Phantom lady (14 page)

The girl turned and sped, down to the near-by corner and around it and along the next street, but with a neat economy of movement that robbed her going of all fear, made it just a precautionary withdrawal from someone in whom she had no interest.

The woman's railing screams, fleeter than their owner, winged after the girl, overtook her midway down the block. "For three days now you been hounding my monn! Come back here and I'll give it to you! Let me get my hands on you and I'll fix you, I will!"

She stood there in view for a moment or two, just past the corner, gesturing threats of dire antagonism with pole and arm. The girl slowed, stopped, dissolved into the gloom.

Presently the woman went back around the corner, sought her own house again.

Presently the girl was back again, too, standing where she had been before, and as she had been before, staring upward at two windows of the house across the way, like a cat watching a mouse hole.

An elevated train wriggled by. ... A taxi passed. ... A late wn'farer came along, passed, receded. . . .

Those blank window-panes staring sightlessly down at

her had a look of helpless frustration now, somehow.

"Soon," the voice on the telephone said. "One more day, to make sure he's completely pulverized. Maybe by tomorrow night—"

It was his day off, and he had been attempting to shake her off for well over an hour now.

He was going to halt again. She saw it coming before it had even occurred, she already knew the signs so well by now. He halted in full sunshine this time, stood back against a building wall, with shoppers streaming to and fro before him. He had already halted two or three times before this, but each time it had ended inconclusively. As it always did. He had gone on again; she had too.

This time she detected a difference. This time the halt almost seemed to be involuntary. As though some mainspring of endurance had finally snapped, then and there, at just that point, as he was passing it, and he had suddenly found himself all unwound. As he backed to the wall the small flat parcel he had held bedded under his arm slowly overbalanced, slapped to the ground, and he allowed it to lie there unrecovered.

She halted a short distance from him, making no pretense, as usual, that her halt had anything to do but with him. She stood looking at him in her usual grave way.

The sun was streaming whitely into his face, and he was blinking his eyes against it. More and more rapidly, however.

Tears appeared unexpectedly, and suddenly he was weeping abjectedly, in full view of all the passersby, his face an ugly, brick-red, puckered mask.

Two people stopped, incredulous. The two became four, the four, eight. He and the girl were both contained in the hollow core of the crowd that in no time at all had ringed them around, kept thickening, outer layer by outer layer.

He was past all ordinarv sense of self-consciousness, humiliation; he appealed to the onlookers, almost as if asking

help, protection against her.

"Ask her what she wants of me!" he bawled soddenly. "Ask her what she's after! She's been doing this to me for days now— Day and night, night and day! I can't stand it any more, I tell ya, I can't stand it any more—!"

"What is he, drunk?" a woman asked another, in a derisive undertone.

She stood there unshrinking, making no attempt to escape from the attention he was forcing her to share with him. She was so dignified, so grave, so fetching to the eye, and he was so grotesquely comical, it could have had only one result; the sympathies of the crowd could have gone only one way. Crowds are more often sadistic than not, anyway.

Grins appeared here and there. The grins became snickers. The snickers guffaws and outright jeers. In another moment the whole crowd was laughing pitilessly at him. Only one face in all that group remained impassive, sober, clinically neutral.

Hers.

He had only worsened his situation instead of bettering it. by making this spectacle. He had thirty tormentors now, instead of one. "I can't stand it any more! I tell ya I'll do something to her—!" Suddenly he advanced on her, as if to strike her, beat her back.

Instantly men leaped forward, caught his arms, flung him this way and that with surly grunts. For a moment there was a confused floundering of bodies around her. His head suddenly forced its way through, lower than normal, straining to get at her.

It might easily have developed into a multiple onslaught —on him.

She appealed to them, self-possessedly but loudly enough to be heard, and the calm clarity of her voice stopped them all short. "Don't. Let him alone. Let him go about his business."

But there was no warmth nor compassion about it, just

a terrible steely impartiality. As if to say: Leave him to me. He's mine.

Arms fell away from him, poised fists relaxed, coats were shrugged back into place, and the angry inner nucleus within the greater one distintegrated. Leaving him alone again within the hollow circle. Alone with her.

He made several false moves, in his torment and frustration, seeking an outlet through the massed figures around him. Then he found one. and forced his way through it, and went plunging out. He went running away from the scene full tilt, padding ponderously down the street; running away from the slender girl who stood there looking after him, her coat belted around her waist to the thickness of little more than a man's hand span. The ultimate in degradation.

She didn't linger long behind him. She wasn't interested in the plaudits of the crowd, or savoring any juvenile public triumph. She thrust those in her way aside with deft little passes of her arm, until she had gained clearance for herself. Then she set out after the heavily laboring figure ahead, at a blend of light running and graceful energetic walking that carried her rapidly forward in his wake.

Strange pursuit. Incredible pursuit. Slim young girl hurrying after a stocky barman, in and out, out and in, through the swarming midday streets of New York.

He became aware almost at once that she had taken up the chase once more. He looked back, the first time in dismal apprehension. She waited for him to look again. When he did, she flung up her arm straight overhead, in imperious summons to him to stop.

Now would be the time, now would be the moment Burgess would approve of, she felt sure. Now he was like wax as he ran through this bright midday sun. That crowd back there had taken away his last prop. He had tested it, found it no protection, and accordingly he no longer had a sense of immunity even in broad daylight on these bustling city streets.

The curve of his resistance might start upward again from here on, if she didn't act now while she had the chance. The law of diminishing returns might set in from here on. Familiarity might very well breed contempt, for all she knew.

Now was the time; it was simply a matter of pinning him against the nearest wall, putting in a quick call to Burgess, and having him take charge in time to be in at the death. "Are you ready to admit now that you did see a certain woman at the bar that night in company with the man Henderson? Why did you deny having seen her? Who paid or coerced you to deny it?"

He had stopped for a moment, down there ahead at the next corner, looking all about him for a way of escape like a trapped, scurrying animal. Panic was on him at white heat. She could tell by the abortive, zigzag false starts he kept making, looking for sanctuary. To him she was no longer a girl, something he could have buffeted senseless with one arm if he chose. To him she was Nemesis.

She threw up her arm again, as the distance rapidly closed between them. It only stung him like the flick of a whip to an added spurt of frenzied disorientation. He was walled in there on the corner by a thin but continuous line of people waiting to cross over, standing elbow to elbow along the curb. There was an adverse light on above.

He gave one last look at her, rapidly nearing him now, and then plunged through them like a circus performer tearing through a paper hoop.

She stopped short, as short as though both her flailing feet had caught simultaneously in a hidden crevice along the sidewalk. A brake keened out along the asphalt, scorching itself to death.

She flung up both hands, ground them into her eyesockets, but not before she had seen his hat go up in the air, in a surprisingly high loop, clear over everyone else's head.

A woman screamed for prelude, and then a vast bay of horrified dismay went up from the crowd in general.

The Eleventh Day Before the Execution

LOMBARD

Lombard had been following him for the past hour and a half and there's nothing slower to be followed on the face of the earth than a blind mendicant. He moved like a tortoise that counts its life span by centuries, instead of a man that counts his by years. It took him an average of forty minutes to traverse each block length, from one corner to the next. Lombard timed it with his watch several times

He didn't have a seeing eye dog. He had to rely on his fellow pedestrians to get him safely over the crossings, each time he came to one. They never failed him. Cops held up traffic well into the green, if he hadn't quite made it by the time the change over came. Hardly anyone that passed failed to drop something into his cup, so it paid him to walk slow It was painful to Lombard in the extreme; he was active* unhandicapped, and with an acutely heightened sense of time value these days. Several times it was all he could do to hang back in the wake of this endless, creeping progress that was like a variation of the Chinese water-drop torture' But he curbed himself, kept him grimly in sight, sucking impatiently at cigarettes for a safety valve, standing immobile for long stretches at a time in doorways and shop-window indentations to let him accomplish some distance then closing in rapidly again in a few hectic strides, and falling motionless once more, to once more let his quarry eke out a little further microscopic progress. Breaking it up that way into fits and starts took a little of the curse out of it

It couldn't keep on forever, he kept reminding himself. It couldn't last through the whole night. That figure up

ahead of him was a human being in a human being's body. He had to sleep sometime. He'd have to turn in out of the open and go behind walls and lie down to rest sometime. His kind didn't beg straight through the night hours until day break, the law of diminishing returns alone would be enough to discourage that.

And finally it came. Lombard had thought it never would, but it did at last. He turned aside, went within walls, and quitted the open. It was in a sector that had unnoticeably become so derelict as they both advanced through it, that no bounty could be expected from it. It was in need of alms itself, instead of being able to bestow. It was blocked off at one end by overhead railway tracks carried on a viaduct of rough-faced granite blocks.

His burrow was a mouldering tenement just short of this. Lombard had had to be careful, although he hadn't realized even yet that the end was this close at hand. He'd had to remain well back, for the streets were desolate hereabouts, with few other footsteps to blur his own, and he knew they had supersensitive ears as a rule.

When he saw him enter, therefore, he was further back than he would have wished to be. He hurriedly closed in for the last time, trying to reach it in time to ascertain which floor it was, if possible. He stopped at the doorway and cautiously entered in turn, just deep enough within to be able to listen.

The cane taps were still going up, with infinite slowness. They sounded a little like drops of water from a faulty spigot striking into an empty wooden bucket. He held his breath, listening. He counted four breaks in them, changes of tempo, one for each turn of the stairs. They were duller on the level landings than on the incline of the stairs themselves. Then they dwindled off to the back, not the front, of the building.

He waited until he'd heard the faint closing of a door up there somewhere, then he started up in turn, treading stealthily but fast, with all the energy he'd had to hold suppressed

until now unleashed at last. The acutely tilted flights of worn stairs would have prostrated anyone else; he was hardly aware of them.

There were two of them at the back, but he could tell which it was, because one of them, even at this distance, was obviously a water-closet.

He waited a moment at the top step until his rapidity of breath was completely quelled again, then advanced carefully toward it. Again he reminded himself how acute of hearing they were said to be. But he accomplished his purpose to perfection; not a floorboard wavered, due more to his superb muscular co-ordination than to any particular lightness of weight. He was and always had been a swell machine; something that belonged under the hood of a racing car instead of in a flimsy sack of skin.

He put his ear over against the door seam and listened.

There was no light coming from it, of course, because for him in there there was never any light, so it would have done him no good to put it on. But he could hear an occasional sound of moving about. It put him in mind of an animal that withdraws into a hole, and then keeps turning for some little time afterward, getting itself comfortable, before it finally settles down for good.

There were no sounds of voice. He must be in there alone.

This was long enough. Now for it. He knocked.

The moving around died instantly, and there was nothing more. A cessation. A place trying to make itself seem empty. A frightened, bated stillness, that he knew would go on for as long as he was out there—if he permitted it to.

He knocked again.

"Come on," he said sternly.

His third knocking was harshly imperative. The fourth would be blows.

"Come on," he said brutally in the silence.

The flooring creaked timidly in there, and then a voice, almost with breath accompanying it, it was emitted so close to the door seam, asked, "Who's out there?"

"A friend."

The voice became more frightened at that, instead of less. "I haven't any. I don't know you."

"Let me in. I won't hurt you."