The officials, in their jockey caps and white pants, took up position. Silence came down like a huge hand over the stadium. Yale kicked off—a long, looping kick; the Yale ends streaked after it. The Cabot fullback caught an awkward ball over his left shoulder, avoided the right end with a feint, made ten yards and was submerged. A roar went up from the spectators. Yale formed a huddle, and very quickly the linesmen strung out, the ball was flipped to their quarterback, who danced five steps backward and sent a torpedo pass to a halfback who had run ’round his opposing end, but could only touch the ball with his fingers. If he had caught it, he would have been away. Yale was starting with a bang. But after a few minutes, the team had failed to make ten yards, and Cabot had possession. “Go go go!” yelled the Cabot men sitting all around Nigel. Their team soldiered on for fifteen yards, for ten, for another ten, before they failed to make it on a third down, and lost possession.
Thereafter, for Nigel, the game was a constantly shifting kaleidoscope, an alternation of storm and doldrum. Blue and gold linesmen colliding like wave and rock, with an impact the more titanic because from up here it was silent. The pauses when the referee and his assistant marched up with a tape measure, like field surveyors, to judge a doubtful carry. The light-foot dancing of the quarterbacks as they poised to throw a pass, their would-be tacklers blocked off to give them room. A huge halfback, hurling himself at the opposing line and leaping over a heap of prostrate bodies. The coaches biting their nails on the sidelines. Pauses while replacements streamed out onto the field, and other players trotted off. The bands in the interval performing complex maneuvers over the grass as they played. . . .
Chester Ahlberg looked at his watch. Less than five minutes to go. He rose, pushed his way to the end of his tier, walked up the aisle, then down the steps which led to an exit at the back of the stadium. It would all be a matter of timing—and of timing, as this morning had proved to him, he was a master. The objective was in his mind’s eye, looming so large now that it blocked out the future beyond it. A continuous roaring, like that of a storm, came hollowly to his ears as he passed round the back of the stadium toward the entrance of section J. . . .
An hour earlier Lieutenant Brady had been at the telephone in the Master’s rooms. He had telephoned every number on a sheet Zeke had given him, to inquire if any of Chester’s friends or associates had seen him today. There were few replies: almost everyone must be at the football game. He had called, among the others, Sukie Tate. No reply.
He banged down the receiver in disgust and left the study. At the main gate he encountered a woman hurrying into the House.
“Miss Tate. I’ve been trying to get you. You wouldn’t by any chance have seen Chester Ahlberg today?”
“Why, sure. He had lunch with me. You looking for him?”
“Is he there still?”
“No. He went to the football game.”
Brady was dumfounded. A hunted murderer taking time off to watch a game of football. “Are you sure?”
“Well, he said he was going. He’d got a ticket. And he borrowed an old tweed overcoat of John’s—said his own wasn’t thick enough.”
“Color?”
“Sort of browny. Faded. But I don’t see—”
“Did he change any other clothes in your house?”
“No. And he left his hat behind. Went out without one. I thought it very foolish, with him just out of hospital—”
“Did he tell you where his seat was located?”
“No, Lieutenant. What are you—?”
But Brady was running toward a motorcycle policeman waiting at the sidewalk. “Our man may be in the university stadium. Brownish tweed overcoat. Alert them at the gates. Step on it!”
The cop kicked his engine to life and raced off. Brady got into the police car, where three bulky men awaited him. “Let’s go.” . . .
Two minutes to go. Cabot was two points behind, but on Yale’s thirty-yard line. The vast crowd was possessed by delirium. Nigel swallowed the remains of his Scotch, and replaced the hip flask in the back pocket of his trousers. A third down. The ball was flipped to the Cabot quarterback. He darted diagonally left, and as he did so the big halfback ran behind him, making right. The quarterback somehow created the optical illusion that he still had the ball: he tore on, Nigel’s eyes following him, and was felled by a blue shirt. Then Nigel saw that a movement was running out to the right. The ball had been slipped to the big halfback, who was almost away, with thirty yards to go. . . .
Chester Ahlberg, one black-gloved hand grasping the hilt of the stiletto in his pocket, stood at the top of J section aisle. He had picked out Nigel’s tow-colored hair three tiers below him, in a seat next to the aisle. He gave a look at the field. His ears were closed to the crescendo of noise below him. He moved slowly down the steps which lay between him and his target. . . .
The big halfback, protected by his team’s interference, strode on. He walked through one despairing tackle, and with a sudden acceleration, rounded the Yale fullback. Charles and Nigel, like every other Cabot man, leaped to their feet, to watch the halfback go sailing over the line. And, as he did so, Nigel felt something like the kick of a horse under his right kidney. He had jumped up at the very instant the stiletto drove at his back. Chester could not stop the blow: the stiletto struck, with maniac violence, the flask in Nigel’s hip pocket, and was jarred out of Chester’s hand.
Nigel whipped round, to see a figure leap up the steps, then disappear. The figure was unrecognizable, but he knew it must be Chester. He picked up the stiletto, fought his way to the exit and clattered down the steps. Outside, behind the stadium, he gazed left and right. His quarry had vanished. . . .
Running round the curve of the stadium, Chester climbed the stairs leading to his own section and emerged into the sunshine. Everyone was leaping down the tiers and flocking onto the field. In that multitude he must lose himself. He wanted to be obliterated, to disappear. The single-mindedness with which he had pursued his enemy turned into a pure impulse of escape. In the vast cheering, chattering, laughing, jostling crowd, he felt absolutely isolated: yet he had to hide himself in it, and sought out the thickest of the concourse where it pressed around the heroes of the game. He allowed himself to be carried hither and thither on the eddies of this crowd, twisting and buffeted like a straw in a torrent.
Chester had sloughed off the burden of the last few minutes—and weeks. For him they existed only as the rapidly fading memory of a dream. He was living in the present, in this milling crowd, his mind blinkered from everything except what lay directly ahead, his new destination. He must get out of here and go to New York, to his father, to the shelter of Abraham’s bosom.
“Hi, Mr. Ahlberg. Didn’t recognize you at first. Oh, boy, what a day!” It was two of his students, with their girls. “You waiting to line up for the march?”
“I guess so.”
The little group was swirled away. Chester drew the muffler over his mouth again. He did not suppose the police would be looking for him here presently—not until that rat Strangeways could reach them to give the alarm. But there’d be cordons out; the bus stops, the railroad station, the airport would be watched by now. A state of panic went into him, like a hypodermic with some injection that paralyzed mind and limbs. He fought its influence. The first thing was to get out of the stadium. And his students had shown him how to do it. Chester edged his way, head down, to the far end of the field. . . .
The Cabot band was forming up. It was their custom, if victory had been won on the field, to lead a procession through the streets of the town, playing college songs. Any motorist who attempted to move through this demonstration would inevitably get jammed in it, for the rejoicing crowd filled the whole street from sidewalk to sidewalk, the effect of which was to cause traffic congestion all through the town. Some of the crowd was already streaming toward the four gates out of the stadium when the band leader threw up his staff, caught it, flourished it; the music and the march began. Both we
re, by tradition, disorderly—and got more so the farther they proceeded: costumes and hats were exchanged en route, for instance. So it occasioned no comment when Chester snatched a football helmet off a nearby head and crammed it on his own, the mouth guard concealing the lower half of his face.
There was some delay at the main gate; but the band, pushed forward by the mass of singing Cabot men behind it, thrust into the smaller crowd in front of them and drove them through the line of police outside the gate. Just before they reached it themselves, Chester snatched a trombone from the bandsman beside him, lowered the helmet’s mouth guard, and applied his lips to the instrument.
“Hey, fella, that’s mine!” said its grinning owner, and snatched it away; but not before the five policemen had been thrown back and they were out in the main road.
Groups of supporters caught up with the band, whose files were now sandwiched between them on either side. Behind them, thousands pressed on, making a 300-yard-long ram of which the band was the butting head.
“Cabot forever! Go go go!” sang the crowd. Trumpets and trombones blared: the big drum boomed, the kettledrums clattered: fifes and piccolos shrilled like a flock of starlings.
Under cover of the pandemonium, shuffling slowly ahead beside the band, Chester thought out his next move. He would follow along as far as the Square, just this side of the main university buildings. Then he would break away from the procession and dive into a taxi. The crowd would already have thinned out a bit: as soon as the taxi could move, he would tell the driver to take him to—to where, though? All the local terminals would be watched. Panic suddenly washed up against his defenses, in a rising tide. He’d have himself driven to Martha, a small town six miles away. There he’d hire a car from a garage proprietor he knew, and drive himself the thirty miles south to Manoosa, where there was a railroad depot and the main line to New York.
Chester sighed with relief. Once again he’d be stealing a march on Them. Tonight he’d be in New York, and dad wouldn’t let Them do anything to him. A tear rolled down his cheek under the mouth guard. His neat little face—what could be seen of it, but nobody was looking at him—began to work, as it had when he was a child, fighting against tears. No, dad will protect me. I am his son. He’ll understand why. He wouldn’t allow Them to take my life away.
The main body was approaching Cabot Bridge, up a slight rise, and slowing down. At the intersection, motorists hooted angrily, held up by the stream of pedestrians. The head of the procession was faced by a row of policemen, spaced out across the near end of the bridge, and flowed past them slowly like a stream which must break up to run past a line of steppingstones. The cops were scrutinizing every person who passed through.
Chester was not tall enough to see them till he was only a few yards away. He stopped dead then, his eyes flickering to either side. But the crowd behind pushed him on remorselessly. Chester shut his eyes, allowing the sluggish tide to carry him forward: when he opened them again, he was past the line of police.
Now the sense of invulnerability possessed him again. They could not touch him—could not even see him, as though the helmet, the tweed overcoat, the black gloves had become a cloak of darkness. He turned his head to a student and his date who were walking beside him: he gave them a kindly smile, and the man winked back. They were now at the middle of the bridge. Ahead of them, the crowd was parting again, into two streams. Through the gap left in the middle of the road, Chester was soon able to see the obstruction.
A police car was drawn up just beyond the bridge, lengthways across the thoroughfare, leaving only the sidewalks to left and right available for the pedestrians. At one end of the car stood Lieutenant Brady, at the other end Nigel Strangeways, with a group of uniformed police between them.
Chester, as though an invisble force were crushing his heart, began to whimper. He could not understand how the blow he had given Nigel, though it felt as if it had struck bone, could have left him unharmed. “It’s not fair,” he whimpered, “not fair.”
The gaily anarchic crowd had slowed to a halt before the police car. Each individual was allowed to filter past it only after a sharp scrutiny by Brady or Nigel. So much, Chester could see. He realized that his cloak of invisibility would be shredded away when his turn came to be inspected. For a few moments he stood there, frozen with despair. Then his nerve melted away, like an icicle in a furnace, and he suddenly turned, and ran crouching into the crowd behind him. Someone shouted. Brady looked up, glimpsing the back of a faded brown overcoat. “Stop that man!” he bawled. A loudspeaker on the police car took up the cry with a harsh, metallic bellow.
The crowd stood, clotted and bewildered, a vast herd of steers in a corral. They gazed curiously at the strange little figure which darted among them like a rabbit looking for a burrow. No one laid hands on it, but neither would anyone give way and leave a gap: they yielded only to the police who came shouldering their way toward the fugitive. Chester, moaning, felt as if he was trying to wade past immovable rocks through a sea of treacle. A hand fell on his shoulder. Desperate, he wriggled away from it, and found himself on the sidewalk, hemmed in, but he saw escape.
Nigel was one of the witnesses as the weird figure of Chester Ahlberg—in the tweed coat, the black gloves, the football helmet—scrambled onto the parapet of Cabot Bridge, shook off the hands that tried to stop it, and with a long crazed screaming hurled itself down to the river far below.
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Copyright © Nicholas Blake 1966
The poems “There’s been a death in the opposite house,” “The bustle in a house” and “I felt a funeral in my brain” are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The lines from “The Municipal Gallery Revisited” by W.B. Yeats, are reprinted by permission of the Macmillan Company.
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First published in Great Britain in 1966 by Collins (The Crime Club)
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