Night Has a Thousand Eyes

by Cornell Woolrich

  He listened some more.

  “He wants to know if he should dump fast, while there’s still any profit left in it.”

  He kept looking at me. I knew he wasn’t thinking of me, though, as he looked. I knew he wasn’t thinking of what Myers was saying, much, either. I knew what he was thinking of. He had a sort of distant, half-apprehensive, half-querulous look. He couldn’t understand; he couldn’t understand how this man should be on the phone like this, at just this time.

  “Well, is it very important—?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter when you own them in the hundreds. But when they’re up in the five and ten thousands, every quarter of a point can—”

  Then he stopped, and said, “Too late. The profit just left it. It’s underwater now, under our buying mark.”

  Myers must have been screaming at the top of his voice; the receiver was giving filelike rasps.

  “He wants to know if we should salvage what we still can, take a loss and get out. And he wants to know bad.” He said into the phone, “I hear you, Walt, I hear you. I understand what you’re saying. Not necessary to repeat. That isn’t it.” Then to me once more, “And all I can think of is that I was told yesterday evening this phone call was coming, before he knew he was going to make it himself.”

  That was all I could think of too. “You’d better tell him something,” I said helplessly.

  He went on talking to me. “What was it he said? What were his exact words?” Then he repeated them himself. “‘Go back to your broker and your buying of shares’…‘Your broker and your buying of shares.’”

  Suddenly his arm had left my shoulders. He was speaking into the phone, brisk, clear, taut.

  “How much have I got now of that stuff, Walt? No, in shares.” He took a pencil out of his inner pocket and jotted down a numeral on the margin of a discarded newspaper that was at hand there by the phone; a four-digit numeral. “All right. Double it. Buy me an equal amount. Buy me another—”

  The phone gave a sudden sharp snap. It must have been a high-pitched yell at the far end.

  “Buy, I said. Buy. Now you’re the one not hearing me right. Bee-you-wy. Buy.”

  The phone was sputtering now, in jangled discord.

  “Buy,” he repeated inflexibly. “Those are my orders.” And he hung up.

  He wasn’t smiling, and he wasn’t very happy. “It would be worth the additional loss,” he said, “just to prove the damn thing wrong. I hope it goes down to five. I hope it goes down to zero. I hope it explodes right in our faces.”

  “Your melon’s waiting,” I said.

  We went in and we sat down at the table. The place was brilliant with sunlight, but I wished I had worn something warmer; I drew my cardigan more snugly around my shoulders.

  We both put our spoons in, and then left them sticking there, as though they’d become caught fast. He began opening his letters, and I just sat there working the handle of my spoon back and forth, as though I were trying to pry it out.

  “Look,” he said. “Look at this.”

  The address was poorly written, in ink. It even had our name spelled wrong, the e was where the i should have been. And up in the left-hand corner, equally laboriously, “J. Tompkins.”

  It had nothing in it, no writing, no paper. Just currency. Five bank notes. He held the slit envelope up on end and shook it, and they came sluicing out onto the tabletop.

  I didn’t touch them. I even drew a little farther away from them, as though they frightened me. They did.

  “What I left behind under the tobacco jar,” he said. “The postmark is midnight. He must have dropped it in the mail almost as soon as he found it.”

  “And he’d been looking at the want ads before we came into the room.”

  He saw that they were frightening me by lying there. He picked them up and put them carelessly away in his wallet. He seemed to be careless about it; his hand, though, was a little maladroit, fumbled slightly, as though it weren’t perfectly steady.

  “The trap didn’t work,” I said. “He’s not out for that. He’s not to be bought.”

  He motioned with the envelope. “That’s the message that we were supposed to get in here,” he agreed.

  He crumpled it with one hand and threw it away.

  “Or maybe he’s smarter than five hundred dollars’ worth of trap,” he said, giving me a steady look. “Maybe his smartness is the long-term kind, that doesn’t believe in cashing in too soon, that lets its dividends accumulate.” He drummed on the table. “When five hundred is accepted, what need is there to offer a thousand? But when five hundred is refused, what else can you do but offer a thousand? And so on up the line. I’m just speaking figuratively now.”

  But he didn’t believe that any more, himself, and I could see it; I could tell just by looking at him, just by listening to the way he said it. He was saying it just for me. Or maybe just for himself. But I know neither one of us believed it, even as he said it.

  Myers called back in midafternoon, and Father wasn’t there. I told him I’d have him call him back as soon as he came in. At his own home, if he was no longer in his office. He wanted to give me the message, but I wouldn’t take it. I was afraid to hear what it was; I quickly hung up before he could get started. He’d sounded almost incoherent, under great stress.

  Then he rang back three times more, anyway, without waiting, at fifteen-minute intervals, and I let the servants answer the calls. I knew he wouldn’t give the message to them.

  Then he quit. The market had closed by that time, anyway.

  When my father came in, toward dinner, I told him how frantically Myers had been trying to reach him. “He tried right and left, all over town. You weren’t anywhere that he could locate you, he said.”

  “I know. I purposely stayed out of reach all day. I wanted to give it all the rope it needed.”

  “Are you going to call him back, now that you’re here?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t got the courage, I’m afraid to.” And I knew he didn’t mean the money, or the loss or gain.

  Then, as we stood there, it started to ring suddenly, and we both jumped, as though an electric current had passed through us.

  “There he is now,” he said. Our eyes sought one another. “This is hell,” he said, “I can’t stand much more of this.”

  He went in to answer it, and I went the other way, to where I couldn’t hear anything. As far the other way as I could.

  I waited as long as I could, but he didn’t call me or come to me, and finally I couldn’t stand it; I went back to where he was.

  It was over. He was bending slightly, pouring himself another brandy, the way he’d been doing in his room the night before. His face looked very white; it was almost chalky. He seemed to have a hard time straightening up again, a hard time letting go of the corner of the cabinet.

  “It went down an additional quarter of a point after he put my order in,” he said. “And then it stopped, and hesitated for a while, and finally started up again. Maybe because my order was put in, I don’t know. Ever since it’s been going up steadily, and faster and faster. Half an hour before closing time it had reached the point from which it had first started to drop. At three o’clock, when the exchange closed, it was already two and an eighth above it, and there’s every indication that tomorrow it’ll do still better.”

  He gulped his brandy and coughed, but his face still stayed white.

  “We’ve made twenty-two thousand dollars, as of three o’clock today. And tomorrow it may run up to forty, or even fifty.”

  But his face still stayed white.

  “Here,” he said, “do you want one of these?”

  So mine must have been too.

  Maybe this is the trap, now, I thought fearfully. And not a five-hundred-dollar tip hidden under a tobacco jar.

  But if it is, the cheese is on the other side of it. The mouse and the bait have changed places.

  Eileen came two or three days later.
Signe said there was someone waiting to speak to me in the downstairs hall, and not being very exacting in matters of that sort, I went down without inquiring any more closely than that into who it was. I would have gone down in any case, even had I known, but I would have spared myself the slight quiver the unexpected sight of her gave me. It wasn’t because of her, herself; it was because of where she came from, because of whom she had to do with, because of the association in my mind that now linked her indissolubly with that matter, whether justly or unjustly.

  At any rate, I found her standing sheepishly against the wall down there—she always seemed to cling to walls, rather than dare the open center of a space, in any given interview—beside a small settee, but too timid to have sat upon it while waiting for me to come down, though that was its exact purpose in being there. Over her arm she held a fur scarf I recognized as mine, and in her hand a paper bag enclosed a small rounded form that by its shape must have been a hat.

  I said from mid-stair, “Oh, it’s Eileen; hello, Eileen,” and went on from the brief stop the first sight of her had brought me to.

  “I didn’t mean to trouble you, Miss Jean,” she quavered. “I didn’t know if I should just leave these here for you, or—”

  Well, then, why hadn’t she? I wondered parenthetically.

  “You left these at our place the other night, and—and if I might I’d like to have my own back.”

  I’d forgotten; I did have them. But did she actually require them, or was that just the excuse for seeing me again face to face? Again one of those two-sided labels; and which was the wrong side, which was the right? Any slightest thing now that had to do with these people— It was unendurable; he was right, it was hell.

  “I would have brought them down with me just now, if I’d known.” Then I asked her what it was really on my mind to ask: “Did you tell Signe who you were just now?”

  “No,” she admitted embarrassedly, “I just asked to speak with you. I was afraid you—you mightn’t want to see me. And I did want those things back—”

  “But they would have given them to you just the same.”

  “I didn’t know that, Miss Jean,” she said humbly. “I thought they’d perhaps have to have your permission. Or maybe not know just which things I meant. They might have given me something good, of yours, by mistake.”

  Which was the wrong side? Which was the right?

  But all right, then. Say she had maneuvered to see me face to face again. Now she was seeing me face to face again. What for? What did she want? The motive should reveal itself, or else the happening was innocent, uncontrived.

  I sent a girl up for the things, giving her their description and explicit instructions as to where to find them.

  There was a game-legged wait, and neither one of us spoke.

  Then the girl came down again, bringing the flaccid coat and beret, and with her nose turned up at them for Eileen’s benefit. She handed them over to her with an arching of her upper body, as though trying not to come too close to them. It was one of the most expressive little cameos of snobbishness I’d ever seen, and I didn’t like her much for it. After all, I’d worn those things on my own body, without feeling that way about it myself. Superstitious fear was what I felt, but not that.

  I waited until we were by ourselves again. “Look,” I said, “do you like that hat? That fur piece? Would you like to keep them for yourself? I don’t want them back.”

  She put them both down hastily, on the settee. You couldn’t even offer her anything, it seemed, without frightening her. “Oh, no, miss, I— Thank you very much, I appreciate it, but—I couldn’t—I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why?” I pressed her. “Why not? Why couldn’t you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, miss …” She backed away a step, to match her recessive excuse.

  “But you must know,” I persisted. “Look, I’ll never wear them again myself.” I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be able to. They were steeped in fear, they were dyed with it, tinctured with it, redolent of it. I’d never be able to look at them again. “Then why don’t you take them?”

  “I couldn’t.” She backed away some more. “It’d be too much like trading on someone’s—” Then she didn’t finish it.

  “Someone’s what?”

  I couldn’t get it out of her. But I didn’t need to; it was fairly easy to supply it myself. Not gratitude; gratitude offered favors, and there was no compunction about accepting them, it was the expected thing. It was something that did not ordinarily bestow rewards; that it was shameful to derive them from. Unhappiness, misfortune, distress, trouble; one of those words was the missing one. One of those words was the right one.

  I went with her toward the door. She stopped short there and turned to me, as though driven at last to say what she had wanted to say all along, but had lacked the courage to say, until now that there was no more time.

  The motive. The motive for the visit was coming.

  “Well, good-bye, Miss Jean. And—and I wish you well.”

  Phrased like a final parting? Why?

  She wanted to say something more than that. I almost labored with her, to bring it forth, but I gave no sign.

  At last she whispered in hurried daring, “Don’t come over there any more, miss. Try not to.” And took an added little step away in trepidation immediately afterwards, as though in imminent danger of rebuke.

  “Oh?” was all I said.

  “For your own selves, you and Mr. Reid—” she whimpered lugubriously.

  I didn’t say anything this time.

  “It can only have a bad ending,” she murmured poignantly.

  She wasn’t there immediately before me in the door any more, so I had to close it. She was hurrying down the steps to gain the walk.

  There was the motive. And again two sides. Which was the right one? Which the wrong? Artifice or sincerity? Was that a lure in reverse, meant to entice us all the more by seeming to discourage us? Or was that an honest plea, given out of the simplicity of her heart? Or was she simply the honest, unguessing medium for an artfully contrived lure, stemming from someone else entirely but passed on to us through her?

  I stood there and I held my head pressed between my two hands, as tightly as though I wanted to crush it out of shape. This was unendurable, it made life an agonizing maze; fear, fear, all over and all around you, fear. And the outlets were in reality barriers, and the barriers were in reality the outlets, and you didn’t know which to take, and you wandered around helpless, until you dropped, all spent.

  The maid had been spying on me, from up the hall.

  “Did she give you a headache, miss?”

  “All over me,” I said, “from head to foot.”

  I passed the things she’d left lying on the settee. “Take these,” I said, “and give them away, get rid of them, get them out of my sight.”

  She pounced on them greedily, and, whisk, they were gone.

  Now it’s over, I said to myself. Now it’s done, finished. Now the connecting thread has been broken. Now there’s nothing to take us to them any more, nothing to bring them to us. Nothing but our own folly.

  And, oh, what fools we two would be—!

  I found him in the car, waiting for me at the door, a few days later. I don’t know how many, I don’t know how few. Enough, I suppose, to have struggled, to have held out against it. Eight or ten or twelve, or maybe two full weeks.

  I could tell he was waiting for me, by two things. Because he was in the seat alongside the driver’s, and not at the wheel himself. And because of the way he’d been looking toward the door as I came out.

  I wondered why he sat facing me so expectantly all the way down the steps and out.

  I came up beside the car and stood there.

  He wasn’t evasive. “Jean,” he said abruptly, “I’m going there.”

  “There” didn’t have to be amplified, I knew where it was.

  “Do you want to come over with me?”

  “They’ve even t
aken that one excuse away. She brought back my things only a day or two later, you know she did.”

  “I know, but, Jean, we’re human beings. I’m going without an excuse, I have none.”

  “Just—just idle curiosity? Just to try him out some more?” For one of the few times in my entire life, I was disappointed in him for a moment or two.

  “Oh, I have a valid business reason,” he went on.

  “Then you do have an excuse—”

  “It isn’t the same thing. I’m not being honest with myself, if I say that. If I were going to him for some flimsy pretended reason, that I didn’t believe in myself, just to try him out, then I could say that I was using an excuse. But I’m going to him about something that’s of vital importance to me, I’m not using it as an excuse. It’s the reason that’s important to me in this case, and not him; not what he can or can’t do about it. I don’t know if you can follow me or not.”

  “I think I see what you mean,” I said. And then I added sadly, “But you are going.”

  “Jean, I’m at my wits’ end. I don’t know what else to do about it. I don’t know whom else to turn to.”

  “I thought you acted a little worried at dinner tonight.”

  “Tonight? It’s been going on for days and days—”

  I opened the car door. “I’ll drive you over,” I said.

  “You don’t have to go there with me if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to go there,” I said, getting in. “But I want to go anywhere that you go. And if that’s where you’re going, then I want to go there with you.”

  I closed the door and turned on the ignition.

  “It’s going to be harder,” I said, “not to go, after you’ve gone this time, than it was not to go, after you’d gone the last time.”

  “I know, Jean,” he said despondently, “I know.”

  We drove a while.

  “Not stocks again, is it?”

  “No, that would be a cheap stunt.” He didn’t say any more for a while. Then, when we were near there, “There’s been a strike, you know, on the Coast.”

  “I know.”