Neither Five Nor Three

by Helen Macinnes

  “Okay,” Louie said. He gave a grin as he left; the cop would be as mad as hell when he found what they had cooked up. At the doorway, he stepped aside to let a white-aproned grocery clerk carry a large box into the hall.

  “That’s a lot of groceries you have there, Bud,” the superintendent said, eyeing the newcomer. Youngish—about twenty-two, slightly built but wiry, grey eyes, fair hair, long chin, sharp nose, uneven eyebrows, narrow face, full-lobed ears.

  “Just another load,” the man said, balancing his foot on the bottom of the steep flight of stairs. Old army wash pants, the superintendent noted, a faded blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, apron soiled, an automatic pencil clipped to the shirt’s breast pocket, good brown shoes, a wrist watch.

  “Where’s it going?” A loaf of bread, a bunch of celery, leafy carrots, a box of eggs, and more underneath.

  The man shifted his grip on the box. He looked at the superintendent and then at Brownlee. “Orpen’s,” he said. He sounded bored with his job.

  “Know where that is?” The superintendent’s voice was casual, his eyes careful.

  The man transferred a wad of gum from one thin cheek to another before he answered. “No,” he said. “Where’s it?”

  “Top floor.”

  “Just my luck.” He looked up the well of the staircase as he spoke, shaking his head wryly. He started climbing.

  “You can leave it here,” the superintendent called. “I’ll take it up.”

  “Got to deliver. Personally. Rules of the store.”

  “Leave it here?”

  “And lose my job?” The man didn’t stop. The superintendent and Brownlee exchanged glances. Then they ran after him. The superintendent caught his arm. “Hey!” the man said, puzzled, angry. “Can’t a guy do his job?”

  “Who ordered this stuff?” the superintendent asked, looking into the box. He opened the box of eggs. They were eggs, all right. He left the celery, the bunch of carrots. The bread was soft to his grip, concealing nothing. Underneath, there were only groceries too.

  “Hey, what’s the idea?” The man’s face showed sudden truculence.

  “Who ordered this?” the superintendent repeated.

  “He did.” The man jerked his thumb upstairs. “He just ’phoned. Urgent.”

  “Wait here! I can check on that.” The superintendent hurried downstairs toward the basement.

  So Orpen’s telephone wire is being tapped, Brownlee thought. And he smiled, for he liked to see a job being well done.

  “What’s so funny?” the man demanded. He looked after the superintendent worriedly.

  “You’d better wait here,” Brownlee said quietly. “What’s all the hurry for, anyway?”

  “I’ve other deliveries to make. We’re shorthanded today.” But there was a nervous drop in the man’s eyes. He frowned at the watch on his wrist. “Half-past one already,” he said angrily, and he seemed to hesitate as if he were making up his mind. He looked over the bannisters, down toward the basement door. He’s nervous, Brownlee thought; he’s lied to the superintendent.

  “Okay, okay,” the man said unexpectedly. “You deliver it.” He dumped the box on the step below him and started to move downstairs.

  But Brownlee blocked his path. “Yes, we’ll go down together and talk to the superintendent, shall we?”

  The man stopped, backing away, staring down at Brownlee. And then, at that moment, a door opened above them on the third-floor landing and a woman came out screaming. She waved a dish towel frantically as she leaned over the railing. “Get a cop!” she yelled. “There’s a man on the fire escape. He’s breaking into the top floor—get a cop!”

  The man’s stare deepened as he listened. For a second he stood motionless; and then, his face tightening, he turned and raced upstairs. Brownlee started after him. Far below there was a shout. Doors opened. Voices exclaimed and questioned. A babel of sound soared up through the house.

  Brownlee kept on. The blood pounded in his ears, a searing band tightened round his chest, his shoes were soled with lead, his thigh muscles strained painfully. Yet he kept on. And he was gaining. Three steps, just over an arm’s length, separated him now from the running man. But there, just ahead, was Orpen’s landing. The man stumbled slithering on to it, his hand fumbling in his pocket for the pencil. He pulled it free and twisted it sharply. He threw it at Orpen’s door even as Brownlee made a desperate lunge for his arm. The twisted pencil lay at the edge of the sill, seemingly simple and innocent.

  Brownlee stared at it. An incendiary pencil. Its action had started. From the moment it had been twisted, from the moment the thin dividing wall inside its body had been snapped, the action had started. And nothing could stop it. Nothing. The two substances it contained were no longer separated: they were mixing, flowing together, forming a third force, inevitable and deadly. He made an instinctive movement to pick it up, even as he knew it was hopeless. The third force was working; its power was already born in the first little jet of white flame, no bigger than a pilot light under a gas burner, that now pointed its warning. In a minute now, perhaps even in a few seconds... The man beside him was staring, too, his breath coming in heavy gulps. Suddenly, he twisted away from Brownlee and darted for the staircase.

  He won’t get far, Brownlee thought grimly. But now, the warning is the important thing; that has to be clear. He left the landing, too, leaning over the rail as he went downstairs. Below him, the superintendent and a couple of aroused tenants grapple with the escaping man. “Get back there! Fire!” Brownlee yelled. “Fire!” And as the superintendent looked up toward him, startled, he gathered all the breath he had left in his lungs to shout, “It’s an incendiary pencil.”

  The superintendent’s face went tense. He knew what they had to deal with, for he was translating Brownlee’s warning for the others. “Everyone downstairs, everyone downstairs, at once!” And even if he had no time to explain that the pencil’s flame could not be extinguished, that they had to wait until it had died and only a normal fire was left to fight, the urgency in his voice was unmistakable. “Later!” he yelled at a tenant who had grabbed a pail of sand. “Not now. No use. Get downstairs!” Still holding a firm grip on the man he had caught, he herded the tenants downstairs, trying to count them as they came out of the apartments.

  Brownlee halted on the third floor. The woman with the dish towel had stepped back into her room. She was saying, “Fire? Fire?” in a bewildered way. “But there’s nothing burning!”

  “Come on,” Brownlee said, following her, catching her arm.

  She looked at her apartment, looked at its neatness and care and work. “Oh, no!” she cried.

  Brownlee urged her away. “We’ll save it,” he said as he pulled her toward the staircase. “But first, we must get downstairs.” She went unwillingly, looking at him, still carrying the dish towel.

  “What’s that?” she asked, clutching him. From the landing on the top floor came a deep steady hiss. Brownlee quickened their steps. Suddenly, the woman screamed and covered her eyes with the towel.

  A strange light, bleak and white, hung over the well of the staircase. And then, with a rushing noise the gush of flames broke loose, violent jetting spreading flames.

  * * *

  Paul Haydn reached the third floor.

  Down in the courtyard, the dog and man were now hidden by the shade of the ailanthus tree. The dog had lost sight of him as he climbed the fire escape. Paul could still hear an uneasy whine, but the man who had taken Paul past the dog must have said something to reassure it again, for the whine stopped and the bark was checked. And now down there below him was only silence, and the leafy spray of ailanthus leaves blotting out the sad grey earth of the walled yard. The grimy frame of the fire escape shook at each movement and it seemed to cling more closely to the house wall. From the apartments inside this soot-stained box of stone came a hodge-podge of sound—the clatter of dishes, a man’s voice laughing, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” competing with Mozart, a girl argui
ng bitterly with an older woman, an announcer warming up for a baseball game, an imitation Southern voice singing that if she’d have known you were coming she’d have baked a cake. The windows he passed belonged to bedrooms, some frilled and gaily painted, some untidied and dreary, but they all seemed empty. Until the third floor.

  There, as he moved quietly and quickly toward the last flight of skeleton stairs, he saw a movement. But the peeling, weather-bleached frame of Orpen’s window lay ahead of him, coming step by careful step nearer him. He reached it, stood for a moment to gather his breath. He noticed, first with dismay, that the window was crisscrossed with wooden spars dividing it into small panes of glass; then with a surge of relief, that the upper half of the window was a few inches open from the top. He tried to raise its lower half, but it was screwed firmly in place. Then, suddenly, from the floor below him, a woman screamed.

  The upper half of the window screeched like an echo as he wrenched it down. He swung himself up and over, and then dropped to the floor of the bedroom.

  The door ahead of him lay open. But neither Rona nor Orpen was paying any attention to him. His neat entrance had gone completely unnoticed. Orpen was on his feet, facing Rona, his hands brushing his face and shoulders free of cigarette stubs and grey ashes. On the floor beside him lay a large empty ashtray. Rona was standing behind the table, a coffee-pot raised in her right hand. “You’ve no right to keep me here, you’ve no right to make me answer. You’ve no right,” she kept repeating, “you’ve no right...”

  Orpen, taking off his glasses to wipe them, said angrily, “You might have broken them... Put down that coffee-pot. You look ridiculous. And I’ll decide my own rights for myself.” Then his attention was caught by the sounds of footsteps running upstairs and of voices calling from far below. He took a step toward the door, listening, still watching Rona. “That’s an old trick,” he said. “Am I supposed to look behind me to see what you pretend to see? Put down that coffee-pot!”

  Paul Haydn stepped into the living-room. “Yes,” he said, “you can put it down now, Rona.” He went over to her and stood beside her.

  “He had no right,” she said. “He had no right!”

  “None at all,” Paul said gently, “none at all.” He was watching Orpen.

  And Orpen, watching Paul Haydn, was still listening to the sounds outside. The running footsteps were reaching the last flight of stairs.

  “You needn’t watch us,” Paul said quietly. “We aren’t your friends.” As he kept his voice low, he could feel Rona relax beside him. Her near hysteria was passing. That’s the main thing now, he thought. And he gave up his first impulse to smash Orpen’s glasses properly. Not that Orpen was worth fighting, a white-faced little runt with tight pale lips and blinking eyes and thin grey hair—a frightened little clerk who had never been promoted and was afraid for his pension. You’d better stop that, Paul told himself, or you’ll begin to feel he’s a human being, someone you could be sorry for.

  A look of indecision crossed Orpen’s face. Outside, the heavy footsteps stumbled.

  Paul Haydn took Rona’s arm and drew her away from the door. She flinched for a moment, and then looked up at him as if to excuse her foolishness. But he was listening to Roger Brownlee’s voice shouting on the landing outside: “Get back there! Fire! Fire!” And then the words, “It’s an incendiary pencil.”

  Paul glanced at Orpen. He knew what that meant, for he had run to the desk and was gathering up the steel box as he jammed a crumpled sheet of paper into his pocket. He started pulling out books from a deep shelf, sweeping them on to the floor with one hand. But whatever he had to do required both hands. He laid the steel box down, and then—just as suddenly—picked it up, turning to face Paul Haydn as he held the box tightly against his chest.

  Paul Haydn looked at him contemptuously. “We aren’t thieves,” he said. Then his voice changed as he turned to Rona. “This way.” He drew her toward the bedroom and the fire escape.

  She was puzzled by his haste, but she went with him. “A pencil?” she asked in wonder, listening to a sudden hiss that came from the other side of the door.

  “Surest way of starting a fire.”

  Rona halted for a moment. She looked back at Orpen. But she said nothing. Orpen, standing with the box still clutched in his arms, turned his eyes away. Then, as the hissing became a rushing sound, the sound of a torrent unleashed from a dam, he stared at the door unbelievingly, hopelessly.

  Paul Haydn pushed a bureau under the bedroom window. “Come on, Rona,” he said, lifting her on to its top. He climbed up beside her and helped her through the upper half of the window. He glanced back at Orpen. “Make up your mind!” he yelled.

  But Orpen didn’t move. He was still standing in the middle of the room, his face now calm, expressionless.

  Paul looked at Rona. She was waiting on the narrow platform of the fire escape, shrinking back against the wall of the house as she stared down through the skeleton steps and the thin iron struts. He hauled himself through the window, and stood beside her.

  “I’m scared,” she said, shutting her eyes for a moment, steadying herself against the railing. “It shakes,” she said, “Paul, it shakes!”

  “I’ll go first. Don’t look down. I’ll count the steps for you. Here’s my hand.”

  She slipped off her high-heeled shoes. “No good twisting an ankle,” she said, now keeping her voice equally calm. She put out her hand and grasped his.

  There were men down in the yard. And Brownlee.

  “Where’s Orpen?” Brownlee asked.

  “Making up his mind. We’ll have to go back and pull him out.”

  “Damn his eyes,” Brownlee said, and started on his way up the fire escape.

  “Hey you, come back here!” a voice shouted from the courtyard, but Brownlee climbed on. From the street, came the clanging of fire engines. And now other men were mounting the fire escape, carrying axes.

  * * *

  In the street, the ladders were up and hoses were playing on the fourth floor and roof.

  The superintendent, blackened and red-eyed, said wearily, “We held it back with extinguishers and sand and a stirrup pump. It didn’t get downstairs. But the top landing is a mess and the firemen are worried about the roof. These old houses are dry—they go up quickly.” He looked at the tenants grouped in a worried huddle beyond the fire engines. “No one hurt, thank God. They got enough warning. But there’s been a lot of damage. Who’s going to pay for it?” He cursed Orpen silently. Then he looked at Rona. “We’ll follow Orpen when he comes down,” he said to Paul. “We’ve got men out back and in front. Pity we hadn’t the goods on him so that we could have arrested him this morning. And picked up some of his papers. There must be some valuable stuff up there.” He looked at the fourth floor again and his mouth tightened.

  Paul said, “I’m taking Miss Metford to her sister’s. Tell Brownlee when you see him. I hope to God he’s all right.”

  “He can take care of himself.”

  “Who started the fire, anyway?”

  “We got him,” the superintendent said grimly. “He’s just another stooge. He lost his head. That fire was useless the moment we got suspicious of him.”

  “Pretty drastic measure to make sure of Orpen,” Paul said. “There are other ways.”

  “It’s my guess they wanted to destroy something he has got stored away in his room. After all, he could always walk down that fire escape. But there’s something up there that they don’t want to fall into our hands.” He turned to Rona. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the moment you went up there this morning, and stayed—well, that was when they decided they could take no more chances.” He half-smiled as he looked at the girl with the wide dark eyes. And I’m talking too much, too, he thought suddenly. There’s nothing like a fire and a fright to loosen up one’s tongue. “Did Orpen say much?” he asked more casually.

  Rona shook her head.

  “Later,” Paul said quickly to the superinte
ndent. “Later.” He gave the man a nod, as much as to say You know where to find us. He made way for Rona through the curious crowd that had gathered so quickly and spontaneously.

  “Oh, it isn’t much,” one woman said, disappointed. “Look, they’re winding up the hoses.”

  “Some men are still on the roof,” her companion said hopefully. “They’ve got their axes. Ever seen the way they start swinging those axes when they think anything is smouldering? My God, they do as much damage as the fire. Last fall, September, no, it was October, my aunt’s kitchen caught fire. No, I’m a liar, it was September...”

  * * *

  They heard Brownlee calling “Paul!” as they neared Third Avenue. They turned to see him running along the street toward them, his suit stained and torn at the knee, his hair dishevelled, his excited face streaked with sweat and smoke. He caught up with them, looked at Rona and clapped his hand on Paul’s shoulder. He regained his breath painfully. “Paul—” he began, then as he looked at Rona he hesitated. He controlled his excitement. “I’ll ’phone you at the Tysons’?” he asked Paul. “That’s where you are taking her now?”

  Paul nodded, watching Roger Brownlee carefully.

  Rona was watching him, too. She said quietly, “Orpen is dead.”

  Brownlee stared at her. Then he nodded.

  Rona turned away and began walking to the corner. Once, she glanced over her shoulder at the house with its broken windows and blackened roof. “It was the telephone call,” she said. “He was so sure. So sure they’d believe his lie. He almost believed it, himself. When they didn’t, he admitted his guilt... To them. Not to us.”

  Paul Haydn didn’t even try to make sense of what she was saying. He must make her think of something else.

  “Barbara,” he said suddenly, “we’ll go and collect Barbara.”

  “Barbara? Oh, yes...” Then she said, half to herself, “There’s always a Barbara, isn’t there?” Her pace quickened.

  He hailed a taxi on Third Avenue. The streets were alive with traffic. People dressed in fresh bright clothes filled the sidewalk.