve been released into my custody, and you won’t have to face Federal charges. Which is a good deal to be grateful for. It will be necessary for you to give evidence against this man Mordaunt, along with three other men and a colored woman, eventually, but that won’t come up for several months yet.”

He was waspishly unsympathetic. “Don’t cry about it. You brought it on yourself.”

I uncurled my enfolded arm and lifted my face from his desk blotter. “Can I go now?” I faltered helplessly.

“Yes, you can go now,” he said ungraciously. “Take my advice and go home and rest up and stay out of trouble from now on. You see, this whole thing wouldn’t have happened if you’d listened to me in the first place. I told you when you were in here that day —”

I’d risen and gone toward the door while he went on talking.

I was still far from admirable to him. “You’ve been a very dumb person, little Mrs Murray. I’m willing to take your innocence in this mess at its face value on faith alone, but —”

I whirled on him from the door, almost aghast. If it did nothing else, it drove all self-pitying weakness out of me forthwith. “You don’t think I voluntarily cooperated in such a — !”

“I happen to be inclined to believe you. But I have no actual proof, you know. You could have.”

He opened a drawer, took out a folder or dossier of some kind. He moistened his thumb and leafed over several loose papers contained in the seam of it. “Before you go it might interest you to know that the whole undertaking was a waste of time, anyway. His name is Mordaunt, right? And what was the date of the Mercer woman’s murder? Never mind, I have it right here. May the twelfth. I took pains to look up this man’s record — he has one that goes back to when I was in knee pants myself — and here are some interesting facts that I culled from our files. The most recent of his arrests took place on the fifteenth of March. He was evidently arrested on suspicion of some more serious charge, but with the help of a little adroit juggling he seems to have managed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and served time for that instead. Anyway, he served sixty days on Welfare Island for disorderly conduct and a few other little odds and ends, and the date of his release is down on the records as May the fifteenth, three days after her death.” He closed the folder with a snap. “In case you still have any doubts, I’ve checked on the fingerprints and it’s the same man.”

My chin only went down for a minute; it didn’t stay down. It came right up again, higher than before.

“That’s what mistakes are for,” I murmured quietly, “so you’ll keep on going and not quit too easily.”

He looked at me curiously. I don’t know, for some strange reason he seemed to like me a little better when he saw me square off like that than he had only a moment ago.

“I like your spirit,” he admitted, “but your line of reasoning is all flooey.”

“You can keep me from going ahead with it, I suppose, as long as I’m sort of paroled to you, as you say.”

“Do I have to?”

“There’s only one way you can. By having me put back in jail again.”

“Don’t you see it’s no use? Believe me, Mrs Murray, it’s no use. Give up this harebrained idea, quit trying —”

“No, I won’t give up trying. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I believe, and that’s all I’ve got. Don’t take it away from me; I won’t let you.” I opened the door to go. “Why should I quit trying? Because I was wrong this time? The next time I may be right. You’re always wrong until the last time. And then when you’re right, at the end, that wipes out all the times before when you were wrong. I’m going ahead, Mr Flood; I’m going ahead. Whether with your sanction or without it. This very next time may be the right time, the last time of all. I may be just an hour away, a block away, from him. He may be waiting just around the corner. The next time I pick up the phone he may answer; it may be his voice I hear saying ‘Hello. Who is this?’”

EIGHT

butterfield......9-8019......mason

HELLO. Who is this?”

The voice was vivid, tingling; it rushed at you. It was in a hurry. Not in the sense of “I’m busy; what do you want? Don’t bother me,” but eager, zestful, anxious to be on its way from the last interesting thing that had happened to it to the next interesting thing that was to happen to it. The sort of voice that only interesting things happened to. And if they weren’t already, it made them that way just by taking part. That kind of voice.

The first sip of a cocktail in it. The wind up at the prow of a motorboat in it. A walloping good dance tune in it, the kind that takes your feet and lifts them. The spanking bliss of the first gushing cascade when you turn on an ice-cold shower on a melting August day. The turn on a breakneck toboggan run in it. All those things in it. Everything that makes life swell in it. Everything that is life. What a voice.

I said, “I’m a friend of someone you know. I just got into town, and I’m giving you a ring, the way I promised I’d do.”

The voice was open, friendly, trustful; it took me at my word. It didn’t know how to be suspicious, that voice. “Who’s the somebody?”

That was it; who was the somebody?

“Somebody you haven’t seen in quite some time. Now, think.”

The voice fell in with me, helping to work its own undoing, so to speak. “Let’s see, whom haven’t I seen in quite some time?” There was a quickly mumbled name or two, discarded before I could quite make them out. Then, “It wouldn’t be Ed Lowrie, would it?”

I gave a little rill of laughter down the scale, meant to convey admission, capitulation. I let that stand by itself. I hadn’t said it was; if something went wrong I could still get out of it.

He said, “Well, what d’ye know?” as if marveling at this mark of attention on the part of a long-unseen friend. Then he said, “Where is he, still out there?”

I said, “He was the last I saw him. I came sort of a roundabout way myself.” But I laughed a little with it again. Not too much, just enough so I could still leave the way open, back out and say, “It wasn’t he, it was somebody else,” if I had to. This mustn’t go wrong. These opening stages were always the most important part of the whole thing until I could make contact and fasten myself onto them.

“You from out there yourself?” he asked.

“Certainly am.” Then, as if preparing to end the exchange, which was simply a trick in reverse to make him wish to prolong it, I said, “Well, now that I’ve done my duty I guess I may as well —” And I nicked the lip of the telephone mouthpiece with my nail to make the sound carry.

His voice quickened. “Hey, wait; you haven’t even given me your own name yet.”

I was becoming more sure of myself at every phrase. They say the art of being a gentleman is to inspire ease in others. Then the art of being a gentleman’s voice is to inspire confidence in those who converse with it. And his was surely a gentleman’s voice. “Oh, I thought you knew it,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to introduce myself quite cold like this. I didn’t realize I was. Then in that case his letter didn’t reach you yet?”

“No,” he said. “No, I haven’t heard from him in God knows when.”

“I was afraid of that,” I grieved primly. “I bet he forgot to send it at all. And here I’ve been —”

“Oh, come on, I don’t need a letter of introduction to be glad to meet people.”

“Yes, but I don’t like to just foist myself on — I might be anyone at all, for all you know; I might be some little hustler that thinks she’s smart and just wants to —”

“I carry insurance against that,” he said indulgently. “And one way of proving you’re not, you know, would be to —”

“I’m sorry; I still haven’t, have I? I’m Alberta French.”

“So now we’re friends. You doing anything for dinner tonight?” Then, as I hesitated, “Look, we both have to eat, anyway. If we don’t like each other, well — we haven’t lost anything. We’ve each had our evening meal.”

“There is something in that, isn’t there?”

He’d already rushed on past that point. “How’ll I know you?”

“Well, for that matter, how’ll I know you?”

His voice had a grin in it. “I asked you first. Tell you what. Is there a flower shop handy to you where you are?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, get hold of something good and big so that I can’t miss it. A chrysanthemum. Put it on your shoulder.”

“Yes, but that still doesn’t take care of you.”

“I don’t think you’d like me with a chrysanthemum. Look, I’ll just be the fellow that comes up to you and tips his hat and says, ‘Are you you?’”

I knew what he wanted, all right. He wanted to see me first from a safe distance. If I didn’t pass muster he wouldn’t come near me; I’d never see hair or hide of him again. Glasses, maybe. Or a little too high up in the age brackets. I didn’t blame him, really. I had him out there on the fringes. It was up to me to pull him in the rest of the way.

“That’s it, then,” he said. “Now I’ll tell you where. I know a little room, a midget cocktail bar, just around the corner from the Ritz. Can’t miss. It’s called the Blues-Chaser. And it’s like that, really. There’s never too much of a crowd there, and that way we won’t have to run too much interference. We have a date now, don’t forget.”

“All right, we have a date.”

The last thing he said was, “Remember the password. ‘Are you you?’ Don’t go off with the wrong guy.”

The last thing I said was, “I’ll let you do the worrying about that.”

I’d have to play it his way. He was setting the tempo, not I. And the tempo was chaff, badinage, light flirtation. Maybe he was that age. Or maybe it was that he’d always be that age; it was a state of mind. Well, so be it then.

I didn’t do much. I looked at myself in the glass before I was ready to leave and thought: “I don’t know what he wants. So he’ll have to get what I have.”

I bought the chrysanthemum, a bursting yellow one, and had them pin it on. High enough so that I could nestle my cheek against it if I turned that way. Then I went over there about a quarter to five.

The place itself was intimate, confidence-inspiring, made to order for just such a rendezvous as ours. A regular postage stamp of a cocktail lounge; I’d never yet been in one as small. Heavily carpeted and hushed, but hushed in a relaxing, cozy way, not depressingly hushed. It was a little gem of a place, and I wonder now if it’s still there.

The only discordant note was the rather wretched looking attendant who came over as soon as I had seated myself. He was suffering from some skin disorder that necessitated his wearing some half-dozen tiny cross patches of court plaster scattered liberally all over his face and then, to cap the climax, one larger strip, slantwise, nearly sealing the outside corner of one eye. He came at a sort of shamble, without lifting feet from the carpet, and I refrained from looking directly at him after the first devastating glance. He was enough to spoil any aperitif he brought. There was a second, far more prepossessing one at hand behind the bar, but he confined himself to waiting upon those who sat directly before him, and I had drawn this one.

He wasn’t in the place yet. I’d expected that. I’d felt fairly sure he’d purposely delay arriving, in order to allow me to get there first and be able to study me at leisure, preferably without coming all the way in. I made this as difficult as possible for him by selecting a seat that was as removed from the entrance steps as the limited confines of the place would allow. Which wasn’t much. But at least he would have to show himself a few paces within the door to be able to get a comprehensive look at me. Even if he turned around and bolted directly out again afterward. I disposed my shoulder so that from that side I was mostly a burgeoning yellow chrysanthemum topped by an eyebrow and a hatbrim.

“Yes mum, what’ll ye be liking?” the depressing-looking figure at my elbow asked with a brogue you could cut with a knife.

I rejected the wine card. “A glass of dry sherry.”

“Yes mum.” He went away and let me alone.

I thought: “He mayn’t come at all. He may have outfeinted me at my own game without my realizing it.” The mere fact that he stipulated an outside rendezvous, instead of calling at my hotel for me, shows that he accepted me with reservations. These open, hale, guileless voices can experience mistrust as readily as the more wary, evasive kind. Why not? The only difference is that they don’t show it outwardly. True, I always knew where I could reach him again, but that was valueless. This was one of those cases in which, if the first skirmish was lost, the whole campaign had been thrown away; there was no use pursuing it any farther.

I couldn’t call him a second time, not even with an attempted change of identity. He already knew my voice. He had retained his freedom of action. I had already lost mine before I’d even gained contact with him.

“Ah yes,” I reflected, “he isn’t quite the unsuspecting soul he seemed.” I wondered why that hadn’t occurred to me sooner than this. There must have been some magic in that voice of his.

My sherry came back, and with it, as he set it down, there was a small folded leaf of white paper inserted between the base of the glass and the platter it stood on. I thought it was the bill at first, but when I’d taken it up and opened it —

Are you you?

it said on it.

“Wait a minute, where did this come from?”

He looked down at it in stupid astonishment himself. “I don’t know, mum. Sure, it wasn’t there when I set the glass onto the tray just now.”

“But you came over here in a straight line from the bar to me; I saw you. It couldn’t have been put on after you started over with it. It was under the glass.”

I looked around covertly. “Wait a minute, don’t move away. I want you to stand here just as you are, in front of me. Did you rest the tray on the bar for a minute before you picked it up and started out?”

“Well, just for a minute, mum, but then I always do. Only just long enough to jot the order down on my tab, so I have it on the bill later.”

“At which end of the bar were you when you did that?”

“Over there by the wall; that’s the only way you can come out from behind.”

“Is it that man sitting there with a vacant place on each side of him?”

He looked over. About as subtly as a steam calliope revolving full blast. “Maybe it was, at that. It was by him. Shall I ask him, mum?”

“No, don’t, you fool,” I said with more candor than politeness.

I wondered why I let it irritate me, why I didn’t take it in good part. It might have been that I didn’t like the realization that I was up against something smarter than I’d bargained for. He’d been in here all along. And since no one had entered after me he’d already been here when I arrived. My face must have been naked to him the whole while, and I didn’t like that thought. He must have sat there quietly watching me while I transparently sat marshaling my strategy about me.

I didn’t like his looks, if that were he. And by elimination it must be. For all the others were in twos, girl and man or man and man. He was the only single.

I didn’t like his looks. He belied his voice completely, but that was the least of it. There was a merciless shrewdness there, a cold sort of calculation that I could sense I was going to be no match for. Nothing came of itself. Nothing was casual, first time, unthought of. Every abstract turn of his head in some new direction than before, every lift of his glass, every draw of his cigar conveyed the impression: “Is it to my advantage to do this? Is there some gain in my doing it? Very well, then, I’ll do it.”

If he was playing at billets-doux with me, at hide-and-seek, then there was some motive in it other than just youthful gaiety, high spirits, I could be sure.

He’d been born old, that man there at the bar. Old and cruel. He’d never wasted a move in his life. He should have had everything in the world already by mere dint of lifelong rapacious application. But maybe there were many things he didn’t want at one time, then wanted at another; that was all that kept him going.

I dropped my eyes and sipped my sherry and knew defeat ahead of time.

I wondered why he was playing with me like this. I bore the chrysanthemum. He’d sent the note, so he wasn’t trying to pretend he wasn’t here. He just let me sit on there. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. Cruelty without provocation, just for its own sake.

I couldn’t get up and go. I couldn’t scuttle my own undertaking. I had to sit and wait out his pleasure. He had me. And if he had me this early what would it be like later?

I’d sipped to the bottom of my glass. I’d lit a cigarette and put out its fingernail-length remnant. The table barman, taking more pity on me than he, for all his ignoble blemish-studded physiognomy, came back again unsummoned, perhaps drawn by my dejected, trapped mien.

“Would you be wanting another, mum?”

“Yes, bring me another.”

I thought: “Since I know it’s he and he won’t come over to me, why don’t I get up and go over to him and have an end to it?” I thought: “He wants me to do that. That must be what he’s waiting for. And with a man like that, anything he wants you to do it’s better not to do, since there’s some purpose there you can’t fathom.”

I must have been looking at him too long. He’d turned full face toward me on his stool, now, and there was a sort of challenge in the cold, steady way he held my eyes.

The barman cut between us just as the look was turning into something else; what, I couldn’t see yet. He was lifting his feet this time as he traveled. He’d brought somebody else’s order back with him, along with mine.

He put my glass down, then put the second one down at the vacant place opposite me. Then he discarded his tray on an unused table behind him and suddenly was sitting there with me in informal sociability.

“Here, what do you think you’re — !” I started to say.

He grinned, called over his shoulder, “Here’s your spare jacket back, Matt, and thanks for the loan of it.”

I glanced over at the bar, and the cold-faced man was settling back onto his stool again. He turned away, unemotional as ever.

“That guy was slow,” he chuckled.

I turned back to him again. “You wanted me to —?”

“Just for the fun of it.”

Matt came over with his own coat, solicitously helped him into it.

“How was I?” he asked him cheerfully. “You’ll find the orders I took in the pocket — if you can make out my writing.”

“Not bad at all, Mr Mason. You can have a job here any time you say the word.”

“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.”

I saw them touch palms briefly. I didn’t see what it was. I suppose it was quite a large amount.

He saw me looking at his face. “Oh, I forgot something,” he said to me. “This is going to hurt; it was easier going on than taking off.”

“I’ll do it for you, Mr Mason,” Matt offered. “Just hold still. Do it quick is the best way.”

He recoiled, especially at the paring of the big one across the rim of his eye. “Art for art’s sake.” He winced. The skin was clear under all of them as soon as the temporary irritation was gone. It had been clever of him. Though they had been individually tiny — each one had occupied no more than a minute area of his skin surface — they had drawn the eye so, as those things do, that they had broken up his face by optical illusion into something quite other than it was. Just like those photographs transmitted by radio, composed of consecutive dots instead of unbroken lines.

So that, though it had been just a matter of four or five midget wens of plaster, and he had been in the same room with me all the while, only now for the first time was I seeing him as he actually was.

My first thought was: “He looks awfully wholesome and friendly to kill a woman.”

I studied him as carefully as though life and death depended on it. They did. Kirk’s life and death. Here he was, then, at this first meeting of ours: the line of the table and a glass with scotch watered to straw color in it. An idle hand beside that, half curved around nothing. Not brutish, as Mordaunt’s had been, yet good and strong. A gold seal ring on one finger, holding a flat square stone with a crest engraved on it. An onyx, it appeared to be. The nails neat-looking and trimmed short with a pair of scissors, possibly, but not professionally manicured, not glossy from a buffer; in other words, just as they should be in good taste.

Then, above where the lapels joined, a tie that, if it didn’t come from Sulka, had the look of one that did. A tie so neutral, so integrated into the rest of his clothing, that you weren’t aware it was there unless you searched it out. Again just as it should be in good taste.

Now came his face, the crux of the whole matter. It was a broad face, not one of these long thin ones, nor yet one of these round fat ones. It was broad, substantial, solid; when he became older it might grow too heavy, too massive, but that wasn’t yet. The skin fitted it like a glove, without any looseness or seams anywhere. Its most distinguishing characteristic, as far as expression went, might be the adjective “pleasant.” It pleased you. If, for instance, you were to fall in love with it, it must please you to a hell of a degree if it pleased you as much as it did just to look at it the first time you saw it.

His eyes were very dark brown, very alert, very intelligent. The pleasantness of all the rest of the face came to a head in them. They gave him away, not in the sense of treachery, but revealed his true inner capacity. You might think you could fool him, but if you looked directly into them you weren’t so sure any more; you wondered if you were smart enough yourself.

His hair was red-brown and combed dry, so that it didn’t clot together and fasten into blades but topped his head the way hair should: good and plentiful, kept short, and, beyond that, allowed to do pretty much what it felt like doing.

There he was; that was he. And meanwhile he’d been studying me equally deliberately on his part. And, I suppose, telling himself those things about me that I was telling myself about him.

“So you’re you.” He smiled finally.

I nodded. “How do you find me?”

He screwed up one eye in self-disgust. “Of course it pays to look before you leap, but I shot twenty minutes of our time to pieces for no good reason. I’m just yellow, I guess.”

“Well, maybe you’ve been stuck before,” I suggested.

“There’s no good reason for getting stuck, really. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You see the thing through past the cocktails. I mean, a cocktail will see you through practically anything, anyway. If it’s the face that bothers you you’ve got an olive to look at instead. Then with the soup, you step outside a second to buy a pack of cigarettes. You pick some brand you’re darned sure they won’t be able to bring to your table, in case there happens to be a ciggie girl in the place. Rameses the Third, or something, straw-tipped. Never smoke anything else. Then with the main course comes the rescuing phone call. Somebody’s dying in your house, or somebody’s having a baby, or your office is on fire. You pay the waiter for the rest of her dinner — that’s to make sure she’ll have to stay and finish it, not try to come with you — you apologize; you’ll call her, and you’re out of it.”

I laughed a little. “How many times have you done that?”

“Well, that, of course, is the funny part of it. I told you I’m yellow. I never have yet. I’ve sat and planned the whole thing out in my mind, but somehow when the coffee comes around I’m still sitting there, just suffering. They always look so trusting. The most I’ve ever been able to do is just cut the evening a little short at the other end.” I liked the answer; it spiked the conceit that otherwise would have been implicit in the discussion.

“I must remember that; from now on all soup-course phone calls are open to suspicion.”

He grinned. “Don’t clutter your mind up with stuff you’ll never have to use. I bet the only time they leave you during a soup course is to put a padlock on the inside of the door so you can’t get away from them.”

“A spoonful at a time,” I begged. “Not with a shovel like that; you won’t have any left.”

“Another?”

“No, two are enough, thanks.”

“A cigarette, then?”

“A cigarette, then.”

He held a lighter to it.

I said, “Do you have your initials over everything like that?”

He chuckled, as though he didn’t think much of it himself. “No, that was my sister’s idea. Last Christmas. I suppose so I couldn’t return it or something.”

He blew it out, forgot about it. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

“Didn’t I? I thought I did. Alberta French.”

“What do they call you?”

“Alberta French.”

“I’ll have that worn out in a week,” he promised.

“Well, you’ll be fresh out of a name for me, then.”

“Maybe I’ll just be plain fresh, without the rest of it.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” I told him demurely.

He called Matt over to settle his bill. Then he thumbed a dime down onto the table directly before him. “Mustn’t forget the waiter,” he said to me confidentially. “That ought to be enough, don’t you think? He wasn’t so good.”

“Oh, he was worth more than that,” I urged plaintively.

He added a nickel to it with a show of reluctance. Then in the brogue he’d affected before he said to himself: “Thank you, sorry.” And out of the side of his mouth, in a seething undertone: “Cheapskate!”

I couldn’t help tipping my head back and laughing.

“Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ve got places to go and things to do.” He shifted my chair for me. “You’re in my clutches now.”

“You mean,” I thought somberly as I rose to join him, “you’re in mine. Whether you know it yet or not.” And I wasn’t kidding as he was.

A scrubwoman on hands and knees kept chasing us around the mosaic-floored hotel lobby, out before the elevator, from dry spot to dry spot in a sort of concentric circular pattern.

“Now I’ll really have to break away and go up,” I laughed. “We’re back where we started. Don’t you remember this place with the wriggly crack in it?”

“I knew I’d seen it before. It must have been our last trip around.”

The scrubwoman wrung out a cloth and grinned toothlessly up at us. “I’m catching up with yez,” she said.

It was starting to get light out. There was light blue peering in through the doors. It seemed like a year ago I’d first met him, not just twelve hours. He knew how to make time fly.

“What’re you waiting for?” I demanded, still laughing. “You’ve got me to that silly stage now, where I laugh at everything you say and do. We’ve been standing here like this for nearly an hour, doing nothing but laughing. That night desk man over there thinks we’re crazy.”

He turned to him and blurted out, “Isn’t she nice? I just met her tonight.”

He turned back to me without waiting for any comment. “I keep waiting to see how you look when you get tired. And you don’t get tired.”

“With you one doesn’t get tired in the face; one gets tired in the larynx. Mine’s positively raw. Well, tired or not, up I go. This is positively it now.”

He took leave of me matter-of-factly enough, when at last he did. “I’ll call you.” Picked up my hand, dropped it again, turned, and went out. As limberly as though it had been six the night before.

“Nice kid,” the desk man offered, unasked, gazing after him.

I didn’t answer. “Nice kid,” I thought, going up in the elevator, “but I wonder if he’s ever killed a woman?”

Upstairs in my room I sat for a long while, motionless, by the window, while the roofs below turned strawberry and then orange. Not laughing any more. Card-indexing him.

“He was just showing off because I’m new to him. No one can be that happy-go-lucky, that harum-scarum, whatever you’d call it, that brimful of life, all the time. No one is. Don’t be taken in. There’s a darker side to the picture. Patience. Patience. It will turn my way.”

He called as he’d said he would. I was there when the phone rang. I’d been waiting for it to ring. I knew it was he. Who else knew I was here in this place, here in this particular room? This room had been taken for him, to give me background, a setting, for him.

I sat there in the chair without moving and let the call wear itself out into silence. That came under the heading of technique. Keeping him interested.

It came again in about half an hour. Again I didn’t move. Then the next time it came within fifteen minutes. Interest was quickening to uneasiness, anxiety.

I answered it the third time.

He’d been worried. “You had me going. I thought maybe I’d lost you.”

“I just came in. I was out window-shopping. You know, out-of-town girl in New York.”

“Isn’t there something you would like to do tonight?”

“Yes, very much.”

His voice took an upcurve. “Fine. What is it? Tell me.”

“Just go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep after last night.”

His voice dipped again, even though there was a lugubrious laugh in it. “I meant something I could join you in. You don’t want to sleep in New York. New York isn’t for sleeping in.”

“They tell me millions do. In fact, I’ve even seen beds. I’m looking at one right now, and it looks awfully good from here.”

“Mason, are you slipping!” he said. “I never thought I’d play second fiddle to a Murphy.”

“You couldn’t get me out of this building tonight,” I told him firmly. “I’ve got just about strength enough to take me downstairs and back for a sandwich. Then I’m going to stand up perfectly straight beside this Murphy, as you call it, and let myself go over backward.”

I said to myself as I hung up: “He won’t take it. He’ll ring again before the night’s through.”

I sat waiting, but he didn’t. One error out of four is permissible. After an hour, when he hadn’t, I finally did go down to get myself a sandwich.

He was sitting there on a line with the elevator tier, grinning and patiently waiting. He was holding a terraced brown paper bag balanced on one knee, a bevy of paper napkins on the other.

He said, “You took an awful long time getting down. I have them already, yours and mine both. Just a sandwich before bed, you said. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t eat them together, off in some quiet corner of the lobby, is there? And then I’ll see you back to your elevator and we’ll say good night.”

Which was the pursuer and which the pursued? He couldn’t have told; I could.

It was on a subway car that our lips first met. Of all unlikely places. That moth-eaten expression for once is apt; no other one will do. There was no intent there; it just happened that way. His lips struck mine.

To him they were novel, and he didn’t know how to hold himself in them very well. He was bringing me home from someplace; it was abominably late, as it always was when I was out with him, and it had been my suggestion. “It’s the quickest way after all, even figuring on the station waits. Let’s be plebeian for a change.”

The train jarred to a stop at the station with one of those flounces they sometimes give — maybe the motorman up ahead was sleepy or something — and he was flung against me in the vestibule where we were standing waiting to get off. His head had been lowered to peer out, make sure it was the right station. His face went into me. Then he stayed that way.

I refrained from moving too. The weapons weren’t of my choosing, but I wasn’t discarding anything.

“You’d better hold that door,” I had to say finally; “it’s starting to go back again.”

He was quiet going up the steps.

Halfway to the top he turned to me. “Stand here a minute. Let me try that again.”

I kept on moving. “The staircase doesn’t shake,” I reminded him. “It was the train that did.”

I thought he was kidding, but when I looked he wasn’t. He had a pensive look in his eyes. Almost a little troubled.

I was too, for some reason.

It was like a premonition of disaster to both of us.

“Here’s the street,” I said.

“So it is.”

He parted from me rather more hastily downstairs at the hotel elevator than he usually did. No laughing jags tonight, no shilly-shallying. “I want to leave you now. I have a lot to think about. And though you’ll be there, it’s better in a way if you’re not in front of me.”

I turned away without a word and left him.

Upstairs it kept ringing lingeringly in my ears for a long time afterward. Not so much what he’d said as the strange, grave way in which he’d said it. No lightness, no banter there any longer. “I want to leave you now. I have a lot to think about.”

“Something on your conscience?” I answered to myself.

“Something about a death that comes back now and then to plague you — particularly at the birth of a new love?

“The death of an old love?

“A death you caused?”

From time to time I said something about going back. I had to. Technically I was still here only on a visit, elastically adjustable though it seemed to be. I still didn’t know where it was I was supposed to go back to, but I felt I had to refer to it every now and again, if only for the sake of plausibility. After all, he was no fool.

His reaction to the test, each time it was made, provided a good barometer of his feelings. Unconsciously he was self-revelatory about it. The first time I mentioned the subject he winced half humorously, coaxed, “Ah, wait another week. A few days more can’t hurt. There’ll still be trains running.” The second time he sobered, looked down, and, I noticed, didn’t have much to say for quite some time after that. The third time he scowled, began moving restlessly about the room, and when he went out later was grouchy, ill-humored, drank considerably more than he usually did, and left the waiters and the rest anarchistically small tips.

The fourth time he turned the tables on me. He brought the subject up, not I. “I can’t think of your going back,” he said. “I’m going with you when you do.” And then, when I tried to object, “I’m just as entitled to make a trip out there as you were to make one here. What do I do around here anyway? Sit in my old man’s chair at board meetings half the time without opening my face. They can take my vote by proxy for a couple months just as well!”

I prudently let the entire matter lapse after that. It was the better part of valor. The elastically temporary sojourn became a permanent stay.

I changed from the hotel room, which I had used as a springboard for meeting him, to a little one-room studio place over on Fifty-Third, just east of Second Avenue. He’d helped me to find it, since I was supposedly still a little green in New York. There was not only the matter of expense, which was as actual a consideration to me on the real plane of my existence as on the camouflaged, two-dimensional one in which I presented myself to him, but my former surroundings had outlived their usefulness. I felt we were now at, or soon to approach, a stage, he and I, in which I needed more privacy, more seclusion, to work effectively.

He accompanied me there the day I moved in. In fact, took me in his car.

I said to myself, “It is only right that he should be on hand from the very first day, the very first minute that this room begins. For the day he ends the room ends with him. It is of him and for him and because of him; it is through him alone that it has any reality. Without him it isn’t there at all.”

Little room on Fifty-Third Street that I expected to forget so soon.

I wasn’t expecting it.

I could feel his eyes on me, studying me from close range, and finally I chose to become aware, said: “What are you looking at me for like that?”

“I’m trying to think what to call you.”

“Isn’t it a little late for that?”

“There’s something about Alberta; it’s too stiff; it doesn’t ride easily on the tongue. Do you remember the night we first met? I told you I’d give that up after a week, and it’s long past that now. I have to find some name for you. Some name of my own. Stand up and let me look at you. I’ll see if I can get one.” He held me poised before him, his hands to my sides.

His eyes went deep, went lonesome. I saw that and I tried to keep it light. “This is the oddest christening. I’m a little old and tall, aren’t I? I should be held in someone’s arms and have on a long trailing nightgown-dress. Who’s there to sprinkle the water on my head?”

“Don’t,” he said. Just that one word. With a haunted severity.

I shut up and looked away, waiting for it to blow over by itself.

“Turn your head this way again, toward the lamp, so that the light falls softly on your face from the other side.”

His breath caught.

“That soft light, what it does to you. You look like an —”

He rose slowly to his own feet before me, his hands still to my sides.

I smiled a little, waiting.

“I’ve found one for you,” he breathed. “You’ve got the face of an angel. I’m going to call you Angel Face. Angel Face I’m going to call you.”

I wrenched myself away so suddenly, in such momentarily maddened pain, his hands were left there stretched out, empty, measuring off the space where I had been. And I was all the way across the room, not just a step away, a yard away, but all the far way across, as though he’d taken a knife to me and probed right there where my heart was.

I saw his lips moving and I couldn’t hear what he said. I didn’t want to, anyway.

He came over to me then, took my hands and drew them down from over my ears, where they’d been pressed in fierce closure.

“What have I done to frighten you?” he said. “Why are you covering your ears like that? Look, you’re white — your eyes are so big —”

“Don’t ever call me that name,” I said shakily. “Don’t even say it over a second time now to remind yourself what it was. Don’t use it again, Ladd, or I’ll — you’ll never see me again. Call me any other name, anything you want. Anything but that.”

“There was someone else once, is that it?”

He made his peace with my past.

“There would have had to be, with a face such as you’ve got. You weren’t born yesterday.”

I leaned against him and closed my eyes against his shoulder and saw a face before me that he didn’t know was there.

Then later, of course, I was immeasurably glad I’d gone. But at the time I didn’t dream it would profit me anything. Everything comes so by chance, so haphazardly, even in the best-laid schemes. He was the one I was interested in, not his background, his mother and sister, or whoever it was, as the case might be.

In addition, I was convinced there was the usual situation lurking behind it: he wanted me to be there; he was pulling the strings to force a sort of grudging affability out of them, considerably against their own inclinations, and in short was forcing me down their throats.

It was his sister’s birthday.

The invitation, of course, I had disregarded as being something he’d been responsible for himself, even though she put an inked personal message on it in addition. “Do come, so anxious to meet you, have heard so much about you from L.”

I tried all the stalls I knew to get out of it.

“I don’t belong there.”

“You don’t belong there! You’re my Alberta; you belong wherever I am. What are we, the landed aristocracy or something?”

“No, but I mean I’ll have no mutual interests with anyone that’s there.”

“Fine, because you wouldn’t have a chance to exchange them if you did! You’re going to be with me all evening; no one else is going to get near you. I’m just looking out for myself in this, you see. I have to be there. Don’t you want me to enjoy my own sister’s party?”

Finally I even fell back on the most moth-eaten excuse of all.

“I have nothing to wear.”

“You’ve been going around with me pretty steadily, and you’ve never been arrested yet for indecent exposure.”

Then when the dress had come and I’d sent it back, the next time I saw him I said: “Don’t ever do that again, young man, or when the night of the party does come you’ll show up carrying your arm in a sling!”

He only laughed. “I could have sworn it wouldn’t work. I told them so at Carnegie’s when I picked it out.”

“I hope you laid side bets on it,” I said maliciously.

And even when she called me herself on the phone, just before the affair, I still said to myself knowingly: “He put her up to it.”

“This is Leila Mason. Now, you’re not going to be mean to me, are you? I’ve been trying so hard to get Ladd to bring you. And — well, there’s no telling with Ladd; he can be very selfish about his friends. Come. As a special favor to me, won’t you?”

After I’d hung up I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem to me that any amount of browbeating could have extorted that much from a sister if she were congenitally unwilling. She must want me herself. And I wondered why.

I went.

It was about what I’d expected it to be. But for the number of rooms that you kept encountering if you were foolish enough to keep progressing, and an occasional crystal chandelier like an inverted wedding cake, it was any party in anyone’s home above the twenty-five-thousand-a-year bracket.

There was a mother, but counter to all my expectations, which had run toward a domineering, bejeweled dowager, she was a shadowy, wispy little nonentity, fragile-looking as Dresden china, who weighed about ninety pounds, talked with fluttering wrists à la Zasu Pitts, and seemed to have the status of a pet Persian kitten in the household. Even the guests, I noticed, would give her a sort of pat in passing, so to speak, and then go on to somebody of more consequence.

It was the sister who counted. She was a tall, lovely girl. She was Ladd all over. She had all his charm of the individual and then some additional little facets of her own as the due of her sex. She greeted me with her two hands clasped to my one.

“Well, you did! You never can get together with anyone you really want to at this sort of thing, but at least it helps to break the ice. Now remember, no matter what happens, if the very building burns down around us, we’re going to get in at least one heart-to-heart talk before it’s over, even if we’ve got to wait all night. Ladd, make her stay.”

“I’ll make her.”

She rushed off again, pointing her finger at me commandingly. “Remember, we have a date.”

“She’s charming,” I said to him.

“She’ll do,” he answered with typical brotherly lukewarmness.

It was Ladd, Ladd, Ladd all evening. He was almost grotesque about it, the way he kept me to himself. We danced a little in one oversized gallery where they had four or five players working at instruments, sipped an occasional champagne cup, roamed around a little. He showed me some of the rooms.

“How many are there, anyway?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said half contemptuously. “I just sleep in one of those nearest the door and go in and out a lot.”

I laughed.

And as I say, none of it amounted to anything. I had no hopes of or for anything; I was just killing time there, so I let the evening drift by.

Around half past twelve they started to thin out, and in another half hour the backgrounds were once more clearly visible in all the rooms. I’d quite forgotten about her; I thought it had just been lip courtesy. He looked at his watch, said we’d done our duty, and he suggested that I get myself together and we’d go for a drive in the open air before he took me home.

He only released me from his protective custody now, at the very end, because I was going into a room where other men were hardly likely to follow me, I adduced. And at any rate, I sat there for a few moments in a preserve still piled fairly high with mink and brocade wraps and fooled around with my face a little.

I don’t know whether she’d had her weather eye out and had seen me go in or had happened to look around after I was gone and had missed me; anyway, within a moment or two she came dashing in after me.

She swooped past without stopping, caught me by the hand as she did so. “Come on,” she said. “This won’t do. I have a special place for us.” She took me into some little private sitting room of her own — it hadn’t been open to the party — and rang for someone.

“We’ll have a glass of champagne in here by ourselves,” she said. “All right with you? I haven’t had a chance to get down to the bottom of one all evening.”

I said it was all right with me and meant it.

She was, now that I looked at her more closely, fully as lovely as she had seemed to be outside in the crowd, and that wasn’t a test that I’d been at all sure she would pass. It was a loveliness of mind as well as appearance. She was cultured, but not in a cold, bookish way. Switzerland, Paris, the usual background, I suppose. But it wasn’t just a veneer, as with so many of her kind. She had absorbed it. Young as she was, she was mellow with it. She was well baked, golden brown with civilization.

She poured for us when they’d left the champagne and then brought out the cigarettes. Then she sat down and loosed the bands of her backless sandals. I made some complimentary remark about a diamond bowknot she was wearing, just to do my share at starting us off together, and she said it was Ladd’s gift.

And then it happened. And this is how it happened.

We were looking around for a light, and neither one of us had one.

“I should have asked him just now —” she said and went over and opened a drawer.

I sat waiting.

“There’s usually a lighter on this table of mine, but somebody seems to have removed it,” she said. She closed the first drawer and opened a second. “I’ll go out and get some,” she said. Then suddenly she said, “Oh, never mind, here’s an old book of them left over in here.”

She came back and settled herself beside me once more and lit the cigarettes for us.

I lost track of the opening part of the conversation. I suppose it was girly-girly stuff, anyway. I kept looking at it where she was holding it absently in her hand.

It was blue and it had that single M on it. It was a duplicate to the one I’d taken from behind the door seam at Mia Mercer’s apartment.

I pretended my cigarette had gone out. I said, “May I?” and took them from her. I struck one, but what I was really doing was looking at it hard at closer range.

It was the same, the same folder I’d sat comparing on the bed in the furnished room that night they’d brought me back Kirk’s clothes.

I said offhandedly, “Are these yours?”

“Ladd’s, really. I made him a gift of a tremendous bale of them one Christmas. Silly sort of gift, wasn’t it? But if I remember correctly, I think I did it because I’d used up all my own Christmas funds by the time I got around to him, so I simply put in the order with Father’s tobacconist and charged it to his tobacco account. He never did really use them much, and since then they’ve been sprouting up all over the house. I don’t think we’ll ever get to the end of them.”

I kept them in my own hand from this point on. Absently, as she had. They were going out of here with me when I left tonight.

Success had a curious pewter lackluster to it; it wasn’t bright at all.

She’d become serious suddenly. About Ladd and me, evidently, though I’d missed the original point of transposition. “You don’t know what you mean to him,” she was saying. “Oh! my dear, I don’t know how you feel about him, and it’s not my place to ask you —” She stopped a minute, then went on: “He can’t tell you this. I’ll have to. Don’t let him become too set on you. You mustn’t. For your own sake. There are reasons why — why things with Ladd should never go beyond a certain point.”

It took a moment for it to sink in. It wasn’t the usual stuff. Are you good enough for him? Will you do? She was trying to warn me against him. I could sense it. It radiated from her. There was no mistaking it.

Suddenly he stood there looking in the doorway at us. He didn’t look pleased. “What’ve you been saying to Alberta?” He sounded a little crisp about it, I thought. Even taut. “Anything I shouldn’t hear? You wouldn’t go deep on me now, would you, Leila?”

She tried to laugh it off. “Ladd, you shouldn’t stick your head in here like that! We might have been comparing stocking tops or something.”

He said to me, “Are we going?”

“Yes,” I said, “we’re going.” It wouldn’t have done any good to stay; there wouldn’t have been anything to stay for now any more.

I wondered what she’d been trying to say to me.

I said hardly a word to him all the way home.

“Why are you so glum?”

I smiled wanly. “No reason,” I said, “no reason.”

I thought, “So I’ve found you, have I?”

I went to see Flood right after that, the very next day. He heard me for a while. “Well, have you any evidence yet?”

I showed him the matches.

He looked them over, shook his head finally. “They’re valueless by themselves, not sufficient. For one thing, you didn’t hang onto the original match cover that you found wedged behind the door up there, discarded it. It’s therefore only your word that the two are similar. In the second place, although they strongly indicate that the party in question was up there and left them there, they’re not positive proof in themselves; they could have been carried there by someone else just as readily. What you’ve got to have is direct —”

“I know,” I said. “And it may come at any minute now. That’s why I came to see you. I want to be ready for it. I don’t know how to trap it, to catch it on the fly. To just come here afterward and repeat it to you I want something stronger than that.”

“You’ll have to have.”

“What do you advise me to do?”

He thought about it. “Are you by yourself in this place?”

“Entirely.”

“And you feel fairly sure that something’s coming?”

“After these matches — yes, I do.”

“I’ll have something made up for you by our carpenters. Make sure there’s no one there with you when they bring it around.”

It was installed before the week was out. He came over with them himself to supervise.

I said, “What is it? It looks like an old victrola cabinet.”

“That’s what it is,” he told me. “It’s built into one. It’s the same principle as these machines they dictate into in offices sometimes.”

I said, “Oh, I understand; right here in front of it, is that the idea?” I felt a little crawly; I don’t know why.

“Anywhere around here in front of it. I’ll give you the range approximately. You won’t be hollering, so anything farther out than here, say, is liable to blur.” He traced an imaginary line with his foot along the floor. “Keep him inside that.”

He rearranged things. “This divan ought to go over closer, right up against it. I imagine it’ll come in handy to you.”

I could feel a little red stop light burning on each cheek; I don’t know why.

“Now, so you won’t have to go over to it each time, I’ve had this cable starter rigged up for you. See, there’s a plunger on the end. Flatten it with your thumb when you want to take. I’ll pay it out along here, behind the divan, and bring it up here between these two cushions, the green and the orange. Remember where it is now. That ought to be easy; just work your hand in.”

“Quite easy,” I thought; “just like driving nails into a cross.”

He had that masculine instinct for mechanical perfection. “Now let’s try it out,” he said. “We already tested it over at the workshop, but I want to see how it takes here in the room.”

He did something to it. Not at the end of the concealed cable but right in under the lid itself. “Say something into it. Quietly, just as though you were talking to him.”

I crushed my own fingers together. “I don’t know what to say.”

“That’ll do as well as anything else.” There was a faint hum. “Suppose he notices that?”

“Tell him it’s the water pipes in the wall, or something.” He turned it off. “We can’t get that out of it entirely.” He did something to it again. “Now listen. The playback.” He held up his hand.

It was uncanny. “Say something into it. Quietly, just as though you were talking to him.”

A cottony feminine voice answered, “I don’t know what to say…Suppose he notices that?”

“Tell him it’s the water pipes in the wall, or something.”

I couldn’t recognize my own voice. They say you never can; you so seldom hear it.

He cut it off.

“Are you going to leave that on there?”

“He won’t hear it. It’ll go on from there.”

“Suppose I run over. How will I know?”

“You won’t run over. You’ve got plenty of room. Just don’t waste it. I mean, don’t have it on by the hour. Just turn it on when you’re getting hot.” Then he said, “Call me if you think you’ve got anything.” He went over to the door. Then just as he was about to leave he said, almost by way of afterthought, “By the way, who is he?”

I said, “I’d rather not give you the name beforehand. I think it’s he, but if it isn’t, then giving you the name is no good. If it is I’ll give it to you then. Or it’ll probably be down on here anyway.”

“That was a typically feminine reaction just then.” He closed the door.

I stood looking over at the green and orange cushions. I wondered why I felt so low.

I took the tickets and threw them aside.

“I was scalped for them,” he protested cheerfully. “That show’s sold out solid until next Fourth of July.”

“Not tonight, I’ve changed my mind.”

“I see you in a new light. So suddenly cuddly and stay-homish and domestic. Look at this, the lights low. Highballs cooking over there waiting for us. Great guns, even sandwiches for later! Say, you can do something to a place, can’t you? You make me feel like I’ve been married ten years. Only the nice part of that, though.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” I pleaded forlornly. That set the mood, gave the key we were to play in. Bittersweet, not wisecracking.

“Here, stretch out here. Put your feet up. No, the other way, I want to sit on that side of you.” Orange and green. “Tonight’s our night for getting to know one another better. Tonight’s our night for reminiscence.”

I felt as though I were preparing something for the slaughtering block.

We sipped awhile and talked awhile, until the mood I wanted had grown on us, fastened on us. Our voices were low; the lights were low; slanting shadows of treachery were stroked upon the walls.

“It’s bromidic but it’s true,” I went on, “that a woman doesn’t want to be the very first love in a man’s life. He’d be too raw yet. So don’t fail me, Ladd. Don’t let me down. Don’t make me think you’re lacking in the completeness I want you to have. I give you two, three — how many will I need to give you? — before me.”

He quit evading me. “Two will do,” he murmured, “if you must make mountains out of molehills.” His voice was drowsy with the return to forgotten things. “Her name was Patsy and I was twenty, and it was one of those first things. She lived on Columbus Avenue; that was when they still had the el there, and it ran past her flat right at the level of her living room windows. No, excuse me, they called it the front room. I remember you had to finish up what you were saying before a train came, or else it would be broken up into two parts with a long wait in between.”

He groped uncertainly. “You can’t tell these things very well, can you?”

“But you loved her.”

“Yes, I guess I must have, or I wouldn’t still remember it. It lasted about a year, I think, and it really was pretty shiny. Maybe that was because I was twenty and she was eighteen. You can’t be any younger than that, either one of you. I used to go over to the Columbus Avenue flat for Sunday dinners. I don’t think I missed a Sunday dinner in months.

“Then I made the mistake of taking her to a party. Cinderella shouldn’t go to a party, the story in the storybooks to the contrary. I was proud of her; I had a good time showing her off. I remember she cried a little on the way home. I hadn’t noticed anything, but she claimed they’d snickered at her. Just the girls, not the boys. She wouldn’t go out with me at all for a while after that, wouldn’t even see me at first.

“Then suddenly she asked me of her own accord if I’d take her to another party. Another party like the first one again, where pretty much the same crowd would be. I located one and I called for her. I remember how she came out of the downstairs doorway all bundled in a beautiful fur wrap. Cinderella to the bitter end. She said her aunts and her cousins and I don’t know who else besides had all chipped in and made a first payment on it for her.

“All through the party that night she kept it on. She’d open the windows when no one was looking and make the room good and draughty, as an excuse to keep on wearing it. And this time no one laughed at her. They were all pretty young there, I guess.

“She was very happy riding home with me that night, strangely happy. She kept kissing me almost fiercely, as though we’d never see one another again.

“We never did. A couple of detectives came around to her home the next day, and she was sentenced to the State Prison for Women for stealing it.”

He got up abruptly and moved away. I knew. Who doesn’t want to be twenty again? Suddenly he’d stopped. He was standing right by it. My heart got quiet.

“Let’s have something,” he said.

“It doesn’t work; it’s a D.C.”

My voice went up too high. But I had to stop him quickly; his hand was already out to the lid. “No, Ladd, come over here. Come here by me. Don’t roam around when I’m talking to you.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to.”

I did then, God knows. I told him so. “I do now.”

He came right back. He subsided beside me again with a sweeping half embrace and a stretched-out “A-n-y time.”

I blew out my breath a little to myself.

He told me of the second one, then. It wasn’t she, I could tell in a moment, and I hardly listened after that. It was briefer. He’d been older, and the skin around his heart had been thicker.

“And —?”

“And that’s all. The rest is just — my personal laundry. You wouldn’t want that.”

“Only two?” She hadn’t shown up.

“Only two.”

“You’ve told me of those you loved. Now tell me of someone you’ve hated. A girl, of course, not a man; someone you’ve hated with that same side of your heart. That’s all that interests a girl about a man: the other girls he’s loved — or hated.”

For a minute I thought it wasn’t coming, it took so long. But it wasn’t the fact of trying to remember that slowed it; it was the fact of remembering, itself. “There was one like that,” he said at last.

“What was she like?”

“She was rotten. Rotten all the way through. That word hardly does her justice.” There was still hate there, now that he was raking the ashes. “If she’d looked on the outside like she looked on the inside she would have been clapped into a ward for contagious diseases. But she didn’t. They never do —”

And suddenly there it was, starting. I knew almost at the first word.

“She worked here in a club —”

I felt carefully for the plunger, with one hand crossed over behind my own back. It was hard to do that way.

It nearly destroyed the gossamer skein he was weaving. He said, “What’s that?”

It was more noticeable in the quiet of now than it had been in the daytime when Flood was there, I thought fearfully. We were so close to it too. “Just the Frigidaire. It needs defrosting. Go on with what you were saying.”

“She’s the only woman I ever —”

“What?”

He wasn’t going to for a minute.

“What?” I said again on a suspended breath.

“Well, the only woman, I think, that I ever wished dead.”

I waited.

Then he said in a curiously sepulchral voice that must have transmitted well, “Well — she is dead now.”

“What was her name?”

“What good does that do you?” he said ruefully.

“Well, it’s something that has to do with you, and when you love someone and want to learn everything there is about them, then it does do you some good.” I looked up at him overhead. I put my hand lightly against the side of his face and left it there. “Tell me her name.”

“She was a bum named Mercer.”

“Was that her first name?”

“Mia Mercer was her name. Her stage name, probably; I don’t know.” It was well under way now. If I just left it alone it would come by itself. It was like pulling the cover off a furled umbrella: the first part is the hard part; after that it just peels effortlessly.

“It was just a nightlife stand in the beginning. Everyone has them in their lives. Someone you meet in a place, a club, one night and then start seeing off and on from then on. It had nothing much to do with love, believe me, from start to finish. But at least I didn’t hate her at that stage yet. I thought she was a good enough scout. She was a little heavy on the — expense roll, you might say. They have no souls, so they must have things they can see and feel and touch; that’s their only heaven.

“Then one night she found out something about me.”

Again there was a snag in the unraveling skein.

“What?” I said without joining lips together.

“Oh, nothing to speak of — I was taken ill in her place one night and — she got a little frightened, wanted to send for a doctor — something like that.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, but I thought I’d better not sidetrack him too much.

“Unfortunately, she’d found out about Leila. Leila was engaged to someone at the time, someone who’d come over from England, and — well, it meant her very life to have had anything happen to it. And Leila was an innocent party to — She’d been in Europe for years going to school, and she didn’t know very much about me even as my own sister. That was what made it so damnable. I don’t think this mutt would have been willing to believe that, but whether she had or not, I doubt that it would have made any difference to her.”

I still couldn’t understand at all. I could sense he was being purposely vague about it, and that was helping to fog me too.

“Well, suddenly this woman, this devil — I think she had some doctor friend and he first put the idea in her head — I noticed a change coming over her. First she became too sweet to me, sweeter than I cared to have her be. I hadn’t minded it as a place to stop by and have a drink in at three in the morning, but she started to get too twiny and whiny to suit me. Above all, she became too interested in Leila and her approaching marriage. Finally I felt I had to tell her bluntly, ‘Goodbye, you won’t be seeing me any more after this.’ She changed a second time right after that. Still sweet, but discarded the buildup. Started mentioning some fantastic amount, twenty-five or thirty-five thousand dollars; did I know where she could get that much?

“I told her flatly no, I didn’t.

“Well, did Leila know, perhaps? she wondered.

“Leila neither, I let her know.

“Well, then, did I think the Honorable So-and-so, the Earl of Such-and-such’s eldest son, the man Leila was engaged to, did I think perhaps he might know?

“I started to smell a rat, and I forced a showdown. She was still very sweet and innocuous about it. He wouldn’t want to be told that Leila could be taken ill, as I had on that one particular occasion; it might worry him a lot.

“‘You try that,’ I said, ‘and I’ll kill you!’”

I could hardly breathe. I could feel my heart going so, it was a wonder he couldn’t feel it from the back, where he was pressed against me.

“There was no threat mentioned, you understand, just what I’ve told you. On her part, I mean. She pretended to back down very prettily. Oh, I hadn’t understood her. She’d simply been wondering aloud whether either one of them, or myself for that matter, had known where she could get such an amount. She hadn’t meant anything by it, anything in the world. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions like that. We’d forget about it, should we? She took leave of me very amiably. She said, ‘I’ll see you again in two or three days. I’ll expect you then, shall I?’ That was the punch line right there. ‘I’ll expect you in two or three days.’

“I told her I wasn’t coming near her again, to get that into her head. She just smiled at me very forgivingly and said, ‘Don’t drop me now, Ladd. I couldn’t bear that; I wouldn’t let you do such a thing.’ That ‘now’ got over what she wanted to say. She let me take the seed home with me, to give it time to sprout in the hothouse of my mind.

“She put me through a night of hell. The next day I told Leila. I felt it was the only decent thing to do. They were two such beautiful kids. He was only a boy himself, one of those apple-cheeked English youngsters. I pleaded with her not to pay any attention, not to let it affect her. I said, ‘Don’t let it frighten either one of you. It’s nothing; it has nothing to do with you, believe me. Once or twice I haven’t been well; that’s all it amounts to. You’ve never been ill, have you? Well, that shows it has nothing to do with you. You’re going back to the other side, anyway; we probably won’t see one another again for years at a time. If you speak of this now you’ll only be creating something between you that doesn’t exist, that’s imaginary.’

“It was hard work convincing her, God knows, but I finally got her to believe there was nothing to it, got her to promise me she wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t smash up her whole life for no good reason. I didn’t tell her that I was going to pay for her immunity. I didn’t tell her of the woman. I only told her enough to make me feel I’d taken the woman’s weapon away from her, robbed her of any chance of ever using it again.

“Then I broke my neck scraping together everything I could lay my hands on, and I went over there. That was about noon on the day she died. I had a hard time getting in, and when I did she acted frightened. Something seemed to have happened in the meantime that made her change her mind. I thought it was of me that she was frightened at the time, but now that I look back I’m not so sure that it wasn’t of something or of someone else. I told her that I’d brought a considerable part, if not all, of the money that she’d hinted she needed, and she backed away from it, wouldn’t touch it. She insisted I’d misunderstood her — she hadn’t meant anything like that — she’d only been talking at random. She was good and scared, whatever the reason. I tried to put it down there, and she forced it back on me, insisted I take it away with me again. The only explanation I could find was that she’d suddenly lost her courage, was afraid I was setting some trap for her, going to have her nabbed for blackmail if she accepted it.

“I didn’t like the way she was acting, so I told her to think it over and I’d be back later. She couldn’t wait for me to go, and I could tell by her expression that she didn’t intend letting me in if I came back later, so when she wasn’t watching I did something to the door, put a little wedge in it, to make sure of getting in again if I came back.

“When I got back to our own place Leila was standing there waiting for me. Just standing like a statue out in the middle of one of the rooms. One look at her face and I knew what had happened. She’d changed her mind and decided to tell him after all, but she’d waited too long; she’d been too late. He’d already heard it from some other source; he’d already been told.

“I asked her if that was the kind he was, ready to shy away at the very first.

“She smiled a little and said no, he wasn’t that kind. All he’d said to her from first to last was, ‘I would rather have heard it from you first, my dear.’ She said, ‘I released him. He didn’t want me to, but I had to. It was dead. It was gone already. He would’ve stuck, but I didn’t want him that way, just the outside of him. Mother and I will make the announcement, Ladd. Love is like an eggshell, isn’t it? It can never be put together again.’

“I never saw Leila shed a tear, or mope, or wilt. She held her head up. Then in a little while, a month or two afterward, she went away on a long cruise down South America way. She’ll never love again, I know.

“Two lives smashed up. He threw his away flying for the Chinese a few months later.

“Anyway, that day, that day it happened, I went back there again. I didn’t have much trouble guessing what the ‘other source’ was he’d received his information from. There’d been some flaw in timing, some slip-up that she hadn’t intended. I thought I could understand now why she’d been so frightened the first time. I’d warned her what I’d do if she did that to me, and I went there to do it.”

“You went there intending to kill her?”

“I went there to see that she stopped living. I would have killed her if there’d been twenty witnesses in the room.”

I couldn’t stand it; my chest was going up and down so. “And —?”

He laughed a little, bitterly. “She was dead when I got in there. Somebody’d beat me to it. She was lying there on the floor with a pillow over her. I bent over her and pushed back my cuff, like when you touch something unclean, and put my hand on her heart to make sure. She was dead all right. The way I wanted her to be. So I straightened up again and I tipped my hat to whoever it was had done it, for saving me the trouble, and I went out and closed the door after me and left her there just the way she was. Her cat got out, I remember, along with me. Even her cat wouldn’t stay with her.”

“So you didn’t kill her.”

“I would have, but I didn’t have the chance.”

A deep sigh drifted from me — I wasn’t aware of it myself until it was gone. So deep it never seemed to end.

He said, “I wouldn’t ask anyone else but you to believe that, but it’s the truth.”

I believed it. Yes, to the ones we love, in a room alone like this, we tell the truth.

I felt my thumb go down on the plunger, almost as if of its own volition. The slight hum we had become used to faded away. There was a long silence. I felt like a spent swimmer who has reached the shore, is incapable of further movement, lies there amid the debris of his recent struggle.

I raised my eyes and cast them around me, in strange first-time glimpses, as at a new scene that I hadn’t seen until now. I wondered what made the lights seem brighter than before all at once. Why, look, they shone; they sparkled. My heart was like a cork bobbing around in champagne, it was so light. The silly thing, it was trying to fly up through my throat with a pop. And where was that music coming from? Ghost trumpets all at once sounding allegrettos. Maybe it wasn’t there, but just the same Harry James would have been jealous.

He didn’t do it; he didn’t do it; he didn’t do it!

He’d been very quiet for a long time. His hand felt very heavy on me. I moved it a little, and it started to drop at its own weight. I caught it in time and eased it down gently the rest of the way. Then I disengaged myself and stood up.

I stood looking down at him for a minute. Then I moved slowly away. I put my hand on the lid of the cabinet, let it linger there a moment. Then I drew it away.

“You’re getting out of here,” I ordered myself sullenly. “You’re getting out of here, hear it?”

He shifted a little to a more comfortable position now that he was freed of me.

“Do you want another drink?” I said softly.

He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he looked at me in transient awareness. “Sweetheart, I’m so sleepy. May I take a little nap here? Just for a little while? I’ll go later. Put something over me, sweetheart, and I won’t be in your way.”

His eyes dropped closed again.

I walked quietly about. I picked up the thing or two I had, from here, from there, unhurriedly, and dropped them in the cheap, lightweight little case I’d originally had with me in the hotel room for scenic effect. I stood it by the door and went back toward him again.

I hate writing notes. But I didn’t want him to wait too long. He might think I was coming back. And I never was. Just —

Goodbye,my dear.

You never knew me.

I never knew you.

I left the light on so he wouldn’t be too lonely when he woke up. He’d be lonely enough, but at least he wouldn’t be in the dark.

His face was the last thing the light fell on as I eased the door closed, squeezing the light in there to a slit. I took that away with me. I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t seem to get rid of it, shake it loose. It stuck to my heart like flypaper.

I came out into the night with my lightweight case in one hand, and I started walking down the street. I didn’t know where to. Just in one direction — away from there. Good and away. All the way away. Away from where there might have been love if I’d stayed any longer.

NINE

columbus 4-0011......mckee

MCKEE'S GONE OVER to his club.

Won’t I do just as well instead?”

I made myself sound cordial. “Well, almost. But not quite. By the way, I’ve forgotten. Won’t you tell me where it is?”

“If you don’t know where it is, then you don’t know McKee, sister.”

So the voice wasn’t a butler’s or he wouldn’t have dared call me that. My momentary vision of a pompous figure sitting puffing a cigar and drowsing over a newspaper in a bay window overlooking Fifth Avenue thinned away. A nightclub. Or, more likely still, some sort of social-political club where they played cards, that sort of thing.

“Oh, I know McKee all right. He told me to ring him at the club. And I’ve lost the number. That’s why I rang him up here instead.”

The voice said, “How’je get this number? He never gives this number to no one.”

“Oh, I’ve got a way,” I said lightly.

A change of voices took place. The new one was deeper in pitch, breezily ribald. “Whadd’ye looking for, a dancing job? Come over here and we’ll audition you.”

So it was a nightclub. He’d said “his club.” He owned it, then.

They were still having a good time with me, both voices. They were taking turns, displacing one another. “Yeah, c’mon over; until you’ve been auditioned by us you’ve never been auditioned at all.”

The other voice cut in, “And bring your practice trunks.”

I became a little dancer about town, hail fellow well met. It seemed to be about the best ground to meet them on. “Ah, please, boys, have a heart. You know how it is. A girl has to work. And there are so many of those darned places.”

One voice asked the other in a confidential aside that still reached me, “Sh’ I give it to her?”

I couldn’t get the answer — that was still further aside — but I got the result. “Okay, it’s the Ninety Club.” Then a curious cackling chuckle that was somehow terrifying, almost simpleminded. “Now don’t say we never guv you nothing.” He actually said that in all seriousness: “guv”; I’d thought until now they only used it to parody illiteracy in comic strips and on the stage.

Its actual street number was eighty-eight; I think the reason for this curious flaw in designation was that ninety took up less room, saved light tubing over the entrance.

You went in the side way. A beetling-browed individual hanging around at the entrance, as though he had just emerged for a breath of air, pointed this out. “Looking for a job? Then you go round the alley and in through the second fire exit.”

I went around the alley and in through the second fire exit. I knocked, and a disembodied hand pushed open the heavy metal slab without any accompanying face being interested enough to look out and see who it was. I went inside into semidarkness. A white gash stayed open behind me a moment or two; then the heavy metal slab went whongg! and closed it up.

Fear flickered over me — I didn’t know of what or of whom — and then rippled away again. I think the closing of that door. I was coming into a new world.

The place was barren-looking and musty. Tables huddled in a corner, piled atop one another two and three at a time, and the whole thing threatening to come down. One had been left out where it belonged, and there was a man sitting at it, his coat turned inside out over the back of his chair. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting waiting in the gloom. There were eight or ten girls there, grouped about. They weren’t doing anything either. They, too, were just standing waiting. Some had jumpers over their upper bodies. All were barelegged.

There was something hideously naked about it. Obscene, almost. Pleasure, turned inside out to show its lining, always is.

The man at the table said, “You an applicant? Awright, drop your dress.”

“On the floor?” I quailed.

They all roared. He said, “The maid’ll be right around to pick it up for you. She ain’t here right now. Makes it very inconvenient.”

I compromised by rolling it into a neat oval and packaging it on top of a fire-extinguisher cylinder clamped to the wall.

They were all smirking about something. I still had on more than most of them, so I couldn’t see the point.

A rather gaunt-looking brunette sauntered over finally and stood looking me up and down as though I were something curious to her.

“You’ll never make it,” she said. “You may as well get dressed again and save yourself the time.”

“Why? What makes you say that?” I answered docilely.

“Anyone that comes to an audition without having her practice trunks already on under her street dress has never been in this business before. Look around you; where you going to change here?”

I stood there huddled helplessly in my white rayon briefs.

She finally took a sort of contemptuous pity on me. Turned her back and made herself into a screen. “All right, make it fast and keep down.”

While I was doing it I said from behind her, “Give me a hint, will you? Where’ll I say I worked before? I need this job.”

“Pick an out-of-town joint someplace.” Then she added, “If it’ll do you any good.” The last thing she said as she turned away to rejoin her more experienced fellow applicants was, “I’m telling you again, you’ll never make it. I c’n tell ’em just by looking at ’em.”

I felt great.

A door opened and men came out. First there were five of them, all talking at once. “Here’s an angle, boss. For three or four days ahead run a little square space in all the papers with nothing in it, blank, just the number, ninety by itself in the middle of it, until they start wondering what it —” “Yeah, if I can get that kind of red you want, but it ain’t going to be easy. I’ve already been all over —” “I told him if he won’t meet our price we’ll let somebody else supply us, but he’s holding out till the last minute to see if —” Then they started to break up, until there was just one left. A looming figure, blank in detail, little better than an outline against the light filtering out of the office behind him. Tall, almost grotesquely tall, but that might have been partly due to the uncertain dimness in which they kept this outer place.

He said, “Okay, Dolan. You ready out here?”

The man at the table said, “Give us a couple of lights out here, Harry.”

A sort of flare path swept into being between me and him, and there was a lot of shuffling around. It seemed that way, anyway: as though I were at one end of it and he was at the other and it was a path that I had to travel. Sooner or later I had to traverse.

I missed most of the rest of it. I looked over at him hard. He slowly lit up, came into existence, came into this funny story that was my life. I guess the lights went on slow, but that was the way it seemed: as though he were gradually brightening from the floor up.

Tall. Over six and something. Carrying it without trouble, as though every joint were newly oiled. Black pitted eyes and hair almost as dark, brown only in the superficial sheen that hovered over it. A face with an Irish cast to it. Handsome, I suppose. But hard. Not hard in a brutalized, vicious way, if you can understand the distinction, for that bespeaks heat, even though a warped heat; but hard with the passionlessness of concrete, of a steamroller that flattens you impersonally if you happen to be in its way.

I looked at him hard. Looked at his hands: one at a pocket, one to the knob, ready to close the door he had just come through. Sure, they could have. Sure, they already must have — not once but many times. I looked at his eyes. Sure, they could have watched that other thing, unflinching, as they watched this line of girls now. I had to get up that flare path that stretched between us, to where the answer waited.

Someone shoved a piano out away from the wall, sat down at it, rubbed his elbow along the keyboard to dust it. It had a panel missing, and you could see the wires move each time he struck notes over on that side.

The man at the table said, “All right, line up for a time step.”

I tried to get up his way. All the others seemed to have the same idea. I got in third from that end. Then I got crowded back to fourth, sidestepped to fifth, elbowed to sixth, detoured around to seventh, while the line wriggled into straight like a worm. I wound up third from the wrong end, away from him. My face must have been just a pinkish dot to him.

This was to weed out the obvious incompetents before they interviewed and passed on the remainder individually. I was the first one to be weeded. Every time he said left I raised my right leg and every time he said right I raised my left. I didn’t know how to change over once I’d got started wrong.

Finally the man at the table said, “Hey, you, number three. Step out. You’re tangling up the whole line.”

I stepped out. I looked up there, not at him. He thumbed the fire exit. “Get dressed,” he said wearily.

The tall figure lounging by the closed office door spoke. “Give her a chance,” he said. He was more lenient than his hired man. I suppose the latter wanted to show how conscientious he was.

“What do you do?” he asked me with a sort of aloof kindliness. “You got some sort of specialty or solo? Is that it?”

Thus for the first time McKee had spoken to me. Even though my face was still a pink blob to him. I had edged one foot forward along the flare path.

If I said no it meant the fire exit. “Yes,” I said, “I — I do a solo.”

“What’ll you have?” the man at the piano said, spitting out a loose leaf of his cigar.

I couldn’t think how anything went. I remembered something that Kirk used to like, but by name alone, not how it went. “ ‘Moonlight and Roses,’ ” I stammered.

He started it, and only then I realized it was too slow to do anything with. I didn’t know anything about dancing. I could only think of two things to do. Pirouette; that is, swing around. And kick high. So I pirouetted. And I high-kicked. And I pirouetted. And I high-kicked. The third high kick was too high. I sat down. Straight, in a vertical line, almost with economy of movement.

A howl went up. Even the face by the doorway joined in it. I scrambled to my feet, and this time I started over for the fire extinguisher where my dress was cached without being told.

Suddenly his face froze. His own hand started up toward it, as if to touch it, then dropped again. He asked the man at the table in surprised discovery, “Wait a minute, was I laughing just then?”

“Who wasn’t?”

“I don’t laugh easy. I never laughed in one of my own clubs yet. Or anybody else’s. If she can do that to me and to everyone else in the place here, what’ll she do to an audience with fizz under its belts?” Then he said to me, “Stay where you are.”

I stayed. He thought about it for a minute. “Can you do that every night? Sit down like that every three or four kicks you take, for about five minutes straight?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Pretty looks, you’ve got a specialty. She’s in for seventy-five a week.”

A hiss of reptilian antagonism went up from the line behind me.

Even after I’d given my name and address I didn’t go right away. I hung around. It didn’t do me any good. He didn’t look at me again.

I left when it was all over and they were milling around getting dressed. He’d gone by then by the front entrance. On my way out I cut across the brunette’s path and nicked her with my elbow. “Who wasn’t going to make it?” I said softly.

I never got near him all that week. I used to see him sometimes in the distance. He never watched rehearsals; that wasn’t his job. His show was set and he let Dolan beat it into shape.

I rehearsed wearing a sort of protector of quilting on wires around my hips so I wouldn’t injure my spine. I would have been in the hospital in forty-eight hours if I hadn’t. Then later, when they made up the gown, they put heavy pads into it down around there. It was one of these spreading, hoopskirt things, so it couldn’t be detected. It was a lovely looking piece of business, clouds of filmy black like mist. Then there were two long streamers attached to my wrists, and when I moved my arms they opened out like wings. And for the head there was a sort of silver arc that went halfway around on the order of a halo. You get the most unexpected allies.

I was getting a little better at it. The falls came easier once they’d waxed the dancing floor for the opening. But Dolan warned me not to get too good. “If you get too good it looks like you rehearsed it; it takes some of the funniness out. Try and keep it looking accidental, like it was the first day.”

We had a dress rehearsal around five in the afternoon, the day the show was to open. I put on the finished dress for the first time. Until then we’d just used practice shorts and things.

I started to notice something; something was coming up as far as I was concerned. I kept getting signs that I was starting something. Something I only hoped I’d be able to finish.

The first one came from the old woman who had charge of the costumes. That was her job, and she was old and tired and didn’t care one way or the other how we looked, only how her stuff fitted us. She helped me into the thing and fooled around a little down at the bottom. Then she happened to look up, I suppose to see if it was on right, and she stopped dead, stayed like that on her knees.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

She sounded out of breath. “It’s a sin to say it around here, but you look like — like a vision up above the altar of a church.” And she almost acted afraid to come very near me and finish putting in the tacking and the pins.

Then one of the others came in. I was the first one in there because I was the green one. It was the same brunette of the first day. She did something to her head; it gave kind of a quirk around my way, and her feet locked where she’d last put them. She stayed like that a moment, and then she fought it off and grunted: “You’re the first Jane I ever saw that looked better with her clothes on than with them off. They better have stretchers outside this place tonight; the casualties are going to be terrific.”

And the third sign that I was under way came from Dolan himself, whom I’d overheard saying once that he was so sick and tired of looking at pretty girls that it was a relief to go to the zoo and stare at a cageful of the ugliest monkeys they had there. He dropped his lower jaw when my cue came up and kept it that way for a minute. He started to say, “Are you that same skinny little — ?” Then he didn’t go any farther. He didn’t have to.

I said to myself, “If I hit him like I’m hitting them I’m as good as at the other end of the flare path already!”

I’d heard them all saying over and over, to explain their own difficulties, that there was no tougher audience to gain the attention of than the opening-night audience at a nightclub. I saw what they meant as soon as I’d stepped out there. With me it didn’t matter as much, because I had no lines to speak, no song to deliver. And the show I was giving had nothing to do with this crowd out here; it was a show for one.

There was a blur of lights and faces. It was like a machine shop going full blast. Nobody was looking at the floor space. People talking from table to table, waiters cutting between me and ringside, dishes and glasses going. Even the cigarette girl was getting more attention than I.

Somebody saw me at last. Someone at one of the back tables gave one of those long-drawn-out corner-loafer whistles. Then the commotion started to taper off. All of a sudden there was less noise. Then all of a sudden it was quiet. Then all of a sudden it was deathly still.

You can feel things. I didn’t know what I looked like, and I wasn’t there to find out at this late date. All I knew was something about me was doing something to them. And since I wasn’t doing anything as yet, it must have been just the way I looked standing there.

I heard a drunk say close by me, “Is it real? Boy, I’m getting good ones now for a change!”

A mantle of oddly attentive silence seemed to have fallen over the entire place that had something nostalgic about it, pensive. Only the music went on, subdued, decorous, a little melancholy, for that was the way we had arranged it. For perfection of contrast, I was to fall to stately, muted music, not the raucous, laughing kind.

I kicked and I fell, and a gasp went up. Then I did it again. The laughter was slow in coming, but it came finally, dragged out of them by sheer repetition of the grotesque. I knew I was destroying something, but I didn’t care. It was something I hadn’t sought, didn’t want. I was no performer.

I had only one thing to ask, when I went off, of Dolan, the director, who was standing there looking on. “Did Mr McKee see it? How did he feel about it? What did he say?”

“He was there until a minute before you came out,” he said. “Then he got called to the phone, someone wanted to congratulate him on his opening. He’s been in there ever since. You’re the only part of the whole show he muffed seeing. There he is; he just came back now.”

I turned and slunk back toward the dressing room, and even the gown couldn’t make me anything but a skinny, whipped little thing now. All those days and nights of drudgery for nothing. All those black-and-blue marks for nothing.

Each time I’d come off the floor I’d ask: “Was Mr McKee out there tonight? Did he see me?”

Sometimes they said, “He was around before. He left just a little while ago.”

Sometimes they said, “He hasn’t been here tonight yet. They expect him over a little later.”

Five nights went by like that.

The sixth night I kept the dress on after I’d come off the floor. I sat there in the dressing room in it, waiting, and when the wardrobe woman came to take it from me I said, “I’m staying in it.”

“You ain’t supposed to,” she said. “I’m responsible for it; it’s got to go away. Now gimme it here.”

“I’m staying in it awhile,” I snarled threateningly.

They all came spilling in. “Hey, what’re you waiting for, an encore? The show’s over; didn’t you know that?”

Yes, I was waiting for an encore. Or rather a premiere. But not the kind they meant.

The old woman kept badgering me. “I gotta go home; gimme that dress!”

“If you want it you’ll have to pull it off me piece by piece.”

The brunette stopped at the door on her way out, gave me a look. Then she changed her mind, came back a minute. “I think I get it,” she said. She gave her head a hitch toward the door. “He’s out there now. He just came in before the finale.”

I acted as though I hadn’t heard her, didn’t move.

When the last of them had gone I got up. I warded off the old woman’s shakily interfering hands and opened the door and went out. I stood there for a minute at the mouth of the dressing-room passage, looking into the club room proper. He was at a ringside table over at the left, on the other side of the bandstand. There were two men with him, the same two that were always with him.

There was a small table far back against the wall that had been recently vacated. It wasn’t a very good one, but I made my way over toward it at an obtuse angle — by way of his table.

They were talking avidly as I went by.

They stopped talking on the down syllable.

“I’ve made it,” I said to myself.

I heard him ask in an undertone, “Who’s the angel with the folded wings?”

I sat down all the way over against the wall and didn’t look at anyone in the room. A couple of minutes went by. Then a light-toned shadow blotted some of the cloth’s whiteness.

“Haven’t I seen you before? Now please, before you answer, I know that’s old, but I’m asking it in all sincerity; it’s not a wisecrack.”

“I work for you here, Mr McKee.”

“How much do I pay you?” Then before I could answer he said to someone, “Call Dolan over here a minute; is he still around?”

Dolan got there fast.

“Double this young lady’s salary. By the way, what’s her name?”

“Miss Alberta French.”

“What does she do?”

This time I answered. “I sit down on the floor, Mr McKee. From where I come in, all the way across the room in a straight line, over to where I go off. Don’t you remember me? I did it by mistake the first day, and now they have me doing it every night.”

Something about it made him sore. It was his own idea, but he’d forgotten that. “You did it for the last time tonight. What’s the matter? Haven’t they got any sense around here?”

Dolan got out of the way fast.

He said, “Come on back to my table. It isn’t often that I have a chance to sit with an angel. I want everyone to see.”

He didn’t waste finesse on the two men he’d been with. “All right,” he said curtly to one, and “See you around” to the other, and they both got up without delay, drifted away.

I caught something one said to the other, though, before they’d quite gone beyond earshot. “It was about due. It’s been a long time now.” It wasn’t said maliciously; it was said philosophically.

While we were waiting for the champagne I thought a little about Kirk. A voice penetrated my thoughts dimly. “Gee, you look so sad. I’ve never seen anything so lovely.” The voice of somebody or other from outside my innermost thoughts; they couldn’t exactly identify who it was at the moment. I sat and thought a little about Kirk while we were waiting for the champagne.

It was excruciatingly hard to get rid of him at the door.

“Words are curious things, aren’t they?” I said through the narrowing gap I’d finally achieved. “Their meanings are so often just the opposite to what you think they are. To like someone, to think a lot of someone, then, that means to force yourself on them, to make them unhappy and cause them distress, to harm them and make them ashamed. Doesn’t it? I must remember; I didn’t understand that until now.”

He looked down at the floor. “No,” he said almost inaudibly. And all of a sudden he was sober, penitent; all the champagne was gone.

“Good night,” I said with warm friendliness. I closed the door slowly and cut his face in half, in quarters, into nothingness. I drew the finger bolt across.

After a long time I heard someone go away on the other side of it. I’d been thinking of Kirk; my innermost thoughts couldn’t remember who it was for a minute. Someone outside their pale, someone out there on the other side of the door.

It was effortlessly easy to get rid of him outside the door.

“Don’t stand there looking at me like that, McKee. I have no answer for a look like that, and you know it.”

“Don’t be sore at me. You’re like an angel fading from view. Just smile at me once more before you close it. Is that asking you so much, a smile through a door as you close it?”

I closed the door slowly and cut the smile in half, in quarters, into nothingness. I drew the finger bolt across. After a long time I heard someone go away. I’d been thinking of Kirk; I wasn’t sure who it was. Just someone on the other side of my door.

The sit-down falls had ended since the night I’d first met him. All I did was stand there now with a line behind me doing the work. Not literally stand there, but that was all it amounted to practically. He’d got hold of someone to teach me a few simple turns and dips and bends. Just enough to give the illusion of dancing. “No one looks at anything but your face when you’re out there, so just if you move across the floor a little, that’ll do,” as Dolan had said.

Not a word was breathed in the back room. The combustive violence of the suppressed thoughts, however, made it dangerous to strike a match in there. Once somebody wrote in eyebrow pencil “Du Barry” across my section of the glass. I hadn’t known there was anyone that literate in there. I didn’t care; what did I care?

And then one night this arrangement ended too. As dramatically as everything else that happened with him.

We were in the middle of it, and he’d just come in. With Skeeter and with Kittens, of course, never alone. He stood there for just a moment, looking at me. Something got him. I don’t know what it was — jealousy, some possessive instinct or other.

Suddenly, in the music-underscored silence, his voice boomed out, shattering the illusion like a hand grenade tossed onto the floor. “Kill that music! Kill that spotlight! Hey, you back there, take that spotlight off her, hear what I say? If you don’t I’ll come back there and make matchwood out of your whole booth!”

The music died. The spotlight dimmed. The girls behind me stopped, knees elevated. I stopped, and the swirling black mists settled about me.

He was wild-eyed and I was scared; I couldn’t tell what was the matter. It wasn’t drink; though his face was mottled, his hair, his tie, his clothes still retained the perfect grooming of sobriety.

His voice was a bay that shook the walls of the confined place. “Get ’em outta here! Clear the tables! Never mind settling their bills; get rid of ’em! They’re not gonna look at her any more! I won’t let ’em look at her like this every night!”

Skeeter was trying to hold him back by one arm. And yet trying not to be too obtrusive about it too. I think he was afraid he’d draw a gun.

In another minute there would have been a full-fledged panic on. Already a two-way rush had started in, was gathering headway. Some of the more timorous customers were making for the front entrance; the floor girls all started spilling toward the back, in toward the dressing room.

“What is it, hop?” I heard one of them breathe frightenedly to another, directly behind me.

I heard the answer too.

“No. Love.”

That cold slug of fear I’d experienced the first day I walked in here bedded itself in me again. I stood rooted there where I’d been originally, almost the only one in the place who wasn’t on the run.

The club manager was pleading, “Mr McKee, don’t! We’re doing a landslide business. Mr McKee, think what you’re doing. Take the young lady out of here if you want — I’ve sent someone back for her coat — but at least let me go ahead serving them; let them dance with each other. What harm is that?” And then he kept wheedling interrogatively, “All right, Mr McKee? All right, Mr McKee?” over and over.

“All right!” he raged back at last. “Let ’em dance; let ’em drink till they can’t see straight; I don’t give a — what they do! But they’re not going to look at her any more! Nobody’s going to look at her any more — but me!”

The club manager snapped his fingers in an urgent aside. “Boys! A quick rumba. Hurry up, before we lose any more of them!”

Somebody put my coat around me from behind, just the way I was, angel outfit and all, and I was gently but insistently pushed toward him by about six or eight hands at once. The way a noontime meal is prodded gingerly toward a raging lion’s maw.

Those few straggling steps I took across the floor — that was the flare path leading to him that I was crossing at last. And at the other end of it he stood waiting with his arms extended to receive me, to shepherd and take me in tow.

And as I reached him, as we came together, there in that crowd around us, suddenly — I don’t know — he was so docile; he was so contrite; he was all over again just what he’d been all along, someone I could wrap around my little finger.

He adjusted my coat about me, put his arm around behind my waist. “Come on, Angel, don’t be frightened,” he said with husky solicitude. “It’s only that I’m taking you out of here with me.”

I’d made it all right. But it occurred to me to wonder how I was ever going to manage the return trip — away from him again — when the time came.

It was a strange place he had. A fantastic place. High up on a turret on Central Park West. New York has more than a few such, I suppose, but not more than a few people ever get into them and see them. It was hard to say what there was about it that called for the adjective “strange.” Hard to put your finger on what it was. It wasn’t its size; the Mason apartment had been even larger. It wasn’t any definite freakishness or bizarreness of appointment; he seemed to have turned over the entire job to a decorator, and it didn’t sin particularly in that respect, although it may have been a little too coldly formalized, as such jobs usually turn out to be. The trouble was there was a certain discord to it. The setting and the occupants didn’t blend, clashed at every turn.

You would stop before this impeccable, carefully atmosphered drawing room, and at a glance the whole thing would fly to pieces around the figure of a man sitting there coatless, shirt sleeves flowing through the arm holes of his vest, a bottle of beer standing on the floor at his feet, playing solitaire upon a knee-high inlaid table.

Or you would come upon a guest bedroom, tailored for masculine occupancy, perfect in every detail, and he’d widen the already partly open door to display it to you with pardonable pride. “This is one of the boys’ rooms.”

And the boy in question — Kittens or the other one — would be sprawled sidewise athwart the bed with a pipe cleaner in one hand, a loosely dangling revolver in the other. He’d flip it up by the trigger, blow through the bore. And on the wall, superimposed along with the carefully chosen hunting prints that had originally been placed there, a startling photograph of a nude, clipped from some art magazine.

Whereupon my host ejaculated testily, “Cover that thing up — what’s the matter with you? — I want to show her your room!”

The room’s owner got up from the bed, went over to it, planted one outspread hand strategically in the middle of it, and stood there like that, waiting for our visit to be completed.

I felt neither embarrassed nor yet secretly amused, but only supremely silly. I worked in a nightclub, after all.

That sort of thing. A certain discord between the occupants and the surroundings.

He didn’t try anything.

He only said, unobtrusively at one point, “You could have all this.”

I didn’t pretend not to have heard. I merely closed my eyes briefly, opened them again.

I stayed there about an hour.

There was a slight crackling sound from the pocket of my coat when I got back and took it off and threw it carelessly down.

I put my hand in and found a check that hadn’t been there yet when I went up to his place. It was signed “Jerome J. McKee” and endorsed on the back, as a sop to my scruples: “For one year’s salary in advance, for professional services to have been rendered, Club Ninety.” It was for ten thousand dollars.

I had become the most highly paid performer in New York in one night.

I knew how to use it most effectively. He was putting my own weapons into my hands.

I put a stamp on an envelope and addressed it to him. I put some red on my lips and made a print of them just under the endorsement. I wrote beneath that: “But no.” I put it in the envelope and mailed it back.

That meant I would be getting the highest possible return out of my money.

Twice a day, for several days past, he’d been calling me up about this party, reminding me I’d promised him to be there, urging me not to fail to keep my promise; I didn’t quite understand why. That it was to be more or less in my honor, I gathered, but his insistence almost seemed to go beyond that, as though I were actually sponsoring it along with him.

“I want you here good and early. I’ll send the car for you, say about six — how will that be?”

“You don’t have to do that. I can get over there all right —”

“I should say not. I wouldn’t think of it. You’re coming in the car.”

Then he went on: “Will you do something for me? Wear the angel dress again. Have you still got it? I want them to see you just like I do.”

I said to myself, even while I was still on the line, talking to him, “The safe is built in above the fireplace in that little study or whatever it is; I saw it in there.”

“All right,” I said.

He was like a kid; I’d never heard anything like it. “I can hardly wait until tonight. Gee, it’s still so long away until tonight — what am I going to do until then?”

“It will come,” I said evenly. I thought: “It always does.”

He was in a dinner jacket when I arrived, and the place was swarming with florists and caterers. He was standing there supervising a great long table they were arranging in the dining gallery for about twenty or thirty people.

He was still like a kid. Skeeter had been standing unobtrusively by, looking on with him, and as McKee came forward to greet me Skeeter crept a stealthy foot nearer the table. McKee immediately whirled on him in a sort of righteous fury. “You touch another one of them salted almonds after I told you not to, and I’ll bust your jaw so you won’t be able to use it at the meal!”

Skeeter retreated guiltily to where he had been before.

I had to tell myself: “These men have killed people.”

“What is it, your birthday?” I asked him.

“Better than that, much better. I’m not going to tell you ahead; you’ll find out when the time comes.”

The other one, Kittens, came in harassed. “Hey, I can’t get this tie on right. I must be nervous or something. We never gave a formal party like this before, just brawls.”

“Here, I’ll do it for you,” I offered, so McKee would find me charming.

He stepped up close to me. His face smelled a little of tangy shaving lotion. “How strange,” I discovered to myself with a sort of wonderment; “they’re no different from other men, except that the moral sense is gone, and you can’t see that from the outside.”

When I finished McKee was crowding at my elbow. His face had a slightly sulky look to it, and his own tie, which I could have sworn had been intact a moment before, was drooping invitingly down. He was jealous of his own henchman!

Within the next half hour his past came to life before me, came in the door in twos and threes. No, not the past. Who knew where that actually was at this moment as he stood beside me greeting arrivals? A lumpy torso huddled ankles to throat in a rotting sack in a lime pit somewhere. A wavering, undiscovered thing down under the waters of the harbor, feet in a cement cast. A skeleton under a cement garage floor that would be dug up some far-off day when this lawless age was a forgotten moment in a distant past.

His present, then, came to life before me, came in the door in twos and threes. In a sort of strained demureness that was their new-found respectability still sitting uneasily upon them. The men were too meek and brittlely polite; you couldn’t move but what they moved a chair to accommodate you. The women were too subdued and kept porcelainly smiling at nothing, just to keep smiling for the sake of smiling. Dolls that the men had brought with them. That slightly heightened excitement of voice and vivacity of movement that women ordinarily bring to a party that is a party were entirely lacking in them. A faux pas would have warmed the rarefied air, but they were all alike in dread of one.

He had me at his right.

I kept thinking, “The safe is in the study, over that way, to my right. Tonight is the time, with all of them here. Far safer for it than if I were alone.”

His voice broke in upon me: “I didn’t get you one because — you’re more than just a guest. And I have something else for you later on.”

I looked around, and they were all exclaiming over little gold powder compacts. I hadn’t even missed not having one.

The conversations were ludicrous, but I wasn’t there to be amused, to take social notes. Who was I, after all? I asked myself. Just a desperate, stealthy creature sitting in their midst, less secure than they were even.

Then from one of the wives, in tactful arbitration, stemming perhaps from some long-haunting memory of a small dispute that had once grown beyond bounds and ended in a tragedy: “Oh, don’t let’s talk politics. It’s not nice at the dinner table. After all, we’re all good Americans here, I’m sure. Don’t you agree with me, Miss French?”

“You’re right. Of course we are.” I smiled cordially.

They had so many taboos, their new state of grandeur must be hell for half of them.

He had risen.

Kittens went “Sh!” to the person next to him. Skeeter went “Sh! The boss is going to say something” to the man across the way from him.

He looked at me privately, then at them. “I’d like to make a little speech to you. I suppose you wonder why you’ve all been brought together here on this particular night. Well, it’s like this. Everyone finds someone. But most men, they just find women. I’m a man in a million. I’ve found an angel.”

They all looked at me and applauded delicately.

“Give me your hand, Angel.”

I stretched it out mechanically, already beginning to be a little afraid even before I knew what was coming next.

It hadn’t been there a minute before. I don’t know whether somebody had just passed it to him from behind his chair or it had been concealed underneath something on the table itself. Suddenly there was this plush box. There was a snap and the box split open. There was a flash from the satin lining for just a second, and then the box was empty.

Something cold, cold as death, that struck a shudder into the very deeps of my heart slipped down my finger.

The flash came from there now. Kept coming from there. Came from there permanently. I’d never seen a diamond that size before.

It went up to his lips and down again, and the kiss now struck the same cold shudder into me that the ring had.

“I want to announce my engagement to Miss Alberta French. Our engagement to be married.”

The pupils of my eyes felt like taut exclamation marks stretched from lid to lid. Under cover of the hand clapping and din of congratulatory ejaculation that churned around the table he leaned over toward me. “Say something to them. What’s the matter; did I startle you? Look at her, how white her face is. Was it too sudden for you? Don’t be frightened —”

I kept saying to myself, “This isn’t real. This isn’t so.”

They were subsiding now. They were waiting. He was waiting. I had to do something. What did you do when you were suddenly told you were engaged? Jump up and run from the table? Say “No, I decline the honor with thanks”?

“Say something to them. Come on, say something to them.” He had me by the elbow now.

If Kirk’s face would only get out of the way —

I found myself standing suddenly, so I must have risen. I didn’t look at him, nor at them. I raised the champagne high until I could see the ceiling lights turn gold through it. I didn’t point it at him. I pointed it upward, through the lights, through the ceiling, toward — whatever it was up there.

“To my husband,” I said in a steady voice.

“Keep it on,” he coaxed in the study. “Are you supposed to take it off like that? I think I once heard somewhere it brings bad luck.”

“That’s the wedding band,” I improvised, “once the ceremony’s been performed. Not this. I’m worried about it. There are so many people here — and you never know. Look, it’s a little loose, and I don’t want anything to happen. Let me put it in your safe while I’m here. I’ll put it on again when I’m ready to go.”

He found me charming. If I’d stood on my head he’d have found me charming. “So that’s why you wanted to get me alone in here. You’re a sentimental little lady, aren’t you? I didn’t know you thought that much about it. All right, give it to me; I’ll put it in for you.”

I continued to work at being charming. “I want to put it in myself. It’s my ring.”

I put my hand on the dial, stood waiting in an attitude of trustful helplessness. “Tell me what I have to do.”

For a moment his innate caution held out against his heart. He cast a brief look of sober speculation at me, hesitated almost unnoticeably.

I opened my eyes a little. “I thought it was an engagement ring.”

He raised my hand and put his lips to it in amends. “It is,” he said. “Wait a minute till I close the door.”

He came back again.

“I wouldn’t do this for anyone but you. Steady it so that little arrowhead points straight up first of all. That’s it. Now go around this way until you come to eleven —”

He came back from seeing the last of them out.

“Well, how’d you like it? What sort of a party did I give you? I’m glad you stayed to the end like you did; I was afraid you’d —”

“It was my party. I couldn’t leave before all of them did.” I hooked a finger to an inadvertent yawn.

“Tired? Shall I take you back now?”

“I’m almost too tired to go back,” I said languidly. I hooked a finger to a second yawn. “It seems so much trouble to go all the way over —”

An idea hit him, born of his solicitude. Or perhaps my yawns. “Say, you wouldn’t want to —? I don’t suppose you’d feel right about staying over here on account of me being in the place? Because if it weren’t for that —”

I looked around me as if in sudden attentiveness to the proposal. “You know, that’s not such a bad — I don’t think I’d mind doing that at all, if I could only be sure you wouldn’t misunderstand me.”

“How could I ever misunderstand anything you did?” he protested with an almost luminous sincerity. “That stage ended long ago with you and me. You shouldn’t say things like that to me. You ought to know me by now. You’d be as safe here in my place as you would back at your own.”

“Then I think I will stay,” I acceded impulsively. “After all, we are engaged, and I’m too tired to care about the looks of it.”

His bustling, enthusiastic reaction showed how complimented he felt by this mark of confidence I was showing him. There was a brief undercurrent of ordering and telephoning, and one of these prepared toilet kits containing everything necessary for the night arrived — I don’t know where he’d been able to obtain it at that hour, possibly from one of the hotels — within fifteen minutes.

I took leave of him at the door of the room I was to grace. The last thing I said to him was, “Now you won’t do anything to make me regret this, will you?”

I knew he wouldn’t. I could tell just by looking at him. He would as soon have thought of desecrating a church.

To be worshiped, though I didn’t realize it at the moment, is a far more dangerous situation to be in than simply to be desired.

“Pleasant dreams,” he said with abashed tactfulness, refraining even from kissing me, lest that seem to be an attempt at tilting the delicate balance between us.

I heard him go back to “the boys.” I could hear him say, from where I was, as he went in, “Now listen, cut out the drinking, you two. There’s a lady staying here in the place tonight, and I don’t want her disturbed by you guys getting loud.”

There wasn’t a sound. They knew enough not to smirk or say anything out of turn. They must have known him well. They must have known when he wasn’t kidding, when a thing was just what he claimed it was.

First you steadied it so that the little arrowhead pointed straight up. Then around this way until you came to eleven —

It came open quite easily. Quite easily and quite silently in the slumbering, plushy silence of the apartment.

I shifted the boxed ring out of the way first, over to one side. Then I eased out a metal strongbox that stood at the back, careful not to scrape it against anything. I took it over to the table, tipped up the foresection of the pleated lid. Bonds, whole packets of them. They weren’t his; they were registered in the name of Michael J. Dillon. Under them an assortment of legal papers, deeds, or liens, or something; I couldn’t make out. I riffed through them rapidly. I didn’t want any of them. I closed it up again. There was a smaller fitted-in box in the upper compartment of the safe. I took that out, brought it over in turn.

Currency, tight-packed little bricks of it, taped in strips of manila paper with the amounts or denominations serialized on them, the way banks do. I disregarded them. Under them, sheaves of clipped-together checks, perforation-canceled. I rippled through them, scanning the payees.

Her name suddenly flickered up at me as I went on too far past. I toiled back to it again, retrieved it. “Mia Mercer.” Two hundred and fifty dollars. Salary or something? There was nothing there at sight —

Suddenly I went into reverse, crushed the lid flat on them, started the box hectically back into the safe. I misjudged the upper slot, couldn’t slip it in right the first time, had to withdraw it partly and aim it over again.

I was too late.

“Mr McKee won’t like that,” he said in a sort of grieved remonstrance from the doorway.

I’d drawn the door even to the frame, but I hadn’t fitted it in tight, to avoid a possible betraying latch click. Now it was wide again. It was the one called Kittens. In a dark flannel robe, fists to pockets.

The bleached skin of my face felt like cardboard, it was so stiff.

“My ring is in there; I wanted to see if it was all right. I had a bad dream just now and —”

He was simpleminded. But dangerous and shrewd as only the simpleminded can be. “But there it is in front of you, and it’s those other things you were taking out. I watched you through the crack of the door first.”

I died a little more than I had already.

“I didn’t mean anything by it. You know how curious women are. Don’t — don’t tell him about it.”

Instantly I realized what a bad mistake that was.

His face twisted into a grin. He came in and returned the door to where it had been before, flush with the frame. “Okay, it’ll just be something between you and me.” And suddenly that high-pitched cackle that I’d heard the very first day of all on the telephone wrenched jarringly from him, stopped short again.

He came over close. I pushed the safe lid back into true, trying to efface the marks of my own guilt.

He was looking at me, not the safe.

There was something wrong about him. I’d known that all along. I couldn’t tell just what it was. Something that went beyond just ordinary cruelty. I remembered now that I’d seen him one day. There was no time to review that now. Suddenly he’d caught me to him.

“Don’t you know what McKee’ll do to you if I tell him you tried to kiss me? Don’t — please — ah, please, don’t! Don’t let’s have any trouble.”

“I ain’t trying to kiss you. Look, am I trying to kiss you? I don’t like kissing myself.”

“Then what’re you holding me like this for? Let me —”

“Just let me twist your hand a little, like this. I’ll stop if it hurts you. Ever since I first saw you I’ve been dying to —”

I threshed around a little. “Sh! Somebody’ll hear us. Don’t!”

“Just the skin on the back of your wrist, where it’s loose; the wrong way around, like this. Don’t do that now; don’t scream!”

I screamed more in stark terror of the pain to come than at any pain he’d actually caused me yet. I knew now what was the matter with him. He was a pain worshiper. Something out of the nether world of twisted impulses. Cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Cruelty that was not punishment but love.

He was becoming enraged. “I told you not to scream, di’n’t I? When anyone tries to stop me like that I can’t stop at all. Now I can’t stop, myself! Now you’re gonna get it!”

I’d never seen anyone hit so hard before. He went into the table, took that with him until it had overturned, and then toppled backward over it, legs bucking briefly in air, to lie there floundering on his back and with it partly over him.

McKee didn’t go after him, continue the assault, as ordinary rage would have dictated; he held back, froze there where he’d first struck him. The hardness of cement. The implacable steamroller pulsing in leashed motion.

He said to me in a breath-choked voice, “Get out of the room here; hurry up. I’m going to shoot him as soon as I come back with my gun, and I don’t want you to see it.”

Then he turned to accomplish it in cold blood, as if he’d said: “I’m going out to get a handkerchief.”

The palpitating huddled mass in the corner said, “She was going through your safe — I caught her —” Then ran out of further breath.

The other one had come in belatedly.

He said to him with a complete lack of emotion that was almost insane: “Get me my gun, Skeeter. You know where it is.”

“You can shoot me, but it’s true, McKee; she was going through your safe.” Blood peered at the corner of his lip.

“Did he see anything like that?” He was waiting for me to say no. That was all I had to do, and it wouldn’t have gone any farther.

Something locked in me. I knew he’d kill that man within the next thirty seconds if I said no. That was all I had to say. I couldn’t, couldn’t bring myself to. One’s better instincts can show up at the damnedest times, to one’s undoing.

He repeated it, phrased even more prejudicially. “He didn’t see anything like that, did he?”

Then suddenly it was no longer necessary to say anything. The wind had subtly changed direction. I’d lost my chance.

“Look, boss,” Skeeter purred almost inaudibly. His hand was on the safe front; he’d tilted it out from the frame, showing it to be unlocked.

Then after a while he closed it again.

“He doesn’t know the combination,” McKee murmured. “Neither of them do.” He didn’t say it to me. You couldn’t tell whom he was saying it to. To himself, maybe, in a sort of sad confirmation.

He didn’t say anything more than that; he let it go at that. But I could sense a slow change taking place in him; he was drifting away from me; I was losing him, like someone standing on a shore loses a boat carried out on the tide, and I couldn’t do anything to stop him.

“I’ll take you back to your room,” he said to me. His voice was still intimate, considerate; there was still that special quality left in it he’d used for me alone.

I slipped my arm through his and I turned and walked out beside him. I saw his lower lip trembling a little and I was afraid to look any more after that.

Halfway there I suddenly stopped, planted both hands against him in appeal. “McKee, you’ve got to believe me. I didn’t see anything I shouldn’t have.”

“Not even about the Sabbatino affair?” he said dryly.

“No.”

“Or the stuff about Conway?”

“No. No. Nothing but some bonds belonging to a Michael J. Dillon, and I hardly gave them a second —”

He’d trapped me. And I knew that was the name he’d wanted; he’d only made the others up as he went along.

“Even the middle initial,” he mused wryly. “You know I could be sent up for that, don’t you, if it ever came out? You know that Michael J. Dillon, ‘Crooked Judge Dillon,’ the ‘Corkscrew Judge,’ as they called him, disappeared eleven years ago, and I could be accused of something even worse just as well as not?”

I’d heard of him. Everyone in the country had. The “Michael J.” had thrown me off.

He’d spoken quite gently, in a tone of indulgent remonstrance, but somehow I knew, in unshakable premonition, I’d signed my own death warrant.

“I’d never tell anyone on you.”

“I know you wouldn’t.” He took my hands, which had been fastened on him all this while, and stripped them off like empty gloves. He wasn’t obvious about it; there was simply an inattentiveness there, as if to say, “What are these things doing on me?”

He held the door open for me, to show me as a silent order where to go in.

“Goodnight, Angel,” he said caustically. “Angel in Black.”

I was badly frightened as he closed the door on me. I crouched there listening. I couldn’t hear anything. I hadn’t expected to. They must have been talking it over quietly among themselves, if they were talking at all. Or maybe they weren’t; maybe he was just doing the talking within himself and they were waiting silently to be told what the outcome was to be.

Then suddenly I heard a morsel of consolation from one of them. He had perhaps come into a position, just then, from which I could hear that and no more, opposite the room opening or something.

“Don’t take it that way, boss.”

From him no answer.

I could feel the blood leaving my face there in the blue dark. The verdict must have gone against me or he would not be mourning. I wanted to rush out then and there, throw myself at him in one desperate final appeal, before judgment had been inalterably passed. I knew it was too late for that. It wouldn’t do any good. The idol had toppled; it couldn’t be put back on its pedestal again. A remark Ladd had once made came back to me. “Love is like an eggshell; it can never be put together again.”

A further long, breathless wait. Then suddenly another bowdlerized remark reached me. “The place on Long Island.” It was as though somebody were making a suggestion to him.

The suggestion must have been taken up. There were a number of blurred, diverging treads off at a distance, as though they were in the act of dispersal. From nearer at hand, but in a guarded undertone, I heard a voice ask: “Are you coming with us?” Again I failed to detect the answer; perhaps he had just shaken his head.

Finally there was the snap of a light switch somewhere immediately adjacent to the room I was in, and then the elliptic remark: “ — just get my things on a minute.”

An alarm bell was ringing in me wildly, hurting my chest with its brazen clamor. “I’ve got to get out of here!” the voice of inner panic shrieked above it. “Oh, how am I going to get out of here?”

The bell stilled suddenly; its clapper hung breathless. He had just knuckled the door.

I spread-eagled myself against the door in a violent convulsive movement, arms out at their widest. “Don’t come in; I’m — I haven’t got much on!”

“I won’t come in. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute.”

I opened it up a crack, kept back behind it, as if afraid to look at him.

“I’m sending you home with the boys.”

“Home,” I thought; “home into the ground.”

“I thought you said I could —”

“I know, but I have to leave; I just got word, and you wouldn’t want to stay here alone. I think it’s better if you go back now, don’t you?”

What could I say? He could have come in and dragged me out bodily if I tried to resist. “Just — just give me a few minutes. I’m all undressed. I’ll have to —”

He flung them in at me with a sort of contempt. The night was so long; death was so sure, I suppose. “Don’t take too long, baby. The boys are waiting, and I need them for something else — afterward.”

What a horrid word that was, “afterward”; it seemed to give off vibrations, like a knell, long after he’d turned and gone away again.

I ran across the room to the triple casement. Frustration eddied through me like a form of nausea as I stopped short by them. We were so high up that perspective became a crazy quilt, lost all coherence. That string of beaded lights trailing across the dark was not Manhattan any more but the Long Island shore across the East River. The East River Drive, on the near side of the channel, seemed closer at hand than the concealed crevice hidden somewhere deep underfoot that was Central Park West. To scream out was to launch my voice futilely across the night at Astoria, not toward the base of this monstrous monolith.

I tore myself away. There was a bath to my room, and I went in there. Then there was another door that led out on the other side of it again. It had been locked on my side when I was still a goddess. I unlocked it now, listened, drew in daring through raptly parted lips, cautioned it open, and looked out.

The room beyond was dark and unoccupied. For a moment hope shot up again. There was only one further door other than my mode of entrance. Only one way out of it. It must be through there or not at all. But as I reached it and softly pared it away, knob crushed to silence, a crevice of light ignited along it, like a noiseless but livid fuse suddenly set off.

Hope went down again with the sickening suction of a whirlpool draining through me. A figure in shorts and undershirt was revealed, foot to chair, attaching a garter to his leg. Even before I could withdraw the vignette had altered, he was moving so fast. The leg went down, and there was the flurry of an outspread shirt, sleeves without hands sticking up in air like an X-shaped scarecrow. A muffled voice said to someone, presumably in a room beyond, “Bring a little chloroform along, in case we have trouble with her in the car.”

I smoothed the door closed again, stealthily as I had dislodged it. Its silent docility of hinge and latch had been my only salvation.

“Like a rat in a trap,” kept beating through my brain; “like a rat in a trap.”

There was a telephone in the room I was in. As I widened the bath door to re-enter, light fanned out, caught it for me, pinned it against the wall like a beetle, licorice-black, glistening black.

How could I hope to use it undetected, with just a flimsy door between me and him? The first word out of my mouth would resound in the magnifying silence in here.

I crushed myself against the wall, as if trying to smother it with my entire body. Such a loud clatter the release of the hook gave. Sh-h! The police? I didn’t know; I wasn’t sure of whom I was calling until I already held it cupped to my lips, like a sort of chalice of salvation. I only knew I needed help, wanted it fast, in the worst way.

I thought she’d never get on, answer the signal, and I daren’t touch that hook again.

And then, when she had, suddenly it seemed to come by itself; it was my heart speaking out in its fright to the only one it remembered.

TEN

butterfield 9-8019 again (and hurry, operator, hurry!)

ASLEEPY VOICE got on, one of the servants.

He couldn’t hear me, I was so strangled with caution. Oh, the fool, he was killing me! I had to do it all over again.

“Quick — Ladd! Only Ladd, not you! Only Ladd will do! Don’t stand there —”

“I know, miss, but it’s after three o’clock. If you’ll only give me an idea of who you are I’ll see whether —”

“Tell him Alberta. This is an emergency. Tell him to come quickly to the phone if he loves me. If he ever loved me.”

I didn’t know what I was saying any more. Already some of my life had gone by, and nobody could bring it back.

If he loved me; if he’d ever loved me. Oh, he must have, all right, to come so fast. I could hear the floundering rush of unshod feet and something go over, like a chair that had been in the way. I could hear the fright in his voice, needling sleep to pieces.

“What is it? Where are you? What’s happened?”

And like the squeaking of a trapped little mouse in her hole, “Sh! Listen carefully. I have only a minute. I’m in an apartment on Central Park West. They’re going to do something to me. Some men. They’re taking me out of here in just a minute. Ladd, find some way of helping me. I have only you to turn to —”

“The police. I’ll get them there right away. I’ll come over with them my —”

“That’ll be too late. They won’t get here in time. I won’t be here any more. They’ll deny I ever was. No one’ll ever find out where —”

It’s hard to think fast when your heart has just received an uppercut. Fast and clear. He did it. He had to. “Where are they taking you, got any idea at all?”

“I heard one of them mention Long Island, but I can’t be sure.”

“That means the Queensborough Bridge, nine chances out of ten. Where is the place you’re in right now, Park West and where?”

“In the upper Sixties.”

“They’ll take you through the crosstown cut in the park at Sixty-Seventh, then. That’s quicker than going down to Fifty-Ninth and over, no lights. Maybe I can cut in on them —”

“Oh, Ladd, don’t miss me, whatever you do. They may hold me out there for days, or I may never get there. Ladd, his car — the license plate is 072-027. Try and remember that.”

I heaved, elongated as if I were trying to climb up the bare wall.

“Ladd, he’s knocking at the door, inside in the other room. They’re ready for me —”

Even having him just on the phone, all the way across the city from me, was better than nothing at all.

“Ladd, Ladd, are you still there? Oh, don’t leave me —”

He was already gone. He hadn’t waited to hang up.

I got back to the bath outlet on the far side just as McKee reentered the room from the other door. His face was dangerous for a minute, as if threatening something imminent, here and now, because of the delay. Then it smoothed somewhat. “Are you ready?”

I moved across the threshold ahead of him. “Why are you sending me home in disgrace like this?”

He didn’t seem to hear me.

I tried once more, between my room and the one where the two men were waiting for us. “McKee, you wouldn’t let them do anything to me, would you?”

This time he gave me the oddest smile. I could translate its message so clearly: “There was a soft spot there, in that place, until a little while ago. You’re just too late; it’s sealed up now. But how well you remember its location, don’t you?”

We came into the room and he said to them, “She’s a little frightened, boys; don’t drive too fast.”

If I hadn’t known already, it was a dead giveaway the way the two of them flanked me. They didn’t exactly stand one on each side of me like sentries, but somehow they were there, closer than they’d ever walked beside me yet.

Suddenly his voice caught up with us, pulled us back like a lariat. “Wait a minute. I want to say good night to her. Wait outside there.”

I went calmly back toward him; they went on. It was the strangest thing I’d ever witnessed. And though I was a participant, I still could witness it, for I wasn’t involved. How could I have been?

His arms went around me; he strained me to him. I turned my head aside, and he missed my mouth.

“Good night,” he said huskily, “good night.”

I’d been yellow until now, all the way through, from the moment he’d first trapped me at the safe, whining and whimpering. Now I could feel a cold, low-burning flame of contempt licking through me, fusing a little courage into me, stiffening my back against him. I was glad. I’d have that much to look back on afterward, at least, no matter what happened after I left here.

I smiled as his arms fell away, releasing me. “Who gets the ring now?”

“Oh — wait, take it with you. I want you to have it on you.”

He got it out and put it on my finger.

I let him.

I turned and went back toward where they were waiting, just past the doorway. It had been a little loose from the beginning. I gave my fingers a disdainful downward fling, as though ridding them of some clot of mud or dirt that had adhered. It flew off downward, like a raindrop, and lay there winking in the plushy carpet nap.

Our eyes met for the last time in this life, his and mine.

I stepped on it, ground it under my foot with supreme contempt, as I moved on.

“Come on, gentlemen,” I said, “take the lady home.”

Skeeter had me in the back beside him, Kittens at the wheel. We skimmed through the Sixty-Seventh Street transverse, the park a rippling black desolation on either side of us. They were going fast even for that unobstructed and unfrequented thoroughfare at three-thirty in the morning; they wanted to get me over the bridge quickly, I guess.

I was holding the cigarette they’d given me — as executioners are wont to do — fast in my mouth without benefit of hands. It shed sparks backward on the buffeting wind of our progress.

We hadn’t spoken, any of us. What was there to say?

As we neared the Fifth Avenue exit on a long, slow curve that hid the roadway ahead from us, a stalled cab came into sight, hugging the westbound lane, vis-à-vis to us, motionless there where it had no right to be. This was just clear of the last overpass; that is, before we reached it. These overpasses, carrying lengthwise park-roadways overhead, form tunnels for all practical purposes, wherever they occur. Every New Yorker is familiar with them.

The cab’s headlights, whether accidentally or intentionally, flared up as we came within range of them, drenched us in a momentary spray of light, like a mist of calcium. While it splashed over us it must have been vivid enough to catch our license number on the wing, if that was the purpose, though in another instant we had torn through it and plunged into the tunnel. Three long, spaced blasts of the cab horn, I noticed, chased us into the tunnel and beat us through to the other end, as sound does even the fastest-winging car.

There was no time to analyze all this; before one could it was already all a terminated fact. I had thought, for a moment, that it might be he in the cab, but there was no one to be seen in the rear of it, only the driver up forward.

The tunnel ended and we came out into the light, the last lap of the defile continuing to unwind semicircularly before us. Suddenly the black shape of a lightless car impinged itself into mid-thoroughfare dead ahead of us, gliding out in low, slantwise to the right of way, narrowing it to a bottleneck that every moment grew slimmer.

I heard Skeeter scream something: “Look out, he’s cutting us off down there!” Kittens slewed us over, trying to get through between the curbing and the impediment while there was still time, before the space had closed entirely.

The offender immediately and effortlessly ebbed back again, as though it had been but teetering on open brakes, but it was too late to do us any good; all it could ensure now was to avoid a catastrophic fender-to-side collision between the two machines. We were already off course. The two inside wheels had struck up onto the pedestrian lane with a sickening pitch. A moment later there was a series of dragging concussions as we skimmed the retaining wall.

He stopped us short of overturning by a miracle of adroit brake graduation, and we lurched motionless, now on the far side of the erratic jaywalking car that had caused all the trouble.

The three of us sat there dazed for a moment from the cushioned buffeting we had received. Kittens was leaning his face down upon the wheel, cushioned by both arms, his senses evidently doubly dislocated by this shaking up coming so soon after McKee’s frightful blow.

“Son of a — ! Did you see what he tried to do?” Skeeter muttered numbly.

Suddenly the door on my side, which was the only one of the two still usable, wrenched open, and Ladd was standing out there beside it afoot. I recognized him even in the dark.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I made an abortive movement to lurch out through the opening and join him, then swayed back into place again, like some thing dangling on a loose string.

“I can’t, Ladd; he’s holding a gun against me!” I croaked hoarsely.

“Stay where you are, you out there; don’t come any nearer!” Skeeter warned him over my shoulder.

The cigarette was in my hand. I don’t know how I came to do it; I don’t think I would have found the nerve if I’d thought about it consciously. I didn’t; I just acted on instinct alone. His hand was against my side, just over the hip. I simply swept my outside hand around, under the arm on that side, and burrowed the live cigarette deep into the veined back of his hand.

He barked like a seal and snatched it back, and the gun fell loose onto the seat. I sprang down and was already on the ground beside Ladd. I think my abrupt movement dislodged it even farther, and it fell from there down to the floor, but there wasn’t time to see exactly what happened.

Ladd closed in and sent his fist crashing through into the open side of the car. It caught Skeeter off balance, bending down to retrieve the gun, his face thrust forward to meet the blow almost gratuitously.

I saw the face there one moment, then the fist, then just empty space under the car ceiling. The shank of Kittens’ leg was coming out through the front-door opening, without the rest of him showing yet. I turned and ran back along the walled-in chute, back along the way we’d just come. “Up this way, quick! I’ve got a taxi waiting at the other end of the tunnel,” I’d dimly heard him say.

“Look out, Ladd, they’re going to shoot before we can get in there!”

“Keep in front of me,” he said tersely. He could have outdistanced me; he didn’t, of course — hung back, propelling me forward with an arm about my waist. We were like that statuette group of shepherd and shepherdess fleeing before the storm. Angel in a high wind.

A moment later the shot came. There was something unreal about it even after I’d heard it. A shot right in the middle of a New York traffic bypass. It wasn’t very loud. I’d thought they were louder than that.

The first car, his, provided us with a measure of shelter, once we’d rounded it and streaked for the tunnel entrance up ahead. But I could hear their feet beating up fast on the other side of it.

“They’re coming after us. We’ll never get in —”

A truck had slowed on the eastbound lane, blocked in turn by the snarl we had wrought between the lot of us. I screamed out toward it at random as we raced by: “Stop those men; they’re trying to hold us up!”

A deep masculine voice blared accommodatingly from the towering driver’s seat: “Police! Holdup! Poli-i-ice!” A moment later I heard what sounded like an empty pop bottle on the wing strike something with a bell-like bounce and shatter on the ground. There was the sound of a long, dragging fall. One pair of footfalls kept pounding relentlessly on after us.

We were nearly at the tunnel mouth now. “There he is; he backed up like I told him!” Ladd gasped. A red taillight glowed out in welcome to us. He flung me inside just as the second shot came, and I landed sprawled on hands and knees. There was a dull, whacking sound from some part of the cab structure, as though somebody had hit it with a stick. He clung to the outside of the door handle as it swept off with us into the gloom, then finally floundered in after me. “Get us out of here!” I heard him grunt to the driver. “Just keep going and never mind looking around!”

A police whistle was starting to blow, faint and querulous, somewhere out on Fifth Avenue, now that it was all over.

I crawled up onto the seat by means of my hands. Then I just lolled against him while he panted down into my hair from overhead.

I don’t think we said anything as far west as Amsterdam Avenue, two blocks beyond the park.

Then I said, “Did that really happen to us? I’ll never doubt anything like that I read in the papers again —”

He said, “Where do you want me to take you? Back to my place?”

I said, “No, they’ll find your car and they’re liable to come after me there. Take me back to my old place; I’ll be all right there. They don’t know about it. That is, if it’s still available.”

“It’s still there waiting for you,” he said. “I made sure that it would be. I wouldn’t let them dismantle it. I’ve been going around there nearly every day, hoping that sooner or later you’d —”

“And now I am,” I sighed with inexpressible content.

“For good,” he added, low.

It would be light in a little while. New York was a night older. I couldn’t hate the town. I forgave it. It was easy to, with him there with me. Tender there with me.

“Over it now? Better?”

“Over it now. Better,” I answered with heavy-lidded eyes.

“How’d you happen to get mixed in with such a bunch in the first place?”

“I was trying to find evidence that might help Kirk.”

“Kirk? Who’s Kirk?”

“My husband.” I wasn’t watching what I was saying.

Then I thought, “Oh, he may as well know now as any other time; he’s got to sooner or later.” I was too tired.

“I’m Kirk Murray’s wife. He’s under sentence, you know, and I’ve been trying to help him; that’s all it is. I found his name — McKee’s — I found all your names in a little book of hers, and I’ve been going down the list —”

I saw I’d hurt him, so I stopped. “Then it was sort of a police assignment — on your own?”

“Yes, but — Don’t look at me that way; don’t feel that way about it,” I said contritely.

“Then that was all you wanted with me too. I was just a name on your list. I was just a suspect and you were just an informer. Then I didn’t really meet you, know you, live you —”

We both fell silent. What could I say to that? We both stopped talking, and I thought perhaps it was better so. I saw I’d hurt him very badly, more irreparably than I knew.

He’d been holding a small glass in his hand for some time before. That was the first sign of anything, that glass. His face hadn’t changed; his body hadn’t moved yet. There was a crunching sound, like someone crushing nuts with his teeth. A little white stuff like coarse sugar trickled out of the hollowed curve of the hand he’d been holding it in. Then the brown liquor dripped out. It slowed, attenuated, changed slowly to red. Became drops instead of a continuous line.

I said, “Oh, you’ve —”

He was looking at it now himself, without seeming to understand what it was. Then he looked up at me, as if to ask me what it was. His eyes looked funny; they weren’t right.

First a trembling started. Then retching. That went down deeper than the throat. Deeper than the chest. The stomach. Down through the very legs. Until — it was all of him.

He bolted to his feet, as if his first impulse was to get out of here. Then he checked himself. He leaned against something, as if he couldn’t make it. Then he straightened again. Leaned again and straightened again.

I was on my own feet now. “What is it? What’s happening to you?”

He kept doubling and straightening again; it was hideous.

“You brought this on,” he heaved. “You should have loved me. Should have loved me, as I did — you. The shock. You brought this on. You brought it on —”

I tried to help him. “Lean on me. Let me get you over here to —”

“And I said she was low! Even she left me some guard against herself at least; you crawled into my blood, into my brain. Now I can’t get you out and I can’t have you either. Well, I can get you out, if I have to. There’s one sure way that never fails.”

Before I realized what was happening he was trying to get at my throat. But something was the matter with his reflexes; they were faulty. Fluctuations, like a sort of alternating current passing through him, would interrupt the clutch of his arms each time; yet they kept coming back, coming back, as I retreated before him, at first only fighting him off passively, then, as necessity slowly mounted in me, struggling more and more strenuously against him.

“Don’t — Not you, Ladd! No, not you! Ladd, you’re ill; you don’t know what you’re doing —”

Foam was suddenly flecking his lips.

“I’m ill,” he said in a terrible, hacking voice, “but I know what I’m doing. I’m going to” — and then he lunged for my throat again — “if I die a minute later myself.”

He had me pressed back against some sharp outline — I think it was that cabinet Flood had brought into the place — and the whole thing rocked in company with our combined weights.

I tried to reason with him, even at this pass. I don’t know; terror wasn’t absolute, as it had been with Mordaunt or even McKee. It could never be with him. “Don’t — haven’t I been through enough for one night?” The thing gave behind me, shunted aside, and we were wedged in there, in a little space. A little space, but big enough for dying in.

I kept trying to hold his swollen eyes with mine. “You can’t. Look at me well. You loved me, didn’t you? You can’t do it!”

“I’ve done it before. I can do it this time too. I’m going to kill you as I killed her.”

“You didn’t. Don’t you remember? You went there and she was already — It wasn’t you. No, Ladd. You said it wasn’t —”

“I did. It was. I never told anyone, not even you. I was afraid it would stand between us. Now know it and be damned to you. You’ve broken me all open.”

I went down on one knee. “I can’t breathe, Ladd. Can’t — breathe —”

The room was darkening intermittently, as though fleeting banks of clouds were passing over it. Then it would clear again in between.

“Air — give me air, Ladd. One breath more — only one —”

He held the words down in me; he wouldn’t let anything through.

He was swinging my body from side to side now, like a rag doll. I could feel my legs sweeping bonelessly far over one way, then far back the other way again.

Suddenly he let me go, and I was all limp, but alone, without him. A dim pinpoint of light flickered, like a spark in straw, threatened to go out. Then the straw caught, kindled into renewed brightness. Life was on again.

I kept coughing strangledly and pulling at my own throat, and blurred figures moved before my eyes until they were able to focus properly again.

He was at the open window, on the outside of the open window, one hand grasping the frame, wavering there, so ill, so stricken, so alone, against the night. My heart went out to him, the heart he had tried to founder.

The door had sprung open, and there were figures deployed about the inside of it in bated attitudes, frozen still, where each had fallen to a halt at instant of entry. One of them was Flood, though I couldn’t think who he was for a moment.

I only knew I had to speak, had to speak quickly; they must hear me in time. I clawed at my own throat to free it.

“Don’t shoot,” I pleaded raspingly. “Don’t shoot that man!”

I heard their breaths all go Ih-f-f! together in sharp ascent. I turned slowly, and by the time my look had reached it my eyes only told me what I knew already. The window was empty.

Later they had me sitting there huddled, lonely in a chair, one side of my face pressed to the back of it, my eyes staring sightlessly down toward the nothingness on the floor. Oh, I heard all the things they did and said; sometimes they even said them to me, but I seldom answered.

“It’s a good thing we got over here when we did.” That was Flood, I guess; I didn’t move my eyes to see. “That owner-less car left standing there earlier tonight, when those shots at the Sixty-Seventh Street transverse were investigated, was traced to him, and I got word of it. We’ve been keeping him under fairly constant surveillance, anyway, ever since that first transcript was taken out of the thing here; there was enough on it to warrant that, if nothing else. He’s been seen coming around here pretty steadily, even after you’d left, and when we were unable to locate either of you at his own address, for questioning about that McKee business, we thought of this place.”

He gave up, turned away again. I could sense that he was shaking his head to them to express futility.

At one point I heard somebody say to him: “What was that? He acted like he had the bends just before he went over.”

“Epilepsy, I think,” he answered in an undertone. “That’s what it looked like to me, anyway.”

I remembered what he’d once told me: “I got ill there one night up in her place. She got frightened and wanted to send for a doctor —” And his sister, trying to say something to me: “He can’t tell you this; I’ll have to —”

It didn’t matter; I would never remember this last scene; the heart is kind that way. I’d only remember a cheerful face across from mine at the Blues-Chaser a hundred years ago, a minute ago, forever.

I got up abruptly and drifted toward the window. Flood didn’t understand. “Don’t look down there,” he tried to warn me.

“I wasn’t going to. I was going to look up —” I didn’t finish it. That’s where they go in your memories of them; up, not down.

Suddenly, behind me, they brought him back again for just a moment or two. Unwittingly, without intent at cruelty; somebody’s idly straying hand must have done it.

“I’ve done it before. I can do it this time too. I’m going to kill you as I killed her.”

“No, Ladd, it wasn’t you. You said it wasn’t —”

“It was. Now know it and be damned to you! ”

“It’s on there!” I heard Flood exclaim.

For only a moment or two, but I couldn’t bear it. I arched my back away from the sound as though a knife had been put into me, then deflated again.

Flood was standing by me, shaking me so I would listen. “You’ve done it! You’ve saved your husband. It got on there without your knowing it. It’s on there, all you need. Do you hear what I’m saying? Do you understand? You’ve done what you wanted. He’ll be back again. Inbound through Grand Central one of these days —”

I said after him, like a parrot, so he’d stop shaking me: “I’ve done what I wanted. He’ll be back again.”

I turned to him in sudden fearsome supplication, quickened now in turn, but not by the same thing he was. “Please go. All of you. Please! Hurry. I can’t hold out much longer. Something’s going to happen to me, something I don’t want you to see.”

He gave a quick order or two. “All right, that’s all for now. Carry the whole thing out with you, the way it is. She’s been through a lot; she’s all in.” He cleared them out and went after them.

I got the door closed, but they didn’t go away quickly enough on the other side of it. Two of them were slower than the others.

The tears weren’t just wet. They were heavy. They pulled me draggingly downward against the door, face pressed inward to it, while they stormed and raged from me.

I could hear their voices in surreptitious inquiry of one another out there as the sound reached them.

“What’s she feelin’ bad now for? It came out all right. She got what she wanted, didn’t she?”

“I dunno. Unless maybe — say, d’you suppose? — she musta loved him.”

“She must have,” kept echoing through the freshets of my woe; yes, oh yes, she must have. She must have, all right!

ELEVEN

closing scene

THIS MORNING HE was leaving me again.

He always leaves me. I don’t know where he goes, but each time he goes I’m afraid I’ll never have him back again. Then when he does come back it’s only to leave me once more.

He was leaving me like he always does. Slowly, lingeringly, in that most poignant, hurtful way of all. Each time he goes like that I hear the barman’s voice again that night of our first meeting at the Blues-Chaser: “Do it quick is the best way, Mr Mason.”

Everything that was ever said, that was ever done, that had to do with us at all, like that, keeps coming back again, over and over all the time. They are so few; they must be made to last.

This morning he was leaving me again, drawing away slowly, moving softly backward out of the room, thinking perhaps I was asleep and trying not to disturb me. He was near the door now, that recurrent door that I could never get by, no matter how I ached and strained, that I could never pass through myself. His face was turned to look back at me. Now he was drawing the door slowly closed after himself. Now he would be gone again.

I started upright, arms stretched arrestingly out toward him, to show him I wasn’t asleep; he mustn’t go like this without at least — “Ladd, wait!” I called out to him. “Don’t go! Come back a minute!” The door was all but closed now. I could still see just the outline of his face, slowly dimming behind it. My arms strained out in helpless appeal, while I kept calling after him, more loudly, more heartbrokenly with every breath, “Don’t leave me behind! Don’t leave me behind!”

And then the miracle did happen; my plea was heard this one time. The cry was answered. His face grew clearer again, came back toward me. He hovered over me, sat anxiously down beside me, tried to quiet my wildly reaching hands by nursing them with his, at last drew me to him and kissed me soothingly on the brow.

My eyes flew open and I was in my husband’s arms.

I hid my face against him. I felt him touch his finger to the outward corner of my eye and gently stroke it off, and the touch of it was wet.

“Why are there so often tears in your eyes, like this, when you wake up?” he asked softly. “Who was that you were calling? Who is it hurts you so?”

“Somebody I knew in a dream, I guess.”

“I know you’ve been through a lot. There’s nothing more now.”

“No,” I agreed sadly, “there’s nothing more now.”

“Angel Face, don’t ever leave me.”

“No. And you won’t leave me either, will you? I don’t want to be all alone.”

“You’re so loyal; you’re so mine.”

He’s leaning toward me now; his face is close to mine. He’s cost me dear, but that’s the price, and I won’t quibble.

“Angel Face,” he murmurs low.

He always calls me that; that is his name for me. That is a special thing, from him to me, when we are by ourselves.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

PART ONE

bliss

Blue moon, you saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.

Blue moon, you knew just what i was there for. . . .

—Rodgers and Hart

ONE

the woman

JULIE, MY JULIE." It followed the woman down the four flights of the stairwell. It was the softest whisper, the strongest claim, that human lips can utter. It did not make her falter, lose a step. Her face was white when she came out into the daylight, that was all.

The girl waiting by the valise at the street entrance turned and looked at her almost incredulously as she joined her, as though wondering where she had found the fortitude to go through with it. The woman seemed to read her thoughts; she answered the unspoken question. "It was just as hard for me to say goodbye as for them, only I was used to it, they weren't. I had so many long nights in which to steel myself. They only went through it once; I've had to go through it a thousand times." And without any change of tone, she went on, "I'd better take a taxi. There's one down there."

The girl looked at her questioningly as it drew up.

"Yes, you can see me off if you want. To the Grand Central Station, driver."

She didn't look back at the house, at the street they were leaving. She didn't look out at the many other well-remembered streets that followed, that in their aggregate stood for her city, the place where she had always lived.

They had to wait a moment at the ticket window; there was somebody else before them. The girl stood helplessly by at her elbow. "Where are you going?"

"I don't even know, even at this very moment. I haven't thought about it until now." She opened her handbag, separated the small roll of currency it contained into two unequal parts; retained the smaller in her hand. She moved up before the window, thrust it in.

"How far will this take me, at day-coach rates?"

"Chicago—with ninety cents change."

"Then give me a one-way ticket." She turned to the girl beside her. "Now you can go back and tell them that much, at least."

"I won't if you don't want me to, Julie."

"It doesn't matter. What difference does the name of a place make when you're gone beyond recall?"

They sat for a while in the waiting room. Then presently they went below to the lower track level, stood for a moment by the coach doorway.

"We'll kiss, as former childhood friends should." Their lips met briefly. "There."

"Julie, what can I say to you?"

"Just 'goodbye.' What else is there to say to anyone ever—in this life?"

"Julie, I only hope I see you someday soon."

"You never will again."

The station platform fell behind. The train swept through the long tunnel. Then it emerged into daylight again, to ride an elevated trestle flush with the upper stories of tenements, while the crosswise streets ticked by like picket openings in a fence.

It started to slow again, almost before it had got fully under way. "Twanny-fith Street," droned a conductor into the car. The woman who had gone away forever seized her valise, stood up and walked down the aisle as though this were the end of the trip instead of the beginning.

She was standing in the vestibule, in readiness, when it drew up. She got off, walked along the platform to the exit, down the stairs to street level. She bought a paper at the waiting-room newsstand, sat down on one of the benches, opened the paper toward the back, to the classified ads. She furled it to a convenient width, traced a finger down the column under the heading Furnished Rooms.

The finger stopped almost at random, without much regard for the details offered by what it rested on. She dug her nail into the spongy paper, marking it. She tucked the newspaper under one arm, picked up her valise once more, walked outside to a taxi. "Take me to this address, here," she said, and showed him the paper.

The landlady at the furnished rooming house stood back, waiting for her verdict, by the open room door.

The woman turned around. "Yes, this will do very nicely. I'll give you the amount for the first two weeks now."

The landlady counted it, began to scribble a receipt. "What name, please?" she asked, looking up.

The woman's eyes flicked past her own valise with the "J.B." once initialed in gilt still dimly visible midway between the two latches. "Josephine Bailey."

"Here's your receipt, Miss Bailey. Now I hope you're comfortable. The bathroom's just two doors down the hall on your—"

"Thank you, thank you, I'll find out." She closed the door, locked it on the inside. She took off her hat and coat, opened her valise, so recently packed for a trip of fifty blocks—or a lifetime.

There was a small rust-flaked tin medicine cabinet tacked up above the washbowl. She went over to it and opened it, rising on her toes as though in search of something. On the topmost shelf, as she had half hoped, there was a rusted razor blade, left behind by some long-forgotten masculine roomer.

She went back to the valise with it, cut a little oblong around the initials on the lid, peeled off the top layer of the papier-mâché thus removing them bodily. Then she prodded through the contents of the receptacle, gashing at the stitching of an undergarment, a night robe, a blouse; removing those same two letters that had once stood for her wherever they were to be found.

Her predecessor obliterated, she threw the razor blade into the wastebasket, fastidiously wiped the tips of her fingers.

She found the picture of a man in the flap under the lid of the valise. She took it out and held it before her eyes, gazing at it for a long time. Just a young man, nothing wonderful about him: Not so strikingly handsome; just eyes and mouth and nose as anyone has. She looked at it a long time.

Then she found a folder of matches in her handbag and took the picture over to the washbasin. She touched a lighted match to one corner of it and held it until there was nothing to hold anymore.

"Goodbye," she breathed low.

She ran a spurt of water down through the basin and went back to the valise. All that was left now, in the flap under the lid, was a scrap of paper with a penciled name on it. It had taken a long time to get it. The woman looked further, took out four similar scraps.

She brought them all out. She didn't burn them right away. She played around with them first, as if in idle disinterest. She put them all down on the dresser top, blank sides up. Then she milled them around under her rotating fingertips. Then she picked one up, glanced briefly at the underside of it. Then she gathered them all together once more, burned all five of them alike over the washbowl.

Then she moved over toward the window, stood there looking out, a hand poised at each extremity of the slablike sill, gripping it. She seemed to lean toward the city visible outside, like something imminent, about to happen to it.

TWO

bliss

THE CAB DREW UP short at the entrance of Bliss's apartment house and threw him forward a little on the seat. The liquor in his stomach sloshed around with the jolt. Not because there was so much in him but because it was so recently absorbed.

He got out, and the top of the door frame knocked his hat askew. He straightened it, fumbled for change, dropped a dime to the sidewalk. He wasn't helplessly drunk; he never got that way. He knew everything that was said to him and everything he was saying, and he felt just right. Not too little, not too much. And then there was always the thought of Marge—it looked like he was getting someplace there. You didn't want to drown out a thought like that in liquor.

Charlie, on night door duty, came out behind him while he was paying the driver. Charlie was just a little behind time with his reception ritual, because he'd stayed behind on his bench in the foyer to finish the last paragraph of a sports writeup in a tabloid before coming out. But it was two-thirty in the morning, after all, and no one's perfect.

Bliss turned and said, "Lo, Charlie."

Charlie answered, "Morning, Mr. Bliss." He held the entrance door open for him, and Bliss went inside. Charlie followed, his duties more or less satisfactorily performed. He yawned, and then Bliss caught it from him, without having seen him do it, and yawned, too—a fact that would have interested a metaphysician.

There was a mirror panel on one side of the lobby, and Bliss stepped up, took one of his usual going-in looks at himself. There were two kinds. The "boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what's-up-tonight" look. That was the going-out look. Then there was the "God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed" look. That was the coming-back look.

Bliss saw a man of twenty-seven with close-cropped sandy hair, looking back at him. So close-cropped it looked silvery at the sides. Brown eyes, spare figure, good height without being too tall about it. A man who knew all about him—Bliss. Not handsome, but then who wanted to be handsome? Even Marge Elliott didn't care if he was handsome or not. "As long," as she had put it, "as you're just Ken."

He sighed, snapped his thumbnail at the bedraggled white flower that still clung to his lapel button-hole, and it flew to pieces.

Bliss took out a crumpled package of cigarettes, helped himself to one, scanned the neat hole in the upper right-hand corner. He saw that there was one left, offered it to Charlie. "Greater love hath no man," he remarked.

Charlie took it, perhaps figuring there wasn't likely to be anyone else coming in after this.

Charlie was big and roundish at the middle. He wasn't so good at polishing all the way down toward the bottom of the brass stanchions that supported the door canopy, but the middle and upper parts always shone like jewels, and he could handle twice his weight in disorderly drunks. He'd been night doorman in the building ever since Bliss had first moved into it. Bliss liked him. Charlie liked Bliss, too. Bliss gave him two bucks on Christmas and spread another two throughout the year in four-bit pieces. But that wasn't the reason; Charlie just liked him.

Bliss lit the two of them up. Then he turned and started up the two shallow steps to the self-service elevator. Charlie said, "Oh, I nearly forgot, Mr. Bliss. There was a young lady around to see you tonight."

"Yeah? What name'd she leave?" Bliss answered indifferently. It hadn't been Marge, so it really didn't matter much—anymore. He stopped and turned his face only a quarter of the way toward the answer.

"None," said Charlie. "I couldn't get her to leave any. I asked her two or three times, but—" he shrugged "—she didn't seem to want to."

"All right," said Bliss. And it was all right.

"She seemed to want to go upstairs and wait for you in the apartment," Charlie added.

"Oh, no, don't ever do that," Bliss said briskly. "Those days are over."

"I know. No, I wouldn't, Mr. Bliss, don't ever worry . . ." Charlie said with impressive sincerity. Then he added with a somewhat reticent shake of his head, "She sure wanted to bad, though."

Something about the way he said it aroused Bliss's curiosity. "Whaddya mean?" He dropped one foot down a step to the lower level again, turned head and shoulders more fully toward Charlie.

"Well, she was standing here with me, a little to one side, over there by the mirror, after I'd already rung your announcer without getting any answer, and she said, 'Well, could I go up and wait?' I said, 'Well, I dunno, Miss. I'm not supposed to. . . .' You know, trying to let her down easy. And then she opened this bag, this evening pockybook she was holding on to, and sort of hunted around down in it like she was looking for a lipstick. And right there on top of all her things there was this hundred-dollar bill staring me in the face. Now y'may not want to believe me, Mr. Bliss, but I saw it with my own eyes—"

Bliss chuckled with good-natured derision. "And you think she was trying to offer you that to let her up, is that it? G'wan, Charlie." He kicked up one elbow scoffingly.

Nothing could lessen Charlie's pained, round-eyed earnestness. "I know she was for a fact, Mr. Bliss, y'couldn't miss it, the way she done it. She left the top of the bag wide open and went around under it with her fingers, so's to be sure not to disturb it. It was spread out flat, see, on top of everything else. Then she looked from it to me, looked me square in the eye—even holding the bag a little ways out from her. Not right at me, y'understand, but just a little ways out, so I'd catch on what she meant. Listen, I been in this business long enough. I know all the signs. I could tell."

Bliss scratched the corner of his mouth reflectively with the cutting edge of one thumbnail, as if feeling to see if it was still there. "Are you sure it wasn't just a ten spot, Charlie?"

Charlie's voice became almost falsetto in its aggrieved insistence. "Mr. Bliss, I seen the two O's in both upper corners of it!"

Bliss worried his lip between the edge of his teeth, pinching it in. "Well, I'll be damned!" He turned full body toward Charlie at last, as though intending to talk until this thing had been thrashed out to his satisfaction.

Charlie seemed to understand the need for further colloquy between the two of them. He said, "Be right with you, Mr. Bliss," as the sound of another cab arriving outside reached them. He went out, did his devoir with the doors, returned in the wake of a man and woman in evening garb who must have been very spruce at eight-thirty. All the starch was out of them now.

They nodded slightly to Bliss in passing, and he nodded slightly back to them, with all the awful frigidity of metropolitan neighbors. They stepped into the car and went up.

As soon as the glass porthole in the elevator panel had blacked out, Charlie and he resumed where they had left off. "Well, what'd she look like? Was she anyone you ever saw before? You know most of the crowd I used to have around to see me pretty well."

"Yes, I do," Charlie admitted. "And I can't place her. I'm sure I never seen her before, Mr. Bliss, all I can tell you is she was some looker. Was she some looker!"

"All right, she was some looker," agreed Bliss, "but like what?"

"Well, she was blond." Charlie brought his hands into play as the artist in him came to the fore. He outlined—presumably—masses of luxuriant hair. "But this real blond, y'know this real yella blond? Not this phony, washed-out, silvery kind they make it. This real blond."

"This real blond," Bliss confirmed patiently.

"And—and blue eyes; y'know, the kind that are always laughing, even when they're not? And about this high—her chin came up to this second chevron here, on me sleeve, see? And, er, not too fat, but y'wouldn't call her skinny, either; just a right armful—"

Bliss was eying the far side of the foyer ceiling as the description unfolded. "No," he kept saying, "no," as if going over the records himself. "The closest I can come to it is Helen Raymond, but—"

"No, I 'member Miss Raymond," Charlie said firmly. "It wasn't her; I got a cab for her many a time." Then he said, "Anyway, y'know how I'm pretty sure you don't know her? Because she didn't know you herself."

"What?" said Bliss, "Then what the hell did she want coming around asking for me, trying to get into my place?"

Charlie was still a lap behind him in the circles they seemed to be making. "She didn't know you worth a damn," he repeated with heavy emphasis. "I tried her out, on the way up—"

"Oh, so then you were going to let her up. That must have been a hundred, after all."

Charlie cleared his throat deprecatingly, realizing he had made a faux pas. "No, Mr. Bliss, no," he protested soulfully. "Now, you know me better than that; I wasn't. But I did start up on the car with her, acting like I was going to. I thought maybe that'd be the quickest way of getting rid of her, pretend like I was going to and then at the last minute—"

"Yeah, I know," said Bliss dryly.

"Well, we started up in the car together, to the fourth. And on the way I remembered that robbery we had here in the building last year, y'know, and I figured I better not take any chances. So I started to reel her out a fake description of you, just the opposite of your real one to try her out. I said, 'He's red-headed, ain't he, and pretty tall, just a little bit under six feet? I'm kind of new on the job here. I wanna make sure I got him placed right, there are so many tenants in the building.' She fell for it like a ton of bricks. 'Yes, of course,' she said, 'that's him.' Kind of quickly, to keep me from catching on that was the first time she heard what you looked like herself."

"Well, I'll be a—" Bliss said. He went ahead and said what it was he would be.

"So, of course, that was enough for me," Charlie assured him virtuously. "That finished it. When I heard that I said to myself, 'Nothing doing. Not on my shift, y'don't!' But I didn't say anything to her, because—well, she was dressed pretty swell and all that, not the kind it pays to get tough with. So I let her down easy, tried the wrong key to your door and when it wouldn't work pretended I didn't have no other and couldn't let her in. We went downstairs again, and she just kind of shrugged it off, like if she hadn't gotten in that time, it didn't matter because she was going to sooner or later. She smiled and said, 'Some other time, then,' and started off down the street, just the way she came walking. It was funny, too, dressed up the way she was. I watched her as far as the corner, and I didn't see her call no cab or nothing, just walked along like it was ten in the morning. Then she turned the corner and disappeared. O'Connor, the cop, he passed her coming up this way, and I even seen him turn and look after her. She sure was a looker."

"Just a ship that passes in the night," remarked Bliss. "Well, one sure thing, it was some kind of stall. If I didn't know her—and I don't, from your description—and she didn't know me, what was it all about? What the hell was she after? Maybe she had me mixed up with somebody else."

"No, she had your name right, even your first name. 'Mr. Ken Bliss,' she asked for when she first come in."

"And she didn't drive up, either, you say?"

"No, just came walking along from nowhere, then went walking away again just like she came. Funniest thing I ever seen."

They talked it over a few moments longer, man to man, with the typical freemasonry of two-thirty in the morning. "Aw, you run into a lot of funny things like that from time to time, livin' in a big city like this. You're bound to. I know, Mr. Bliss, I seen enough of them myself, in my line of work. Nuts that think they know you, and nuts that think they love you, and nuts that think you done something to them. You'd he surprised what bugs and mental cases there are walking around loose—"

"So now maybe I've got one of 'em fastened on me. That's a cheerful thought to take up to bed," Bliss grimaced.

He turned away, readied the elevator panel. He flashed Charlie a mock-apprehensive backward grin just before it closed on him. "It's getting so a young guy ain't safe anymore living by himself. I think I'll get myself married off and get hold of some protection!"

But the thought that he took up with him was of Marjorie—not of anyone else.

Corey showed up at his door at eight-thirty, long before he'd even begun to get ready, the night of Marjorie's engagement party. "What the hell," Bliss said with the pretended disgruntlement one shows only a close friend, "I only just got back from eating; I haven't even shaved yet."

"I called y'at the office at four-thirty. Where the hell were you?" Corey barked back at him with equally familiar brusqueness.

He came in and appropriated the best chair, swung one leg up over its arm. He got rid of his hat by aiming it at the windowsill. It missed but stayed on a low book rack underneath.

Corey wasn't a bad-looking sort of fellow, without being decorative about it. Taller than Bliss, a little leaner—or maybe just seeming so because he was taller—and with dark brown hair and heavy brows. He tried to be man-about-townish in an Esquire sort of way, but it was just a veneer; you could tell he was a primitive underneath that. Every once in a while a crack would show, and you'd get a startling glimpse of jungle through it. Veneer or not, he worked hard at it. Any party you ever went to he was there, holding up a door frame, hand-warming a glass. Any girl you ever mentioned him to, she knew him, too—or had a friend who did. His technique was a head-on attack, a blitzkrieg, and it had succeeded in the unlikeliest quarters. Some of the haughtiest, most unbending shoulders in town had been pinned to the mat, if the truth had only been known.

He started rubbing his hands with a fine show of malicious glee. "Well, tonight you get hooked! Tonight you get branded! Feel like running out yet? You bet you do! You're all white around the gills—"

"Think I'm like you?"

Corey trip-hammered a thumb against his own chest. "You should be like me. This is one guy they don't pin down to a formal promise!"

"If you'd bathed oftener, maybe you'd get more offers," Bliss grunted disparagingly.

"And make them have a hard time finding me when the lights go out? That wouldn't be fair. So where were you this afternoon? I wanted to eat with you."

"I was out getting the headlight. Where d'you suppose?" He opened a dresser drawer, took out a little cubed box, snapped the lid. "What d'you think of it?"

Corey took it out of the plush, breathed on it admiringly. "Say, is that a rock!"

"It ought to be. It threw me pul-lenty." Bliss pitched it back in the drawer with an air of indifference that was admirably assumed, started unhitching his suspenders. "I'm going in and take a shower. You know where the Scotch is."

He came in again in something under twenty minutes, complete down to bat-wing tie. "Who was the dame?" Corey asked idly, looking up from a newspaper.

"What dame?"

"The phone rang just now while you were in there, and some girl asked for you. I could tell it wasn't one of your old pals by the way she spoke. 'Does Mr. Kenneth Bliss live there?' I told her you were busy and asked if there was anything I could do. Not another word, just hung up."

"Strange."

Corey swiveled his drink. "Maybe it was one of these women society reporters looking for stuff on your engagement."

"No, they usually tackle the girl end of it. Marjorie's people have already given out all the dope there is, anyway. I wonder if it was her?" he said after a moment's thought.

"Who's her?"

Bliss grinned. "I haven't told you but I think I've got a secret admirer. Funny thing happened not long ago. One night when I was out a beautiful girl tried her level best to get into the apartment here. The doorman told me about it afterward. She wouldn't give her name or anything. He knows most of the crowd I used to hang out with—you know how doormen get after a while—and he was pretty sure he'd never seen her before. She was all togged out in evening clothes, looked like real carriage trade to his practiced eye. But she didn't drive up to the door, that was the strangest part of it; just came strolling along the street from nowhere, dressed to kill like that.

"He told me she opened her bag, pretending to hunt for a lipstick or something, and let him get a good look at a hundred-dollar bill floating around on top of everything else. And the way she acted gave him a pretty good idea it would have been his for the asking if he'd just opened my door with his passkey and let her in."

Corey looked skeptical. "You mean a doorman is going to turn down a chance to make a hundred dollars that easy? He's bulling you."

"I don't know about that. The amount is so fantastic in itself that, to me at any rate, it bears the earmark of truth. If he was just making the thing up, he would have been more likely to make it ten or twenty dollars."

"Well, what'd he do—let her in?"

"I could tell by the way he spoke that the hundred darned near got him; he was just on the point of bringing her up and letting her in. Only he thought he'd better try her out first, see if she really knew me, before he went ahead and admitted her. So he strung her along with a fake description that was just the opposite of mine in every respect, and she fell for it, said yes, that was the man—proving she'd never seen me before in her life.

"That finished it, of course; he was afraid to take a chance after that. He pretended he didn't have the key or something and eased her out as tactfully as he could. She was too well dressed for him to get snotty with. When she saw it was no go, she just smiled, shrugged and went sauntering down the street again."

Corey was leaning interestedly forward by this time. "And are you sure you don't recognize her from his description?"

"Dead sure. And as I just told you, she didn't recognize me, either."

"I wonder what she was after?"

"She wasn't out to clean the apartment, that's a cinch, because she was willing to pay a hundred dollars just for the privilege of getting in here, and anyone who can get a hundred dollars' worth out of this place is a magician."

Corey nodded judicious agreement on that point.

Bliss stood up. "Let's go." He smiled nervously. "I like everything about marriage except the functions leading up to it—such as tonight's."

"The part I like best," said Corey, "is not having it happen in the first place."

They were out in the public half waiting for the self-service car when a thin, querulous ringing piped up behind a closed door somewhere nearby.

Bliss cocked an experienced ear. "Key of G flat, That's mine. I'd better hop in and take it a minute; it may be Marge."

He went back to the door, fumbled in his pocket for his key, dropped it, had to stoop to get it. Corey stuck his foot out to hold the car up for them, "Hurry up before somebody gets it away from us," he urged.

Bliss pitched the door open. The thin wail rose to a full-toned peal, then perversely stopped short and didn't resume. He backed out again, pulled the door shut after him. "Too late, they've quit trying."

Riding down in the elevator, Corey suggested, "Maybe it was that same mystery dame again."

"If it was," Bliss grunted, "whatever it is she wants, she sure wants bad."

Alone there with Marge, in a little alcove away from the rest of the party, he scratched the back of his neck in pretended perplexity. "Let's see now, how does this go? I've seen enough movies, I ought to have the hang of it. Well, let's give it the old shut-eye treatment, that's the safest. Shut your eyes and stick out your finger."

She promptly hooked her thumb toward him.

He slapped it out of the way. "Not that one. Help a fellow out. I'm so nervous I could—"

"Oh, wrong finger? You should be more specific. How'd I know but what you wanted to bite it or something?"

And then the ring. Their heads drew together, looking down at it; they made a love knot of their four hands. They made nonsensical purrings and cooings and other noises that to them were probably language. Suddenly both became aware of eyes regarding them steadfastly, and they turned their heads in unison toward the doorway. A girl was outlined in it, as motionless as though she had taken root in the floor.

She was in tiered, wide-spreading black, the creamy whiteness of her shoulders rising out of it without any interrupting straps. A gossamer black wimple twinkling with jet was drawn over hair so incredibly yellow it seemed to have been powdered with corneal.

A dimple of sympathy—or possibly derision—at the corner of her mouth had disappeared before they could confirm it. "Pardon me," she said quietly, and moved on.

"What a striking girl!" Marjorie exclaimed involuntarily, continuing to stare at the empty doorway as though hypnotized.

"Who is she?"

"I don't know. I think I remember her coming in along with Fred Sterling and his party, but if I was introduced, it didn't take."

They looked down at the ring once more. But the spell had been broken, their mood was gone, they couldn't seem to get it back. The room didn't feel quite as warm as it had. As though that look from the doorway had chilled it.

She shivered, said, "Come on, let's get back to the others."

The party was in the homestretch now, and they were dancing, he and she. Those little sketchy turns and fake half steps that are just an excuse to cover up a private conversation.

He said, "Well, let's take the apartment on Eighty-fourth Street, then. After all, if he'll give it to us for five dollars less a month like he said. . . . And with the furniture they're going to give us, we can fix it up to look like something—"

She said, "That girl in black can't take her eyes off you. Every time I look over there she's staring at you for all she's worth. If it was any night but tonight, I might begin to get worried."

He turned his head. "She isn't looking at me."

"She was until I called your attention to it."

"Who is she, anyway?"

She shrugged. "I thought all along she came with Fred Sterling and his bunch. You know how he always shows up anywhere with a whole posse. But he left quite some time ago and now I see she's still here. Maybe she decided to stay on alone. Whoever she is, I like the way she handles herself. None of this cheap dazzle stuff. I've been watching, she's had her troubles all evening long, poor thing. Every time she tries to sneak out on the terrace alone, three or four of the men mistake it for a come-on and make a beeline after her, Then a minute later she'll come in again, usually by the side door, still alone. What she does to get rid of them that fast I don't know, but she must have it down to a science. They'll come slinking in again themselves right afterward, one by one, with that foolish look men have when they've been stymied. It's a regular sideshow."

She touched her hand lightly to his lapel as a signal; they stopped on the half turn.

"Some more people are leaving; I'll have to see them off. Be right back, darling. Miss me while I'm gone."

He watched her go, standing there like a flagpole on which the flag has suddenly been run down. When the light blue gown had whisked from sight at one end of the room, he turned and went out the other way, onto the terrace for a breath of air. He felt a little sticky under the collar; dancing always made him warm, anyway.

The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, while-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. "I'm all set now," he thought. "I'm young. I've got love, I've got a clear track. The rest is a cinch."

The terrace ran along the entire front of the apartment. At one end it made a turn around to the side of the penthouse superstructure, and the moon couldn't follow it. It was dark there. There were no floor-length windows, either, just an infrequently used side door whose solid composition blacked out light.

He drifted around the turn, because there was another couple on the other way and he didn't want to crowd them. He stood in the exact right angle formed by the two directions of the ledge, and now he had two views instead of one.

And then suddenly—she must have slipped unnoticed out through the side door and come along from that direction toward him—that ubiquitous girl in black was standing there a foot or two away from him, looking out into the distance, the same way he was. She was weirdly like a white marble bust floating in the air without any pedestal, for the black of her dress was swallowed up in the blackness of the trough they both stood in.

"Swell, isn't it?" he suggested. After all, they were at the same party together.

She didn't seem to want to talk about that, so maybe it wasn't so swell to her.

At that instant Corey came along, conquest bound. He'd evidently had his eye on her for some time past, but the wheel of opportunity had only now spun his way. Bliss's presence didn't deter him in the least. "You go inside," he ordered arbitrarily. '"Don't be a hog, you're engaged."

The girl said in quick interruption, "Do you want to be a dear?"

"Sure I want to be a dear."

"Then get me a big tinkly highball."

He thumbed Bliss. "He does that better than I do."

"It would taste better coming from you." It was primitive, but it worked.

Corey came back with it. She accepted it from him, held it out above the coping, slowly tilted it until the glass was bottom up and empty. They she gravely handed it back. "Now go in and get me another."

Corey got the point. It would have been hard to miss it. The suave man-about-town glaze shattered momentarily and one of those aforementioned glimpses of jungle showed through the rent. Not travelogue jungle, either. A flash of white coursed over his face, lingering longest around his mouth in a sort of bloodless pucker. He stepped in and went for her neck with both hands, in businesslike silence.

"Whoa—easy," Bliss moved quickly, blocked them off before they could get to her, deflected them up into the air. By the time they came down again, Corey already had them under control. He bunched them in his pockets, perhaps to make sure of keeping them that way. Vocal resentment came belatedly, after the physical had already been reined in.

"Any twist that thinks she can make a monkey outta me . . . !" He turned around and strode back from where he'd come.

Bliss turned to follow. After all, what was she to him?

Her hand flashed out, pinned him at her side. "Don't go. I want to talk to you." It dropped away again as soon as she saw that she had gained her point.

He waited, listening.

"You don't know me, do you?"

"I've been trying to find out who you are all evening." He hadn't; he'd paid her less attention than any man there. It was the gallant thing to say, that was all.

"You saw me once before, but you don't remember. But I do. You were in a car with four others—"

"I've been in a car with four others lots of times, so many times I really can't—"

"Its license number was D3827."

"I've got a rotten head for figures."

"It was kept in a garage up on Exterior Avenue in the Bronx. And it was never called for afterward. Isn't that strange? It must still be there, rusted away. . . ."

"I don't remember any of that," he said, baffled. "But say, who are you, anyway? There's something electrifying about you—"

"Too much can cause a short circuit." She moved a step or two away as though she had lost interest in him as unaccountably as she had developed it. She lifted the jet-spangled scarf from her head, held it spun out in a straight line before, her hands far apart, let the breeze flutter it forward.

Suddenly she gave a little exclamation. It was gone. Her hands still measured off its length. An aerial wire, invisible against the night, came down diagonally right there where she was, riveted to the facade below the ledge by a little porcelain insulation knob. She flashed him a look of half-comic surprise, then bent over, peering down.

"There it is, right there! It's caught on that little round white thing. . . ." She plunged one arm down, probing into space. A moment later she had straightened again with a frustrated smile. "It's just an inch away from my fingers. Maybe you'd have better luck; you probably have a longer reach."

He got up on the coping, squatting on both heels. He cupped one hand to its inner edge, as a brake to keep from going over too far. His head turned away from her, searching for it.

She stepped forward behind him, palms out-turned as if in sanctimonious negation, then recoiled again as quickly. The slight impact forced a hissing breath from her, a sound that was explanation, malediction and expiation all in one.

"Mrs. Nick Killeen!"

He must have heard it. It must have been a spark in his darkening mind for a moment that went out as he went out.

The ledge was empty. She and the night had it to themselves. Through the terrace windows, around the turn, the radio was pulsing to a rumba and voices were laughing. One, louder than the others, exclaimed, "Keep it up, you've got it now!"

Marjorie accosted her on her way in a moment later. "I'm looking for my fiancé." She used the word with proud possessiveness, touching her ring with unconscious ostentation as she did so. "Is he out there, do you know?"

The girl in black smiled courteously. "He was, the last time I saw him." She moved on down the long room, briskly yet not too hurriedly, drawing more than one pair of admiring masculine eyes after her as she went.

The maid and butler were no longer on duty in the cloakroom adjoining the front door, came back only as they were summoned. Just as the front door was closing unobtrusively, without their having been disturbed, the house telephone connected with the downstairs entrance began to ring. It went on unanswered for a few moments.

Marjorie came inside again from the terrace, remarking to those nearest her, "That's strange. He doesn't seem to be out there."

Her mother, who had finally been compelled to attend to the neglected telephone in person, screamed harrowingly from somewhere out near the entrance, just once. The party had come to an end.

THREE

postmortem on bliss

LEW WAGNER LEFT the cab with its door teetering open and elbowed his way through the small knot of muted onlookers who had collected about it. "What is it?" he asked the cop, showing him something from a vest pocket.

"Cash in." The patrolman pointed almost vertically. "From up there to down here."

Somebody's midnight edition of tomorrow morning's paper had been requisitioned, expanded with its component leaves spread end to end and formed into a mound along the ground. One foot, in a patent-leather evening oxford, stuck out at one corner.

"I understand they're having a blowout up there. Probably had a drink too many, leaned too far over and lost his balance." He tipped a section of the news sheet back, for Wanger's benefit.

One of the spectators, who hadn't been expecting this and was standing too close, turned his head aside, cupped a precautionary hand to his mouth and backed out in a hurry.

"Well, what'd y'expect, violets?" the cop called after him antagonistically.

Wanger squatted down on his heels and began to knead at a rigidly contracted fist that was showing at the upper right-hand corner of the mound. He finally extracted what looked like a swirl of frozen black smoke.

"Dame's handkerchief," supplied the cop.

"Scarf," corrected Wanger. "Too big for a handkerchief."

He looked down again at the shrouded body.

"I know him by sight," the night doorman of the building supplied. "I think they were announcing his engagement to their daughter tonight, up at the Elliotts'. That's the penthouse."

"Well, I'd better get up there and get it over with," Wanger sighed. "Just routine; probably won't take more than ten or fifteen minutes at the most."

At daybreak he was still hammering at the disheveled, exhausted guests ranged before him. "And do you mean to say there's not one of you here even knew this girl's name or had never seen her before tonight?" All heads kept shaking dully.

"Didn't anyone ask her name? What kind of people are you, anyway?"

"We all did at one time or another," a dejected man said. "She wouldn't give it. Passed it off each time with some crack like 'What's in a name?'"

"Okay, then she was a gate-crasher, pure and simple. Now what I want to find out is why, what her motive was." Marjorie's mother came back into the room at this point, and he turned to her. "How about it, any valuables missing, anything stolen from the apartment?"

"No," she sobbed, "not a thing's been touched. I just got through checking up."

"Then robbery wasn't the motive for the intrusion. She seems to have avoided and discouraged all the rest of you young fellows all evening long, according to what you say; singled Bliss out as soon as there was a chance of getting him alone. Yet according to what you say—" he turned to Corey "—he didn't seem to recognize her from the description passed on to him by the doorman at his own flat, And when he arrived here and finally saw her, he acted as though she was a perfect stranger to him. That is, assuming it was the same girl.

"That's about all there is to be done up here for the present. Has anyone anything to add to this description you've given me of her?"

No one had; she had been seen by so many people, it was exhaustive in itself. As the guests filed mournfully out one by one, giving their names and addresses in case they should be wanted for further questioning, Corey edged up to Wanger. He was full of drink and cold sober at the same time. "I was his best friend," he said huskily. "How do you see it? What do you figure it for?"

"Well, I'll tell you," Wanger answered as he prepared to leave, "not that you're entitled to be taken into my confidence any more than anyone else. There isn't anything to show that it wasn't an accident—but one thing. The fact that she cleared out of here so fast right after it happened, instead of staying to face the music like all the rest of you. Another very incriminating piece of behavior is that when she met Miss Elliott in the doorway and the latter asked her if she'd seen him, she calmly answered that he was out there, instead of screaming blue murder that he'd just gone over, which was the normal thing to do. There's always a possibility, of course, that he didn't go over until after she'd already left him and gone inside. But what argues against that is that he took that black scarf of hers down with him. That makes it look very much as though she was still with him at the actual instant it happened. Yet she could have dropped it or even given it to him to hold for her, then gone in.

"You see, the thing is fifty-fifty so far; everything you can bring to bear on one side balances nicely with something you can bring to bear on the other. What'll finally tip the scales one way or the other, as far as I'm concerned, is her ultimate behavior. If she comes forward within a day or two to identify or clear herself, as soon as she hears we're looking for her, the chances are it'll turn out to have been an accident and she ran out simply to escape the notoriety, knowing she had no right up here. If she remains hidden and we have to go out hunting for her, I think we can say murder and not be very far from right."

He pocketed the description and other data he'd taken down. "We'll get her, either way, don't worry."

But they didn't.

Evening accessories department, Bonwit Teller department store, fifteen days later:

"Yes, this is our twelve-dollar wimple. The only place it could have been purchased is here; it's a special with us."

"All right, now call your sales staff in here. I want to find out if any of them remembers selling one to a woman whose description follows. . . ."

And when they'd assembled and he'd repeated it three times over, a mousy little person with glasses stepped forward. "I—I remember selling one of these numbers in black, to a beautiful girl answering that description, a little over two weeks ago."

"Good! Dig up the sales slip. I want the address it was sent to."

Fifteen minutes later: "The customer paid cash and took it with her; no name or address was given."

"Is that the customary way you make these sales?"

"No, they're a luxury item; they're usually delivered. In this case it was at the customer's special request that she took it right along with her, I remember that."

Wanger (under his breath): "To cover her Tracks."

Wanger's report to his superior, three weeks later:

". . . And not a trace of her since. Not a sign to show who she was, where she came from, where she went. Nor why she did it—if she did it. I've investigated Bliss's past exhaustively, checked back almost to the first girl he ever kissed, and she doesn't appear anywhere in it. The testimony of the doorman at his flat, and of his friend Corey, seems to show that he did not know this girl, whoever she was. Yet she deliberately discouraged and shunned everyone else at this party, until she had maneuvered to get him alone out on that terrace. So mistaken identity won't jibe, either.

"In short, the only indication it was not an accident is the strange behavior of this mystery woman and her subsequent disappearance and refusal to come forward and clear up the matter. On the other hand, other than the above, there is no positive indication it was murder, either."

Wanger's record on Ken Bliss:

"Met death in fall from seventeenth-floor terrace, 4:30A.M., May 20. Last seen with woman about twenty-six, fair skin, yellow hair, blue eyes, five feet five inches. Identity unknown. Wanted for questioning.

"Motive: Uncertain if crime was committed, but, if so, probably passional or jealousy. No record of former relationship.

 Witnesses: None.

 Evidence: Black evening scarf, purchased Bonwit Teller's, May 19.

 Case Unsolved."

PART TWO

mitchell

He starts as one who, hearing a deer's tread,

Beholds a panther stealing forth instead.

—de Maupassant

ONE

the woman

MIRIAM—last name long forgotten within the confines of the Helena Hotel—was a short pugnacious person the color of old leather. She had three things she clung to tenaciously; her British citizenship—which had been passively acquired through the accident of birth on the island of Jamaica; a pair of gold-coin earrings; and her "system" of doing rooms. No one had ever made the slightest attempt to interfere with the first two, and the few abortive efforts at tampering with the latter had met with resounding failure.

Numerical progression of the rooms had nothing to do with it. Nor had their location along the dim, creaky, varileveled corridors. In fact, it was a sort of mystic algebra known only to the innermost workings of her mind. No one could disturb it—not with impunity, anyway. Not without bringing on a long malevolent tirade, down endless reaches of labyrinthine corridor, that went on—or seemed to—for hours afterward, long after the original cause of it had slunk away, frustrated.

"The fo'teen come after the seventeen. It got to wait tell I finish the seventeen. I ain't never yet do fo'teen first."

Nor did this precedence have anything to do with gratuities, which were in any case an almost nonexistent factor at the Helena. Habit, perhaps, would be the closest guess to what after all was a purely emotional state of mind on Miriam's part.

The wheel of the "system" having finally, at the appointed hour and fraction thereof of the day, swung around to "the nineteen," Miriam advanced down a particularly moldering length of corridor far toward the back, tin bucket in one hand, long pole in the other, at the working end of which could still be detected stray wisps of fibrous fuzz.

She halted before "the nineteen," reversed her key and sounded it twice against the woodwork. This was a mere formality, since she would have been as highly outraged at finding "the nineteen" in as at having her "system" interfered with. "The nineteen" had never been in at this hour yet. "The nineteen" had no right to be in at this hour.

Nor was the formality of the key tap due to scrupulous observance of hotel regulations, either. It was reflex action. She could no longer enter a door without doing it. Inevitably, on returning home to her own furnished room at the end of the day, she gave that same trip-hammer tap on the panel before inserting her own private key into the lock.

She threw open the door challengingly and advanced into a small and singularly unprepossessing room. The pattern of the carpet had been ground into oblivion. A sort of gray green fungus was all that now covered the floorboards. A whitewashed-brick wall blocked the eye a few feet outside the window. Through this a shaft of sunlight struggled downward at an angle that was enough to break its back. The room would have been better off without it, if only to preserve an illusion of cleanliness, for it was fuming like a Seidlitz powder with masses of dust particles.

On the wall above the bed was ranged an array of girls' photographs of varying sizes, all mounted, framed and glassed over. Miriam did not even deign to raise her eyes to these, Most of them had been up for years. The one "nineteen" was going with now would never get up there, she opined, because she couldn't afford to have a picture taken and he couldn't afford to have it mounted, framed and glassed over. And there wasn't any more room left on that side, anyway. He was too old now to begin a new side. And if he wasn't, he ought to be. Which disposed of that matter.

The bed made, with frenziedly swirling effects on the dust motes in the sunbeam, Miriam narrowed the room door considerably but without closing it altogether. There was nothing furtive about the way she did this; there was rather an injured defiance. She even put this into words, aloud, it was felt so keenly. "Hidin' it all the time. Always hidin' it. Who he think going to take it anyway? Who he think want it?"

She gave her mouth a preparatory drying—or perhaps it was a whetting—along the back of her hand. She opened the closet door, stooped, disrupted a cairn of soiled shirts on the floor in one corner of it, brought up a bottle of gin like someone lifting a rabbit out of a hole.

She displayed no satisfaction at the sight of it, only moral indignation. "Who he think come in here, anyway, but me? He know ain't nobody come in here but me! Suspicionin' people that way!"

She tilted the bottle, lowered it again. Then she came out with it, advanced to the washbasin, turned on the cold-water tap. With a dexterity that bespoke long practice she switched the open bottle mouth under it and out again, just enough to restore the contents to their former level, no more. This was not so difficult as it appeared. There were mistrustful pencil gauge marks plainly visible on two of the four corners of the frosted glass to guide her. She corrected a slight discrepancy she had been guilty of in favor of the bottle, by means of her mouth. She was heaving with a sense almost of persecution by now. "Ol' miser! Stingy ol' thing!" she glowered with Antillean passion and a slight accompanying tinkle from the gold-coin earrings. "One thing I don't like is people mistrustin' me!"

She returned the bottle to its bourn, closed the closet, restored the room door to its former width and entered upon the second stage of her duties, which consisted in thrusting the staff with the errant fuzz at random places along the base of the walls, like someone spearing salmon from a rock in midstream.

It was while she was engaged in this slightly puzzling maneuver that she became aware of being observed. She turned her head and there was a lady standing out there in the hallway, looking through the open doorway. Miriam knew at a single glance that she did not live in the hotel, and she rose accordingly in Miriam's esteem. Her low regard for and truculence toward those who did was matched only by her high regard for and willingness to be affable to those who didn't. A blanket order, both ways.

"Yes, ma'am?" she said with cordial interest. "You lookin' for Mist' Mitchell?"

The lady was so friendly and so soft-spoken. "No," she smiled. "I just happened to drop in to see a friend of mine, and she's not in. I was on my way back to the elevator, and I'm afraid I became a little confused. . . ."

Miriam rested on her mop handle like a Venetian gondolier at ease and hoped the lady wouldn't go right away.

She didn't. She advanced an unnoticeable step nearer the threshold but still remained well outside the confines of the room proper. She gave the impression of an overpowering interest in Miriam and her conversation.

Miriam visibly preened herself standing there in the sulfurous sun shaft, wriggled almost ecstatically around the mop pole.

"You know," the lady confided with an enchanting woman-to-woman intimacy of manner, "I always think you can tell so much about a person just by looking at the room they live in,"

"Yes, indeed, you sho' right about that," Miriam agreed heartily.

"Just take this one here—as long as you happen to be in it tidying it up and I happen to be on my way past the door. Now, I don't know a thing about the person living in it—"

"Mist' Mitchell?" prompted Miriam, almost mesmerically engrossed by now. Her chin had come to rest on the rounded point of the mop handle.

The lady made a careless gesture of one hand. "Mitchell or whatever the name may be—I don't know him and I've never seen him. But just let me tell you what his room shows me—and you correct me if I'm wrong."

Miriam squirmed her shoulders with anticipatory delight. "Go 'head." she encouraged breathlessly. This was nearly as exciting as having your palm read by a fortune-teller, free of charge.

"He's not very tidy. That necktie twisted around the light fixture—"

"He's a slob," confirmed Miriam pugnaciously.

"He's not very well off. But of course the hotel itself would tell me that; it's not very expensive—"

"He's been a month and a half behind in his rent fo' eight years straight!" divulged Miriam darkly.

The lady paused—not like one who is trying to put one over on you, but like one who wants to weigh her words carefully before committing herself. "He doesn't work," she said finally. "There's an early edition of today's paper standing on end in the wastebasket. I can see it from here. He evidently gets up around noon, reads for a while before going out for the rest of the day. . . ."

Miriam nodded enthralled, unable to take her eyes off this apparition of wit, wisdom and graciousness. The mop handle could have been snatched away from under her and she probably would have retained her half-inclined position unaltered, without noticing it. "He shiftless, all right. He live on some kine of a sojer pension come in each month, I dunno what it is." She shook her head reverently. "Gee, you sho' good."

"He's lonely, hasn't many friends." Her eyes went up to the wall. "All those pictures up there, they're a sign of loneliness, not popularity. If he had many friends, he wouldn't have to bother with pictures."

Miriam had never thought of it in this light before. In fact, if the pictures had meant anything at all to her—which they hadn't for years past now—they had stood for a certain nastiness of mind on their owner's part, a gloating over his misdeeds. In the beginning she had even expressed this aloud once or twice, at sight of them. To wit: "Dirty ol' thing!"

"Even," the lady went on, "if he actually knew all those girls well—which he probably didn't—he knew them only one at a time, not all in a group. There are the ear puffs of right after the war and the Japanese-doll bob of the early twenties and the flat, shoulder-length hair of a few years ago. . . ."

Miriam had swiveled her head, was looking around and up at the wall behind her; the rounded point of the mop handle now rested just above one ear. She even scratched her head by moving it slightly back and forth in this position.

"He's never actually found the girl he's looking for; there wouldn't be so many of them up there if he had. There wouldn't be any of them up there if he had. But they . . ." She tapped the rim of one of her lower teeth reflectively. "Blend them all together, into one composite picture, and they try to tell you what he has been looking for."

"Blame!" marveled Miriam, who apparently hadn't even known he had been looking for anything. Or at least, not something that you discussed in polite company.

"He's been looking for mystery. An illusion. A type of girl who is not to be found anywhere in this world. Who does not exist outside his own imagination. A rootless creature floating detachedly above the everyday world, with no points of contact. An odalisque. A Mata Hari."

"Who?" queried Miriam alertly, swinging her head around.

"Just look at them up there. Not one of them as she really is—or was, rather. Soft-focused in tulle, haloed in photographic mist, peering through a lace fan, ogling the camera in reverse through a mirror, biting a rose. . . ." She smiled a little, not altogether unkindly. "A man and his dreams."

"I 'spect he never goin' get one like he really wants her," suggested Miriam.

"You never can tell," the lady in the doorway smiled. "You never can tell."

Then she deferred to Miriam with an enchanting, quizzical little quirk of her head. "Tell the truth now, haven't I been right more than I've been wrong?"

"You been right all the way!" Miriam championed her stoutly.

"You see? That's what I mean. It just goes to show you what an empty room can tell you."

"Don' it though! It sho' do."

"Well, I mustn't keep you from your work any longer." She gave a chummy little flurry of her fingers, an extra-warm smile of parting, and moved on her way.

Miriam sighed regretfully as the doorway showed blank. She let the mop staff stagger against the wall, went over to the entry and stood in it, watching her down the hall and around the turn. Then that showed blank, too.

She sighed again, more disconsolately than ever. What an enjoyable conversation! What an instructive, entertaining one! What a shame it had to be over so soon, couldn't have kept on a little longer! Just until she finished one more room, for instance.

The elevator door clashed faintly, out of sight around the turn there, and she was gone for good now. Miriam moved unwillingly back into the room to her uncompleted task.

"She sho' was nice," she murmured wistfully. "I bet she don' ever come back again, either."

TWO

mitchell

MITCHELL CAME INTO the shabby lobby of his hotel at his usual time, folded paper under his arm. He stopped at the desk to see if there was any mail. He got that special look from the clerk, reserved for those who are chronically a month and a half behind in their room rent. He got three letters.

The first was a note from Maybelle, his blond friend from the restaurant. The second was a mistake, belonged in the pigeonhole above. The third one was either a circular or a bill, he could tell right away by looking at it. The address was typed, and the envelope bore no return address. He didn't open it right away, for that reason. He could scent bills and advertisements a mile away.

He went upstairs, closed the door and looked around the room. He'd been living here twelve years. The room had acquired facets of his personality in that time. There were framed photographs of girls galore all over the walls. A regular gallery. It wasn't that he was a roué; he was a romanticist. He'd kept looking for his ideal. He'd wanted her to be glamorous, mysterious. Masks and fans and secret rendezvouses and that sort of stuff. And all he'd ever got was waitresses from Childs and salesgirls from Hearn's. Pretty soon it would be too late to find Her anymore; pretty soon it wouldn't matter.

He hung up his coat, with the third letter making a white scar above its side pocket. He got out the gin bottle from underneath his dirty shirts on the floor at the back of the closet, where the maid couldn't get at it. He allowed himself only two fingers every evening, parceled out each bottle so that it lasted two weeks. He shot the pickup bodily into the back of his mouth, without putting lips to the jigger glass at all.

Here it was night again, and nothing wonderful, nothing glamorous was ever going to happen to him. Just cheapness. A cheap hotel room, a cheap man in his shirt sleeves, cheap gin, cheap regrets. He supposed he might as well call up Maybelle now as later and get it over with. He knew he was going to in the end, anyway. It was a case of Maybelle or nothing. But he knew just what she'd say, just what she'd wear, just what she'd think. Beer and liverwurst.

He picked up the phone and gave the number of her rooming house. Then he always had to wait while her landlady yelled all the way up the stairwell to the fourth floor for her to come down. He'd done it so often he knew just how long to allow for it. He left the phone and went over to his coat to get out a cigarette. He saw that third, unopened envelope in his side pocket. He pulled it out, tore it open.

A crimson ticket fell out. There was nothing else in the envelope. "Elgin Theater. Loge A-1. Good only Tuesday evening." That was tonight. "$3.30," it said in the corner. It couldn't be good; it must be some kind of dummy. He turned it over and over and over, but there was no catch on it anywhere, no additional payment to be made. It was authentic. Who had sent him such a thing?

The phone was making rasping metallic noises. He went back to it. "She'll be right down," Maybelle's landlady was saying, against background noises of clump, clump, clump. She always came down with her shoes left open and flapping.

"Sorry," he said firmly, "I got the wrong number," and hung up.

He started to get ready. It rang back when he was at the hair-smoothing stage. It was Maybelle. "Mitch, was that you just called me here?"

"No," he lied remorselessly.

"Well, am I gonna see you tonight?"

"Gee, no," he whined falsely. "I'm laid up in bed with a touch of grippe."

"Well, should I stop over and keep you company?"

"No, don't do that," he said hastily. "You might catch it from me and lose a week's wages." He hung up before she could bedevil him with any further unwanted kindnesses.

He was almost sure, when he got down to the Elgin and presented it at the door, that the ticket chopper was going to turn him down. Instead, he accepted it, even passed him in with an extra touch of deference because it was a loge seat.

Then it was good, there could be no further doubt of it. But who had sent it to him? Would the person be up there in the Ioge when he got there? Suppose there was more than one; how would he know which one it was?

There wasn't anybody in the loge at all, he discovered to his secret disappointment when the usher had led him to it. Each loge was fitted with four chairs, walled off from its neighbors on either side and from the balcony behind it. There was more privacy to be obtained in them than in any other part of the house, even the boxes.

He felt funny sitting there alone with the three vacant chairs around him, kept looking around to see if anyone was coming. Even kept half expecting to be tapped on the shoulder by the usher and told a mistake had been made and he'd have to leave, there was someone else downstairs at the box office claiming his ticket. But nothing like that happened. All the other loges gradually filled up, but no one came near this center one, which was the choicest of the lot. At overture time, when the house lights went down and plunged the audience into blue twilight, its three remaining chairs were still unspoken for, almost as though they had been bought up ahead of time to make sure they would remain unoccupied.

The play began, and as its glamour and make-believe unfolded before him, little by little he began to forget the strange circumstances that had brought him here, to lose himself in its spell. Then suddenly—at exactly what point during the first act she'd arrived he did not know—there was someone already sitting there next to him. There hadn't even been a flick of the usher's flashlight or a rustle of garments to warn him. Or if there had, he'd missed them.

No one ever came to claim those two other chairs just in back of them. He never saw any more of the show than just that first half of the first act. He couldn't take his eyes off her from then on. She was beautiful; gee, she was beautiful! She was red haired and had a face like a cameo. She had a dark velvet wrap around her, lighter on the inside, and she seemed to rise out of its folds like a—like a nymph out of a seashell.

He would never have dared to speak to her, but suddenly she had turned to him, was holding a cigarette to her lips, waiting for a light. "Would you mind?" she said, with just a trace of foreign accent. "One is allowed to smoke in these loges, I believe."

And that was the start of the acquaintanceship.

He had everything in readiness long before she could be expected to come. He still couldn't believe she'd meant it, that she was really coming here to see him. It had been her own suggestion, he would never have dreamed of. . . . He had told her how to reach the room without having to pass through the inquisitive lobby downstairs, by the service stairs at the back of the house that only old-timers like him knew about. And yet, with all that, she had managed to convey, tactfully and deftly, that this wasn't to be an affair. Certainly it wasn't; you don't have an affair with your ideal. You worship her.

He stood back, looking the place over for the tenth time. All those girls' pictures that he'd taken down from the walls had left yellowed stains behind them from being up so long. What did he want those counterfeits for, now that he'd found the real thing at last? He'd got hold of a screen and put it around the bed. He couldn't do much else for the room; it still remained a shabby $8-a-week cubbyhole.

He rubbed his hands nervously. He looked in the mirror again to see how the new necktie looked on him.

The phone rang, and he almost tripped all over himself trying to get to it fast enough. Wasn't she coming? Had she changed her mind? Then he slumped disappointedly, with a wearied grimace. It was only Maybelle.

"How's your grippe? I been worried about you all day, Mitch. Look, I snitched some of the rest'runt's chicken broth that goes with our special dolla' dinna', I'm gonna bring it over in a container, it's the best thing for you when you're laid up like that–"

He writhed agonizedly. God, tonight of all nights! "I thought you had the night shift Wednesday nights," he snarled ungraciously.

"I changed places with one of the other girls so I could come over and take care of you."

"No, some other time, I can't see you tonight—"

She was starting to snivel at the other end of the line. "All right for you! You'll be sorry!"

He hung up heartlessly just as the delicate tap he'd been waiting to hear sounded on the room door.

He opened the door and Romance came in, just as he'd always daydreamed it would, someday, somewhere. She was muffled in that same velvet cape she'd worn at the theater.

He didn't know what to say or how to act; he'd never been with an Ideal before. "Did you find those stairs all right? I—maybe I should have gone down and met you at the corner."

He turned on the radio, but it was a sports commentary, so he turned it right off again.

She brought a bottle of something out from under the folds of her cape. Yet she could even make that act, which would have seemed unspeakably shoddy if committed by anyone like Maybelle, appear gracious and intriguing. "This is for us," she said. "Arak, I brought it as my contribution to our evening." It hadn't been opened yet, foil still sealed its neck, and he had to pull up the cork with a screw.

It was heady stuff, but it made you see the world through rose-colored glasses. It took away his tongue-tiedness, made him speak without difficulty and say the things that came to his mind. "You're just like I always dreamed of someone being, almost as though you came out of my own head."

"The really clever woman is all things to all men. Like the chameleon, she takes her coloring from his ideal of her. It is her job to find out what that is. Those pictures on the wall, they told so plainly what you had looked for in women—"

He nearly dropped the glass he was holding, stared at her wide-eyed. "How did you know there were pictures on the wall? Have you ever been in this room before?"

She drank a sip of liquor, coughed very slightly. "No," she said. "But it is easy to see from the stains that there were pictures there. And anyone who does that is a romantic and romanticizes women."

"Oh," he said, and took up his glass again. His perceptions were already a little dulled. He was too happy to be captious. "It's funny. . . ."

"What is?"

"Just by being here, you change this mangy room into something warm and glamourous. You take away twenty years and make me feel—like I useta feel walking down the bullyvards on leave under a tin hat, and around every corner I was sure I'd find. . . ."

"What?"

"I don't know, something wonderful. I never did, but it didn't matter, because there was always another corner. It was the feeling that mattered. It made your footsteps sing. I've always wanted it back again, but I was never able to get it anymore after that. You must be magic."

"Black or white?"

He smiled vacantly. He evidently didn't get the allusion.

"I'll have to go now." She stood up, crossed over to the dresser. "One more drink before I do. I think there's enough in it for one more." She held up the bottle eyed it against the light. They had been using the bureau top for a serving table. She filled the two glasses, then interrupted herself, letting them stand there on it a moment, a considerable distance apart. "I must make myself beautiful—for your last look at me," she smiled across her shoulder.

A little metal powder holder flashed open in her hand. She leaned across the bureau top toward the mirror. She made little flurried motions that bespoke the will rather than the deed, for the vast majority of them failed to come anywhere near the surface of her nose. She was really powdering the air between it and the mirror.

He sat there, smiling over at her in hazy benevolence.

Her nose didn't grow any noticeably whiter—but then maybe that was the whole art of powdering it, so that it wouldn't show. A grain or two of white had fallen on the dark-wood surface of the dresser. She bent down toward them, the epitome of neatness. Her breath stirred them off into oblivion.

She picked up the glasses and went back to him.

He looked up at her with an almost doglike devotion. "I can't believe all this is really happening to me. That you're really here. That you're bending over me like this, handing me a glass. That your breath is stirring my hair. That there's just a little sweetness, like one carnation in a whole room, in the air around me. . . ."

He'd put his glass down meanwhile, and so had she, as if in some kind of obligatory accompaniment.

"When you go outside the door, I'll know it wasn't true. I'll dream about you tonight, and in the morning I won't know which was the dream and which was the real part. I don't already."

"Drink." And then as he reached for the wrong one, "No, that one's yours, over there. Are you forgetting?" she said with unexpected sharpness.

"To what?"

"To the coming dream. May it be a long and pleasant one."

He hitched his glass. "To the coming dream."

She eyed it as he set it down again half-drained. "This isn't our first meeting," she remarked thoughtfully.

"No, last night at the theater—"

"Not there, either. You saw me once before. On the steps of a church. Do you remember?"

"On the steps of a church?" His head lolled idiotically; he straightened it with an effort. "What were you doing there?"

"Getting married. Now do you remember?"

Absently, absorbed in what she was saying, he finished what was in his glass. "Was I at the wedding?"

"Ah, yes, you were at the wedding—very much so." She got up abruptly, snapped the switch of the midget radio. "We'll have a little music at this point."

A guttural, malevolent trombone seemed to snarl into the air about them. She began to pivot about him, turning faster and faster, skirt expanding about her knees.

Nobody's sweetheart now.

And it all seems wrong somehow—

He backed his hand to his forehead. "I can't see you so clearly—what's happening—are the lights flickering?'

Faster and faster went the solo dance, the dance of triumph and obsequy. "The lights are still, it's you that is flickering."

His glass fell, crashed on the floor. He started to writhe, clutch at himself. "My chest—it's being torn apart. Get help, a doctor—"

"No doctor could reach here in time." She was like a spinning top now, seeming to recede down the long vista of the walls. His dimming eyes could see her as a blur of brightness; then, like white metal cooling, little by little she seemed to go out forever in the dark.

He was on the floor now at her feet, moaning out along the carpet in a foaming expiration; ". . . only wanted to make you happy. . . ."

From far away a voice whispered mockingly, "You have . . . you have. . . ."Then trailed off into silence.

She backed the room door after her, about to close it inextricably into the frame, then froze to statuesque stillness, holding it ajar that fraction of an inch that meant reentry could be gained at her volition.

They looked at each other, a foot apart. Maybelle was blond and buxom and blowsy, and holding a cylinder of some sort done up untidily in brown paper. The woman in the velvet cape, flung around her in a sort of jaunty defiance that somehow suggested a toreador, eyed her calculatingly, watchfully.

The other spoke first, pouting with overreddened, full-blown lips. "I brought this over to Mitch. If he doesn't want to see me, he doesn't have to; I understand now. But tell him–"

"Yes?"

"Tell him I said he should drink it while it's still hot."

The woman in the cape glanced over her shoulder at the hairbreadth crack of door, too narrow to permit vision. "They saw you come in just now, downstairs?"

"Yes, sure."

"They saw you carrying that soup?"

"Yes, sure."

How easy to have inveigled her into the room. She had moved the screen out and around his body, concealing it, when the first warning knock at the door had come. How easy, in the moment or two before this stupid heifer discovered him, to have silenced her forever, with the same glass he had just drunk from. Or to have left her there, involved, too stupid ever to clear herself.

She turned back to her. The door clicked definitely shut behind her. "Get down there where you come from, get away from here fast." It wasn't said in menace, but in whispered warning.

Maybelle just opened China-blue eyes and stared at her stupidly.

"Quick! Every minute that you spend up here alone will count against you. Be sure you take that container down with you again, unopened. Let them know you couldn't get in—gather people around you, protect yourself!" She gave the slow-thinking lummox a push that started her involuntarily down the corridor toward the front of the building. From the turn at the end of it the blonde looked back dazedly. "But wha-what's wrong? What happened?"

"Your friend is dead in there and I killed him. I'm only trying to save you from becoming involved yourself, you fool. I have nothing against—other women."

But Maybelle hadn't waited to hear the last. She emitted a series of noises like a nail scratching glass, fled from view with a great surging wallow.

The woman in the velvet cape moved swiftly, but with a neat economy of movement that robbed her going of all semblance of flight, to the hinged service door at the other end of the corridor, giving onto the unguarded back stairs.

THREE

postmortem on mitchell

WANGER'S SUPERIOR DIDN'T put him on it until nearly a week after it had happened. A man named Cleary had been working on it in the meantime and getting exactly nowhere.

"Say, listen, Wanger, there's a peculiar case over at the Helena Hotel. I've just been reading the reports sent in on it, and it occurred to me it has certain features in common with that Bliss incident—remember that, six months or so ago? At first glance they're not at all alike. There's no doubt about this one, it's an out-and-out murder. But what gave me the notion was they both feature a woman who seems to have gone up in smoke immediately afterward, for all the trace we've ever been able to find of her. Also a complete lack of discoverable motive. Neither of which is exactly usual in our line. That's why I thought it'd be a good idea to have Cleary run through it for you, give you his findings; you talk to some of the people he's lined up. You see, you're familiar with that Bliss affair, he's not; you're in a better position to judge. If you think you detect any connection, no matter how slight, let me know, I'll assign you to it full-time."

Cleary said, "Here's what I've gotten so far, after seven days on it. It all stacks up very nicely, but it has no meaning. It's as irrational as the act of a feminine homicidal maniac, but I have definite proof that she is nothing of the sort, as you'll be able to judge for yourself later, when you hear it. Now, he died from a pinch or two of cyanide potassium introduced into a glass of arak—"

"Yes, I read that in the examiner's report."

"Here are transcriptions of the witnesses' statements. You can read them over later; I'll give you the gist of them now, as I go along. First of all, I found a red theater-ticket stub—you know, the remainder that's returned to the customer to hold after it's chopped at the door—in the lining of one of his pockets. I traced it back and here's the story: two nights before his death a very beautiful red-haired woman stepped up to the box office at the Elgin Theater and said she wanted to buy an entire loge outright. The ticket seller asked her what night she wanted it for, and she said that didn't matter, any night. What did matter was that she wanted to be sure of getting the entire loge. That was unusual for two reasons: with most customers the date is the important thing; they take the best they can get on the particular date they want. Secondly, the number of seats didn't seem to concern her, either; she didn't ask whether she was getting three, four or five. All she wanted was the entire loge for her own. He gave her the four seats for the first night they were available, which happened to be the very next night. Naturally the incident impressed him.

"Two of them were never used. Mitchell was seen by the theater staff to show up alone on that particular night and turn in one ticket. The same woman who had originally bought them also showed up alone, but a considerable time later, long after the curtain had gone up."

"Only one person is in a position to state for a fact that she was the same woman who bought them," Wanger warned him.

"The ticket seller; and that's his affidavit you have under your thumb there. He'd shuttered his box office for the night and happened to be standing watching the show from the mezzanine stairs; she passed him on her way up—alone—and he recognized her beyond any possibility of doubt.

"Now we come to the important part of the whole thing. I've questioned the usher on loge duty. What he tells me convinces me they were utter strangers to each other. He paid particular attention to the act of seating her for several reasons. He has fewer people to seat than the orchestra or balcony ushers. She came in unusually late and so stood out. She was strikingly beautiful and came alone, which seemed to him to be unusual.

"He watched closely, if not altogether intentionally, for the above reasons, as she settled herself in her seat. Neither one turned to greet the other. Neither one spoke or even nodded. He remained within earshot long enough to be sure of that. He's positive; by everything he's ever learned in all his years of theater ushering, that they were complete strangers.

"And that cinches it, to my mind. If they hadn't been, Mitchell would have waited for her down in the lobby instead of going up ahead. Any man would have, even the crudest.

"It was only during the intermission that the usher noticed they'd begun to talk to each other. And then it was in that diffident way of two people who are just becoming acquainted.

'"In other words, it was a pickup."

"If they were strangers, how'd she get his ticket to him? She bought them, he showed up with one of them."

"Anonymously, through the mail. I found the envelope, also, in one of the pockets. The ticket was a vivid crimson. There's a faint pinkish discoloration visible on the inside of the envelope; somebody with sweaty hands, either at the post office or downstairs at the hotel desk—or, maybe Mitchell himself—handled it, dampened the dye a little. This is it here.

"She was only seen one more time after that. Then she vanished completely. I haven't been able to get a line on her since then. The night of the murder she wasn't seen entering or leaving the hotel. However, that isn't quite as confounding as it sounds, because there's a service stairs at the back that leads directly out into an alley without passing the lobby. The alley door works on a spring lock, can't be opened from the outside, but it could very easily have been left ajar to admit her. These precautions must have been her own suggestion, since she evidently came prepared to kill Mitchell.

"Then who was it saw her that one more time you just mentioned, after the theater episode?"

"The girl he was keeping steady company with, a waitress named Maybelle Hodges. She called at the room within a few moments after the time established for his death by the medical examination. When she knocked on the door, this woman came out. She'd been in there."

"What did the woman say to her?"

"She admitted she'd killed him, and advised the girl to go downstairs again, get away before she became involved herself."

Wanger felt his chin dubiously. "Do you think that statement's trustworthy?"

"Yes, because the girl's description of the woman, both as to appearance and the clothes she was wearing, tallies completely with that given me by the theater staff, so you see she couldn't very well have made the story up. And this brings up a point I mentioned before. She's not a homicidal maniac by any means; she had a beautiful opportunity to kill the Hodges girl then and there. All she had to do was admit her to the room—there was a screen around his body. She had plenty of time. Instead she warned the girl off, for the girl's own sake.

"There's the whole thing. More material than we need, in one way. But the keystone that would give it a meaning is missing; no motive."

"No conceivable motive, and they didn't know each other, and she vanishes as completely as a streak of lightning after it's struck once," Wanger summed up, baffled. "Well, he sent me over here to see if I could make anything out of it. I'm only sure of one thing: this case strings along with the Bliss one; it's an accurate copy."

Chambermaid, fourth floor, Helena Hotel:

"I never seen her before, so I knew for a fact she didn't live in the hotel. I thought maybe she was visitin' somebody. She was just passin' by the hall that day. This was about, um, two weeks before it happened. Maybe mo'. She stopped and looked in the open door while I'm cleanin' his room, I said, 'Yes'm, you lookin' for Mr. Mitchell?' She said, 'No, but I always think you can learn so much about a pusson's character and habits just by lookin' at their rooms.' She talk so polite and refine' it's a pleasure to hear her. She look at the girls' pictures he have all over the wall and she say, 'He likes women to be mysterious, I can tell by them. Not one is an honest everyday pitcher of how those girls really look. They all tryin' to look like somethin' else, for his sake. Bitin' roses and starin' through lace fans. If one of 'em gave him her pitcher like she really was, he most likely wouldn't put it up.'

"That's all. And then before I knowed it, she gone away again, and I never seen her no mo' after that."

Clerk at Globe Liquor Store:

"Yes, I remember selling this. A thing as unusual as arak we don't sell more than a bottle a year. No, it was not her suggestion. I happened to come across it on the shelf and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get it off our hands, as long as she'd asked for something unusual and at the same time potent. She said she was making a present of it to a friend, and the more exotic it was the better pleased he would be. I'd already shown her vodka and aquavit. She decided on arak. She admitted she'd never sampled any of it herself. One funny thing: on her way out she gave me a peculiar smile and said, 'I find myself doing so many things these days that I've never done before.'

"No, not at all nervous. As a matter of fact she deliberately stood aside and told me to go ahead and wait on a man who wanted a bottle of rye in a hurry, while she was making up her mind. She said she wanted to take her time making a selection."

Wanger's superior said a week later, "So you think the two cases are related in some way, do you?"

"I do."

"Well, in just what way?"

"Only in this way: the same unknown woman is involved in both."

"Oh, no, there's where you're wrong, it couldn't possibly be," his chief overrode him, semaphoring with both hands. "I'll admit I had some vague notion along those lines myself when I spoke to you last week. But that won't stand up, man, it won't wash at all! Since then I've had time to look over the composite description Cleary obtained of her and sent in. That knocks it completely on the head. Take the Bliss one out of the files a minute, bring it in here. . . . Now just look at the two of them. Put them side by side a minute.

"There's not even a similar modus operandi involved, or anything like it! One pushed a young broker's clerk off a terrace. The other dropped cyanide into the drink of a seedy ne'er-do-well in a mangy hotel. As far as we know, the two men not only did not know the women who brought about their deaths but had never heard of each other. No, Wanger, I think it's two entirely different cases—"

"Linked by the same murderess," Wanger insisted, unconvinced. "With these two diametrically opposite descriptions staring me in the face, I'll grant you it's like flying in the face of Providence to dispute. Just the same, all those physical differences don't mean much. Just break them down a minute, and look how easy it is to get the smallest common denominator.

"Blond and redhead: any little chorus girl will tell you how transitory that distinction can be.

"Five feet five and five seven; if one wore a pair of extra-high heels and one wore flat heels, that could still be the same girl.

"Fresh and sallow complexions: a dusting of powder takes care of that.

"The difference in eye coloring can be an optical illusion created by the application of eye shadow.

"The seeming difference in age is another variable, likewise dependent on externals such as costume and manner.

"And what else is left? An accent? I can talk with an accent myself, if I feel like it.

"A point to remember is that no single person who saw one of these women saw the other. We have a complete set of witnesses on each of them separately. We have no single witness on the two of them at one time. There's no chance of getting a comparison. You say there's no similarity in modus operandi, but there is in every way. It's just the method of commission that was different; you're letting that mislead you. Notice these 'two' unknown women involved. Both have a brilliant, almost uncanny faculty for disappearing immediately afterward. It amounts almost to genius. Both stalk their victims ahead of time, evidently trying to get a line on their background and habits. One appeared at Bliss's flat while he was out, the other cased Mitchell's room—also while he was out. If that isn't modus operandi, what is? I tell you it's the same woman in both cases."

"What's her motive then?" his superior argued. "Not robbery. Mitchell was' a month and a half behind in his room rent. She bought out an entire loge at $3.30 a seat and threw two of the seats away just to be sure of getting to meet him under favorable circumstances. Revenge would be perfect, but—he didn't know her and she didn't know him. We not only can't fit a motive to it, but we can't even apply the explanation that usually goes with lack of motive. She's not a homicidal maniac, either. She had a beautiful opportunity to kilt the Hodges girl—and the Hodges girl is the juicy, beefy, lamebrain type that's almost irresistible to a congenital murderer. Instead she passed it up, warned the girl off for the girl's own sake."

"The motive lies back in the past, way back in the past," Wanger insisted obdurately.

"You sifted through Bliss's past—broke it down almost day by day—and couldn't find one anywhere."

"I must have missed it then. I'm to blame, not it. It was there, I didn't see it."

"We're up against something here. D'you realize that even if these two men were still alive they themselves couldn't throw any light on who she is, what she did it for—because they didn't know her themselves, seem never to have seen her before?"

"That's a thought to cheer one up," said Wanger glumly. "I can't promise you to solve this, even though you've turned it over to me. All I can promise is not to quit trying until I do."

Wanger's record on Mitchell (five months later):

Evidence:

1 envelope, typed on sample machine on display at typewriter salesroom, without knowledge of personnel.

1 arak bottle, purchased Globe Liquor Store.

1 ticket stub, Loge A-1, Elgin Theater.

Case Unsolved.

PART THREE

moran

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom

When the jungle shadows fall,

Like the tick tick tock of the stately clock

As it stands against the wall—

—Cole Porter

ONE

the woman

IT WAS HIS experience that grownups always asked such dumb questions. Questions about things that were so self-evident that you yourself had long ago learned to take them for granted. But they always had to know the answer. Especially when you wanted to do something else. Something really worthwhile, like bouncing an oversize brightly colored ball along the sidewalk. Like this lady that was holding him up right now. Bending down and being so kind and all that, and keeping him from having any fun.

"My, what a big ball that is for such a little fellow."

Well, anyone could see it was a big ball. Why did she have to tell him that? Why didn't she go home where she lived?

"How old are you?"

What did she have to know how old he was for? "Five anna haff goin' on six."

"Just think. Whose little boy are you?"

What did she have to know whose little boy he was for? He wasn't hers, she ought to know that by looking at him. "My mother's and father's," he mumbled patronizingly. How could anyone be anyone else's?

"And what's your father's name, dear?" Didn't she know anything at all?

She probably meant that vague, formal, never used name that his father seemed to have for an extra appendage; not the logical "daddy," "Mista Moran," he parroted.

She said something about a door. "How adorable." Then she said, "Have you any brothers and sisters?"

"Nope."

"Ah, what a shame! Don't you miss them?"

How could you miss them when you never had them? However, he could vaguely sense some sort of personal reflection involved in not having any, so he immediately tried to make good the lack with substitutes. "I got a grandma, though."

"Isn't that lovely? Does she live right with you?"

One's grandma never did, didn't she know that? "She lives in Garrison." Another substitute came to mind with that mental image, so he threw her into the gap, too. "So does my Aunt Ada, too." Wasn't she ever going to let him go ahead bouncing his ball?

"Oh, all the way up there!" she marveled. "Were you ever up there to meet her?"

"Shoe I was, when I was little. But Dr. Bixby said I made too much noise, so mommy hadda bring me back home again."

"Is Dr. Bixby your grandma's doctor, dear?"

"Shoe, he comes there lots."

"Tell me, dear, have you started school yet?"

What an insulting question! How old did she think he was anyway—two? "Shoe. I go to kindergarten every day," he said self-importantly.

"And what do you do there, dear?"

"We draw ducks and rabbits and cows. Miss Baker gave me a gol' star for drawin' a cow." Wasn't she ever going to go away and leave him be? This felt like it had kept up for hours. He could have bounced his ball all the way up to the corner and back, the time she'd made him waste.

He tried to go around one side of her, and she finally took the hint. "Well, dear, run along and play, I won't keep you any longer." She patted him twice on the bullet-shaped back of his head and moved off down the sidewalk, throwing him a fetching smile backward over her shoulder.

His mother's voice suddenly sounded through the screen of the open ground-floor window. She must have been sitting there the whole time. You could see out through the screen, but you couldn't see in through it; he'd found that out long ago. "What was the nice lady saying to you, Cookie?" she asked benevolently. A grown-up would have detected a note of instinctive pride that her offspring was so remarkable in every way he even attracted the attention of passing strangers.

"She wanned to know how ol' I was," he answered absently. He turned his attention to more important business. "Mommy, watch. Look how high I can throw this!"

"Yes, dear, but not too high, it might roll into the gutter."

A moment later he'd already forgotten the incident. Two moments later his mother had.

TWO

moran

MORAN'S WIFE HAD called up the office while he was out to lunch; there was a message from her waiting there for him when he got back.

This didn't startle him; it was a fairly frequent occurrence, on an average of every third day. Something she'd found out she needed from downtown and wanted him to stop off and get for her on his way home, most likely, he thought at first. Then on second thought he saw it couldn't quite be that, either, or, having failed to reach him, she would have simply left the message with the switchboard girl. Unless, of course, it was something that needed more detailed instructions that could be conveniently conveyed at secondhand.

He made use of his brief after-lunch digestive torpor to phone.

"Here's your wife, Mr. Moran."

"Frank—" Margaret's voice sounded emotionally charged, so he knew right away, before she'd got any further than his name, that this was more than just a purchase errand.

"H'lo, dear, what's up?"

"Oh, Fuh-rank, I'm awfully glad you got back! I'm worried sick, I don't know what to do. I just got a telegram from Ada half an hour ago—"

Ada was her unmarried sister, upstate. "A telegram?" he said. "Why a telegram?"

"Well, that's just it. Here, I'll read it to you." It took her a moment or two; she must have had to fumble for it in her apron pocket and unfold it with one hand "It says, 'Mother down with bad spell, don't want to frighten you but suggest you come at once, Dr. Bixby agrees. Don't delay. Ada.' "

"I suppose it's her heart again," he said somewhat less than compassionately. Why'd she have to bother him in the middle of the business day with something like this?

She had begun to whimper in a low-keyed restrained way that was not quite outright weeping—a sort of frightened watering of her conversation. "Frank, what'll I do? D'you think I ought to call them up long-distance?"

"If she wants you to go up there, you better go up there," he answered shortly.

She'd evidently wanted to hear this advice; it chimed in with her own inclinations. "I guess I'd better," she agreed tearfully. "You know Ada, she's anything but an alarmist, she's always been inclined to minimize these things before now, The last time mother had one of her spells she didn't even let me know about it until it was all over, to keep from worrying me."

"Don't get so unnerved about it. Your mother's had these spells before and gotten over them," he tried to point out.

But her distress had already taken a different tack. "But what'll I do about you and Cookie?"

He took umbrage at being lumped together with his five-year-old son in helplessness. "I can look after him," he said sharply. "I'm no cripple. Do you want me to find out what buses there are for you?"

"I've already done that myself, and there's one at five. If I take a later one I'll have to sit up all night, and you know how miserable that is."

"You better take the early one," he agreed.

The pace of her conversation quickened, became a flurry. "I'm all packed—just an overnight bag. Now, Frank, will you meet me at the terminal?"

"Okay, okay." He was starting to get a little impatient with this endless rigmarole. Women didn't know how to make a telephone call short and to the point. His secretary was standing in the doorway, waiting to consult him about something.

"And, Frank, be sure you're there on time. Remember, you'll have to take Cookie home with you. I'll have him with me; I'm picking him up at the kindergarten on my way downtown."

As punctual as he made it a point to be, Margaret was already there ahead of him when he got down to the terminal, with the little dab of foreshortened humanity that was Cookie by her side. The latter began to jump up and down, giving vertical emphasis to the important information he had to impart. "Daddy, mommy's going away! Mommy's going away!"

He was unnoticed by both of them, this being one of the rare times he didn't succeed in monopolizing the opening moments of one of their conversations. "What've you been doing, crying?" Moran accused her. "Sure you have, I can tell by your eyes. There's no sense acting that way about it."

A torrent of maternal advice began pouring from her. "Now, Frank, you'll find the food for his supper all ready on the kitchen table, all you'll have to do is heat it. And, Frank, don't feed him too late, it isn't good for him. Oh, and another thing, you'd better let him do without his bath tonight. You don't know enough about giving it to him, and I'm afraid something might happen to him in the tub."

"One night without it won't kill him," Moran grunted contemptuously.

"And, Frank, do you think you'll know how to undress him?"

"Sure. Just unbutton, and there you are. What's the difference between his things and my own? Just smaller, that's all."

But the torrent spilled forth unabated. "And, Frank, if you should want to go out yourself later on, I wouldn't leave him alone in the house if I were you. Maybe you can get one of the neighbors to come in and give him an eye—"

A voice was megaphoning sepulchrally somewhere in the vaulted depths below the waiting room. "Hobbs Landing, Allenville, Greendale—"

"That's yours, y'better get on."

They moved slowly down the ramp to departure level. The torrent was at last slackening; it came only in desultory little spurts now, afterthoughts concerned with his own personal well-being. "Now, Frank, you know where I keep your clean shirts and things—"

"Ba-awd," the bus starter was keening.

She wound her arms about his neck with unexpected tightness, as though she were still not one hundred percent maternal. "Goodbye, Frank, I'll be back the minute I can."

"Phone me when you get up there so I'll know you arrived okay."

"I do hope she'll be all right."

"Sure she will, she'll be up and around again before the week is out—"

She crouched down by Cookie, adjusted his cap, his jacket collar, the hem of one of his little knee pants, kissed him on the three sides of the head. "Now, Cookie, you be a good boy, listen to whatever daddy tells you."

The last thing she said, from inside the bus steps, was, "Frank, he's forming a habit of telling little fibs lately, I've been trying to break him of it; don't encourage him—"

She finally had to turn away because others were trying to get in after her and she was blocking the entrance. The bus driver turned his head and followed her morosely with his eyes down the aisle toward her seat. He muttered, "For Pete's sake, I only run a couple of hours upstate, not all the way to the Mexican border."

Moran and offspring shifted over on the platform opposite her seat. She couldn't get the window up, or she would probably have gone on indefinitely in the same vein as before. She had to content herself with blowing kisses and making instructive signs to the two of them through the pane. Moran couldn't tell what most of them meant but pretended he understood by nodding docilely in order to make her feel better about it.

The bus started to wheel out along the concrete with a gritty, hissing sound. Moran bent down to the diminutive self beside him, raised one of its toothpick arms. "Wave goodbye to your mother," he instructed. He worked the little appendage awkwardly back and forth, like something on a toy pump.

He was thinking of Margaret for the tenth time, with a newborn respect, almost with awe, for being able to whip any kind of results out of chaos like this—and not just once, but day after day—when the doorbell rang.

He groaned aloud. "I haven't got enough on my hands, I gotta have company yet, to hang around and laugh at me!"

He had his coat and tie off, shirt sleeves rolled up out of harm's way, and one of Margaret's aprons tucked into his belt. He'd managed to get Cookie's food warmed up—after all, the way Margaret had left it waiting, all you did was strike a match and put it on the gas stove—and he'd managed to bring Cookie and the food together at the table, after a lot of running around. But accomplishment ended there. What did you do to keep a kid from walloping it backhand with the flat of his spoon, making mud pies with it so to speak, so that it flew up all over? With Margaret around, Cookie just seemed to eat. With him, he laid down barrages on it, and flecks of it were even hitting the wall opposite.

Moran kept shifting around behind him from one side to the other, trying to nab the niblick shots that were doing all the damage. Persuasion was worse than useless; Cookie had him out on a limb and knew it.

The door bell peeped a second time. Moran meanwhile being so busy he had already forgotten about the first ring. He raked despairing fingers through his hair, looked from Cookie out toward the door and from the door back to Cookie. Finally, as though deciding nothing could be any worse than this, he started out to answer it, wiping off a dab of spinach from just above one eyebrow.

It was a woman, and he didn't know her. She was a lady, anyway; she carefully refrained from seeming to see the apron with blue forget-me-nots in one corner, acted as though he looked perfectly normal.

She was young and rather pretty but was dressed in a way that seemed deliberately to seek to ignore the latter attribute; in a neat but plain blue serge jacket and skirt. Her hair was reddish gold and kept in severe confinement by pins or some other means. Her face was innocent of anything but soap and water. She had a little rosette of freckles on each cheek, high up on it; none anywhere else. She had an almost boyish air of friendliness and naturalness.

"Is this Cookie Moran's house?" she asked with a friendly little smile.

"Yes—but my wife's away right now . . ." Moran answered helplessly, wondering what she wanted.

"I know, Mr. Moran." There was something understanding, almost commiserating, about the way she said it. There was also a betraying little twitch at the corner of her mouth, quickly restrained, "She said something about that when she came by for Cookie. That's why I'm here. I'm Cookie's kindergarten teacher, Miss Baker."

"Oh, yes!" he said quickly, recognizing the name. "I've heard my wife speak of you a lot." They shook hands; she had the firm, cordial sort of a grip you would have expected her to have.

"Mrs. Moran didn't actually ask me to come over, but I could tell by the way she spoke she was worried about how you two would make out, so I took it upon myself to do it anyway. I know she's had to leave on fairly short notice, so if there's anything I can do—"

He didn't make any bones about showing his relief and gratitude. "Say, that's swell of you!" he said fervently. "Are you a lifesaver, Miss Baker! Come in—"

He became belatedly aware of the forget-me-notted apron, snatched it off and hid it behind him bunched in one hand.

"How do you get them to eat, anyway?" he asked confidentially, closing the door and following her down the hall. "I'm afraid to ram it in his mouth, he might choke—"

"I know just how it is, Mr. Moran, I know just how it is," she said consolingly. She took one all-comprehensive look around her when she got to the dining-room doorway and gave a deep-throated little chuckle. "I can see I got here just in the nick of time." He'd thought it was in pretty good shape until now, compared to the kitchen. That was where the hurricane had really struck.

"How's the young man?" she asked.

"Cookie, look who's here," Moran said, still overjoyed at this unexpected succor that was like manna from heaven. "Miss Baker, your kindergarten teacher. Aren't you going to say hello to her?"

Cookie studied her a long moment with the grave unblinking eyes of childhood. "Is not!" he finally said dispassionately.

"Why, Cookie!" Miss Baker rebuked gently. She crouched down by the high chair, bringing her head to the level of his. She put a finger to his chin and guided it. "Turn around and look at me good." She found time to flash a tolerant smile to Moran over his head. "Don't you know Miss Baker anymore?"

Moran was embarrassed for the child, as though it made him out the parent of a mentally retarded offspring. "Cookie, what's the matter with you, don't you know your own kindergarten teacher?"

"Is not," said Cookie without taking his eyes off her.

Miss Baker looked at the father, completely at a loss. "What do you suppose it is?" she asked solicitously. "He's never been that way with me before."

"I dunno, unless—unless—" A remark his wife had made came back to him. "Margaret warned me just now before she left that he's starting to tell little fibs; maybe this is one of them now." He put an edge of authority into his voice for his auditor's benefit. "Now, see here, young man—"

She made a charming little secretive gesture with her eyelids, a sort of deprecating flicker. "Let me handle him," she breathed. "I'm used to them." You could see she was a person who had infinite patience with children, would never lose her temper under any circumstances. She thrust her face toward him cajolingly. "What's the matter, Cookie, don't you know me anymore? I know you."

Cookie wasn't saying.

"Wait, I think I have something here." She opened her large handbag, brought out a folded sheet of paper. Spread, it revealed an outline drawing, printed, filled in with crayon coloring by hand. The crayon filling did not match the guidelines very accurately, but the will was there.

Cookie eyed it without any visible signs of pride of accomplishment.

"Don't you remember doing this for me this morning—and, I told you how good it was? Don't you remember you got a gold star for doing this?"

That, at least, had a familiar ring to Moran's own ears, if not his offspring's. Many a night on coming home he'd gotten the vertically ejaculated tidings, "I got a gol' star today!"

"Are you Miss Baker?" Cookie conceded warily.

"Ho!" She worried the lobe of his ear. "Of course I am, bless you! You know that,"

"Then why don't you look like she does?"

She smiled amusedly at Moran. "I suppose he means the glasses. He's used to my wearing horn-rimmed glasses when teaching class; I came out without them tonight. There's a fine point of child psychology involved, too. He's used to seeing me in the kindergarten and not in his home. I don't belong here. So—" she spread her hands "—I'm not the same person."

Moran was secretly admiring her scientific attitude toward the child and the thorough knowledge it was obviously grounded on, so different from Margaret's irrational, emotional approach.

She stood up, evidently not a believer in pressing a contested point too far with a reluctant child at any one given time; rather winning it over to her viewpoint by degrees, a little at a time. He'd heard Margaret say that was the way they handled the youngsters at the kindergarten.

"He'll forget all about this refusal to recognize me himself in five minutes—watch, you'll see," she promised brightly in an undertone.

"You've got to know just how to go about it with kids, don't you?" he said, impressed.

"They're distinct little entities in their own right, you know, not just half-formed grown-ups. That's a mistaken old-fashioned notion that we've discarded." She removed her hat and jacket, started toward the ravaged kitchen. "Now, let me see what I can do here to help. How about you yourself, Mr. Moran?"

"Oh, never mind about me," he said with insincere self-denial. "I can go out to a cafeteria later—"

"Nonsense, there's no need for that at all, I'll have something ready before you know it. Now, you just read your evening paper—I can see by the way it's still folded over you haven't had a chance to go near it yet—and just forget everything, as though your wife were here looking after things."

She was, thought Moran with a grateful sigh, one of the nicest, most competent, most considerate young women to have around that he'd ever yet had the pleasure of encountering. He strolled out into the living room, rolled down his shirt sleeves and eased back behind his evening box score.

It seemed a longer ride than it had the summer before, when she and Frank had last made the trip up, although Garrison hadn't moved any at one end, or the city at the other. But that was because she was making it alone, for one thing, she supposed, and under unfavorable auspices, for another.

Frank had got her a seat by the window, and no one came to claim the one beside her, so she was spared the added discomfort of having to keep up a desultory conversation with some well-meaning seatmate; the penalty for refusal being, as she knew only too well, the even greater discomfort of sitting in strained, hostile awareness of each other after the preliminary snub.

The countryside spilled past with the rippling motion of overturned earth, as though the bus were plowing a steady furrow through it but carrying its trees, houses, fences along with it intact. She saw it only with the physical surface of her eye, it wasn't transmitted through the iris. Every twelve minutes, regularly, she remembered something she'd forgotten to tell Frank about Cookie or the house or the milkman or the laundryman. But then—and she realized this herself—even if she had remembered in the first place and told him, he probably would have forgotten it himself by now. That docile nodding outside the bus window hadn't fooled her; it had been too facile.

Between the twelve-minute intervals she did a lot of worrying about her mother. The way one does, anyone does.

But she realized she was only making herself feel worse, borrowing trouble ahead of time, writing an obituary, so to speak, before there was any need to. As Frank said, it would be all right. It had to be. And if—God forbid—it turned out not to be in the end, then rushing to meet it halfway was no help, either.

She tried to shorten the trip, take her mind off its purpose, by thinking of other things. It was not easy to do. She had not the pictorial eye; inanimate scenery had never meant much to her. And since, on the other hand, she had never taken a passionate interest in the study of human nature in the abstract, what else was there left on a vehicle of this sort? She wondered if it would have helped if she'd bought a book or magazine at the terminal and brought it with her. Probably not; it would have remained opened on her lap at one certain page the whole way. She'd never been any great shakes as a reader.

In desperation that was almost pathetic she started to tally up her household expenses for the past week, and then for the past two weeks. The figures blurred in her mind, became fantastically senseless. She could not forget the hard little knot of worry that lay heavy within her.

It had grown dark now, and the view became restricted to the midget, tubular world she was confined in. The other people around her in the bus were—the other people usually around in a bus. No sublimation to be found there. Just the backs of heads.

She sighed and wished she were an Indian or whatever those people were who could leave their bodies and get there ahead of where they were going. Or something like that, anyway; she wasn't sure of the mechanics of it.

Around eight they stopped at Greendale for ten minutes, and she had a cup of coffee at the counter in the bus station. As far as Cookie was concerned, at home, the worst was already over by this time, she realized. Either he had a bad case of stomachache by now or else Frank had fed him the way he should be fed and there was nothing further to worry about.

It seemed needless to phone ahead to Garrison from here; she was already two-thirds of the way there. And then there was always the thought that if she should get worse news than she'd already had in the telegram, it would make the rest of the trip an unendurable torment. It was better to wait until she got there herself to find out.

They arrived strictly on schedule, ten-thirty on the dot. She was the first one down, elbowing her way through the other passengers.

She wasn't disappointed that there was no one waiting to meet her, because she realized Ada must have her hands full at the house; it couldn't be expected at such a time.

Garrison's brief, foreshortened nightlife was in mid-career immediately outside the bus station. Which meant the movie-theater entrance was still lighted on one side of the way and the drugstore on the other.

She passed a group of chattering young girls in their late teens and early twenties holding down a section of the board sidewalk just outside the drugstore entrance. One of them turned her head to look after her as she went by, and she heard her say, "Isn't that Margaret Peabody—now?"

She hurried along the plank walk, head lowered, into the surrounding darkness. Luckily they didn't yoo-hoo after her to try to make sure. She didn't want to stop and talk to near strangers. They might have news. She didn't want to hear it from them first. She wanted to go straight home and get it there, good or bad. But that "now," it hung trembling over her, roaring in her mind. What did it mean, that it was already . . . ?

She hurried up the dark tunnellike length of Burgoyne Street, smothered under trees, turned left, continued on for two house lengths (which here meant two city blocks, very nearly), turned in at the well-remembered flagstone walk with its tricky unevenness of edges. Each one went up a fraction of an inch higher than the one adjoining. Many a fall in childhood's awkward days—

She caught her breath with a quick little suction as the house swiveled around full face to her. Oh, yes, oh, yes, there were too many lights lit, far too many. Then she curbed her mounting panic, forced it down. Well, even—even if mother was laid up in bed at all with the slightest of attacks, Ada would have more than the usual number of lights lit, wouldn't she? She'd have to, to be able to look after her.

But then as she stepped up on the little white-painted porch platform, dread assailed her again. There were too many shadows flitting back and forth behind the lowered linen shades, you could hear the hum of too many voices coming from inside, as at a time of crisis, when neighbors are called in. There was something wrong in there, there was some sort of commotion going on.

She reached out and poked the bell button with an icicle for a finger. Instantly the commotion became aggravated. A voice screamed, "I'll go!" Another shrieked, "No, let me!" She could hear them clearly out where she was. Had one of them been Ada's, high-pitched and unrecognizable with uncontrollable grief? It seemed to her it had. She must be hysterical, all of them must be.

Before her heart had time to turn over and drop down through her like a rock, there was a quick shuffle of frenzied footsteps, as though someone was trying to hold someone else back. The door billowed open and a great gush of yellow interior light fanned out all over her. There were two unrecognizable figures silhouetted in it, grotesques with strange shapes on their heads.

"I got to it first!" the smaller one proclaimed jubilantly. "I was opening doors before you were born—" The music and the welter of hilarious voices streamed out around them into the quiet country night.

Her heart didn't drop, her overnight bag did instead—with a slap to the porch floor. "Mother," she gasped soundlessly.

The other figure in the paper party cap was Ada. "Margaret, you darling! How did you remember it was my birthday? Oh, what a dandy surprise, I couldn't have asked for anything—"

They were talking at cross-purposes, the three of them. "Oh, but Ada—" Margaret Moran was remonstrating in a shaky, smothered voice, still unmanageable from the unexpected shock. "How could you do it that way! If you knew what I went through on the way up here! No, mother's health is one thing I don't think you have any right to joke about. Frank won't like it a bit when he hears it!"

A puzzled silence had fallen over the two standing in the doorway. They turned to look after her. She was inside in the crepe-paper-lighted hallway now. The vivacious old lady asked Ada with a birdlike, quizzical cock of her head, "What does she mean?"

Ada asked at the same time, "What on earth is she talking about?"

"I got a telegram from you at one this afternoon. You told me mother'd had another of her attacks, and to come at once. You even mentioned Dr. Bixby's name in it—" Margaret Moran had begun to cry a little with indignation, a natural reaction from the long strain she had been under.

The mother said, "Dr. Bixby's in there now; I was just dancing a cakewalk with him, wasn't I, Ada?"

Her sister's face had gone white under the flush of the party excitement. She took a step backward. "I never in the world sent you any telegram!" she gasped.

Moran surreptitiously stuck a thumb under the waistband of his trousers to gain a little additional slack. "Margaret couldn't have done any better herself," he said wholeheartedly, "and when I say that, I'm giving you all the praise I know how.

"It'll make her your friend for life when I tell her how you walked in here and saved the day. You must come over and have dinner with the two of us—I mean without working for it—when she gets back."

She eyed the empty plates with a cook's instinctive approval, flattered to see that her efforts have not been slighted. "Thank you," she said, "I'd love to. I don't get as much home cooking as I might myself. I've had a room at the Women's Club since I've had this school job, and there are no facilities. Before then, of course, at home, we all took turns in the kitchen."

She rose slowly, stacked the dishes together. "Now you just sit there and take it easy, Mr. Moran, or inside in the next room or wherever you please. I'll get through these in no time."

"You could leave them in there," he remonstrated. "Margaret's cleaning lady comes tomorrow, and she'll do them."

"Oh, well," she shrugged deprecatingly, "it's not much trouble, and one thing I can't bear to see left lying around is dirty dishes, in my own or anybody else's kitchen. I'll be all finished before you know it."

She was going to make some lucky stiff a mighty fine little wife one of these days, Moran thought, watching her bustle back and forth; the wonder of it was she hadn't already. What was the matter with the young fellows around these parts, didn't they have eyes in their heads?

He went into the living room, turned on the double-globed reading lamp and sat down with his paper, to give it a second and more exhaustive going-over. It was just as good as though Margaret were home, really; you could hardly tell the difference. Except maybe that she didn't say, "Don't" to Cookie quite so often. Maybe too much of that wasn't good for a kid. She was a teacher, she ought to know.

She came out to the dining-room door one time and spoke to him, drying a large dish between her hands with a cloth. "Nearly through now," she announced cheerfully. "How're you two getting along in here?"

"Fine," said Moran, looking back across his shoulder at her from the semireclining slope the chair gave him, "I'm waiting to hear from my wife; she promised to call as soon as she gets up there and let me know how things are."

"That won't be for some time yet, will it?"

He glanced at the clock across the room. "Not much before ten-thirty or eleven, I guess."

She said, "I'm going to squeeze out some orange juice for the two of you, for the morning, as soon as I finish putting the last of these away. I'll leave it in a glass inside the Frigidaire."

"Aw, you don't have to bother doing that—"

"Doesn't take a minute; Cookie really should have it daily, you know. It's the best thing for them." She returned to the kitchen again.

Moran shook his head to himself. What a paragon.

Cookie was in there with him just then, playing around. Then a minute or so later he got up and went to the hall door, stood there looking out, talking to her. She'd evidently wandered out there herself, from the kitchen door at the other end of it, while she finished drying the last of the utensils. Margaret had that habit, too, of perambulating around when she was in the last stages of drying.

Cookie was standing perfectly still, watching her. He heard him say, "What're you doing that for?"

"To dry it off, dear," she answered with cheery forthrightness.

Moran heard it only subconsciously, so to speak, with the fraction of those faculties not absorbed in his paper.

She came in a moment later, painstakingly wiping the blade of a small sharp-edge fruit knife that she'd evidently just used to cut and prepare the oranges.

Cookie's eyes followed the deft motions of her hands with that hypnotic concentration children can bring to bear on the most trivial actions at times. Once he turned his head and glanced back into the hallway, somewhere beyond the radius of the door, where she had been just now, with equally rapt absorption. Then back to her again.

"There, all through," she said to him playfully, flicking the end of the dishcloth toward him. "Now I'll play with you for five or ten minutes, and then we'll see about putting you to bed."

Moran looked up at this point, out of sheer sense of duty. "Sure there's nothing I can do to help?" he asked, hoping against hope the answer would be no.

It was. "You go right back to your paper," she said with friendly authoritativeness. "This young man and I are going to have a little game of hide-and-seek."

She was certainly a godsend. Why, when it came to getting your paper read without distraction, she was even better to have around than Margaret. Margaret seemed to think you could read your paper and carry on a conversation with her at one and the same time. So either you had to be a surly bear or you had to read each paragraph twice, and slowly, once as a gentle hint and once for the meaning.

Not that he was being disloyal about it; rather have Margaret, bless her, conversational interruptions or not.

Ada tried to silence the buzzing party guests. "Shh! Be quiet just a minute, everybody. Margaret's out in the hall, trying to call her husband in the city and tell him about it." She took the added precaution of drawing the two sliding parlor doors together.

"From here?" one of the younger girls piped up incredulously. "For heaven's sake, that costs money!"

"I know, but she's all upset about it, and I don't blame her. Who could have done such a thing? Why, that's a horrible trick to play on anyone!"

One of the matrons said with unshakable local pride, "I know nobody up here in our community would be capable of it. We all think too much of Delia Peabody and her girls." Then immediately spoiled it by adding, "Not even Cora Hopkins. . . ."

"And they signed my name to it!" Ada protested dramatically. "It must be somebody that knows the family."

"And mine, too, isn't that what she said?" Dr. Bixby added. "Where'd they hear about me?"

Half-frightened little glances were exchanged here and there about the room, as though somebody had just told a chilling ghost story. One of the girls, perched on the windowsill, looked behind her into the dark, then stood up and furtively moved deeper into the room. "It's like a poison-pen tellygram," somebody breathed in a husky stage whisper.

Ada had reopened the sliding doors a foot, overcome by her own curiosity. "Did you get him yet?" she asked through them. "What does he say?"

Margaret Moran appeared in the opening, widened it and then stayed in it undecidedly. "She said our house doesn't answer. He could be out, but—look at the time. And if he is, what's he done with Cookie? He wouldn't have him out with him at this hour. And the last thing he said was he wouldn't budge out of the house. There ought to be someone there with Cookie to watch him. . . ."

She looked helplessly from Ada to her mother to the doctor, who were the three nearest to her. "I don't like it. Don't you think I ought to start back—"

A chorus of concerned protest went up.

"Now?"

"Why, you just stepped off one bus, you'll be dead!"

"Ah, Margaret, why don't you wait over until the morning at least?"

"It isn't that—it's that telegram. I don't know, it gives me a creepy feeling, I can't shake it off. A thing like that isn't funny, it's—it's malicious; there's something almost dangerous about it. Anyone that would do that—well, there's no telling what—"

"Why don't you try just once more," the old family doctor suggested soothingly. "Maybe he's gotten back in the meantime. Then, if he hasn't and you still feel like going, I'll drive you over to the bus station; my car's right outside now."

This time they didn't bother closing the doors at all; they didn't have to be told to be quiet. With one accord they all shifted out into the hall after her and fanned out in a wide half circle, ringing her and the telephone around, listening in breathless sympathetic silence. It was as though she were holding a public audition for her innermost wifely distress.

Her voice shook a little. "Operator, get me the city again. That same number—Seville 7-6262."

From time to time he could hear a splatter of quick running footsteps somewhere nearby, and a burst of crowing laughter from Cookie, and an "I see you!" from her. Mostly up and down the hall out there.

Hide-and-seek, he supposed tolerantly. They said there were two things that never changed, death and taxes; they should have added a third—children's games. Even this she seemed to be able to go about in a soothing, fairly subdued way, without letting the kid be too boisterous about it. Must be the professional touch, that. He wondered how much kindergarten teachers earned. She was certainly good.

One time there was a stealthy, stalking cessation of sound a little more long-drawn-out than the others, and he looked up to find her hiding herself just within the room doorway. She was standing with her back to him, peeping out around it into the hall. "Ready?" she called genially. Cookie's answer came back with unexpected faintness. "Not yet—wait."

She seemed to enjoy it as much as the kid. That was the right way to play with them, he supposed—put your whole heart and soul into it. Children were quick to spot lack of enthusiasm. You could tell Cookie was already crazy about her. He was evidently seeing her in a different light than he had in the school, where she had to maintain a certain amount of discipline.

She turned her head, found him watching her approvingly. "He's gone into that little storage space built in beneath the staircase," she confided with a twinkle. And then, more seriously, "Is it safe for him to go in there?"

"Safe?" repeated Moran blankly. "Sure—there's nothing in there, couple of old raincoats."

"Ready," a faint voice called.

She turned her head. "Here I come," she warned, and vanished from the doorway as unnoticeably as she had first appeared in it.

He could hear her pretendedly questing here and there for a preliminary moment or two, to keep up the relish of the game longer. Then a straining at woodwork and a muffled burst of gleeful acknowledgment.

Suddenly his name sounded with unexpected tautness. "Mr. Moran!" He jumped up and started out to them. It had been that kind of a tone: hurry. She'd repeated it twice before he could even reach them, short as the distance was.

She was pulling at the old-fashioned iron handgrip riveted to the door. Her face was whitening down around the chin and mouth. "I can't get it open—see, that's what I meant a minute ago!"

"Now, don't get frightened," he calmed her. "There's nothing to it." He grasped the iron handgrip, simply pulled it up a half inch parallel to the door, the latch tongue freed itself, and he drew out the heavy oaken panel. It was set into the back of the staircase structure, half the height of the average door and a little broader. It did not quite meet the floor, either; there was a half-foot sill under it.

Cookie clambered out hilariously.

"See what it was? You were trying to pull it out toward you. It works on a spring latch and you have to free that first by hitching the iron bracket up; then you pull it out."

"I see that now. Stupid of me," she said half-shamefacedly. She gestured vaguely above her heart, fanned a hand before her face. "I didn't let on to you, but what a fright it gave me! Phew! I was afraid it had jammed and he'd smother in there before we could—"

"Oh, I'm sorry . . . darn shame . . ." he said contritely, as if it had been his fault for having such a door in his house at all.

She seemed to want to continue to discuss possibilities, as though there was a hidden morbid streak in her. "I suppose if worse had come to worst, you could have broken it down, though, at a moment's notice,"

"I could have taken something to it, yes," he agreed.

She seemed surprised. He saw her eye glance appraisingly over his husky upper torso. "Couldn't you have broken it down with your bare hands or by crashing your shoulder against it?"

He fingered the edge of the door, guided it outward so she could scan it. "Oh, no. This is solid oak. Two inches thick. Look at that. Well-built house, you know. And it's in a bad place; there isn't room enough on either side to run against it, to get up impetus. The turn of the wall here only gives you a couple yards of space. And on the inside it slants down with the incline of the stairs; you can't even stand up full-length. The closet's triangular, wedge shaped, see? Swing your arm too far back over your shoulder, on either side of the door, and it would jam against the sloping top. Or against the wall indentation out here."

Suddenly, to his surprise, she had lowered her head, gone through the low doorway into the darkness inside. He could hear her sounding the thick sides of it with her palms. She came out again in a moment. "Isn't it well built!" she marveled. "But it's stuffy in there, even with the door open. How long do you suppose a person could last if they did actually happen to get themselves locked into such a place?"

His masculine omniscience was caught unprepared for once. He'd evidently never given the matter any thought before. "Oh, I don't know . . ." he said vaguely. "Hour and a half, two hours at the most." He looked up and down the thing with abstract interest. "It is pretty air-tight, at that," he conceded.

She winced repugnantly at this thought she had herself conjured up, wholesomely changed the subject. Everyone, after all, has odd moments of morbid conjecture. She leaned down, grasped Cookie from below the armpits and started to march his legs stiffly out before him like a mechanical soldier. "Well, mister." Then she deferred to Moran: "Do you think he should go to bed now?"

Cookie started some more vertical emphasis. He was having too good a time to give it up without a battle. "One more! One more!"

"All right, just one more and then that's all," she conceded indulgently.

Moran went back to his chair in the living room. He'd finished his paper. Exhaustively; even down to the quotations of stocks he didn't own but would have liked to. Even down to letters from readers on topics that didn't interest him. He took out a cigar the man he'd lunched with had given him today, appraised it, accepted it for smoking, stripped it and lit it up. He blew a lariat of sky blue around his head with ineffable comfort. He sat there with it for a moment in a complete vacuum of contentment.

It was a seldom enjoyed luxury, and he almost didn't know what to do with it. His head started to nod. He caught it the first time, took time off to put his cigar on the tray beside him so he wouldn't drop it and burn a hole in Margaret's carpet.

Cookie came tiptoeing in with exaggerated mincing of footfalls that was almost a hobbling creep, probably impressed upon him from outside, carrying Moran's soft-toed carpet slippers, one in each hand. Soft toed and soft soled. "Miss Baker says to put these on, you feel better," he whispered sibilantly.

"Say, that's fine," Moran beamed. He bent down and effected the change. "Tell her she's spoiling me."

Cookie tiptoed out with the discarded shoes—heavy soled, thick toed—with as much precaution as when he'd come in, even though the object of his care was unmistakably still awake.

Moran sprawled back and, when the second and third nods came, let them ride. A girl like that oughta . . . oughta be in a jewelry-store window . . . mmmmmm. . . .

He meant well, but oh, God, it was like being on the rack to have to sit there beside him and listen to him. "Yessir, I brought all three of you girls into the world. I can remember the night you came as clear as though 'twere yesterday. And now look at you, sitting here beside me, all grown up and married and with a youngster of your own—"

And frightened, oh, how frightened, she thought dismally, eyes straining for the bus that seemed never to come.

"Doesn't seem possible. No sir, either you grew up too fast or I don't feel old enough for my age, must be one or the other."

She matched her chortle with a wan smile by the faint light of the dashboard.

"I know," he purred. He reached out and grasped her outside shoulder and juggled it hearteningly. "I know. You're all worried and upset and wish you were down there already. Now, honey, don't take on like that. It'll be all right, it's bound to be, how could it help being otherwise? Just 'cause he doesn't answer the telephone? Shucks, he's probably over at one of the neighbors' houses guzzling beer—"

"I know, Dr. Bixby, but I can't help it. It's that telegram. It gives me the most uncanny feeling, and I can't throw it off. Somebody sent that telegram—"

"Nat-chelly, nat-chelly," he chuckled benevolently, "telegrams don't just send themselves. Maybe some blame fool in his office thought he'd like to get back at him. . . ." But he let the thought die out; it wasn't very convincing.

She was staring ahead, down the state highway that skirted the opposite side of the bus station to where the doctor had his Ford parked. "It's late, isn't it? Maybe there aren't going to be any more tonight. . . ." She kept continually putting a finger to her teeth, replacing it a moment later with another one.

Dr. Bixby good-naturedly drew her hand down, held it pressed to her lap. "I broke you of that habit when you were seven; you're not going to make me do it all over again, are you?" He looked ahead through his none-too-spotless windshield. "Here she comes now. See those two lights way off down there? Yep, that must be her, all right."

Something soft brushing against his legs down by the floor roused him. He brought the point of his chin up off the second button of his shirt, looked down blurredly.

Cookie was scampering around down there on all fours like a little animal, head almost lower than his feet. "Still trying to find someplace to hide?" Moran asked fondly.

His young son looked up, sharply corrected his failure to keep abreast of current events. "We not playing now anymore. Miss Baker los' her ring, I'm he'ping her to fine it."

Her voice sounded somewhere outside at that moment. "See it yet, dear?"

Moran roused himself, got up and went out. He remembered seeing it on her when she first came in.

The stair-closet door was wide open, as though she'd already been in there. She was exploring the baseboard across the way, on the opposite side of the hall, slightly bent forward, hands cupped to knees.

"I don't know how it happened to slip off without my feeling it," she said. "Oh, it's probably around somewhere. The only reason I'd feel bad about losing it is my mother gave it to me on my graduation. . . ."

"How about in here?" he said. "Have you looked in here? You stepped in here once, remember, and thumped the sides."

She glanced casually over her shoulder while she continued her search. "I looked in there already, but I didn't have any matches, so it was hard to make sure—"

"Wait a minute, I've got some right here, I'll look again for you. . . ." He stepped across the sill, struck a tarnished gold glow, crouched down with his back to the entrance.

The sound the door made was like a pistol shot echoing up and down the enclosed hallway.

THREE

postmortem on moran

WELL, what'dja find out over there? You seem to be becoming our expert in murders-that-don't-look-like-murders-but-are."

"Sure it was! Certainly it was! How can there be any doubt about it?"

"All right, don't blow all these papers off my desk. Well, Kling tells me the men he put on it don't seem to feel as sure about that as you do yourself. That's why I got his okay on your horning in. He was very nice about it—"

"What?" Wanger became almost inarticulate. "What're they trying to do, build it up that he locked himself in acci—"

His superior sliced his hand at him calmingly. "Now, wait a minute, don't get so touchy. Here's what he means by that, and I can see his point, too. It's true that Mrs. Moran got, or claims she got, an anonymous telegram with her sister's name signed to it. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any trace of it found around the house; it's disappeared, so there's no way of tracing where it was filed from. It may have been filed right here in the city, and in her perturbation she didn't notice the dateline. It's true that the kid keeps prattling about a 'lady' playing games with him. The only two facts that point definitely to an adult agency's being involved are the cut telephone wire and the note on the kid's quilt—"

Wanger forced up his underlip scornfully. "And what about the putty?"

"Meaning the kid couldn't have reached the top of the door with it, that it? No, Kling tells me they tried him out on that. Didn't interfere, just handed him the putty set, said, 'Let's see you cover up the door like the other night,' stood back and watched. When he'd gotten as high up as he could go, he dragged over the three-legged telephone stool, climbed up on that, and his hands spanned the top crack beautifully. Now if he did that, of his own accord and without being coached, the second time, why, they wanna know, couldn't he have done it the first?"

"Hoch!" Wanger cleared his throat disgustedly.

"They put him to another test. They said to him, 'Sonny, if your daddy went in there, what would you do—let him out or make him stay in?' He said, 'Make him stay in there and play a game with me.'"

"Are those guys crazy—where're their heads? I suppose the kid cut the phone wire, too. I suppose he wrote out that note in printed capitals—"

"Let me finish, will you? They're not trying to say that the kid did all those things himself. But they are inclined to think along the lines of it being an accident, with a clumsy frightened attempt on someone's part, afterward, to escape being involved.

"Now here's the theory of Kling's men—and remember, it hasn't jelled, they're just playing around with it until something better shows up: Moran had some lady friend on the side. A fake telegram was sent to the wife to clear the coast. Before the woman got there, Moran, alone in the house with his kid, started playing games with him. He accidentally locked himself in the closet and the damn-fool kid puttied up the door. The woman shows up and Moran is smothered to death in there. She loses her head, deathly afraid of being dragged into it because of her reputation. She puts the kid to bed and leaves an unsigned note pinned to the quilt for the wife. Maybe the phone starts ringing while she's there, and, afraid to answer it, she loses her head even further and cuts the wire. They think she even went so completely haywire that after having already opened the closet door once and seen that Moran was dead, she made a panicky attempt to leave things looking just like she found them by closing the door on him a second time and leaving him in there, even replugging the putty so it would look like the kid's work and nobody else's. In other words, an accident followed by a clumsy attempt at concealment on the part of somebody with a guilty conscience."

"Pew!" said Wanger succinctly, pinching the end of his nose. "Well, here's the theory of your man Wanger: bull fertilizer. Do I stay on or do I come off?"

"Stay on, stay on," consented his overlord distractedly. "I'll get in touch with Kling about it. After all, you can only be wrong once."

They seemed to be playing craps there in the room, the way they were all down on their haunches hovering over something in the middle of the floor. You couldn't see what it was; their broad hacks blotted it out completely. It was awfully small, whatever it was. Occasionally one of their hands went up and scratched at the back of its owner's rubber-tired neck in perplexity. The illusion was perfect. All that was missing was the click of bone, the lingo of the dice game.

A matron stood watchfully looking on, over by the doorway, without taking part in the proceedings herself. Something about her clashed with one's sense of fitness. Almost anyone's sense of esthetic fitness. She kidded the beholder, from the top of her head all the way down to her ankles, that she was going to end bifurcated, in a pair of trousers. Then at the ankles she ended in a skirt anyway; and the sense of harmony was revolted.

Wanger, over in the opposite doorway, where he'd just come in unnoticed, stood taking in what was going on as long as he could stand it. Finally he strode forward, the apelike conclave disintegrated, to reveal a pygmy in the middle of the giants. Cookie looked even smaller than he was against their anthropoidal bulk.

"Not that way, not that way," Wanger protested. "Whaddaya trying to do, anyway—sweat a kid that age?"

"Who's sweating him?" Wanger knew they hadn't been. One of them put away a gleaming pocket watch he'd evidently been dangling enticingly at the end of its chain with complete lack of result.

The matron threw back her head and laughed with a neigh like a horse.

Cookie, with that devilish quickness of children to scent sympathy and play up to it, took one look at Wanger, wrinkled up his muzzle into a monkey grimace and began to emit the moderator opening stanzas of a good hearty bawl.

"Yeah. See?" Wanger said, fixing an accusing eye around the room. "Don't y'know kids that age are afraid of cops to begin with? Each one of you guys is a natural enemy to it, and when you all gang up on it at once—"

"We're in civvies, ain't we?" one of them retorted in perfect seriousness. "He didn't see the badges, so how could he tell?"

"The expert child handler," another chuckled under his breath as they moved toward the door.

The last one said morosely, "I hope y'have better luck than we had. Jazes, I'd rather tackle the hard-to-crackest yegg any day than a kid like this that don't even know what you're saying to it at all."

"It knows all right," Wanger grunted. "It takes a little finesse, that's all."

The matron was the only one who stayed in the room, though her value was problematical. It had been found early in the game that she terrified their "material witness" far more than all the males put together. If she came any closer than the doorway, he went into nightmare hysterics.

Wanger drew up a chair, sat down on it, spread his legs at a ninety-degree angle and perched Cookie on one.

"We're going to play Charlie McCarthy again," the matron chuckled pessimistically. "I don't think he was even awake through the whole thing that night—"

"He was awake all right. Who's doing this?"

Cookie was beginning to know Wanger from previous knee "interviews." He smiled favoringly, perhaps even a trifle venally, up at him. "You got'ny more jelly beans?"

"No, the doctor says I gave y'too many already." Wanger got down to work. "Who made your daddy go in the closet, Cookie?"

"Nomebody made him, he wannedta go. He was playin' a game."

"That's the same place where y'got stumped before," the matron pointed out gratuitously.

Wanger snapped his head around with a flash of unfeigned ill temper, rare with him. "Listen, will you do me a favor!" He drew a long, preparatory belly breath to see him through what he knew he was in for. "Who was he playing the game with, Cookie?"

"Us."

"Yes, but who's us? You and who else?"

"Me and him and the lady."

"What lady?"

"The lady."

"What lady?"

"The lady that was here."

"Yes, but what lady was here?"

"The lady that—the lady that—" It wasn't that Cookie wasn't willing; the dialectics of the thing were throwing him. "The lady that was playing the game with us," he concluded with a burst of inspiration.

Wanger had nearly run through the breath supply he'd laid in by now; he let the dregs of it out with a dejected hiss.

"Y'see how he gets away from y'each time? That kid isn't going to need a mouth when he grows up."

Wanger was not in an equable mood. "Listen, McGovern, I'm not kidding, if you make one more side remark while I'm doing this—"

"Doing what?" the matron wanted to know, but with prudent inaudibility.

Wanger took out a small black pocket notebook. He turned back to his knee-riding witness, who was swinging his legs blithely. "Well, look, what was the name of the game?"

"Hide-n'-seek!" crowed Cookie positively. He was on familiar ground now.

"Whose turn was it first?"

"Mine!"

"And then whose turn was it?"

"'Nen the lady's!"

"And after that?"

"Nen it was my daddy's turn."

"Build-up," murmured Wanger softly. He scribbled almost indecipherably on his free knee, using the curve of one arm to support his other burden: "Invegled—" He crossed it out, substituted, "Invagled—" He crossed that out, too, scrawled, "Lured in during game of hide-and-seek."

Then he looked up bitterly. "What the hell! It don't make sense! How's a strange woman that the guy never saw before going to walk into a house and get a full-grown man to play games with her—just like that!"

The sardonic matron said very softly, to make sure she couldn't be accused of having spoken at all, "You'd be surprised. But not the kind of games you mean."

The book hit the opposite wall and dropped with a little flurry.

"What'sa matter?" asked Cookie, looking after it interestedly. "What'd the book do, ha?"

"Wait a minute, you're taking it for granted he never saw her before, aren't you?" the matron tried to remind him, at the risk of her neck.

"You heard what he says each time!" Wanger hollered over at her wrathfully. "I've got it jotted down in that thing six times over! She never came to their house before."

Cookie started to pucker up into his wizened monkey expression again.

"I'm not sore at you, sonny," Wanger hastily amended, patting the slope of Cookie's head mollifyingly a couple of times.

Then it suddenly came. Cookie looked up at him with the uncertainty of one whose confidence in a relationship has just been shaken. "Whoua you mad at then? Are you mad at Miss Baker?"

"Who's Miss Baker?"

"The lady that was playin' games with—"

Wanger nearly dropped him to the floor on the back of his head. "My God, I actually got her name out of him! Did you hear that? Here I didn't even think he—"

His enthusiasm was short-lived. His face dimmed again. "Aw, it was probably just a spiked handle she gave herself. She started being Miss Baker when she came in the door, she stopped being Miss Baker the minute she got outside it again. If I could only get an idea of what the stall was she sold herself to Moran on, to be let in here like that, it might help some—"

"One of the neighbors?" suggested the matron.

"We've canvassed every one of them for six blocks in all directions. Cookie, what did Miss Baker say to your daddy when he first opened the door and let her in?"

"She said hullo," he faltered tentatively, evidently doing his conscientious best to fulfil what was required of him.

"That's going to start in again," sighed the matron resignedly.

Wanger glanced around in the direction of the stairs. "I wonder if she'd be any help—Ask the doctor if she's in condition to come down for just a minute. Tell him I don't want to question her, y'understand, I just want to see if she can throw some light on a point the kid brought up. I won't keep her a minute."

"Don't take any lead pipe to the kid while I'm out of the room now," the matron warned. "I'm supposed to be in attendance the whole time he's with you."

She returned in a couple of minutes. "They didn't want her to, but she did want to. She'll be right down."

The doctor and a nurse both came in with her. She walked very slowly. The murder hadn't been in the closet out there; it was in here on her face.

"Now, please—" the doctor urged Wanger.

"I promise you," Wanger assured him.

She was a mother. She was half-dead herself, but she was still a mother. "You're not tiring him too much, are you, officer?" She tottered over to the two of them, bent forward and kissed the youngster. The doctor and the nurse held her up, each by an arm.

Wanger almost didn't have the heart to go ahead. But, after all, it had to be done sooner or later. "Mrs. Moran, I don't suppose there's a Miss Baker that you happen to know of. . . . I'm trying to find out if there really is such a person or if it was just a. . . . He just mentioned a Miss Baker—"

He saw the change come over her face before the doctor and nurse did, because she was turned toward him. It had seemed impossible a moment ago that anything could have been added to the emotion she had undergone already, and yet now something was. A climactic excess of horror, to top all the other horror she had experienced, seemed to spread slowly over her face like a cold, viscous film. She pressed two fingers to the outer edge of each eyebrow, as if to keep her skull from flying apart. "Not her!" she whispered.

"That's what he says," Wanger breathed back unwillingly.

"Oh, no—no!"

He correctly translated the meaning she gave the harried negative; not a denial of the person's existence, a denial of the accusation—simply because it was so unthinkable.

"Then there is . . ." he persisted gently.

"The child's—" She pointed, hardly able to articulate. Tears, no longer of grief but of mortal terror, welled unchecked from her eyes. "Cookie's—kindergarten teacher—

If there was anything could make what had happened seem even worse than it was, it was this: to have the cause of it take form, materialize into human shape, cease to remain just an abstraction—become, from an impersonally barred door, the young woman who was in charge of her own child several hours each day.

She crumpled; not in a faint, but her legs gave under her. The nurse and doctor caught her, supported her between them. They pivoted her slowly around to face the door, started her over toward it, taking small steps. She was incapable of saying anything further, but nothing further needed to be said. It was all in Wanger's hands now.

Just before the door closed on the pathetic little procession, the doctor snarled crankily over his shoulder, "You fellows make me sick."

"Can't be helped," answered the detective doggedly. "Had to be done."

She was in the middle of a flock of kids in a subdivided section of the school yard, separated from the rougher activities of the older children. They were playing games, marching one at a time under the arched hands of two pivots, and then being imprisoned there and swung back and forth, and then being given a whispered choice of two incalculable treasures, and then being posted behind one or the other of the two pivots, according to the selection they'd made. They'd never played that in Wanger's day, down on East 11th Street, so he couldn't follow it very closely.

He hated to do this more than he'd ever hated any job before, even though it was not an arrest yet or anything even remotely resembling it. He supposed the sight of the kids made him feel that way. There was something brutal, almost unclean, about hauling her off from here, to find out if she had taken a human life.

She saw him watching and left them a minute and came over to him. She was a short, slender little body with coppery gold hair; young, not more than twenty-four, or -five; pretty behind her shell-rimmed glasses. In fact, even pretty before them, if a trifle more austere. Sparingly gilded with freckles on her cheekbones. They were becoming.

"Were you waiting for one of them?" she asked pleasantly. "The session won't be over for another—"

He'd asked that he be allowed to find his way out here to her unescorted—or rather guided only by a "monitor," one of the older children, who had now gone back—and hadn't explained his business to the principal; it seemed more considerate. "It's you yourself I'd like to speak to," he said. He tried to do his job without frightening her unduly. After all, she was just a stray name on a child's lips, so far. "I'm Wanger, of the police department—"

"Oh." She wasn't particularly frightened, just taken aback.

"I'd like you to come over and see Cookie Moran—you know, Mrs. Frank Moran's youngster—with me as soon as you're through here, if you don't mind."

"Ah, yes—poor little soul," she commiserated.

The game had stalled meanwhile. The children were still in playing formation, all faces turned toward her for further instructions. "Should we start pulling now, Miss Baker?"

She glanced at him inquiringly. "Finish your class out first," he consented. "I'll wait for you."

She went back to her charges immediately, no premonition of impending difficulties seeming to mar her attention to her duties. She clapped her hands briskly. "Ail right, now, children. Ready? Pull! . . . Not too hard now. . . . Look you, Marvin, you're tearing Barbara's sleeve—"

In the classroom later, the children all safely packed into the bus and sent off, he watched her clear the desk at which she held sway over them, putting things neatly away into the drawer. "Those little crayon drawings they do for you–like those you've got there—don't they take them home every day?"

It was the idle question of a man standing by watching something he is not familiar with. It had that sound, at least.

"No, Fridays are our days for that. We let them accumulate during the week, and then on Fridays we clear out their little desks and send everything home with them to show their mothers how they're progressing." She laughed indulgently.

He picked up one of the color plates at random. It was an oversize robin perched on a limb. He chuckled with hypocritical admiration. "Is this pattern from last week or from this week?" Another of those idle, stopgap questions, as if simply to make conversation while she was straightening her hat.

"This week's," she said, glancing around to identify it. "That was their Monday afternoon assignment."

Monday night was the night—

They took a taxi to the Moran house. Wanger was the more diffident of the two, kept looking out the window on his side. "Is this a police matter you're taking me over on or, er, an errand of mercy?" she finally asked, a little embarrassedly. It wasn't the embarrassment of guilt, it was the uncertainty of a totally new, uncharted experience.

"It's just a bit of routine, don't pay any attention to it." He looked out the cab window again as though his thought were a thousand miles away. "By the way, were you over there the night it happened?" He couldn't have made it sound more inconsequential if he'd tried.

Not that he was being unduly considerate or leaning over backward about it; the situation so far didn't warrant any heavier handling. He would have been out of order.

"Over there at the Morans'?" She arched her brows in complete astonishment. "Why, good heavens, no!"

He didn't repeat the question and she didn't repeat the denial. Once each was enough. She was on record.

Wanger had looked on at many confrontations, but he thought he had never been present at a more dramatic one than this. She was so defenseless against the child, in one way. And the child was so defenseless against the whole grown-up world, in another way.

He was overjoyed to see her when the matron brought him in. "H'lo, Miss Baker!" He ran across the room to her, clasped her below the hips, looked up into her face. "I couldn't come to school today because my daddy went away. I couldn't come yesterday, either."

"I know, Cookie, we all missed you."

She turned to Wanger as if to ask, "Now what do I have to do?"

Wanger got down on his haunches, tried to keep his voice low and confidence inspiring. "Cookie, do you remember the night your daddy went into the closet?"

Cookie nodded dutifully.

"Is this the lady that was here with you in the house?"

They waited.

She had to prompt him herself finally, "Was I, Cookie?"

It seemed as though he were never going to answer. The tension became almost unendurable, as far as the grown-ups in the room were concerned.

She took a deep breath, reached down, sandwiched one of his little hands between her two. "Was Miss Baker here with you the night daddy went into the closet, Cookie?" she asked.

This time the answer came so suddenly it almost jolted out of him. "Yes, Miss Baker wuss here. Miss Baker had supper with my daddy and me—'member?" But he was talking directly to her, not to them.

She straightened slowly, shaking her head blankly. "Oh, no . . . I can't understand it. . . ." Their faces had sort of closed up around her. Nothing was said.

"But, Cookie, look at me—"

"No, please don't influence him," Wanger cut in, civilly but decisively.

"I'm not trying to—" she said helplessly.

"Will you wait for me outside, Miss Baker? I'll be with you in just a moment."

When he came out presently, she was sitting by herself out there, in a chair against the wall. True, there was a man busy with something or other in one of the adjacent rooms that commanded the front door, but she didn't know that. She was fastening and unfastening the clasp of her handbag, over and over. But she looked up at him with directness. "I can't understand that—"

He didn't say anything more about it one way or the other. The child was on record now, too, that was all.

He'd brought a crayon-colored outline pattern out to show her. An oversize robin on a bough. "You've already told me that this is the pattern you gave them to fill in Monday afternoon. And that they only bring their work home once a week, on Fridays."

Her eyes clung to it much longer than was necessary for mere identification. He waited a moment, then folded it and put it away.

"But it was found right here in the house, Miss Baker, in the early hours of Tuesday morning. How do you suppose it got here?"

She just looked at the place where it had last gone into his clothing.

"It's possible, of course, that the youngster brought it home with him himself without permission that day, before it had even been marked." The suggestion came from him, questioningly.

She looked up quickly. "No, I—I don't think he did. I excused him ahead of the rest that day, because his mother was waiting outside to take him with her. You can ask Mrs. Moran, but—"

"I have already."

"Oh, well, then—" she stood up. A little added color peered slowly into her face. "Then what was that supposed to be, a verbal trap for me?"

He quirked his head noncommittally.

"This seems to have put me in a somewhat awkward position."

"Not at all," he said insincerely. "Why say that?"

She looked down at her handbag, unfastened and refastened its catch one more time, then suddenly looked up, flung at him with a spirited little flare-up of impatience that matched her hair, "Although I don't know why it should! That was hardly a fair test in there just now."

He was urbane to the point of silkiness. "Why wasn't it? Doesn't the child know you well enough? Doesn't he see you five days a week? It's not conclusive as far as we're concerned, that you're entitled to say, but fair it was."

"But don't you see? A child's mind, a child that age, is as sensitive as an exposed camera plate; it'll take the first impression that comes its way. You asked me not to influence him just now, but you men have undoubtedly already influenced him, maybe without meaning to, during the past few days. He's heard you talking about my being here and now he believes I was. In children the borderline between reality and imagination is very—"

He spoke in a patiently reasoning tone. "As far as our influencing him goes, you're entirely mistaken. We'd never heard the name, any of us, until he first mentioned it, so how could he have heard it from us first? As a matter of fact, we had to send for Mrs. Moran and have her explain who you were, when he first brought it out."

She didn't actually stamp her feet, but she gave a lunge of her body that expressed that state of mind. "But what am I supposed to have done—would you mind telling me? Walked out of here, when such a thing took place, without notifying anybody?"

"Now, please." He spread the flats of his hands disarmingly. "You've already told me once you weren't here, and I haven't asked you a second time, have I?"

"And I repeat I wasn't. Most decidedly! I've never been in this house before today."

"Then that's all there is to it." He made a calming motion, as of pressing something gently downward with his hands. Peace at any price. "Nothing more to be done or said about it. Just give me a rough outline of your movements that night, and we're through. You don't object, do you?"

She quieted down. "No, of course not."

"No offense, it's just routine. We've asked Mrs. Moran that herself."

She had sat down again. Quiet became thoughtfulness. "No, of course. . . ." Thoughtfulness became a loss in innermost contemplation. "No. . . ."

He cleared his throat presently. "Whenever you're ready."

"Oh, beg pardon. I seem to do everything wrong, don't I?" She opened and closed her handbag catch one final time. "The children were sent home at their usual hour. Four, that is, you know. Until I cleared my desk and so on, it must have been four-thirty by the time I left. I went back to my room at the Residence Club, stayed in it until about six, resting and doing a little personal laundering. Then I went out and had my dinner, at a little place down the block where I usually go. You want the name, I suppose?"

He looked ruefully apologetic.

"Karen Marie's; it's a little private dining room run by a Swedish woman. Then I took a walk, and at, oh, sometime around eight, I dropped in to a moving picture—"

"Don't recall just which one it was, I suppose?" he suggested leniently, as though it were the most unimportant thing in the world.

"Oh, oh, yes. The Standard. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, you know. I don't go to them very often, but when I do, the Standard's the only one I go to. Well, that's about all, I guess. I came out when the show did and got back to the Residence Club just a little before twelve."

"All right, well, that'll do very nicely. Thanks a lot, that takes care of everything. Now, I won't keep you any longer. . . ."

She stood up almost unwillingly. "You know, I almost would rather not go under—under these circumstances. I'd feel better if this whole thing were cleared up one way or the other right while I'm still here."

He gave one hand a paddle twist. "There's nothing to clear up. You seem to be reading more into it than we're willing to put into it ourselves. Now don't worry about it, just run along and forget the whole business."

"Well. . . ." She went reluctantly, looking back until the very last, but she went.

The minute the front door had closed on her he seemed to get an electric shock from some unseen source. "Myers!" The man who had been in the room farther down the hall popped out. "Day and night. Don't let her out of your sight a minute." Myers went hustling by to seek the back way out.

"Brad!" Wanger called. And before the staircase had stopped swaying with tumultuous descent: "Beat it out of here fast; check with the Standard Theater and find out the name of the other picture they were showing there Monday night, with Mr. Smith, That's one good thing about double features; they come in handy in our business. Then check with this Karen Marie's place; find out if she ate there, I'm going to go over this alibi of hers every inch of the way and God help her if it doesn't hold up under hundred-pound weights dropped from a height!"

First phone call to Wanger, at the Moran house, twenty minutes later:

"Hey, Lew; this is Bradford. Listen, I didn't have to check with the Standard movie house. The name of the second feature that night was Five Little Peppers, if you still want it. But somebody else stopped by just ahead of me and asked them the same question, I was told. The girl in the box office wondered why all the sudden interest in a grade-B filler."

"Who?" Wanger jumped through the phone at him.

"Her. The Baker girl. I got her description. Must have headed straight over there as soon as she left you. How d'ya like that?"

"I like it pretty well," answered Wanger with grim literalness. "Polish the rest of it off. The kid just came through with the color she was wearing that night. Another of those freak spills, like his popping the name. Dark blue, got it? Go over to the Residence Club, see if you can get a line of what color she had on when she left her room Monday evening; somebody might have noticed. And do it cagey; no badge. I don't want her to tumble. We're taking stitches until the sewing-up's all done. You're just a guy trying to follow up a crush on someone whose name you don't know; you can get to her by elimination."

Second phone call to Wanger, same place, half an hour later:

"Brad again. Holy smoke, is her alibi cheesecloth! I think we've got something now all right."

"All right, never mind the schoolboy ardor; when you've been at this as long as I have you'll realize that the time you think you've got the most is when you've got two big handfuls of nothing."

"Well, d'ya wanta hear it or should I keep it confidential to myself?"

"Don't get fresh, rookie. What is it?"

"She didn't eat in Karen Marie's that night! First the Swen-sky woman that runs it backed her up solid. 'Oh, ya, ya. Sure she vos dare.' Well, after what happened at that movie box office, I dunno why, but something gimme kind of a hunch, so I took a chance and played it. And it paid off!. I threw a big bluff and got tough about it and told her, 'Whattaya trying to do, kid me? Don'tcha suppose I know she was just in here herself and told you to say that, if anyone asked you? Now, d'ya wanta get in trouble or d'ya wanta stay out of it?'

"She caved right in like wet cement. 'Ya,' she admitted, kind of scared, 'she vos here yust now. I like to help her if I could, but as long as you know dot already, I don't want to get in no trouble myself."

"And wait, there's more yet. I spaded around over at the Residence Club lobby. The elevator girl and the desk clerk both remembered seeing her pass through that night, and she was wearing—dark blue."

"Come to papa," intoned Wanger fervently.

Third phone call to Wanger, next day:

"Hello, Lew? This is Myers. I'm outside the school. I've got her safely nailed down until four this afternoon. I've been practically sitting on her shoulders ever since yesterday. But here's a little something just turned up; I wanted you to get it right away. It might mean something and then again it might not. I picked her up when she came out of the Residence Club doorway just now, and on her way to the bus I noticed a fruit-stall keeper give her the old good-morning and she smiled back. So I dropped behind and cased him quick, so I'd still be able to make the same bus she did. He told me she bought half a dozen Florida oranges from him at six o'clock Monday evening. I'm remembering that two glasses of orange juice turned up in the Moran refrigerator the morning after that Mrs. Moran couldn't account for, that she was certain she didn't prepare herself before she went up to her mother's."

"I'm remembering that, too. At six she was on her way out, not in, even according to her own story. She took them somewhere with her. I'm going over there right now and have a chat with the cleaning maid that does her room. One good thing about oranges, from our point of view, is you can't eat the peel, too."

Wanger to superior:

"How's it looking up, Lew?"

"Almost too good to be true. I'm afraid to breathe on it for fear the whole thing'll collapse. Believe it or not, Chief, I've got a life-size, flesh-and-blood suspect at last, after chasing will-o'-the-wisps until now. I've actually talked to her and heard her answer me. I keep pinching myself all the time."

"Pinch her, that'll be a little more constructive."

"This girl has tried to palm off a tissue of lies on us for an alibi. I've heard of them with one weak link, and two weak links, but this thing is spun sugar in the sun! She wasn't at the restaurant where she said she was, she wasn't at the picture show, she left her room in a dark blue outfit. The Moran kid identified her to her face as having been with him and his father that night. A crayon drawing he did in school Monday afternoon was found there in the house in the small hours of Tuesday morning, and Mrs. Moran is dead sure he didn't have it with him when she called for him and took him away. And just to do it up brown: she bought half a dozen Florida oranges at a fruit stall near the club six o'clock Monday evening and rook them with her—to wherever she was going. There were two large double glasses of the stuff found standing in the Moran Frigidaire afterward that Mrs. M is positive were prepared by some other hand than her own. True, there were already oranges in her bin, to the best of her recollection. But then where did the ones this Baker girl bought go to? They never showed up in her room from first to last; I've questioned the cleaning maid and she didn't remove any orange peel from that room all week long, not so much as a dried seed.

"Now, what does it look to you?"

"It looks like three strikes and out. Suppose you let her flounder for, say, another twenty-four hours and see if she goes in any deeper. Then get ready for the jump. But don't lose her whatever you do. Stick close to her day and night—"

"And even at other times," amended Wanger remorselessly.

"This is Wanger, Chief."

"I've been waiting to hear from you. I think you better bring the Baker girl in with you now."

"I am, Chief. I'm calling you from the lobby of the Residence Club right now. I wanted your okay before I go up to her room and get her."

"All right, you've got it. I just got a report that gives the kid's story grown-up confirmation for the first time, even if it's only partial. A man named Schroeder who lives on the other side of the street a few doors down happened to go to his bedroom window to pull down the shade and definitely saw the figure of a woman leaving the Moran house shortly before midnight. He couldn't identify her at that distance and in the dark, of course, but I don't see much sense in holding off any longer."

"No, there isn't. Not with her past record of disappearances. I'll be in in about fifteen or twenty minutes."

The girl elevator operator tried to bar his way. "I'm sorry, sir, no gentlemen are allowed up in the rooms."

"I'm not a gentleman, I'm a detective," Wanger was half-tempted to say, but didn't. He had to admit there had been pickups he'd like better than this one. "The desk cleared me," he told her gruffly. She looked out across the lobby and got a surreptitious high sign that it was all right to go ahead up with him. Wanger hadn't been willing to take a chance on his slippery quarry to the extent of waiting below and having them call her down.

The girl opened for him at the seventh.

"Wait here for me. And no other passengers on the way down, straight trip."

She was all eyes as he made his way down the peaceful, homelike corridor; she could tell it was an arrest.

He knocked on the door. Her voice said unfrightenedly, "Who is it?"

"Open the door, please," he answered quietly.

She did immediately, surprise at the male voice still showing on her face. She had a washbasin full of silk stockings there behind her.

"Would you mind coming over with me?" He was somber about it but not truculent.

She said, "Oh," in a weak little voice.

He stood there waiting in the open doorway. She fumbled around for her outer things in a closet, couldn't get what she was looking for. "I don't know why I'm not frightened," she faltered. "I suppose I ought to be—" She was very badly frightened. She dropped the hanger with her coat and had to brush it off. Then she tried to put the coat on, forgetting to take the hanger out of it.

"Nothing's going to happen to you, Miss Baker," he said morosely.

"I'll have to leave my stockings go, won't I?" she said.

"I guess you better let them go."

She knitted her brows, pulled out the stopper on her way past. "I wish I'd finished them before you got here," she sighed. "Am I coming back?" she asked just before putting the lights out. "Or should I—should I take anything with me for the night?" She was very badly frightened.

He just closed the door for her.

"You see, I've never been arrested before," she said placatingly, accompanying him down the hall, quick nervous little steps to his longer slower ones.

"Cut it out, will ya?" he said gruffly, with a sort of querulous annoyance.

He came into the dim room, looked at her, lit a cigarette whose outer radius of slowly expanding smoke took a moment or two to reach the conical shaft from the shaded light over her. When it did it turned pale blue, like something in a test tube. "Crying won't do any good," he said with distant correctness. "You're not being mistreated in any way. And you have only yourself to blame for being here."

"You don't know what it means—" she said in the direction his voice had come from. "You deal in arrests, to you it's nothing. You can't possibly know what goes through you, when you're in your room, secure and contented and at peace with the world one minute, and the next someone suddenly comes for you to take you away. Takes you down through the building you live in, in front of everybody, takes you through the streets—and when they get you there you find out you're supposed to have—to have murdered a man! Oh, I can't stand it! I'm frightened of the whole world tonight! I feel as though I were in the middle of one of those stories told to my own children, suddenly come true; bewitched, held under the power of some ogre's spell."

And as she wept, she tried to smile into the darkness at them, in apology.

Another voice spoke up from the perimeter of gloom: "D'you think Moran had an easy time of it, that last half hour or so in the closet? You didn't see him when he was taken out; we did."

She pressed her hair flat to her head, soundlessly.

"Don't," Wanger said in an aside. "She's the sensitive type."

The unseen matron made a plucking sound at her lips with her tongue, to express her own opinion on that subject.

"I didn't know it was a murder. I didn't know it was done to him purposely!" the girl on the wooden chair said. "When you had me out there at their house the other day, I simply thought it had been an accident, that he'd locked himself in some way, and the child hadn't realized the seriousness of the danger, and then afterward perhaps, to escape the blame, as children will, had made up the story that I was there."

Wanger said, "That doesn't alter the case any. That's not what we're talking to you about now. You didn't eat at the Swedish woman's. You didn't go to the Standard. But you went to both of those places afterward and told them to say you did! Then you wonder why you're here."

She held one wrist with the other hand, twisting at it circularly. Finally she said, "I know—I didn't realize I was being watched so soon—you seemed so friendly that afternoon."

"We don't give warnings."

"I didn't know it was a murder; I thought it was just the child's little fib I had to contend with." She took a deep breath. "I was—with my husband. His name is Larry Stark, he—he lives at 420 Marcy Avenue. I made dinner for him at his apartment and was there all evening."

It made no impression. "Why didn't you tell us that the first time you were asked?"

"I couldn't, don't you see? I'm a teacher, I'm not supposed to be married, it'll cost me my job."

"We've shot your first story to pieces, there's nothing left of it; naturally you've got to replace it, you can't just stand on thin air. Why should we believe this one any more than the first?"

"Ask Larry—he'll tell you! He'll tell you I was there with him the whole time."

"We'll ask him all right. And he probably will tell us you were there with him. But the Moran child tells us you were there with him. And the crayon drawing tells us you were there with him. And the two glasses of orange juice in the icebox tell us you were there with him. And your dark blue suit tells us you were there with him. And your own actions for the past few days tell us you were there with him. That's quite a lineup to buck, little girl."

She gave a wordless intake of breath and let her head tilt back across the chair back.

A shaft of yellow corridor light slashed through the foursquare darkness around her and a voice said, "He's ready for her now."

Wanger's chair scraped back. "It's a little late for that now. It won't do you as much good as if you'd come out with it in the beginning. This thing's well under way, Miss Baker, and it seldom pays to change trains in the middle of a trip—you're liable to fall down between the two of them."

His hand became visible up past the wrist, reaching out into the downpouring cone of light for her.

She was crying again, soundlessly as ever, when the matron and Wanger brought her up before his superior's desk.

"So this is the young lady?" Under other circumstances it might have been misconstrued as a half-friendly opening remark. It wasn't meant that way.

A phone beside him stuttered, "D-d-d-d-d-ding, br-r-r-r-ring."

He said, "Just a minute." Then he said, "Who? Yes, there's a Wanger here, but you can't use his extension. Well, what is it you—"

He lowered it, looked across the desk at him. "There's somebody has something to tell you about this girl you just brought in. Go ahead, see what it is."

He motioned, and the matron stepped outside with Miss Baker again.

"The husband, I guess," Wanger murmured, moving around beside him and picking up the instrument.

A woman's voice said, "Hello, is this Wanger?"

"Yes. Who is it wants to—" he started to say warily.

The other voice cut through his like a knife through butter. "I'm doing the talking. You've just brought a girl in with you from the Women's Residence Club. A Miss Baker, a kindergarten teacher. That right? Well, this is just to tell you she had nothing to do with what happened to Moran in that closet; I don't care how it looks or what you think you know or what you think you've found out."

Wanger started to have ants in his pants, to squirm around trying to keep the mouthpiece silenced and at the same time signal, "Trace this! Trace this!" to his superior.

The voice was almost telepathic. "Yeah, trace this, I know," it observed dryly. "I'm getting right off, so don't waste your time. Now, just in case there are any doubts in your minds, and you want to pass me off as a crank, the note pinned to the Moran kid's quilt read, 'You have a very sweet child, Mrs. Moran. I am leaving him where he will be safe until you return, as I would not want any harm to come to him for the world.' Miss Baker couldn't possibly know that, because you haven't given it out yourselves. Their radio's a Philco, he reads the Sun, I gave him scrambled eggs for his last meal, there were two moldy raincoats in the closet, and his whole cigar burned down without losing its shape, next to the chair he was last sitting in. You'd better let her go. Goodbye and good luck." Click.

The other phone on his chief's desk was ringing at that very moment.

"A pay telephone in the Neumann Drugstore, corner of Dale and Twenty-third!'"

Wanger nearly pulled the door off its hinges, left it open behind him.

Six minutes and eighteen seconds later he was panting his insides out into the face of a startled proprietor hauled out from behind the prescription counter. "Who just put in a call from that middle booth there, where the bulb is still warm?"

The proprietor shrugged with expansive helplessness. "A woman. Do I know who she was?"

Wanger's record on Frank Moran:

Evidence: 1 note in hand-printed capitals pinned to quilt on child's bed.

      1 crayon-colored outline drawing, probably an adult imitation of a child's handiwork.

      Case Unsolved.

PART FOUR

ferguson

For the portent bade me understand

Some horror was at hand.

—de Maupassant

ONE

the woman

IT WASN'T A well-attended exhibition, even as one-man shows go. Perhaps he hadn't made enough of a name yet. Or perhaps he had already made too much of a name—in the wrong direction. For his work was not only to be met with here, in this gallery; you could also find it on every subway newsstand in town, nearly any day in the month, hanging diagonally downward from a little clip. For twenty-five cents you could take it home with you, and get not only the cover but a whole magazine full of reading matter behind it. And that, almost anyone in attendance at the gallery would have told you, was certainly success in the wrong direction.

But there were a few who came just the same, not so much because it was his work as because it was an art exhibition. They were the usual types who never missed an art exhibition, no matter whose, no matter where. A scattering of the dilettantes, or, as they would have preferred to be known, the cognoscenti, were drifting superciliously around, simply to have something to chatter about over their next party cocktails. A stray dealer or two was on hand, just to be on the safe side if there was any interest shown in this particular talent. A couple of second-string critics were there, because of their jobs. The exhibit would get only a half column in tomorrow's papers. Encouragingly phrased, perhaps, but only a half column.

Then there were the two visiting ladies from Keokuk who had come to this because they were starting back home tomorrow night and it was the only one available in the time left to them and they had to take in at least one art exhibit while they were in the city. Anyway, his name was a nice American name, easy to remember and tell "the girls" about back home when they attended their next Ladies' Thursday.

And then there was the professional art student. You could spot her in a minute just by looking at her. Here taking notes or something. The same type that sits down and copies Old Masters in the art museums. Intensely serious, a hungry look on her face, horn-rimmed glasses, lank bobbed hair under a dowdy tam-o'-shanter, oblivious of her surroundings, moving raptly from canvas to canvas, every once in a while jotting down some mystic abracadabra of her own in a cheap little ten-cent ruled notebook.

She seemed to have some inchoate critical canons of her own; she passed by still lifes, landscapes and groups with the merest of glances. It was only the portrait heads that drew her conscientious memorandums. Or perhaps that just came under the head of specialization; she was already too far advanced in her studies for fruit and sunsets.

She crept mouselike from room to room, standing back whenever somebody wanted to get a comprehensive look at one of the same subjects she had chosen. No one even looked twice at her. To begin with, the cognoscenti were so very audible that it was hard to be aware of anyone else while they were around. They saw to that.

"Auch. His pictures are photographs, I tell you! It might as well be 1900. There might as well have never been Picasso. His trees are simply trees. They don't belong in a frame, they belong out in the woods with the other trees. What is remarkable about a tree that looks like a tree?"

"How right you are, Herbert! Doesn't it turn your stomach?"

"Photographs!" repeated the male cognoscente belligerently, glancing around to make sure he was overheard.

"Snapshots," contributed the female as they strode on, outraged.

One lady from Keokuk who was slightly hard of hearing asked her companion, "What're they mad at, Grace?"

"They're mad because you can recognize what the pictures are about," the other one whispered informatively.

The art student sidled inconspicuously by, without pausing before the scorned trees—which should have been shriveled and sere by now, after the blast they'd received.

The cognoscenti had stopped and taken out their scalpels again, this time before a portrait.

"Isn't that too pathetic for words? He shows the part in her hair, the very shadow cast by her lower Up. Why bother doing a picture at all? Why doesn't he just take a living girl and stand her up there behind an empty frame? Realism!"

"Or why not just hang up a mirror and call it Portrait of the Passerby? Naturalism! Bah!"

The art student came up in their wake and this time jotted down a note. Or rather, a pothook. The little lined blank book she was carrying bore four scribbled notations: "Black," "blond," "red" and "intermediate." Under "black" was a long perpendicular column of pothooks. Under "blond" there were only two. Under the other two classifications none at all, so far. She was evidently spending her afternoon taking a census of the types of hair coloration to be found in a cross section of this particular exhibitor! Strange are the ways of art students.

The gallery was closing for the afternoon now. The stray dealer or two had gone long ago; there was nothing here for them. Good enough stuff, but why load up on it? The few-remaining bitter-enders came straggling out. The cognoscenti emerged, still loudly complaining. "What a waste of time! I told you we should have gone to see that new foreign film instead." It was noticeable, however, that they had remained as long as there was anyone at all around to hear their pontifications.

The visiting ladies from Keokuk came out with a grim air of having done their duty. "Well, we kept our word," one consoled the other. "It's sure hard on your feet though, isn't it?"

The art student was the last one of all to leave. The notations in her little blank book now stood: black—15; blond—2; red—0; intermediate—1. Out of a total of eighteen portrait heads he had displayed, one conclusion was possible: the artist had a penchant for dark-haired subjects.

At any rate, she alone of all the visitors had an air of having put in a thoroughly satisfactory afternoon, of having accomplished just what she had set out to do.

She buttoned her shabby coat close up under her chin and trudged up the darkening street, back into the anonymity from which she had emerged.

TWO

ferguson

FERGUSON HAD JUST finished arranging his easel and canvas when the knock on the door came. "Be right with you," he said, and started laying out his oil tubes.

He didn't look like a painter. Maybe because they don't anymore. He didn't have a beard, or a beret, or a smock, or velvet pants. He knocked down a thousand a magazine cover. But in between he liked to do serious stuff, "for himself," as he put it. One whole side of the studio was glass—the essential northern light. But that side didn't rise up straight like the other three walls; it slanted in at an angle, so that it was a cross between an upright wall and a skylight.

He went over to the door and opened it. "You the new model?" he said. "Come over here by the light and let me look at you. I don't know whether I can use you or not. I told the agency I wanted a—"

He stopped faultfinding and held his breath. He had her over in the full glare of the skylight wall by now. "Sa-ay," he exhaled finally, between a long-drawn whistle and reverent hiss. "Where have you been keeping yourself? Turn around a little, that's it. Maybe you don't fit the specifications for the ginger-ale spread, but, baby, I'm using you all right! You're just what I had in mind for that Diana-the-huntress thing, for myself. I think I'll begin that, now that you're here, and the commercial can wait."

She was raven haired, creamy skinned, and her eyes seemed violet behind the imperceptible shadow line she had drawn around them.

"Who'd you work for last?"

"Terry Kaufmann."

"What's he trying to do, hog you all to himself?"

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"Sure I know the bum," he said jocularly.

She dropped her eyes momentarily, caught her lip between her teeth. Then she looked up at him with renewed confidence.

He was rubbing his hands exuberantly, overjoyed at this unexpected find. "Now, there could be only one possible catch. How's the figure?"

"Okay, I guess," she said demurely.

"Y'better let me see for myself. You can go in the dressing room there and hang up your things. You'll find the stuff I want you to put on all laid out in there. The gold bangle goes on the left arm, and hook the leopard-skin kilt so that the opening's at the side; your thigh shows through."

She moistened her lips. One hand went helplessly up toward her shoulder. "Is that all?"

"That's all; it's a semi-nude. Why? You've posed before, haven't you?"

"Yes," she said, face impassive, and went unhesitatingly into the dressing room.

She came out again, as unhesitatingly, but with her face held rigidly half-averted, in about five minutes' time. Her bare feet made no sound on the floor.

"Beautiful!" he said fervently. "Too bad those things don't last. In two years it'll be gone, as soon as they start dragging you around to cocktail parties. What's your name?"

"Christine Bell." she said.

"All right, now get up there and I'll show you how I want you. It's going to be a very tough pose to hold, but we'll take it in easy shifts. Crouch forward now, dead center toward the canvas, one leg out behind you. I want her to seem to be coming right out of the frame at them when they look at the picture. Right arm bent out in front of you, grasping something, like this. Left arm drawn back, past your shoulder. That's it. Freeze. Steady, now, steady. You're supposed to be stalking something, about to let fly an arrow at it. I'll put the bow in later; you obviously couldn't pose for any length of time holding it stretched taut, the strain would be unendurable."

He didn't speak anymore once he had begun to work. At the end of thirty minutes she moaned slightly. "All right, let's knock off for five minutes," he said casually. He picked up a crumpled package of cigarettes, took one out, tossed the package lightly over to her on the stand.

She let it fall to the floor. Her face was white with anguish when he turned to look at her. His eyes narrowed speculatively. "Are you as experienced as you say?"

"Oh, yes, I—"

Before she could go ahead there was a sudden knock at the door. "Busy working, come back later," he called. The knock repeated itself. The girl on the stand made a supplicating gesture, said hurriedly, "Mr. Ferguson, I need the money so bad; give me a chance, won't you? That's probably the model from the agency—"

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I was hanging around there trying to get taken on, but they won't take you on, they've got a waiting list this long, and I heard them telephoning to her to report over here to you, so I went downstairs and called her back from a public booth and let her think it was still the agency. I told her it was an error, she wasn't wanted after all, and I came over in her place; but I guess she's found out since. Won't you try me at least, won't I do?" The pleading look on her face would have melted a heart of stone, much less an artist's susceptible one, always touched by beauty.

"Tell you better in a minute." He seemed to be having a hard time keeping a straight face. "Get back out of sight," he whispered conspiratorially. "We'll give it the old Judgment-of-Paris workout."

He went to the door, held it open narrowly, staring intently outside with critical appraisal. Once he turned his head and glanced over at the first candidate, cowering against the wall, arms crossed over her bosom with unconscious—or was it unconscious—artistry. Then he reached into his pocket, took out a crumpled bill, handed it through the door. "Here's your carfare, kid; I won't need you," he said gruffly.

He went back to the easel with a suppressed grin struggling to free itself at the corners of his mouth. "There's even muscling-in in this racket," he chuckled. The grin overspread his features unhampered. "Okay, Diana, up and at 'em!"

He poised his brush again.

Corey, highball glass in hand, paused before the easel in the course of his aimless wandering about the studio, fingered the burlap carelessly flung over it. "What's this, the latest masterpiece? Mind if I take a look?"

"No, stay away from that. I don't like anyone to see my pieces before they're finished," Ferguson answered above the hiss of the seltzer water.

"You don't have to be bashful with me, I'm not a competitor. What I don't know about art would—" The sacking had gone up and he was standing there rooted to the spot.

Ferguson turned his head at the continuing silence. "Well, if it takes your breath away like that before it's even finished," he said hopefully, "imagine what it'll do after the fixative's gone on."

Corey shook his head vaguely. "No, I'm trying to think. There's something vaguely familiar about that girl's face."

"Oh, sure, I expected that," Ferguson said dryly. "Well, you don't get her phone number out of me, not till after this picture's finished, if that's what you're—"

"No, I mean it. It hit me like a flash when I first lifted the sacking. Now I've lost it again. Like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue and can't bring it out. Where the devil have I seen those ice-cold eyes before and that warm, kissable mouth? What's her name?"

"Christine Bell."

"I don't know her by name, at any rate. Have you ever used her before? Maybe I've seen her on some of your covers."

"No, she's brand-new. I'm just breaking her in, so you haven't."

"There's just enough familiarity about the eyes and mouth to tease my memory. There isn't enough about the whole head in general, the hair for instance, to help me place her definitely. Damn it, Ferg, I know I've seen that girl somewhere before!"

Ferguson dropped the protective sacking over the canvas once more, somewhat like a jealous hen guarding its chick. They both moved away.

But Corey came back to the subject again later, just before he left, as though it had lain uppermost in his mind all the while. "I won't get any sleep now until I get straightened out on that." He went out, casting troubled backward glances at the covered canvas to the very last, until the door had closed after him.

She winced delicately as Ferguson notched the arrow into the bowstring, fitted the integrated weapon into the formalized pose of her hands. "Wasn't that horrible, the way that snapped through my fingers yesterday? I almost hate to touch it, after that!"

He laughed good-naturedly. "It wasn't horrible, but it sure could have been—if my neck had been two inches farther back, where it belonged and where it had been a minute before! What saved me was I happened to bend my head toward the canvas just then to concentrate on a detail I was working on. I felt this streak of air shoot past the nape of my neck and the next thing I knew the arrow was wobbling in the wooden frame between two of the skylight panes over there."

"But it could have killed you, couldn't it?" she lamented, wide-eyed.

"If it had happened to hit me in the right place—the jugular vein or dead center to the heart—I suppose so. But it didn't, so why worry about it?"

"But wouldn't it be better if I used one with a guard, a protective knob on the end of it?"

"No, no, I'm nothing if not realistic; I go flat when I fake things, even such a simple thing as an arrowhead. Don't be nervous now. It was just one of those hundred-to-one shots. Most likely you were unconsciously pulling it tighter and tighter as the tension of posing grew on you, and then without realizing it you let your muscles relax to try to ease them, and the damn thing sprang! Just remember not to pull it all the way back. Pull it only enough so that the bowstring isn't relaxed, forms a straight line to the arrow cleft; that's all you've got to do."

When they had taken time out and the cigarette package had passed between them on the fly, as a hand cloth does between gymnasts, she remarked, "Strange that you should become a painter."

"Why?"

"You always think of them as sort of gentle people. At least, I always did until now."

"I am gentle. What makes you think I'm not?"

She murmured, so low he could barely hear her, "Maybe you are now. You weren't always so gentle."

Then afterward, when she was back on the stand, bow stretched toward him in shooting position, she said, "Ferguson, you bring happiness to many people. Did you ever—bring death to anyone?"

His brush halted in midair, but he didn't turn to look at her. He stared before him as though seeing something in the past. "Yes, I have," he said in a subdued voice. His head inclined a little. Then he straightened it, went ahead retouching. "Don't talk to me while I'm working," he reminded her evenly.

She didn't anymore, after that. There wasn't a sound in the studio, and scarcely a motion. Only two things moved; the long slender stem of the paintbrush between his deft fingers; the retreating steel-tipped head of the arrow as it slipped slowly back upon the shaft to the position of uttermost tension the cord was capable of. A third thing there was that moved: a shadow played back and forth across the hollow of her left arm, as the white flesh contracted, as the tendons below it strained. Only those three things were not still, in the vibrant, supercharged silence.

Then suddenly there was a rain of jovial blows against the studio door, and a bevy of voices called, "Come on, Ferg, let us in. Union hours, you know!"

The arrowhead edged unnoticeably forward again, past the staff, as the strain was let out of the cord, degree by degree. She exhaled in such a peculiar, exhausted way that he turned to ask, "Matter, can't you take it?"

She shrugged, threw him a glazed smile, "Sure, but—too bad we couldn't have finished it, while we were at it."

She had never dressed under such difficulties before. The dressing-room door had no lock, and after the first inadvertent discovery that she was in there, they kept purposely trying to break in on her every few minutes, to tease her. Even Ferguson added his voice to the good-natured clamor. "Come on out, Diana, don't be modest—you're among friends."

Once the critical moment of transition from the leopard kilt to nothing to her own underthings was safely past, the worst was over. She effected this by wedging herself against the door—it opened inward—and blocking it with her body while she struggled into her things. Every moment or two it flounced against her, forcing her forward a little; then she would flatten it behind her again and go ahead with her dressing. She had never put on stockings that way before; it was an acrobatic feat.

Judging from the sounds going on in the studio proper, the party was no temporary intrusion. It was going to be an all-night affair, one of those snowball things that kept rolling up more people as it went along. Twice already the outer door had stormed open and new voices had come screaming in. "So this is where you are! I went looking for you at Mario's and when you weren't there—"

Once she heard Ferguson at the phone bawling his lungs out above the bedlam: "Hello, Tony? Send over some one-gallon jugs of Spanish red. That monthly hurricane has just hit here again. Yeah, you know the one."

There were shrieks of protest, "What that man makes on commercials alone, and the best he can offer us is Spanish red!"

"Champagne! Champagne! Champagne, or we'll all go home!"

"All right, go home!"

"Just for that we won't! Ble-e-eh."

Dressed, she stroked the side of her own face uncertainly, looked around. There was no other way out of here than through the studio. She turned, opened the door narrowly and peered out. They were already thick as bees out there—or seemed to be, the restless way they kept moiling around. Somebody had brought in some sort of stringed instrument—as bohemians, they evidently wanted no part of mechanical music—and was plucking vigorously if not too expertly at it. A girl was dancing on the model's platform.

She watched her chance, and when the line of escape from dressing room to studio door was least populous, she slipped out, threaded her way diagonally across that corner of the vast room and tried to make her exit unobserved—or at least unquestioned.

It was an attempt that was foredoomed to failure. Somebody shouted, "Look, Diana!" There was a concerted rush over toward her, and she was swept into their midst as if by a maelstrom. They were unhampered by conventional formality.

"How beautiful! Oh, just look, how beautiful!"

"And trembling like a frightened gazelle. Ah, Sonya, why don't you tremble for me like that anymore?"

"I do darling, I still do; but with laughter now, every time I look at you."

When the first effusion of appraisal and praise was over, she managed to draw Ferguson aside. "I have to go—"

"But why?"

"I don't want all these people to—to see me—I'm not used to it—"

He misunderstood. "On account of the picture, you mean? Because it's a semi-nude?" He found this so charming, he promptly repeated it to the whole assemblage at the top of his voice.

They found it charming, too; it was that thing they were always looking for, the unusual. This brought on another group formation around her. The girl named Sonya seized her hand, clasped it protectively between her two, blew upon it as if to cherish some impalpable virtue it possessed. "Ah, she's still so innocent!" she condoled, no sarcasm intended. "Never mind, dear. Just spend ten minutes in my Gil's company and you'll get over it."

"Did you?" somebody asked her.

"No," she shrugged. "He spent five minutes in my company and he got it."

They meant well. Ferguson backed the canvas to the wall. "Nobody look at that picture. Nobody so much as think about it!"

"She ends below the shoulders!" somebody else proclaimed.

"She is a bust," Sonya added fervently. Then with a quick clutch at her arm, "Not in the slang sense, dear."

If her unease had stemmed from the cause they ascribed it to, she could not have helped but overcome it; they all tried so heartily to make her feel at home. Since it didn't, it persisted. She finally acquiesced to the extent of sitting on the floor against the far wall, a cup of untasted red wine on one side of her, an intense young man reciting some of his own blank verse on the other. She sat there passively, but her eyes kept calculatingly measuring the distance between herself and the studio door. Her hands suddenly clenched spasmodically on the floor, slowly opened out again.

"Ah!" the blank-verse poet exulted. "That last line struck home. Its beauty pierced your heart. I could tell by the change that came over your face."

He was wrong.

Corey had just turned up across the room from her, was standing there over by the entrance—drawn as unerringly by a party, any party, even one going on all the way across town from him, as a bloodhound is by the scent he has been set to track down.

Seconds hung like moments in the air, moments hung like quarter hours. Her eyes, which had sought refuge on the floor, slowly, unwillingly traveled the ascending arc of the figure that had come to halt directly before her.

"Wait, let him finish first," she had said in a smothered voice. The intense young man's blank verse had never been as highly appreciated before as at this moment, would never be again.

Thick soles with welt edges. Heavy brown brogues with punctured scrollwork on their toes. Ten-dollar shoes. Then long legs, in trousers of a fuzzy tweed mixture. The hands—they'd tell, wouldn't they? Still unflexed. One hooked onto a side coat pocket by its thumb, the other negligently holding a cigarette just a little above hip level. Signet ring on its little finger. Golden glint of hair on its back, visible only by indirection. Two-button jacket, top one left open. The face was coming, couldn't be dodged any longer. The tie, the collar, the chin. The face at last. The two looks, fusing just as the last line of blank verse died into silence.

Then Ferguson's jovial voice, somewhere close beside them: "Now call his bluff, Diana!"

She got up slowly, at bay against the wall, working her back against it a little to aid her legs. "I can't," she said to where the voice had come from, without looking that way, "until you tell me what it is—and until you introduce me."

"There you are, there's your answer!" Ferguson jeered at him.

Corey wouldn't take his eyes off her. She couldn't take hers off him, as though afraid to trust him out of their sight a single instant. He said, "All kidding aside, haven't I met you before?"

Even if she'd given an answer, even if she'd wanted to, it would have been drowned in the howl of friendly derision that went up.

"Look, there are moths flying around from that one!"

"You should oil up that technique."

"Is that the best the Great Lover can get off?"

Sonya squalled informatively to someone, with that dead-earnest mannerism of hers, "Yes, didn't you know? That's how they make girls in the upper-middle classes. A friend of mine who went uptown once told me. She had it said to her three times in one night."

Corey was laughing with them at his own expense, shoulders shaking, facial muscles working, everything humorously attuned except those coldly speculative eyes that wouldn't leave hers.

The girl they held pressed to the wall with their stabbing stare shook her head slightly, smiled a little in regretful negation. She stood there a moment, then maneuvered her way out of the corner pocket he had her backed into, sauntered across the room, conscious his head had turned to look after her, conscious his eyes were following her every aimless step of the way.

She found refuge on the other side of the studio for a while, took shelter with almost the entire personnel of the party between them for a buffer. In fifteen minutes he had marked her down again, came bringing a cup of red wine over, for an excuse.

She seemed to grow rigid when she saw what he was bringing her, swallowed hard, as though there lay some danger in the imminent courtesy itself, apart from the fact of his approach.

He reached her finally, held it out to her, and the pupils of her eyes dilated. She seemed afraid to accept it and equally afraid to refuse it, afraid to drink it and equally afraid to set it aside untasted—as though anything she did with it bore a penalty of flashing recollection. She took it finally, touched it toward her lips, then held it behind her with one hand, safely out of sight.

He said, blinking troubledly, "I nearly had it for a minute when I handed you that just then, and then I lost it again."

"You're torturing the hell out of me, quit it!" she flared with unexpected savagery. She turned away from him and went into the dressing room.

He followed her even in there after a decent interval of ten minutes or so. There was no impropriety in it, the room was open to the party now.

She began busily tapping at her nose with a puff before the mirror the instant that she saw him nearing the outside of the doorway. Until then—

He came up behind her. She saw him in the glass but didn't seem to. Standing at her shoulder he placed his hands one at each side of her face, as if trying to obliterate the dark luxuriant masses of hair that framed it.

She stood motionless under the ministration, without breathing. "What're you doing that for?" She didn't pretend to misunderstand it as a caress.

He sighed and his hands fell away. He hadn't been able to cover her entire head with them after all.

She turned partly aside from him, folded her arms, chafed their upper parts uncomfortably, bent her head downward. It was a pose strangely suggestive of penitence. She wasn't thinking in terms of penitence. She was seeing in her mind's eye a sharp little paint-scraping knife of Ferguson's that was somewhere about the place. She was seeing in her mind's eye the masses of people there were in the adjoining room. Perhaps, too, the diagonal line of escape that led from this dressing room to the outside studio door.

He'd finished lighting a cigarette. He spoke through smoke. "It wouldn't bother me like this if it weren't so."

"It isn't so," she said dully. With dangerous dullness, still looking down.

"I'll get it eventually. It'll suddenly come to me when I least expect it. Maybe five minutes from now. Maybe later on tonight, before the party's over. Maybe not for days. What's the matter? You're looking a little pale."

"It's so stuffy in here. And that red wine, I'm not used to it—especially on an empty stomach, you know."

"You haven't eaten?" he said with extravagant concern.

"No, I was posing, you know, when they broke in on us, and I haven't been able to get away since. He doesn't seem to feel it, but I haven't had anything since ten this morning."

"Well, er, how about coming out and having something with me now? Even though I don't exactly seem to have made a hit—"

"Why shouldn't I go with you? I have nothing against you. All contributions gratefully accepted."

"Don't say anything to the rest of them or they'll gang up on us."

"No," she agreed, "it would be better if we're not seen leaving—"

"Have you got everything? I had a hat out there somewhere in that pile. I'll see if I can dredge it up on the Q.T. Meet me over by the door; we'll make a break and run for it."

Their crafty preparations for impending departure did not go as unnoticed as they had hoped. Sonya chugged past at random, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke after her like a straining locomotive on an upgrade.

"Watch yourself with him," she said curtly over her shoulder.

The overshadowed figure behind her murmured with a gleam of eyes, "I'll make sure he doesn't get very far past just telling me where it is he thinks he saw me before."

"And just in case your hands slip off the throttle, here—take down my address. You can come around and have a nice long cry at my place tomorrow. There's nothing like a good stiff cry for washing down a seduction. And I'll make you some of my own special borscht."

"I'll watch out."

Sonya wasn't being flippant, far from it. "No, the reason I warn you is he's got such a direct approach that no one ever takes it seriously—until it's over. A girl I used to go around with—she laughed her head off at him all night long at a party one night. She only let him take her as far as her door. Then the next day she came around and ate borscht."

She went chugging off again billowing plumes of smoke. You almost expected to hear a train whistle blow.

They'd got as far as the foot of the outside stairs when they were stopped again. There was a thundering stampede behind them that sounded like six people in pursuit. It was only Ferguson.

"Say, will you do your foraging someplace else? I need her for a picture."

"Do you own her soul?"

"Yes!"

"Fine. Well, then, it's just the body I'm taking with me. You'll find her soul up there on the canvas."

Ferguson straightened his tie determinedly. "Well, then, we're both going with the body."

They weren't openly truculent about it, but both were in that mercurial state of mind where there is no longer much of a borderline between horseplay and hostility.

The girl surreptitiously sliced her hand against the side of Corey's arm, as if asking him to leave this to her, drew Ferguson a few steps away, out of earshot.

"I'm going with him—to get rid of him. This is the simplest way there is. See if you can clear the rest of them out up there; "I'll come back later and we'll finish the picture. Or have you had too much to drink?"

"This red ink? This isn't drink."

"Well, don't drink any more then. I'll be back in an hour—in an hour and a half at the latest. Be sure you have them out by then. Wait up there for me."

"Is that a promise?"

"That's more than a promise, it's a dedication."

He turned and, without another word, tramped stolidly up the stairs.

Corey prodded a wall switch, and a small apartment living room lit up. "After you," he said with mock gallantry.

She took two bored steps forward into the place and let her eyes stray halfheartedly around, without any real interest. "Well, now what do we do here?" she asked abruptly.

He shied his hat off someplace where there was nothing to catch it. "You don't seem to get the hang of things very easily, do you?" he said, thin lipped with annoyance. "Do you have to have outline drawings?"

She turned her face aside to her shoulder an instant. "Don't. I hate that word."

She moved ahead toward a dark opening. "What's in there?"

"The other room," he said disgruntledly. "Go ahead in and see it by yourself if you want to. I'm warning you, you're rushing things. That doesn't come for about another ten minutes yet."

It lighted up and she passed from sight. It darkened and she came in again to where he was. He was swirling a coil of rye around in the bottom of a glass. "Aren't you terrified?" he sneered. "It was a bedroom!"

A scornful catch sounded in her throat. "You're the one seems to be terrified. What do you have to do, build up your courage with that stuff?"

"We'll take that up in a few minutes—if you've got breath enough left to ask it."

She went over to a kneehole desk, shot open a drawer or two. "Desk," he said scathingly. "You know, four legs, something you write on." He put his glass down. "Lemme get something straight, just for the record. What was your idea was going to happen when you okayed coming up here with me? You were willing enough when I first put it up to you."

"Because you were too willing to see me back to my place otherwise. My willingness beat yours to the punch, that was all."

"And what's over at your place that you're leery of?"

She shot open a third drawer, shot it closed again. "You name it. My dear old mother. A six-month-old kid that I support by my modeling. Or maybe it's just that the washbasin is cracked."

He loosened his collar so abruptly the button flew off. "Well, the hell with your background, I'm going to give you a future. This is the works—now."

She shot open a fourth drawer, looked down, smiled a little. "I knew there was one someplace around here. I saw a box of the cartridges in the bureau drawer inside." She came up with an automatic.

He kept coming on over, necktie cockeyed. "Put that down! D'ya want to have an accident?"

"I don't have accidents," she murmured placidly. She measured the weapon lengthwise in the flat of one hand, thumbed the trigger.

"It's loaded, you damn nitwit!"

"Then don't try jerking it away from me, that's what always sets them off. The safety's down now, too." She laid it down on the desk before her, but without taking her finger out of the trigger scabbard. He was in a state of mind where an antiaircraft gun wouldn't have been able to do much with him. He caught her from behind in a double-furled embrace and hid her face under his own. Her hand stayed motionless on the desk, hooked in the gun, the whole time.

His face got out of the way finally—he had to breathe himself—and hers came into view again.

She drew her free hand across it with a grimace that wasn't calculated to do his ego any good. "Don't kiss me, you fool. I'm not out for love."

"What are you out for then?"

"Nothing—as far as you're concerned. You have nothing that I want, you have nothing that—is coming to me."

Her attitude shriveled him like a June bug in a match flame. He rammed his hands into his pockets with force enough to drive them in almost up to his elbows.

The gun slid off the desk top, and she sauntered casually over toward the outside door, with it dangling from her one hooked finger.

"Come back here with that. Where do you think you're going with it?"

"Only as far as the front door. I don't know anything about you. I want to be sure that I get out of here. I'll leave it just inside the doorsill."

His voice shook with masculine outrage. "Go ahead if you want to go that badly. I'm not that hard up."

He heard the door open, and when he took a quick step out into the little entryway, the gun was lying there mockingly on the threshold. He could hear her going down the stairs—but with deliberation, not with hate. Even that concession to his injured self-esteem was lacking.

"I'll get who you are yet!" he called down after her wrathfully.

Her answer came back from a floor below. "Better be thankful that you haven't."

The walloping slam he gave his door stunned the house like a shrapnel explosion. He picked up his empty whiskey glass and smashed it all the way across the room. He picked up a pottery ashtray and smashed that, too.

He called her every name under the sun but murderer; he didn't happen to think of that one.

He called her every name but the right one.

The light flashed on in the pitch-black bedroom with explosive suddenness, like a flashlight photograph, revealing Corey in blazer-striped pajamas, lying in a trough of tortured bed coverings, hand outstretched to the switch of the bedside lamp. He squinted protectively, unable to bear the brightness after the long hours of lying there in the dark. His hair was a briery mass that bespoke repeated digital massaging. A pyramid of cigarette butts topped the tray next to him, and he added one last one to the accumulation with a triumphant downward stab that showed it had finally brought results. "Damn it, I knew I'd seen her someplace be—" he muttered disjointedly.

The clock said 3:20.

Then, as the implications of the discovery hit him fully, his eyes opened to their full extent and he swung his legs to the floor. "The girl that was with Bliss that night! She's already killed a man! I'm going to warn him right now to look out!"

He pounded outside in bare feet, came back again bringing the telephone directory from the hall, sat down on the bed with it, ran his finger down the column of F's, stopped at Ferguson.

Then he looked at the clock again; 3:23. "He'll think I'm nuts," he murmured undecidedly. "The first thing in the morning'll be time enough. I wonder if it really is the same girl; the other one was yellow as a buttercup, this one's dark as a raven."

Then, with a renewed stiffening of resolution, "I was never yet wrong in my life about a thing like this. He's got to be told, I don't care what time of night it is!" He flung the directory aside, barefooted it back to the hall and began dialing the number of Fergusons studio.

The call signal at the other end went on interminably; no one came to the phone to answer. He hung up finally, massaged his hair a couple more times. The party must be over by this time. Maybe Ferguson didn't sleep there in the studio at nights. Sure he did, he must; Corey remembered seeing a bed in one of the rooms.

Well, he'd gone on someplace else then with the rest of them. It would have to wait until morning. He got back in bed, snapped out the light.

Two minutes later it had flashed on again, and he was struggling into his trousers. "I don't know why I'm doing this," he tried to reason with himself, "but I can't sleep until I get in touch with that guy." He shrugged on his coat, spliced the two ends of his necktie in a sketchy knot, closed the door after him. He went downstairs, drummed up a cab, gave Ferguson's address.

Rationally, there was no basis whatever for his behavior, he had to admit. He was going to be made the laughingstock of everyone who knew him; their kindest explanation would be that he was drunk and suffering a mild case of the D.T.'s. Chasing down in the middle of the night to tell a guy, "Look out, your model's going to kill you!" But he was in the grip of something irrational; he couldn't explain what it was himself. A hunch, a premonition, a sense of impending danger. If Ferguson was out, he'd leave a note under the door: "She's the girl who was with Bliss the night he died, I remember now. Keep your eye on her." At least give the guy a chance to defend himself.

A knock at the studio door, when he stood before it presently, brought no more results than the phone call had. He noticed something that confirmed his hunch: Ferguson not only worked here but lived here, as well. A small thing, a slight thing—an empty milk bottle standing to one side of the door.

That finished it. Milk bottles are not put out before you go, but after you come back. He was in there, he was almost certainly in there. Corey had a premonition of doom now that wouldn't be dispelled.

He went downstairs and roused the building superintendent, unconcerned at the wrathful reception that greeted him.

"Yeah, he sleeps up there in the studio. But he might be out. Them artist fellows are up all night sometimes. What's all the excitement for?"

"You open that door for me," Corey panted in a voice that brooked no argument. "I'll take the responsibility if I'm wrong. But I'm not getting out of here until you come up and open that door for me, understand?"

The super grumblingly preceded him up the stairs, jangled keys, knocked uselessly before fitting one to the door. Corey knew where the switch was, reached around him backhand and plugged it on. The two of them stood there looking down the long vista of light to the far end where the black skylight panes slanted down and the outside night began.

All Corey said, in a strangely anticlimactic, almost subdued voice, was, "I knew it."

Ferguson was lying facedown before the easel. The wicked steel sliver of the arrowhead protruded from his back, over the heart, forced through by the fall itself to that additional penetration. In front, when they turned him over, the feathered end of it had been splintered by the fall, was at right angles to the rest of the shaft. He must have turned full face toward the stand at the instant it winged at him to receive it dead center to the heart like that.

Above him brooded Diana the huntress, Diana the killer—faceless now. The features that had tormented Corey were gone. An oval hole in the canvas, cut by a paint-scraping knife, occupied their place. The bow, cord slack now, balanced mockingly across one corner of the modeling stand.

Corey brooded, "I didn't tumble in time, she beat me to it. He must have posed her late at night, to finish it up."

"What d'ya suppose it was?" the super breathed, awestruck, after they'd put in the call and stood there in the open doorway, waiting for the police. "Her grip on the bowstring accidentally slipped and the arrow flew out?"

"No," Corey murmured. "No. Diana the huntress came to life."

THREE

postmortem on ferguson

AND THEN SHE moved over here like this." Corey was warming up to his reenactment as he went along, as any good actor does when he has a sympathetic audience and is enjoying his role. A cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth vibrated with animation whenever he spoke. He was in his shirt sleeves, vest unbuttoned. A string of hair had come down over his forehead with the ardor of his movements.

"Go on," Wanger nodded.

"Then she starts casing the drawers one by one like this, slap—slap—slap. Hell, I didn't get it. I figured she was just stalling, giving herself something to do with her hands, you know; killing time like they do until the clinch caught up with her. So then she hits the one it's in and comes up with it—"

"Wait a minute, wait a minute—" Wanger started from his chair, made a hasty gesture of dissuasion. "Don't touch it. We may still be able to get her prints off it. Have you handled it much yourself since she picked it up?"

Corey's arrested hand hung like a claw over it. "No, only to put it back in. But I haven't finished telling you what she did with it afterward—"

"All right, but first let me wrap it up. I want to have it checked—with your permission."

"Help yourself." He stood aside while Wanger took out a handkerchief, dipped into the drawer with it and transferred it to his pocket.

"I'll see that you get it back," Wanger promised.

"No hurry. Only too glad to be of some help." The performance resumed. "So then, she doodles around with it. I go over and give her the old branding iron and—" he looked genuinely outraged all over again, even though this was only a recapitulation "—and it didn't take."

Wanger nodded with masculine understanding. "She wasn't having any."

"She wasn't having any. She says, 'I don't want love, I don't want kisses,' and she goes over to the door, gun and all. I follow her, and she's left it lying there inside the sill, and she's already halfway down the stairs. So I called down after her that I'd figure out who she was if it took me all the rest of the night, and she calls up to me, 'Better be thankful you haven't.'"

He got white around the mouth with virtuous indignation. "The little so-and-so, I'd like to give her a biff across the snout! I don't mind a jane standing you off as long as she's scared about it. But one thing gripes me is a jane standing you off and being fresh about it at the same time!"

Wanger could see his point perfectly. He'd been led on for some reason best known to herself by the murderous little trickster and then dished out of what he had a right to expect was coming to him. As far as Wanger's personal feelings entered into it—and they didn't at all—he liked this guy.

He drummed nails on the chair arm. "As I see it, there are three possible explanations for her coming up here with you like she did, before going back and killing the guy she had in mind to all along. One, she intended getting rid of you first, before you had a chance to warn Ferguson and throw a monkey wrench into the main business at hand. After she got here with you, you still hadn't remembered who she was, so she changed her mind; she'd got you away from the party, and that was the most important thing. She figured she'd have time enough to get back there and finish up before it finally dawned on you where you'd seen her before. Two, she came up only to get the weapon and use it on him. No, that won't hold up. My brain's hitting on two cylinders. She left it behind her, inside the door. Well, three is you were pestering her at the party and she was afraid you would stay on after the others and gum the works up, so she took the easiest way of eliminating you. Gave you a tease treatment and then left you flat."

Corey looked as though this last suggestion didn't do his self-esteem any too much good, but he swallowed it.

"I think a combination of one and three is as close as we can get to it at the first sitting," Wanger went on, getting ready to leave. "She came up here with you because you were getting in her hair. She intended giving you the gun if you came through with who she was, but if you didn't, she was going to let you go. You didn't, and she let you go. Come in tomorrow, will you? I want to go over the whole thing with you again. Just ask for me, Wanger's the name."

Day was breaking when he got back to headquarters, and daybreak wasn't lovely around headquarters, inside or out. He was tired, and it was the hour when human vitality is at its lowest. He went into his superior's untenanted office, slumped into a chair at the desk and let his head plop into his pronged fingers.

"Why the hell did that woman have to be born?" he groaned softly.

After a while he raised his head, took out the gun she'd handled at Corey's place, put it in a manila folder, sealed the flap, scrawled across it almost illegibly: "See if you can get anything on this for me. Wanger" with his precinct number.

He picked up the phone. "Send me in a messenger, will you?"

"There's no one around out here right now," the desk sergeant answered.

"Try to find someone, anyone'll do."

The rookie that showed up about ten minutes later was green enough to have fooled a grazing cow.

Wanger remarked, "Where'd they dig you up from?" But he said it well under his breath. After all, everyone has feelings.

"What took you so long?"

"I got in a couple of the wrong rooms. This building's kind of tricky."

Wanger looked at him through blurred eyes. "Take this over and give it in for me. It's a gun. They'll know what to do." Then, with a touch of misgiving, "Will you be able to get there, d'you think?"

The rookie beamed proudly. "Oh, sure, I been sent over there twice already since I been detailed around here."

He turned, came up against the wrong side of the door, where there was no knob, only hinges, looked up and down the seam as though it had played a dirty trick on him. Then he got what the trouble was, shifted over to where the knob was, grabbed it and still couldn't get out right.

"Get your feet out of the way," Wanger coached him with angelic patience. "They're holding it up."

He was too tired even to get sore about it.

"You're still sure of what you told me the other night?" Wanger began, on his second and more detailed questioning of Corey, at headquarters forty-eight hours later.

"Positive. She had the same eyes, mouth, everything, in fact, but the hair, of that girl in black who was at Marjorie Elliott's engagement party the night Bliss met his death two years ago. I could swear it was the same one!"

"Your testimony's doubly welcome to me; it's not only important in itself but it bears out what my own private theory has been in these cases all along: that the woman is one and the same. A theory that, I might add, isn't shared by anyone else."

Corey clenched his fist, bounced it on the tabletop. "If I'd only gotten it sooner, figured out who it was the portrait reminded me of! But I didn't get it in time."

"Undoubtedly you could have saved his life if you'd only made the discovery even an hour earlier that same night. But the breaks fell her way. As it was, you only succeeded in hurrying the thing up, bringing it on all the faster, by insisting you'd seen her somewhere before. She identified you and recognized the danger, realized she had a deadline to work against. And made it—maybe only minutes ahead of your first warning phone call! He died at twenty-one past three in the morning; his wrist-watch stopped with the fall."

"And I phoned him at 3:22 or 3:23; I saw the time there in my room!" Corey grimaced anguishedly. "The arrow must have been still vibrating through his heart, he hadn't even toppled to the floor yet!"

"Don't let it get you." The detective tried to brace him up. "It's over now and it's too late. What interests me is that you can be invaluable to me; you're what I've been crying for all along in this, and now I've got it. At last there's a link between two of these four men. You didn't know Mitchell, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"Moran?"

"Him, either."

"But at least you did know two of them, if not the others. You're the first witness of any sort we've turned up who is in that position, who overlaps two of these episodes, bridges them. Don't y'see what you can mean to us?"

Corey looked doubtful. "But I didn't know the two of them concurrently. I only met Ferguson about eight months ago, at a cocktail party. Bliss was already dead by that time."

Wanger's face dropped. "So that even through you, any connection between the two of them will have to come by hearsay, at secondhand."

"I'm afraid so. Even Bliss I only knew the last year or two of his life. He and Ferguson had sort of drifted apart, got out of each other's orbit, by then."

"Any trouble between them?" Wanger asked alertly.

"No. Different worlds, that was all. Divergent occupations and hence divergent interests; brokerage and art. No points of contact left after they once started to harden into their molds."

"Did either of them mention Mitchell?"

"No, never that I can recall."

"Moran?"

"No."

"Well, Mitchell and Moran are in it somewhere," Wanger said doggedly. "But we'll let them ride for the present, take the two we've got. Now, here's what I want you to do for me: I want you to burrow back in your memory, rake up every particular mention each of those two made of the other—Bliss of Ferguson and Ferguson of Bliss—and try to recall in just what connection the reference was made, just what subject or topic it had to do with. Women, horses, money, whatever it was. Is that clear? My theory is there is some point at which these four lives cross—maybe other lives, as well. But since I don't know who the others are, I'll have to confine myself to the four I do know of so far. Once I find that point, I may be able to trace the woman forward, from there on, since I haven't been able to trace her or her motive backward, from the crimes themselves."

Wanger to superior:

"As a matter of fact, to clear the decks I'm going to do what will probably seem to you suicidal, fatal. I'm going to eliminate the woman from my calculations entirely, leave her out of it as completely as though she didn't exist. She only clouds the thing up, anyway. I'm going to concentrate on the four men. Once I can put my finger on the connecting link there is between them, she'll reenter the thing automatically, probably dragging her motive into view."

His superior shook his head dubiously. "It's sort of an inverted technique, to say the least. She commits the murders, so instead of concentrating on her, you concentrate on the victims."

"In self-defense. She'll hold us up forever, like she's already held us up for nearly two solid years. When you can't get in one door, get in another. Even if they don't lead to the same rooms, at least you're in."

"Well, try to get in, even if it's by a chimney," his superior urged plaintively. "The only thing that keeps this from being a big stink is that no one inside or out of the department seems to share your conviction that the four cases have any relation to one another. Presumably to be outwitted by four separate criminals on four different occasions is less of a reflection on us than to be outwitted by the same criminal four times running."

Wanger was coming down the steps at headquarters when he bumped into Corey on his way up them. Corey grabbed him by the arm. "Hold on, you're just the man I want to see."

"What brings you around here at this unearthly hour? I was just on my way home."

"I was playing cards until now, and listen, remember those 'mentions' you asked me to recall if I could—Bliss of Ferguson, and vice versa? Well, one of them popped into my head, so I left the game flat then and there."

"Swell. Come on in and let's hear it," They turned and went up the steps together. Wanger led him into an unoccupied room at the back, snapped on a light. "I get the hell bawled out of me whether I get home late or early," he confessed ruefully, "so half an hour more won't matter."

"Now, I don't know if this is what you want or not, but at least I got something. I wanted to get it to you right away, before I lose it again. Association of ideas brought something back to me. We were playing stud tonight and somebody shoved a stack of chips across the table, said, 'Can't take 'em with you.' That brought Ferguson back to me. We were playing poker down at his studio one night, and I remember him shoving a stack across the table with the same remark. Then that in turn brought back a reference he made at the time to Ken Bliss—and that was what you told me the other day you wanted.

"See how it works? Association of ideas, once removed. He said, 'I haven't had a hand like this since I used to belong to the Friday-Night Fiends.' I said, 'What were the Friday-Night Fiends?' He said, 'Ken Bliss and I and a couple of others were banded together in a sort of informal card-playing club. No dues or charter or anything like that; we'd just meet every other Friday—payday for most of us—for a stud session, each time at a different guy's room. Then we'd all pile into a car we owned shares in, half-soused, and go joyriding through the town, raising cain.'

"That was all he said, just in the space of time it took the dealer to fill up discards around the board. Now is that worth anything to you?"

Wanger whacked him behind the shoulder, so hard that Corey had to grab the table to keep an even balance. "It's the first break I've had!"

Wanger to superior:

"They belonged to a card club together, Bliss and Ferguson. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But it's what I've said I wanted, so I'm not kicking: the point at which their two lives crossed."

"What does that give you?"

"One thread by itself is not much good. Two crossed threads are that much stronger. Cross a few more together at the same place, and you're beginning to get something that'll hold weight. It's the way nets are made.

"Now I've got to do a lot of plodding. I've got to find out the date, that is the year, on which this little amateur social club was banded together. I've got to find out others who were in it, along with Bliss and Ferguson. I've got to find out the dates of the month of the particular Fridays on which they got together. When I have, I've got to check those dates carefully to see if I can find just what they were up to when, as Ferguson expressed it, they went tearing around half-stewed. It may show up in the blotter of some out-of-the-way police station.

"Then when I've got all that built up, I can start looking for this woman from that point on. I'll have a fulcrum. I won't be suspended in midair the way I am now."

"Outside of all that," commiserated his superior, but strictly off the record, "you've got practically nothing to do. How you going to spend your spare time?"

Ten days later:

"Get anywhere yet?"

"Yeah, like a snail. I've got the year date and I've got the names of the other two members of the Friday-Night Fiends. But there's a blind spot has developed in it that I don't like the looks of. It may make the whole line of investigation worthless if I can't clear it up pretty soon."

"What is it?"

"No Mitchell. He wasn't a member of the card club; his name wasn't among them. I went checking back through dusty police blotters, and I finally hit something, like I figured I might. Four men in a car were pinched on a Friday for drunken and disorderly conduct, reckless driving, smashing a plate-glass window by throwing an empty liquor bottle at it as they went by and finally knocking over a fire hydrant. They spent sixty days apiece in the workhouse, had to pay the damages, and of course their license was taken away from them. Now, three of the names down on the blotter were Bliss, Moran and Ferguson. They gave their right ones, too, thank God. The fourth is a new one, Honeyweather. Also, I got their addresses—at that time—of the blotter. I'll have an easier time now tracing this Honeyweather, the other member, from there on. But if Mitchell had been a member of the card club, he'd have been in the jam along with them, and he's one of the four she's killed. So I'm scared stiff that the card club has nothing to do with the killings and I'm barking up the wrong tree."

"Mitchell may have been ill that particular night, or he'd passed out and been dropped off at his home before they got into all that trouble, or he may have been out of town. I wouldn't give up yet; I'd keep on with it like you are. At least it's a positive line of approach; it's better than nothing at all."

A week later:

"How are you coming now, Wanger?"

"Do you see this look on my face? It's that of a man about to jump off a bridge."

"Fair enough! Only first clean up these Unknown-Woman Murders. Then I'll drive you as far as the bridge approach myself and even pay the toll for you."

"All kidding aside, Chief, it's ghastly. I've finished building the thing up since my last report. I've got it all complete now, not a thing left out. I even filled in the Mitchell blind spot. And now that I'm through—it has no meaning, it doesn't help us at all! It has the same drawback to it that each of these murders in itself has had: there isn't any motive there, from beginning to end, to incite to murder. Nothing they did was criminal enough, injurious enough to anyone, to precipitate a deferred-payment blood feud."

"It may be present but you haven't identified it yet. Let me hear your report anyway."

"I tried to trace this Honeyweather, the fourth member, from the address he gave that night of their quadruple arraignment. And I've lost him entirely. Gone from the face of the earth. I was able to keep up with his movements for about a year afterward—and God knows he moved around plenty! Then he seems to have dropped from sight, vanished as completely as this woman herself has—only without the subsequent reappearances she makes!"

"What line was he in?"

"Seems to have been chronically unemployed. He sat in his room all day pecking away at a typewriter, from what his last landlady tells me. Then he left there and never showed up anywhere else."

"Wait a minute, maybe I can give you a lift on that," his superior said. "Unemployed—pecking away at a typewriter; maybe he was trying to be a writer. They sometimes change their names, don't they? Have you got a pretty recognizable description?"

"Yes, fairly accurate."

"Take it around to the various publishing houses, see if it fits anyone you know. Now, what about Mitchell? You said you cleared that up."

"Yes. He was the bartender of a place they frequented at that time. They took him with them in the car more than once. Chiefly, I gather, because he chiseled liquor from his employer's shelves and brought it along with him each time. So that although he was not a member of the card club itself, he was very much present when they went skylarking around afterward. Which at least keeps my whole line of investigation from collapsing, the way I was afraid it was going to; those Friday-night tears in the car are still the point at which all their lives intercross. But the main difficulty still remains: they don't seem to have been guilty of anything that would warrant bringing this on, what we're up against now."

"Are you sure of that?"

"As far as all police records go, anywhere within the city limits during that period; and I've even covered the nearby outlying communities."

"But don't you realize that it was bound to be something that escaped police attention at the time, otherwise they wouldn't still be at large today? It must have been a crime that was never attributed to them on the official records."

"More than that," Wanger said thoughtfully. "It just occurs to me—it may have been a crime that they didn't even realize they committed themselves. Well, I've got a way of finding that out, too! I'm going to sift through the back files of every newspaper that came out, on the particular dates of their get-togethers. It must be in one of them somewhere, hidden, tucked away, not seeming to have anything to do with him. That's what libraries are for. That's where I'll be from now on. The tougher it gets, the harder to lick I get!"

Wanger to Fingerprint Department, by telephone:

"Well, what the hell happened to that gun? D'ja lose it? I'm still waiting for a report."

"What gun? You never sent us any gun, whadaya talking about?"

Incoherent squeak, as when a tenor voice goes suddenly falsetto. Then: "I never what? I sent you a gun to be checked over God knows how many weeks ago and not a peep out of you since! I'm still waiting! It wasn't supposed to be a Christmas present, y'know! What kind of a place are you running there, anyway? It's up to you guys to get it back to me, or didn't you know that? You're a fine bunch of crumbs!"

"Listen, thunder voice, we don't needa be told our job by anyone. Who the hell do you think you are, the police commissioner? If y'da sent us a gun to be tested, we'da sent it back to ya! How we gonna get something back to you we never got from you in the first place?"

"Listen, don't get tough with me, whoever you are. I got a gun coming to me and I want it!"

"Aw, look up your assignment and see if that's where you left it!"

Clopp!

City home of a popular and successful writer, three weeks later:

"Mr. Holmes, there's a gentleman in the outside room who insists on seeing you. He won't be put off."

"You know better than to do this! How long have you been working for me?"

"I told him you were dictating into the machine, but he says it simply cannot wait. He threatened, if I didn't come in and inform you, to come in himself."

"Where's Sam? Call Sam and have him thrown out! If he gives you any trouble, call the police!"

"But, Mr. Holmes, he is the police. That's why I thought I'd better come in and let you—"

"Police be damned! I suppose I parked too long by a fireplug or something! Right while I'm in the middle of the biggest scene in the whole book, too! D'you realize this whole interruption has gone into the machine, that I'll have to start over again from the end of the last record? I'm sorry to do this, Miss Truslow, but you've broken one of my first and most inflexible rules that was impressed on you over and over when you were first taken on to help me with my work. No intrusion while I'm creating, not even if the building is burning down around me! I'm afraid I won't need you anymore after today. You finish up the typing that you have on hand, and Sam will give you your check when you're ready to go home.

"Is this the man? Just what do you mean by forcing yourself in here and creating a disturbance like this? What is it you want to speak to me about?"

Wanger (softly): "Your life."

PART FIVE

holmes, the lost one

It seemed to me behind my chair there stood a spectre with 

a cold and cruel smile, lifeless and motionless.

—de Maupassant

ONE

the woman

THERE WERE FOUR of them in the dormitory room, all in varying stages of night attire. One was sprawled across the bed in reverse, her chin and arms dangling over the foot. One was sitting perched on the windowsill, balanced with one pointed toe touching the floor, like a frozen ballet dancer. The third was sitting on the floor, clasping her reared knees, chin atop them. The fourth and last, the only one audible, was in a chair. Not sitting in it, as that position is commonly understood. She was spread across it flat like a lap robe. One chair arm supported her elbows, her legs rippled across the other. In the middle, where she sank in to meet the part of the chair usually reserved for sitting, a book balanced unsupported, rising and falling with her bodily breath. Rising and falling fairly rapidly at the moment.

"'There's a cabin waiting among the spruce and firs that needs a woman's touch, Miss Judith'," he said.

"'She smiled shyly and her head dropped upon his chest. His strong arms slowly encircled her.'"

At this point the reader's own shoulders twitched ecstatically, as though they were receiving the embrace in question. She let the book slide languishingly to the floor.

"I bet he's just like that himself," she rhapsodized dreamily. "Strong and reliant, and sort of bashful with it. D'you notice how he kept calling her 'Miss Judith' right through to the end, sort of respectful?"

"I bet with you he wouldn't have been that respectful."

The girl on the chair exulted, "You bet not, I would have seen to it he stopped being that formal right after the first chapter."

The one on the bed said, "She's sure got it bad."

"I dreamed about him last night. He rescued me from an igloo that was just going to cave in."

The other three tittered. "What else did he do?"

"That was all there was time for. The eight o'clock bell woke me up—darn it."

"Pass around another cigarette," somebody said.

"There's only one left."

"Oh, what's the difference? We'll get another pack for tomorrow night."

"Yes, and don't forget it's your turn to bring them in next. I supplied this one."

"All right, here goes. We'll have to open the window again. If the smoke gets out in the hall and old Fraser comes along—"

The one in the chair gave a deep sigh that buckled her in the middle momentarily. "Why do you have to be old before you meet anyone thrilling, before anything exciting happens to you?"

"She's still thinking about him."

"How do you know he isn't married, and with about thirty-two kids?"

"I know he isn't, he couldn't be."

"Why couldn't he?"

"Because it wouldn't be fair."'

"Poor thing, I hate to see her suffer so."

The one on the bed said impatiently, "Oh, all she does is talk about it, and it ends there. If she ever met him face to face she wouldn't know what to do, she'd probably drop through the floor."

The chair sprawler reared defiantly. "Is that so? I'd show you a thing or two. I'd have him eating out of the hollow of my hand in no time."

Her detractor on the bed taunted, "I bet you wouldn't even get past the front door."

"I bet I would, if I ever made up my mind to! How much do you want to bet?"

"How much do you want to bet?"

"I'll bet you my whole next month's allowance from home!"

The one on the bed eyed her vindictively. "All right, mine against yours. And you either go through with it or keep still about him from now on. I'm sick of hearing about him."

"Yes, get it out of your system once and for all," one of the more sympathetically inclined listeners suggested. "It's no use just going on pining like this."

The skeptic on the bed said, "How'll we know she's telling the truth when she gets back?"

"I'll bring proof back with me."

"Bring one of his neckties," one of them suggested jocularly.

"No, that's no good, I know something better. She has to bring a snapshot of the two of them standing together."

"And his arm has to be around her," crowed the windowsill sitter. "We want our money's worth!"

"Huh!" snorted the man killer in the chair self-confidently. "That'll be putting it mild; the best parts'll never get on the snapshot. If I ever really go to work on him, he'll probably follow me back here on the end of a leash."

"How'll you get away from here?"

"I've got everything thought out. I've been daydreaming about it for the longest time, in French class and places like that, so I know just what to do. You know how scared stiff Miss Fraser is of epidemics—if you show two red dots on your face she can't get rid of you fast enough. And my people are away right now—"

"You better see that you win," one of the neutrals commiserated, "or you'll be broke for thirty days straight—and don't expect us to lend you any pocket money."

The one bunched on the floor flew apart suddenly. "Fraser!" she hissed warningly. "I hear her step in the hall!"

The room dissolved into a flux of flurried motion, in which they all darted at cross angles to one another. Two of them made for the communicating door to the adjoining room and fled back to their own quarters. The one who had been on the windowsill dove for the recently vacated bed and disappeared with a great welling up of covers.

The one who had been in the chair was left stuck with the cigarette. She snapped out the light and its red ember made hectic spirals around in the dark, in search of a landing place.

"Take this! Take this!" she whispered frenziedly.

"You take it!" the unfeeling reply came back. "You were the last one holding it."

It described a parabola out the open window, the bedcovers billowed up a second time, and then there was a sort of heaving silence. An instant later a grimly vigilant head was outlined against the insidiously opened hall door. It sniffed the air suspiciously, remained poised an uncertain moment or two, then finally withdrew, defeated but unconvinced.

When it had inspected the adjoining room, as well, and gone on from there, a whispered conversation in the latter was eagerly resumed.

"Don't you think there's something funny about her? I mean, she's not like the rest of us, she seems older."

"Yes, I've noticed that, too."

"After all, there's nobody here really knows anything about her. Her parents didn't even bring her here when she registered; I heard Miss Fraser say her application was received by mail and she was enrolled on the strength of a recommendation. Who is she? Where did she come from? She suddenly plops down in the middle of us from nowhere and in the middle of the term, too."

"Well, she was transferred."

"Oh, that's what she says."

"Nobody's ever seen her people. And she never gets letters from home like the rest of us."

"Why is she so insane about that silly writer? I don't see anything so wonderful about him."

"He has a country place not far from here; maybe that's why she came here—to be near him."

"Maybe she's not a schoolgirl at all."

There was a moment of silent, shivery conjecture.

"Then what is she?"

TWO

holmes

HOLMES'S ROADSTER WAS crawling along at his usual snail's pace, hugging the extreme outside of the road, German shepherd stiffly erect in the seat beside him, when the taxi flashed by, going the same way he was. He habitually drove in low like that, to help his thinking. He found he could get quite a lot of it done when he was out alone in the car for an airing, just drifting along aimlessly.

He couldn't be positive, of course, but the cab had seemed to him to have just the one girl sitting in the back of it. The reason he figured it that way was the back of her head occupied the exact center of the small oval glass insert in the rear, and when there are two or more passengers they are usually more evenly distributed on the seat than that.

By the time he neared the cutoff that led into his own place, the cab should have been long out of sight, at the clip it had been going, but to his surprise it was still in view ahead as he crested the last rise. It was dawdling along erratically now, as though experiencing a contradiction of orders on its passenger's part.

Just as it came opposite the cutoff, with its warning, T. Holmes, Private Road, No Thoroughfare, stretched across it, three acoustically perfect screams winged up from it. The next moment, the door flung outward and the figure of a girl either jumped or was flung bodily onto the soft turf edging the road. She rolled over once in a complete somersault, then came to a stop right side up. The taxi put on speed and spurted down the road, red tail glowering vindictively.

Holmes glided to a stop opposite her a moment later and got out. She was in a sideways sitting position now, clutching her instep with both hands. The German shepherd undutifully remained in the car, as though that was his first love, rather than his master.

"Hurt yourself?" Holmes bent over her, took her below the arms and helped her to her feet. She immediately teetered against him.

"I can't stand up on one of them. What'll I do?"

"Better come into my place a minute. It's right down the way there."

He helped her into the car, drove the short distance down the private road, helped her out again in front of a typical remodeled-for-city-occupancy farmhouse. The dog didn't have sense enough to follow even then, until Holmes had turned and growled at it, "Come on in, you fool. What do you want to do, stay out all night?" The dog leaped over the side of the car and approached the door independently, with an air of not belonging to anyone.

A manservant opened to the clomp of the Colonial knocker affixed to the door. He greeted Holmes with the familiarity bred of long years of association. "Well, did you get a bang-up finish for that chapter troubling your mind?"

"I did have one," said Holmes somewhat moodily, "but it was knocked right out of my head again. This young lady's had a mishap. Help me get her to a chair, then go out and put the car in."

The two of them helped her down a long pine-paneled living room that ran the entire depth of the house, with a gigantic conical fireplace of cobbled stones set into one side, from floor to ceiling. That is, the trim was ceiling high, the aperture itself was about shoulder height or a little less.

She attempted to stop and sink down when she had reached a large overstuffed chair standing out before it, with its back to the salmon-pink glow. The manservant quickly gave her a little hitch onward, toward another a few paces away. "Not that one—that's his inspiration chair."

Seated, Holmes studied her by the firelight, aided by the watery glow of light from the ceiling. The electricity was obviously generated on the premises, judging by its insufficiency.

She was young, and the mere fact that everything about her tried to convey the exact opposite impression showed how young she really was. Eighteen; nineteen at the very outside. Her hair had probably been golden when she was a child, it was darkening to chestnut now, but with golden overtones still lingering in it. Her eyes were blue.

She had acquired, if nothing else, a generous coating of leaves and twigs in her roll by the roadside just now. She brushed at them sketchily, almost as though she hated to efface them until she was sure he had taken note of what bad shape she was in.

"What happened?" he said as soon as Sam had left to see about the car.

"The usual thing. Whenever you see a girl come out of a car without waiting for it to stop, you can draw your own conclusions."

"But it was a city cab, wasn't it?" It occurred to him it was a little far out for that sort of thing.

"And the ideas in it were city ideas." She didn't seem to want to talk about it any further.

"I guess we'd better have a doctor in to look at that foot of yours."

She didn't show any particular eagerness at the suggestion. "Maybe it'll go down if I just stay off it."

"It hasn't gone up any, from what I can see," he pointed out.

She withdrew it a little behind the first one, so that its outline wasn't so distinct.

Sam had come back. "Sam, who's the nearest doctor to us?"

"Doc Johnson, I reckon. He don't know us. I can try him if you want."

"It's pretty late—maybe he won't want to come," she mentioned.

Sam returned to report, "He'll be here in half an hour."

She said, "Oh," sort of flatly.

After a while, while they were waiting, she said, "I've always wondered what you were like."

"Oh, then you know who I am?"

"Who doesn't? I've read you from A to Z." She sighed soulfully. "Imagine sitting here in the same room with you!"

He turned away. "Cut that stuff out."

"And at least you're like you should be," she went on, undeterred. "I mean so many of these people that write red-blooded outdoor stuff are skinny anemic little runts wrapped in blankets. You at least cut a figure that a girl can get her teeth into."

"You oughta be poured over waffles," he let her know disgustedly.

Her eyes roamed the raftered ceiling, flickering with flame reflections like sea waves. "You live in this big place all alone?"

"I come out here to work." If there was a gentle hint in that, it glanced off her.

"What a fireplace; I bet you could stand up on the inside of it."

"They used to smoke whole hams and turkeys inside it in the old days; the hooks are still set into the inside of the chimney. It's almost too big, takes it too long to draw and get heat up. I tried to cut it down by refining it, putting in a dummy top and sides of zinc."

"Oh, yes, I see that chink that seems to border it all around; I thought it was a fault in the stones."

Sam was thrusting at the fire with a heavy iron poker when the doctor's knock sounded at the door. He stood it up against the stone facing, went out to admit him. Holmes followed him into the hall to greet the doctor. He thought he heard her give a sobbing little moan of excruciation behind him, but the doctor's noisy ingress drowned it out.

When they came in a moment later, her face was contorted and all the color seemed to have left it. The iron poker lay horizontal on the floor, as though it had toppled down of its own weight.

"Let's have a look," the doctor said. He felt gently with his fingers, and she winced, gave an inarticulate little cry. The doctor clicked his tongue. "You've got a bad contusion there, I should say so! But it's not a sprain, more like one of the little cartilages is smashed, from something heavy dropping on it. Wrap it up in cotton wool. You'll have to spare that foot for a day or two, give it a chance to mend."

Even while the overflow wrung from her by pain slowly trickled out of the corner of each eye, the look she gave Holmes seemed to hold something of triumph in it.

Afterward, when the doctor had gone, he said, "I don't know how we're going to do it. The station's a forty-minute pull from here, and I don't even know if there are any more trains in tonight. I could drive you all the way in to the city myself, but we'd get there about daylight."

"Can't I stay?" she said wistfully. "I won't bother you."

"It isn't that. I'm single and I'm alone in the house. Even Sam sleeps out over the garage."

"Och." She tossed that off like a puffball. "The dog'll be chaperon enough."

"Well, er, won't your people worry about you if you stay away overnight?"

Something like a choked laugh sounded in her throat. "Oh, sure, three days from now. They're in New Mexico. By the time they hear I wasn't home, I'll be home all over again."

He gave Sam a look and Sam gave him one. "Fix up that ground-floor room that has the cot in it for the lady, Sam," he said finally.

"Freddy Cameron's the name," the childish-looking figure ensconced in the chair supplied. "Short for Frederica, you know."

They sat there in silence, waiting for Sam to get the room ready. Holmes sat staring down at the floor, she sat staring at him with all the unconcealed candor of a child.

"Why do you keep all those rifles and shotguns stacked up in the corner?"

"Because I do a lot of hunting when I'm not working."

"Are they loaded?"

"Sure they're loaded." He waited a moment and then he added, "They give a terrible kickback when they're fired."

"G'night, Mr, Holmes and lady," Sam called on his way out. The front door closed after him.

The silence became almost cottony, the sort of thing that can be tasted in the mouth.

"Why don't we say something?" she suggested after about a quarter of an hour.

His eyes flicked over her, then down to the floor again, for answer. There was something wary about the slight deflection.

She bunched her shoulders defensively, looked behind her. "Something about this place, it gets you. It's like—something was going to happen."

"It's like," he concurred curtly, and got up and left her without anything further. He moved up the stairs to the upper floor with almost painful deliberation, head bowed as though he were listening intently.

A cooling log ash exploded in the fireplace; his shoulders squared off, then relaxed again. Then the heavy, oily stillness came rolling back again and obliterated the momentary sound. His door closed, up above somewhere.

Sam came in and found them sitting at the table together.

"What's this?" he cried with mock outrage that had an undercurrent of pique to it.

"The Number-Two Boy rustled it up for him this morning. But she has no luck, he won't eat."

"He's thinking of a plot," Sam suggested.

Holmes gave him a startled look, as though the remark was disconcertingly shrewd. He filled a saucer from his cup, put it on the floor. The German shepherd came over and noisily siphoned it up.

"Well, is the plot finished yet?" she wanted to know presently.

"Incomplete," Holmes said. He had been watching the dog. "But I'll get it later." He took up his cup, drained it, held it out to her for more.

He got up, threw her a brief, "See you tonight," and went into the living room.

"What does he mean, 'See you tonight'?" she asked Sam blankly. "What am I supposed to be, invisible until then?"

"He's going to produce now." Sam went in after him, as though his presence was required to set things in order. She watched from the doorway. Sam shifted the "inspiration chair," cocked his head at it, readjusted the chair with hairline precision.

"Does that have to be in the exact same place each time?" she asked incredulously. "I suppose if it was two inches out of line he couldn't think straight."

"Shh!" Sam silenced her imperiously. "If it ain't even with that diagonal pattern of the carpet, it distracts him."

Holmes was standing looking out the window, already lost to the world. He made an abrupt backhand gesture of dismissal. "Get out! Here it comes now."

Sam tiptoed out with almost ludicrous haste, frenziedly motioning her before him. She stood there a moment outside the closed door, unabashedly eavesdropping. Holmes's voice filtered through in a droning singsong, talking into the dictating machine: "Chinook mushed on through the snow wastes, face a mask of vengeance under his fur parka—"

Sam wouldn't leave her in peace even there. "Don't stand this close, you're liable to make the floor creak."

She turned away reluctantly, limping on her one slippered foot. "So that's how it's done. And there must never be the slightest variation in detail, not even in the way his chair stands."

Sam poised himself, watch in hand, outside the door, one fist upraised in striking position. He waited until the sixtieth second had ticked off", then brought his fist down. "Five o'clock!" he called warningly.

Holmes came out haggard, hair awry, shirt open down to his abdomen, cuffs open, shoelaces untied, even his belt buckle unfastened.

A prim, mousy little figure of a middle-aged woman, sitting under the antlered hat rack near the door, stood up. She wore an ill-fitting tweed suit, steel-rimmed spectacles, and had her graying hair drawn tightly back into an unsightly little knot at the nape of her neck.

"I'm the new typist, Mr. Holmes. Mr. Trent says he hopes I'll be more satisfactory than the last one he sent you."

The Cameron girl had come to the doorway of her room, opposite them, drawn by the sound of his emergence.

"I'm afraid the damage has been done already," he said with a glance at her. "Did you come prepared to stay?"

"Yes." She indicated a venerable Gladstone bag on the floor beside her. "Mr. Trent explained the work would have to be done on the premises."

"Well, I'm glad you got here. I've already done six chapters into the machine. I don't know how fast you are, but it'll take you at least three or four days to catch up."

"I'm more accurate and painstaking than I am speedy," she let him know primly. "I pride myself on never having had so much as a comma misplaced on any of my typescripts." She folded her hands limply together, dangled them out before her.

"Sam, carry Miss—I didn't get your name."

"Miss Kitchener."

"Carry Miss Kitchener's bag up to the front second-floor room."

The Cameron girl came toward him, a look of sulky disapproval on her face, as soon as he was alone. "So we're going to have Lydia Pinkham with us for a while."

"You seem put out."

"I am." She wasn't being playful about it, either; she was seething. "A woman likes the run of the place. This was ideal."

He gave her a long, level look. "I'll bet it was," he said dryly, turning away at last.

Sam said later, "We're sure getting a run of women out here! Maybe you better do your work in town, where it's nice and lonely, after this, Mr. Holmes."

"I have an idea they'll be thinning out soon." Holmes answered, brushing his hair at the mirror.

The three of them sat back after Sam had taken out the dessert plates. Freddy Cameron still had the sulky look on her face. Throughout the meal she had tried, much to his amusement, to give the other woman the impression she was a legitimate member of the household.

"Sam," he called. And when the man had returned to the doorway, "How long since you've had a night off?"

"Pretty long. But ain't no use in having one out here. There's no place to go."

"Tell you what I'll do. I'll treat you to one in the city. I'll drive you over to the station when I go out for my usual evening spin. There are some things I want you to stop in and get at the flat in town while you're there, anyway."

"I'd sure like that! But will you be able to get along without me, Mr. Holmes?"

"Why not? You'll be back by midmorning. Miss Cameron can rustle up breakfast for me, like she did today."

Her face brightened for almost the first time since the typist's arrival. "Can I?"

"And I can build my own fire when I'm ready to start work in the morning. Just see that there's enough wood on hand."

It was nearly eleven when he drove slowly back to the house alone, after dropping off his loyal retainer at the depot. The German shepherd, aloof as usual, sat in the seat beside him. The countryside was as still as a grave. The road was empty; no speeding city taxi passed him tonight.

He put the car away himself, opened the house door with his own key. It seemed strange; he was so used to having Sam do these little things for him. The Cameron girl was standing out at the foot of the stairs, listening. A sound like frightened, low-pitched sobbing reached him from above.

She smiled inscrutably, thumbed the staircase. "The old maid's walking out on you."

"What d'you mean?"

"She's packing up to go. She's got the heebie-jeebies. Somebody threw a rock through her window warning her to clear out."

"Why didn't you go up and calm her at least?" he snapped.

"I didn't have to. She came tearing down here to me in an 1892 flannel nightie and practically jumped into my lap for protection. That's only the trailer you're listening to now. I looked up the trains for her, as long as she wanted to leave that bad."

"It would have surprised me very much if you hadn't."

She ignored that. "Some mischievous kids must have done it, don't you think?"

"Undoubtedly," he said as he started up. "Only there don't happen to be any for miles around here."

Miss Kitchener was packing things into the Gladstone bag, between whiffs at a bottle of smelling salts. There was a fist-size rock on the table, and a crudely penciled scrap of paper that had been wrapped around it lay nearby. He read the message on it.

Get out of that house before morning or you won't live to regret it.

One of the small partition panes in the window was shattered into a star-shaped remnant.

"You're not going to let a little thing like that get you, are you?" he suggested.

"Oh, I couldn't sleep a wink tonight after this!" she snuffled. "I'm nervous enough other nights as it is, even in the city."

"It's just a practical joke."

She paused uncertainly in her packing. "Wh-who do you suppose . . . ?"

"I couldn't say," he said decisively, as though to discourage further questioning on that score. "Did you look out, try to see who was down there at the time?"

"Dear me, no! I ran for my life down the stairs as soon as I'd finished reading it. I—I feel so much better now that you're back, Mr. Holmes. There's something about having a man in the house—"

"Well," he said. "I don't want to oblige you to stay here if you're going to be frightened and uncomfortable. I'm willing to drive you in to the station and you still have plenty of time to make the quarter-of-twelve train. You can do the typing next week in the city, when I come back. It's entirely up to you."

The avenue of escape he was offering obviously appealed to her. He saw her look almost longingly toward her open bag. Then she took a deep breath, gripped the foot rail of the bed with both hands as if to steel herself. "No," she said. "I was sent out here to do this work for you, and I've never yet failed to carry out anything that was expected of me. I shall stay until the work is complete!" But she spoiled the fine courage of the sentiments she was expressing by stealing a surreptitious after glance at the shattered window.

"I think you'll be all right," he said quietly, with a half-formed little smile at the corner of his mouth. "The dog's an effective guarantee that no one will get in the house from outside. And my own room's right down at the other end of the hall." He turned to go, then turned back to her again from the doorway. "There's a small revolver kicking around in one of my bureau drawers somewhere; would you feel any better if I looked for it and let you keep it here with you tonight?"

She gave a squeak of repulsion, palmed her hands at him hastily. "No, no, that would frighten me more than the other thing! I can't bear the sight of firearms of any description, I'm deathly afraid of them!"

"All right, Miss Kitchener," he said soothingly. "You're showing a considerable amount of gallantry in remaining—even though there's really nothing to be worried about—and I won't forget to speak favorably to Mr. Trent about it."

The Cameron girl was in the far corner of the living room, turning over a rifle in her hands, when he appeared unexpectedly in the doorway a few moments later. His descent must have been quieter than he realized.

He clasped hands behind his back, tilting the tail of his coat up out of the way. "I wouldn't monkey around with any of those if I were you. I think I already told you last night they're kept loaded."

She looked over at him, hesitated a moment before putting it down, even turned full face toward him with it still clasped in her hands but crosswise to her own body.

He didn't move. There was a dancing quality in his eyes, as though his muscular coordination was prepared to meet a need for instantaneous action, but he didn't show it in any other way.

She stood the gun up against the wall, ostentatiously brushed her hands. "Sorry. Everything I seem to do is wrong."

His hands unclasped, the skirt of his coat fell flat. "Oh, no, I wouldn't say that. Everything you seem to do is right."

He sat down in the "inspiration chair." She hovered around uncertainly in the background. "Am I intruding?"

"You mean at the moment or by and large?"

"I mean at the moment. By and large I am, I don't need to be told that."

"No, you're not intruding at the moment. I don't mind your being in here."

"Where you can keep an eye on me," she finished for him with a satiric laugh. Her eyes went up toward the raftered ceiling. "Did she decide to stay?"

"Much to your regret."

She sighed elaborately. "We either understand each other too well or not at all."

That was the last thing either of them said. The fire had dwindled to a garnet glow, dark as port. The rest of the room was all blue shadow. Just their two faces stood out, pale ovals against the surrounding gloom. A cricket chirped in the velvety silence outside that pressed down, smothered the house like a feather bolster.

He rose to his feet at last, and all you could see rising was the oval of his face; the rest of him already blended into the shadows. He went outside to the stairs, and the scuffing measure of his tread was audible going slowly up them. She stayed on in there, with the garnet embers and the guns.

He closed the door of his room after him, but he didn't put on the light. It was hard to make him out in the India-ink blackness. White suddenly peered faintly over there by the door, in two long columns and a little triangular wedge, and he'd doffed his coat without moving away from before the door seam. A chair shifted, and the white manifestations ebbed lower on it but still there up against the door. A shoe dropped an inch or two, with the sound a shoe makes; then its mate.

The cricket went on outside, and the silence went on inside, and the night went on outside and in. Once, an hour before dawn, a faint disembodied stirring of air seemed to come into the room, but not from the direction of the window, from the direction of the door—as though he had eased it narrowly open without permitting the latch to make any sound. A floorboard creaked in the distance, somewhere far below. Maybe it was just the wood contracting from the increasing night-long coldness. Or maybe stealthy pressure had been put upon it.

Nothing else sounded after that. After a long while, the extra little swirl of air was cut off again. Outside, an owl hooted in a tree and the stars began to pale.

The Cameron girl was unusually vivacious at breakfast, perhaps because she had had the making of it. She was whistling blithely when Holmes came down, a derelict with a shadowy jawline and soot under his eyes. Miss Kitchener was there ahead of him, shining with soap and water, her nocturnal timidity a thing of the past—at least until the coming night.

"You ladies'll have to excuse me," he said, tracing a hand down his sandpapery face as he sat down.

"It's your house, after all," Freddy Cameron pointed out.

Miss Kitchener contented herself with a thin-lipped smile, as though there were no excuse for personal untidiness under any circumstances.

The German shepherd came muzzling up to him, evidently remembering yesterday. He ignored it. Freddy Cameron breathed, so low he barely caught it, "No poison test today?"

He shoved his chair back. "Sam'll be back about noon, to take up where he left off. I'm going in there now and expect to be left undisturbed."

"I'll go upstairs and begin my typing," Miss Kitchener said. "I don't believe you'll hear me from where you are."

"I'll paint Easter eggs," Freddy Cameron said disgruntledly.

He closed the living-room door after him, thrust cords of wood into the fireplace, kindled a wedge of newspaper under them. He stripped the oilcloth hood off the dictating machine that stood on the table, adjusted it to the best of his ability but with an air of somewhat baffled uncertainty, as though Sam had usually been delegated to attend to this detail along with all the others. The "inspiration chair," he noticed, was slightly out of true with the diagonal pattern of the carpet. He shifted it slightly, smiling a little to himself, as if at his own idiosyncrasies. Then he picked up the speaking tube appended to the machine, sat back, everything in readiness for a long day's creative work. Everything but one thing. . . .

The apparatus made a muted whirr, waiting. The necessary flow of thought wouldn't seem to come. Inspiration appeared to be log-jammed. He glanced helplessly up at the row of his own books on a shelf, as if wondering how he'd done it before.

A floorboard creaked unexpectedly somewhere near at hand. He whirled around in the chair, frowning menacingly at the supposed interruption.

There was no one in the room with him at all; the door was still securely closed. The flames leaped higher behind him, filling the cavern of the fireplace with heat and a crimson rose glow.

The Cameron girl snapped her head around, found his eyes boring into her from the doorway some five minutes later. "Wh-what happened?" she faltered uneasily. "No quarantine this morning?"

"I seem to have hit an air pocket. Come in here, will you? I want to talk to you. Maybe that'll help to get me started."

"You sure you want me in there in the holy of holies?" she wanted to know almost frightenedly.

"I'm sure," he said in a flinty voice.

She made her way in ahead of him, looking back across her shoulder at him the whole way. He closed the door on the two of them. "Sit down."

"That chair? I thought no one else was allowed—"

"That's Sam's line of talk." His eyes fixed themselves on her piercingly. "What's the difference between one chair and another?" The question almost seemed to have a special meaning.

She sank into it without further protest. He squatted down, adding an extra log or two to the fire, which was only now beginning to draw, as though he'd had to start it a second time. Then he sat back diagonally opposite her, in a chair she had occupied whenever she had been in here before. He seemed to be watching her closely, as though he'd never seen her before.

"What'll I talk about?" she suggested presently.

He didn't answer, just kept watching her. A minute or two ticked by; the only sound in the room with them was the steadily increasing hum from the fireplace.

"Deep thought," she said mockingly.

"Let me feel your hand a minute," he said unexpectedly. She extended it to him indolently. The palm was perfectly dry. The wrist was steady.

He flung it back at her with such unexpected force that it struck her across the chest. He was on his feet. "Come on, get out of that chair fast," he said hoarsely. "You sure had me fooled. What's your racket, kid?"

But before she had a chance to answer, he was already over at the door, had thrown it open, was thumbing her out past him with an urgency that had something tingling about it.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?" she drawled reproachfully as she regained her own doorway opposite.

"Keep out of the way for a while; don't come in here, no matter what you hear. Got that straight?" Some of the rough edge left his voice as he called up the stairs with suddenly regained urbanity, "Miss Kitchener, could I speak to you down here a minute?"

The diligent pitter-patter of her typing, which had been like soft rain on a roof, broke off short and she came down unhesitatingly, at her usual precise, fussy little gait.

He motioned her in. "How far have you gotten?" he asked, closing the door.

"I'm midway through the opening chapter," she announced, beaming with complacency.

"Sit down. The reason I called you is I'm changing this lead character's name to—No, sit down there, right where you are."

"That's your chair, isn't it?"

"Oh, any chair. Sit down while I discuss this with you." He forced her to take it by preempting the other one.

She lowered a spine stiff as a ramrod to the outermost edge of it, contacting it by no more than half an inch.

"Will changing his name give you any extra work? Has he appeared by name yet in the part you've already transcribed?"

She was up again with alacrity. "Just a moment, I'll go up and make sure—"

He motioned her down again. "No, don't bother." And then with mild wonderment. "You were just going over that part, how is it you can't recall offhand? Well, anyway, it occurred to me that in Northern stories readers are used to identifying French-Canadian characters with the villain, and therefore it might be advisable to—Miss Kitchener, are you listening to me? What's the matter, are you ill?"

"It's too warm in this chair, the heat of the fire. I can't stand it."

Without warning he reached forward, seized one of her hands before she could draw it back. "You must be mistaken. How can you say the chair's too warm for you? Your hand's ice-cold—trembling with cold!" He frowned. "At least let me finish what I have to say to you."

Her breathing had become harshly audible, as though she had asthma. "No, no!"

They both gained their feet simultaneously. He pressed her down by the shoulder, firmly but not roughly, so that she sank into the chair again. She attempted to writhe out of it sideways this time. Again he gripped her, pinned her down. Her spectacles fell off.

"Why is your face so white? Why are you so deathly afraid?"

She seemed to be in the throes of hysteria, beyond reasoning. A knife unexpectedly flashed out from somewhere about her—her sleeve, perhaps—and was upraised against him across the back of the chair. Her hand was quick; his hand was quicker. He throttled it by the wrist, pinning it down over the chair top; it turned a little, and the knife fell out, glanced off the low fire screen behind her and into the flames.

"That's a funny implement for a typist to be carrying around with her; do you use that in your work?"

She was struggling almost maniacally against him now; something seemed to be driving her to a frenzy. He was exerting his strength passively, holding her a prisoner in the chair with one hand riveted at the base of her throat. He was standing offside to her, however, not directly before her. She alone was in a straight line with the fireplace.

"Let me up—let me up!"

"Not until you speak," he grunted.

She crumpled suddenly, seemed to collapse inwardly, was suddenly a limp bundle there in the chair. "There's a gun in there, above the zinc partition—trained on this chair! Any minute the heat will—A sawed-off shotgun filled with—"

"Who put it there?" he probed relentlessly.

"I did! Quick, let me up!"

"Why? Answer me, why?"

"Because I'm Nick Killeen's widow—and I came here to kill you, Holmes!"

"That's all," he said briefly, and stepped back.

He took his hand away too late. As it broke contact, there was a blinding flash behind her that lit up his face, a roar, and a dense puff of smoke swirled out around her, as though blown out of the fireplace by a bellows worked in reverse.

She heaved convulsively one more time, as though still attempting to escape by reflex alone, then deflated again, staring at him through the smoke haze that veiled her.

"You're all right," he assured her quietly. "I emptied it out before I started the fire up a second time, only left the powder charge in it. The dictation machine saved me; you must have accidentally brushed against the lever, turned it on, when you came in here last night. It recorded the whole proceeding, from the first warning creak of the floor to the replacing of the zinc sheet that roofs the fireplace. Only I couldn't tell which one of you it was; that's why I had to give you the chair test."

The door flashed open and the Cameron girl's frightened white face peered in at them. "What was that?"

He was, strangely enough, twice as rough spoken and curt to her as he had been to the woman in the chair, the way one is to a puppy or a child that can't be held responsible for its actions. "Stay out of here," he bellowed, "you damned nuisance of an autograph-hunting, hero-worshiping school brat, or I'll come out there, turn you over my knee and give you a spanking that'll make you need cotton wool someplace else besides your ankle!"

The door closed again twice as quickly as it had opened, with a gasp of shocked incredulity.

He turned back to the limp, deflated figure still cowering there in the chair. She seemed to hang suspended in a void; she had lost one personality without regaining another. His voice dropped again to ordinary conversational pitch, as with an adult. "What were you going to do to her—in case it had worked?" he asked curiously.

She was still suffering from shock, but she managed a weak smile. "Exactly nothing at all. She wasn't even on my list. She couldn't have endangered me. I might have tied her up in order to get away, that's all."

"At least you're fair-minded in your death dealing," he conceded grudgingly. He watched her for a moment, then went over and poured her a drink without turning his back on her. "Here. You seem to be all in shreds. Knit yourself up again."

She tottered waveringly erect at last, one hand out to the chair back. Then little by little a change came over her. She seemed to fill out before his eyes, gain color, body, like those outline drawings they had once given to a child named Cookie Moran. The life-force, that inextinguishable thing, flowed back into her. Not the cold, spinsterish tide that had been Miss Kitchener; something warmer, brighter. Though her hair was still artfully streaked with gray and drawn tightly back, the last vestiges of the prissy Miss Kitchener seemed to peel away, roll off her like a transparent cellophane wrapping. She was somehow a young, more vibrant woman. A woman who knew no fear, a woman who knew how to admit defeat gracefully. But a vengeful sort of grace it was, even now.

"Well, I got them all but you, Holmes. Nick will overlook that. I'm only a woman, after all. Go ahead, call the police, I'm ready."

"I am the police. Holmes was hijacked into safety weeks ago; he's lying low in Bermuda. I've been living his life for him ever since, tearing the covers off his old books and reading them over again into the machine, waiting for you to show up. I was afraid the dog would give me away; it showed so plainly I wasn't its master."

"I should have noticed that," she admitted. "Overconfidence must have made me careless. Everything went like clockwork with all the others—Bliss and Mitchell and Moran and Ferguson."

"Look out," he warned her dryly, "I'm getting it all on there." He thumbed the dictation machine, making its faint whirring sound again.

"Do you take me for the usual petty-larceny criminal for gain, trying to cover up what he's done, trying to welsh out of it?" There was unutterable contempt in the look she gave him. "You have a lot to learn about me! I glory in it! I want to shout it from the housetops, I want the world to know!" She took a quick step over beside the recording apparatus; her voice rose triumphantly into the speaking tube. "I pushed Bliss to his death! I gave cyanide to Mitchell! I smothered Moran alive in a closet! I shot Ferguson through the heart with an arrow! This is Julie Killeen speaking. Do you hear me, Nick, do you hear me? Your debt is paid—all but one. There, Detective, there's your case. Now bring on your revenge. To me it's a citation!"

"Sit down a minute," he said. "There's no hurry. It's taken me two and a half years to catch up with you; a few minutes more won't matter. I want to talk to you."

And when she had sat down, he said, "So you helpfully put it all on the record for me. All but one thing. You neglected to add why; what this outstanding debt was. I happen to know—now, I didn't for years. It was what held me up. I found out just in the nick of time—for Holmes's sake, anyway. If I hadn't he—the real Holmes—would have been where the rest are by now."

"You happen to know why!" Sparks seemed to dart from her eyes. "You couldn't, no, nor anyone else. Did you live through it? Did you see it with your own eyes? A dry line or two on some forgotten, dust-covered police report! But it still stings in my heart.

"It's a long time ago now, as time goes, and yet all I have to do is shut my eyes and he's beside me again, Nick, my husband. And the pain wells up around me again, the hate, the rage, the sick, cold loss. All I have to do is shut my eyes and it's yesterday again, that long-past unforgotten yesterday."

THREE

flashback: the little casket around the corner

FOR BETTER OR for worse, in sickness or in health, until death do ye part?"

"I do."

"I now pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. You may kiss the bride."

They turned toward each other shyly. She drew the filmy veil clear of her face. Her eyes drooped closed as his lips met hers in the sacramental kiss. She was Mrs. Nick Killeen now, not Julie Bennett anymore.

The members of their wedding party came crowding around; they were engulfed in a surging surf of bobbing heads, backslapping hands, congratulatory voices. The bridesmaids' tinted chiffon hats swept over her face one by one like colored gelatin slides, dyeing it without obscuring it, while each gave her a little peck of benediction. Through all the commotion, his eyes and hers kept seeking each other, as if to say, "You're that really matters to me, you, over there."

Then they were side by side again, Mr. and Mrs. Nick Killeen, her hand tucked submissively under his arm, as a wife's should be, her step matched to his, her heart beating his music. Down the long, vaulted church aisle they moved, toward where the doors stood open wide and the future, their future, waited. And behind them, two by two, came the bridesmaids like a bed of mobile flowers, yellow, azure, lilac, pink.

The apsed doorway receded overhead, gave way to a night sky soft as velvet, pricked with a single star, the evening star. Promising things, long life and happiness and laughter; promising things—but with a wink.

Their attendants hung back, as if bonded in some mischievous conspiracy, as the two principals unsuspectingly started down the short, spreading flight of church steps. The foremost of a short line of cars that had been held in readiness a few doors up the street meshed gears and started slowly forward to receive them. A gust of surreptitious giggling swept over those crowded in the doorway behind them. Hands sought paper bags, and the first few swirls of rice began to mist the steps. The bride threw up her arm to ward off the bombardment, huddled closer to the groom. Squeals of glee were emitted, the air whitened with the falling grains.

There was a sudden caterwauling of hysterical brakes; a large black shape, blurred for a moment by its very unexpectedness, careened around the corner of the church. It skimmed over the curb, nearly threatened to mount the steps themselves for a moment. Then by some miracle of maniac steering it veered off, straightened out, revealed itself for a split second as a black sedan, then shot forward into blurred velocity again. A series of ear-splitting detonations had punctuated the whole incredible apparition, and reflected flashes traced it from windowpane to windowpane along the lower floors of the row houses opposite. In its wake a noxious cloud of black smoke blanketed the church steps and those on them, as though an evil spirit had passed that way, and only began to thin out long after the malignant red taillight had twisted from sight at the far upper end of the street.

The laughter and playful shouts had changed to strangled coughs and sputterings. Then there was a sudden silence, as of premonition. In it, a voice spoke a name. The bride spoke her husband's name. "Nick!" Just once, in a hushed, terrified voice. An instant longer they stood down there motionless at the bottom of the steps, side by side, just as they had left the church. Then all at once she stood alone, and he lay at her feet.

The others broke, came milling down off the steps, fluttering around her. In the middle of them all his face peered up at her, like a white pebble lying at the bottom of a deep pool. There was a tiny fleck of red, a comma, so to speak, down near the bottom of her snowy veil. She kept staring at it as if hypnotized. His face didn't move. Not a comma, no; a period.

Minutes went by that had no meaning anymore. She was a statue in white, the one motionless, the one fixed thing, in all the eddying and swirling about. Voices shouting suggestions reached her as from another world, holding no meaning. "Open his shirt! Get these girls out of here, put them in the cars and send them home!"

Hands were extended toward her, trying to lead her away. "My place is here," she murmured tonelessly.

"Stunned," someone said. "Don't let her stand there like that; see if you can get her to go with you."

She motioned briefly, mechanically, and they let her be.

In the welter of sounds a dismal, clanging bell approached in the distance, rushing through the streets. Then it stopped short. A black bag stood open at her feet. "Gone," a low voice said. A girl screamed somewhere close at hand. It wasn't she.

The black bag was held partly toward her. "Here, let me give you—"

She motioned them aside with one hand, the one with the new gold wedding band on it. "Just let me hold my husband in my arms a moment. Just let me say goodbye." She knelt over him, with a great welling up of white tulle around her like a snowdrift stirred by the wind. The two heads joined, as they had been meant to join, but only one gave the caress. Those hovering closest heard a soft whisper. "I won't forget."

Then she was erect again, the straightest one among all of them; like ice, like white fire. A whimpering bridesmaid plucked helplessly at her sleeve. "Please come away now, please, Julie."

She didn't seem to hear. "How many were in that car, Andrea?"

"I saw five, I think."

"That is what I saw, too, and I have such very good eyes. What was the license number of that car, Andrea?"

"I don't know, I didn't have time—"

"I did. D3827. And I have such a very good memory."

"Julie, don't, you're frightening me. Why aren't you crying?"

"I am, where you can't see it. Come with me, Andrea. I'm going back inside the church."

"To pray?"

"No, to make a vow. Another vow to Nick."

FOUR

postmortem on nick killeen

SO THAT WAS IT, and you've repaid your debt," Wanger said musingly, "and nothing we can do to you now can take away the satisfaction of your accomplishment, is that it? No punishment that you receive from us can touch you—inside, where it really matters, is that right?"

She didn't answer.

"Yes, I had you figured that way all along, and now I see that I had you figured right. Sure, imprisonment won't be any punishment to you, no, nor even the chair itself, if they should happen to give you that. There isn't a flicker of remorse in your eyes, there isn't a shadow of fear in your heart."

"There isn't. You read me right."

"The state can't punish you, can it? But I can. Listen, Julie Killeen.

"You haven't avenged Nick Killeen. You only think you have, but you haven't. On the night that Bliss, Mitchell, Ferguson, Holmes and Moran tore past those church steps, howling drunk in their car, a man crouched at the first-floor window of a rooming house opposite, watching for the two of you, a gun in his hand, waiting for you to come out. He'd missed Killeen going in for some reason; maybe the cab Killeen arrived in formed an impediment in his line of fire, maybe there were too many people around him, maybe he reached his death post too late. And so he stayed there; he wasn't going to miss him coming out.

"He didn't.

"He raised his gun as you and your husband came down the steps. He sighted at Nick, and he pulled the trigger. The car streaked by in between at that instant, with its exhaust tube exploding a mile a minute. But his bullet found its mark, over the car's low top. It was a freak of timing that wouldn't have happened again in a hundred years, that couldn't have happened if he had tried to arrange it that way. The very reflections of the backfiring along the row of unlighted windowpanes helped to cover up his flash.

"There's your punishment, Julie Killeen. You've sent four innocent men to their deaths, who had nothing to do with killing your husband."

He hadn't reached her with that, he could tell; there was still the same glaze of icy imperviousness all over her. There was disbelief in her eyes. "Yes, I remember," she said contemptuously, "the papers tried to hint at some flimsy possibility like that at the time, no doubt deliberately encouraged by you people to cover up your own incompetence. There have been cases before that were never solved—Elwell, Dorothy King, Rothstein—and there's always the same reason; rottenness in the wrong places, bribery in the right places, pull. But there never was a case in the whole history of the police force that was allowed to pass so unnoticed as this. Not even a suspect questioned in it from first to last. As though a dog had been shot down in the streets!"

"As far as our encouraging the papers at the time goes, it was the other way around. We did everything we could to keep them from mentioning the man-across-the-way angle, deliberately misled them with stories of a stray shot from some rooftop, hoping if we kept quiet about it, if this unknown gunman thought he wasn't suspected, it would be easier to get our hands on him."

"I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now! I saw with my own eyes—"

"What you saw was an optical illusion, then. If you had come to us at the time, asked us how we were progressing, we could have proved it to your satisfaction once and for all. But no, you hugged your vengeance to yourself, nursed your bitterness, wouldn't interview the police. You deliberately withheld the information that was in your own possession—inaccurate though it was—and used it for murder."

She flashed him a look that was a complacent admission.

"There were powder burns found on the window curtains in that room opposite the church. There were people in it, on the floor above, who distinctly heard a shot beneath their feet, over and above all the backfiring outside. They were in a better position to judge, after all, than you. We even found a discharged shell, of the same caliber as that taken out of your husband's body, wedged between a crack in the floorboards. We knew from the start where the death shot had been fired from; that was why we didn't have to go tracing wild cars all over the city. We knew everything but who the killer was. We only found that out now, recently. Don't you want to know who he is? Don't you at least want to hear his name?"

"Why should I be interested in what rabbits you pull from a trick hat to try to mislead me?"

"The proof is in our files right now. It came in too late to save Bliss, Mitchell, Moran or Ferguson. But it's there today. Scientific proof; proof that cannot be gotten around. Documentary proof; a signed confession—I have a copy with me in my own pocket at this very minute. He's been in custody down in the city for the past three weeks."

For the first time, she had no challenging answer to make.

"You'll meet him face to face when you go back there with me shortly. I think that you'll remember meeting him before."

The first superficial crack had appeared on the glaze that protected her. A flicker of doubt, of dread, peered from her eyes. A question forced its way out. "Who?"

"Corey. Does the name mean anything to you?"

She said with painful slowness, "Yes, I remember this Corey. Twice he crossed my path, for a moment only. Once, on a terrace at a party, he brought me a drink. It would have been so easy to. . . . But I sent him away, to clear the deck for. . . ."

"The murder of Bliss, isn't that right?"

"According to you, someone who had never harmed me, never even seen me before that night." She held her forehead briefly, resumed: "And the second and last time, I was up in his very room with him, for a few minutes. I went back to his apartment with him as the simplest way of getting rid of him. I remember I even held him at the point of a gun to make sure of getting out again unhindered. His gun."

"The gun that killed your husband. The gun that fired the bullet into Nick Killeen. Through a slip-up on the part of a rookie it was checked by ballistics instead of by the fingerprint department for your prints, which was what he had brazenly turned it over to us for.

"I remember I was sitting there raising cain with the fingerprint bureau for not sending me a report on a weapon that had never reached them, when someone at ballistics telephoned me and said, 'That gun you sent us to be tested matches the markings on the slug taken out of Nick Killeen; we suppose that's what you wanted, you weren't very definite about it.' I had to see it with my own eyes before I'd believe them. Then just to make the irony all of a piece, Corey comes walking in to find out if we were through with the gun and he could have it back again. He never got out again!

"He'd come forward to help us of his own accord. He had a license for the gun; he was only too willing to let us have it, to see if we could get your prints off it. I suppose by then so many years had passed since the Killeen killing, his sense of immunity had become almost a fetish. He thought nothing could. . . .

"It took a little while, but we finally broke him down. In the meantime I had been working independently on what we all thought was an entirely different matter and came across an obscure item in old newspapers at the library, datelined on one of those Fridays that the Friday-Night Fiends had been on the loose. Just a little human-interest thing, tragic to those immediately involved but not particularly important. A bridegroom had been struck dead by a stray shot, presumably fired from some roof nearby, as he was leaving the very church he'd just been married in.

"To me that story offered the only possible reason for the murders of the Friday-Night Fiends, who had already lost three charter members and the bartender they carried around with them on those tears of theirs. I put two and two together. No mention was made of who the bereaved bride was, but after all there must have been one; a man doesn't marry himself.

"So we soft-pedaled Corey's arrest, held him practically incommunicado, to be sure you wouldn't get wind of it and pull your next and last punch. It was easy to figure out where it would land, so I simply got into position under it.

"But what I can't figure out is what you did with yourself between visitations, so to speak. How you were able to vanish so completely each time, effect all these quick changes of coiffure and personality. I knew you were coming but to the last minute didn't know from where or how. It was like trying to come to grips with a wraith."

The woman answered abstractedly, "There was nothing very supernatural about it. I suppose you looked for me in out-of-the-way hiding places, rooming houses, cheap hotels. I came into contact with dozens of people daily who never gave me a second look. I lived in a hospital, I'll give you the name if you want, one of the biggest in the city. I worked there and lived right there, didn't have to go out. My hair was kept covered, so no one knew—or cared—what color it was, from first to last. When I was off duty I stayed in my room, didn't encourage friendship from the staff. When it came time to—strike again, I would get a short leave of absence, go away, return again a few days later.

"All for what? All for nothing."

She was breathing again with difficulty, as she had in the chair before. As though something inside her were breaking up, clogging her windpipe.

"So I held the very gun he killed Nick with, in my own hands! Had him helpless at the point of it; lowered it and walked out, to go and kill an innocent man." She began to shiver uncontrollably, as though she had a chill. "Now I can hear that awful cry of Bliss's as he went over the terrace. I didn't hear it then. Now I can hear Mitchell's groan. I can hear them all!"

She bowed her head as abruptly as though her neck had snapped. Her sobbing was low pitched but intense, even paced as the pulsing of a dynamo.

A long time after, when it had ended, she looked up again. "What did he do it for—Corey, I mean?" she asked. "I must know that."

Paper rattled under his coat. He took out a copy of the confession, unfolded it, offered it to her.

She glanced only at the beginning and at the signature at the end of the last page. Then she returned it. "You tell me," she said. "I believe you now. You are an honest man."

"They were working a racket together, your husband and Corey. A nice, profitable, juicy little racket. The details are here in his confession." He broke off short. "Did Killeen ever tell you that?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes, he told me. I knew. He told me—all but the names. He told me what would happen to him if he quit. I didn't believe him. I wasn't as familiar with violence then. I told him it was either that or me. I didn't think it was as serious as all that, I didn't believe it could be. You see, I loved him. He took a week or two to make up his mind, and then he made his choice. Me."

For the first time Julie Killeen looked directly at Wanger. She spoke quietly, as though telling him some other woman's story. "He changed his quarters. Our meetings became furtive. I suggested that we go to the police for protection, but he told me he was in it as deep as whoever it was he feared. He said we'd go away. We'd go away fast, right from the church door straight to the ship. That was another thing I insisted on, a church wedding." She smiled grimly. "You see, I killed him, in a way. That made my obligation even greater afterward." She hesitated a moment, weary, then went on.

"He said we wouldn't come back right away. Maybe we wouldn't come back for a long time after. He was right. We went away all right—but not together. And we neither of us ever came back again.

"I knew I had to take him on those terms or not at all. There was never much question of a choice in it for me. I wanted him. Lord, how I wanted him. I used to lie awake at nights breaking down the time there still was to go without him into minutes and seconds. It made it seem shorter that way. His business. . . ." She shrugged. "He promised he'd give it up. That was all my conscience was strong enough to demand."

"The mistake you both made," Wanger mused almost to himself, "was in thinking that there's ever any quitting the game he was in. They'd chalked up several killings behind them in the course of 'business.' And then there was the question of the final division of the profits, which is always the main rub. Corey couldn't let him go. They had each other deadlocked."

The woman interrupted. There was fury in her quiet voice.

"He quit. He not only quit but made himself over. Mr. Corey, the dashing man-about-town. That's what he's become! Why couldn't he have let Nick go? Why did he have to kill him?"

For the first time in his career Wanger was answering questions instead of asking them. There was a quality of despair in Julie Killeen that carried them both outside the rules of captive and captor.

"Yes, Corey quit. But by the time he tried it there was no one left to reckon with but himself, don't forget. When Kilieen tried it, there was still Corey. And the way he did it wasn't any too reassuring. Just broke the connection off short, put himself out of reach—probably listening to your well-meant advice—but with enough on Corey to send him to the chair in three or four round trips. Not to mention several thousand dollars that Corey thought was coming to him. Corey had his reasons, all right. He wouldn't have known a moment's peace from then on. There would have been an ax hanging over him every minute of his life. He went out to get Nick while the getting was good, before Killeen got him first. The church was the only place Corey would be sure to find him. Before that, Nick evidently didn't show himself."

"He laid low, very low," she said quietly, almost indifferently.

"Nick had moved. Corey didn't know who the girl was, where she lived."

"We met in the dark in the movies, always two seats in the last row."

"But he finally thought of a way. He went around to all the churches asking questions. Somebody slipped up, and he found out where and when the wedding was going to take place. Then he rented a room that commanded the side entrance. He knew Killeen would use the side entrance. He took a gun in there with him, and a package of food, and he didn't go away from that window for forty-eight hours straight. He figured the time of the ceremony might be moved up at the last minute as a precaution."

There was silence in the room. Wanger thought of the bullet that had killed Nick Killeen, the bullet that had gone over the heads of five other men and yet had inevitably caused the death of four of them. He sighed and looked at Julie Killeen.

"You—he never knew who you were from first to last. You were just that unimportant little white doll-like figure next to his target. And he—you never knew who he was either, did you—the man who took you to his room one night, the man who had killed your husband?"

The woman didn't answer, didn't seem to hear.

"Afterward, he sent a wreath to the funeral, in care of the warden of the church."

The woman shivered, put up a hand as though Wanger had struck her.

He saw that he had convinced her at last.

He got up, put the manacle around her wrist, closing it almost gently, as if trying not to disturb her bitter reverie. She seemed not to notice it.

"Let's go," he said gruffly.

She stood up, suddenly became conscious of the steel that linked their wrists. She looked at Wanger and nodded gravely.

"Yes," said Julie Killeen, "it's time for me to go."

black alibi endnotes

Chapter 2. Teresa Delgado

*A shawl, almost invariably blue in color, worn coifed over the head and with one end flung back behind its opposite shoulder.

Chapter 4. Clo-Clo

*The big black one.

*A looped rope, a lasso.

CORNELL WOOLRICH

George Hopley-Woolrich (4 December 1903 – 25 September 1968) is one of America’s best crime and noir writers who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley. He’s often compared to other celebrated crime writers of his day, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Chandler.

Born in New York City, his parents separated when he was young and he lived in Mexico for nearly a decade with his father before returning to New York City to live with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich.

He attended New York’s Columbia University but left school in 1926 without graduating when his first novel, “Cover Charge”, was published. “Cover Charge” was one of six of his novels that he credits as inspired by the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woolrich soon turned to pulp and detective fiction, often published under his pseudonyms. His best known story today is his 1942 “It Had to be Murder” for the simple reason that it was adapted into the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie “Rear Window” starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly. It was remade as a television film by Christopher Reeve in 1998.

Woolrich was a homosexual but in 1930, while working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, he married Violet Virginia Blackton (1910-65), daughter of silent film producer J. Stuart Blackton. They separated after three months and the marriage was annulled in 1933.

Woolrich returned to new York where he and his mother moved into the Hotel Marseilles (Broadway and West 102nd Street). He lived there until her death on October 6, 1957, which prompted his move to the Hotel Franconia (20 West 72nd Street). In later years he socialized on occasion in Manhattan but alcoholism and an amputated leg, caused by an infection from wearing a shoe too tight which he left untreated, turned him into a recluse. Thus, he did not attend the New York premiere of Truffaut’s film based on his novel “The Bride Wore Black” in 1968 and, shortly thereafter, died weighing only 89 pounds. He is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

Woolrich bequeathed his estate to Columbia University to endow scholarships in his mother’s memory for journalism students.

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