Hanoveria, when it came, was of no greater plottage than the place before. A half dozen house fronts set down here and there at varying angles and, fft, it was over. He passed through without halting. No need to stop and ask, it hadn’t lingered here; there wouldn’t have been enough audience to attract.
Somewhere beyond he was just in time to glimpse a roadside vignette that he couldn’t quite make out as he streamed by. That is, he caught what it was, but he couldn’t grasp the reason for it.
There was a lone farmhouse, back some distance, not at road’s edge. Along the road there was a rail fence. It was scarcely knee-high, nothing at all. Over it was dangling and swinging a little girl. A woman came running out from the house, and hauled her off, and took her back, holding her clutched tightly underarm and lying sideward, in that peculiar way typical only of a badly frightened mother. And not anger nor preparation for punishment nor anything else.
But what he couldn’t understand was the reason for her fear. It had nothing to do with the height of the fence, for even had the child toppled from it, she could not have hurt herself. It had nothing to do with him and his car. For she had already been well under way toward the child before he even came into sight. Nor was the fence close enough to the road to endanger the child from succeeding cars, of which there weren’t any anyway. And the woman was tight-lipped and didn’t scold, as though this were a fear she couldn’t share with the child, too grave even to be broached to her. And last of all, the woman didn’t look toward the car, nor after it, nor up and down the road at all. She looked toward a darkling line of trees off in the background.
Fear? wondered Molloy. Of what? But he didn’t give it any further thought. It had just been a snapshot in passing. He’d taken it, but he didn’t develop it.
Then another little nucleus of habitation came along. He didn’t stop here either, didn’t even get its name. You could see out of it in all directions, like a sieve, and it was obvious no traveling show was pitched there.
There was something a little strange-looking about it, he thought. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, because he kept going right on through. But there was an undercurrent of—well, heightened tension stirring through it. No one was doing anything, and yet that was the atmosphere it gave off. The men were in twos and threes standing around talking. They looked at him over shoulder as his car went by, but apathetically, as though their real interest lay in something else, and his passage through their midst was just an interruption to whatever it was that absorbed them. Nearly every house had at least one woman looking out of an upper window. And not downward into the lanes below, but leveled off into a distance. Toward the treelands on the outskirts. If you see a woman doing that at one house or two, Molloy told himself, it’s just plain nosiness. But if you see them all doing it at once, it’s something else.
And every time he caught sight of a child, he’d be just in time to see some woman making a bee line for it to haul it back indoors. This fear for the children, that seemed to have spread over the whole countryside like a strawfire, he wondered what it was.
He added a little speed to the respectable amount he was already making, and he didn’t know he’d done it himself. It was only when he saw the speed gauge that he knew.
Dusk had fallen by the time he’d got to the next hamlet. It was bathed in purple sky glow, its crevices and seams shot with crapy black. The same small knots of men, but one among them had a shotgun this time; they were passing it from hand to hand judiciously looking it over. Another group had a dog on a rope and were gathered about that. The kids had vanished, there wasn’t a sign of one. Where there were lights in upper windows, the shutters had been closed over them, and only frightened chinks got through.
He went on through, and he wasn’t alone in the car any more. Disquiet sat there next to him on the matching seat to his own, and he thought the air was clammy and cool for this time of year.
After a while he saw some lights way off to the left, dim in the half-light before deep night set in, and he thought that must be Thackery, which was the next place he was to hit. He wondered what was the matter with the road, why it went off so wide of it. Then he saw them move peculiarly, and he knew those weren’t the lights from houses. They palpitated, went up, down, up, down. Those were lights from men with blazing torches beating through the trees, looking for something, hunting something, in the woods.
Looking for what, hunting what? In the dark of the woods? They were like combustive sparks of danger, those lights, and as night fell he came into Thackery at a sizzling burst of speed, heads on full. They glared up the main street, with its two disjointed bends, and then came to a stop.
Thackery was at fever pitch all around him. The tent show was there, in the middle of it; he’d caught up with it at last. But it looked as if a windstorm had hit it. Several of the tents were down. Stands were over, and the jumbo peppermint-striped umbrellas that had shaded them were in tatters, dangling forlornly from their own ribs. One of the wagons had a wheel off and was down at a sodden lurch. The fill of popcorn bags streaked the ground in sticky swirls, spread about by countless stampeding feet, and crumpled bladders that had been toy balloons lay here and there. One of them, still blown up, had caught on the gable of a house nearby, and swayed there upright on the end of its taut string. There was even a man’s straw hat on the ground in one place, trodden into shredded wheat.
He got out and walked around in the mess for a while. It was strangely deserted, as though everyone had sought refuge indoors. Finally he caught sight of someone loitering about as he was, went over, and sleeve-jerked him.
“What happened here, bud?”
The man kept his roving eyes on the ground. He acted as if that were a supremely gratuitous question. “Where were you?” was all he answered, on an ironic inflection.
“Not here. I wouldn’t be asking if I had been.”
The man was still interested in the ground. “Couple of them blame things busted out loose, right into the middle of the crowd.”
“What blame things?”
The man’s conversation slipped a notch. “I just had it repaired, too. Seventeen jewels. Imagine, torn right off my wrist. My whole sleeve was torn off with it, right off the coat.” He picked up something. “Here’s the sleeve. But no watch.”
Molloy wanted the exact word. He wanted to hear it spoken aloud for the first time, like something that had been hanging formlessly over him for the past several hours now. He said in a slow-tempoed grating voice, “What were the things that busted out?”
“Lines,” the man said. “What else d’you suppose would start a fright like that?”
Molloy let go his sleeve. In fact, flung it away from himself as though it were something detachable. “Lions,” he said with soft fierceness. “That’s my job.”
The man went ahead using up stick matches over the ground.
“Anyone hurt?”
“Plenty of bruises and black-and-blue—”
“By them.”
“Only one guy, the fellow in charge of them. He was the only guy went toward ’em. Everyone else had sense enough to go the other way, but fast.”
“Who knows how it happened?”
The man shrugged elaborately. “Who knows is right,” he agreed.
“Well, where is this keeper or whatever he is?”
“Laid up over at the minister’s house. They took him there soon after it happened. We got no reg’lar hospital here. They’re sending for him sometime tonight to take him over to—”
“Show me where the minister’s house is.”
“Get somebody else to show you,” the man said ungraciously. “I got a watch to find.”
“Well, take a good look for it,” Molloy said brusquely. He left the man sitting down on the ground, legs spread wide.
Molloy’s impression of the keeper was that he was much more bandaged than critically injured, and much more disconsolate than either. They had him on a cot in the reverend’s front par
lor, with women of three generations in attendance, and bickering over the proper procedures in first aid.
“The trouble with your bandages, ma, is you never know when to stop them. That gash is up round his shoulder, and you ran the lint all the way down past his finger tips. You got to end ’em sometime; you can’t just wait till you get to the end of the roll.”
Molloy managed unobtrusively to get the disputants and the dispute to shift outside to the hall, temporarily if not permanently, and was left alone with his witness-to-be. The setting would have broken down an interior decorator, if not an animal trainer, even before the first question was asked or answered. An oil lamp with an hourglass shape cast a milk-white glare about the room. Violets, or perhaps they were forget-me-nots, painted all over the frosted chimney speckled both their faces, questioner and questioned alike, as though they were coming down with smallpox. They also made the walls seem to be crawling with purple moths in patterned lines.
The keeper was visibly harassed, kept shifting feverishly from side to side as well as his mummified arms would allow, but the cause was unquestionably not the chamber of horrors he found himself trapped in.
“They shot Emma,” he whimpered, wrinkling his chin as though he were about to weep. “They shot her. They didn’t need to. They coulda got her back some way without that.”
“What’d you expect ’em to do, set out a saucer of milk? Those things are killers.”
“They didn’t need to shoot her,” the man insisted. “She wouldn’a hurt anybody—”
“No?” queried Molloy dryly. “Where’d you get clawed up, then? From tripping over a rake?”
“She was frightened. All that screaming, all them people running in all directions. She was more frightened than they were. That’s all it was.”
“Any animal that attacks a man does it from fright,” Molloy said. “That don’t make ’em any the less dangerous. But that isn’t what I came here to talk to you about. How’d it happen?”
“I dunno, mister, I dunno,” the keeper said, wiping some of the forget-me-nots out of his eyes with the back of one gauze-mittened paw.
“You must know. You were in charge of them. They slept through your last pitch, didn’t even lift their muzzles off the ground. I spoke to a man who saw them there. Why should they suddenly go on a rampage here? What happened here that didn’t happen there? What time was it?”
“I dunno, mister. The afternoon show was almost over. I don’t stay right by the cage every minute. I strolled over to chat for a minute with one of the other guys. I wasn’t more than twenty yards away. I heard something bang, like a firecracker, but I didn’t pay any ’tention to it. Plenty of kids was using them around. And we got a shooting booth, and that was sounding off every few minutes. Then I heard some woman scream, and by the time I looked they was already both out. They come out the side door, the one I use, and run down the ladder one behind the other. It’s only three or four steps high. One run one way and one the other. I tried to head off Emma, and she swatted me a coupla times and keeled me over and lit out like a streak.”
“When were you last in the cage?”
“I gave ’em water when we first pitched. I never feed ’em before shows. It makes them sleepy and short-changes the public. I do my feeding after.”
“You locked it up again behind you, this side door?”
“I been going in and out for seven years, mister. I never left it open yet behind me. There’s my keys over there, attached to my belt; see them, on that sofy.”
“How does it work? What’s the hold?”
“Chain and padlock looped around it. Never used anything else in all the years I been traveling with ’em. Never needed to.”
“Until now,” amended Molloy softly to himself. “Notice anybody hanging around the cage, or loitering near it, before it happened?”
“They all do that; that’s what we’re in business for, that’s what we make our money offa.”
“I don’t mean just goggling, with the rest. I mean anybody by himself, hanging around a little too long.”
“There was a guy, pestering ’em a little,” the keeper admitted. “But that ain’t anything. We get that pretty nearly every pitch. Some halfwit’ll try to get a rise out of them, poke a stick through or—”
“Is that what he was doing?”
“No. First I noticed, he’d been standing there rooted before it for some time. I didn’t pay much attention at first; I thought he was just watching ’em fascinated, like. Then I noticed they were getting kind of restless about something. I went up close to him and I found he’d been teasing ’em with a piece of dress goods, a dirty looking rag torn from a woman’s dress. He’d lay it on the edge of the cage floor, just between the bars, and then when they’d paw for it, or lower their muzzles to it, he’d snatch it back again. You keep doing that, that’s like waving a red flag to a bull, you know; to any animal.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing much. Like I say, we get them wise guys nearly every pitch. I stiff-armed him and sent him staggering, and told him ‘On your way, bud.’ He made himself scarce.”
“What’d he look like?”
“Just another village pie-face. I couldn’t tell you more than that, I hardly noticed him.”
“Did you take a look at the fastening after that?”
“Nah, why should I? He wasn’t around by there, he was in front.”
Molloy took a sarcastic tuck in the corner of his mouth. “You’re a pretty careful keeper, aren’t you?” he told him.
“But who’d want to fool around with the fastening of a lions’ cage,” the man demanded plaintively, “to purposely let them out?”
“Just because you can’t answer a thing don’t mean it can’t happen.” Molloy was at the door by now. “I guess that’s all, then, from you.”
The man went back to his original lament, turning his grimacing face away like someone bereft by a personal loss.
“They shot my Emma,” followed Molloy out into the hallway. “They didn’t need to do that. They coulda got her back some other way—”
“—went inside the cage myself and looked it over, and here’s what I found, lieutenant. The end link of the chain, the one that looped onto the clasp of the padlock, had been filed down until it was worn thin enough to be severed. Then the two prongs of the open link had been pried in opposite directions, evidently by a pair of pliers, so that there was a wide enough gap for it to drop off the padlock clasp. The links weren’t very thick or strong anyway. The chain was tarnished and dull from age, but there were shiny bright tracks where the file had rubbed that one link. From the ground underneath I collected a paperful of metal filings.”
“Go on.”
“On the inside of the door, the cage side, there were fresh claw marks; it was a wooden door, or trap or whatever you want to call it. As though one of the animals had reared up against it frightened—just like the ordinary cat when it wants out. You’ve seen them.”
“Keep going.”
“Frightened by something, see? And on the floor of the cage, when I went over it, I found little scorched tatters of red paper. I have those for you too.”
“What do they seem to you?”
“What they’d seem to anyone else. All that’s left of a jumbo firecracker that must have been lighted and tossed into the cage when no one was watching.”
(Whistle from McManus, over the wire.)
“They were being sold all afternoon, at a concession that the show carries right along with it. But not those jumbo-sized ones, mostly the baby kind. I checked, and only two of those were sold. One to a kid about seven or eight. And one to a grownup, who claimed he was buying it for his kid, but who didn’t have any kid along with him.”
“Did you get a line on this grownup?”
“Only very superficially. But from two sources, the concessionnaire and the keeper. And although neither description amounts to much, neither one conflicts with the other at any given point. So
as far as they go, they’re that of one and the same man.”
“Then the escape was not accidental.”
(emphatically) “The escape was not accidental, beyond any possibility of a mistake.”
“And one was shot.”
“One was shot.”
“But one is still at large.”
“One, the larger of the two, is still at large.”
(troubled pause) “I don’t like the way this thing is shaping up. Now we’ve got an actual lion and an allegorical one as well, both to contend with at the same time. You stay up there where you are, Molloy, stay with it and keep me informed. I’m going to contact Shawn, right away, and let him know he may be up against the real thing from one minute to the next, and not just a metaphor any more.”
13
The Wait:
The Last Supper
SHAWN DRIED THE RAZOR AND put it away. He locked the bathroom cabinet unobtrusively, and the key wasn’t there any more when his hand came away. He picked up a bottle of witch hazel from the shelf below, dribbled out a palmful, moistened his opposite palm from the first, and applied them both to Reid’s face. A little awkwardly, losing some of it in transit. Then he took a towel and patted the area.
“I did pretty good,” he said cheerfully. “Considering. I never shaved another man before. Not even a nick.” He picked up a canister questioningly. “Use talc?”
Reid turned his head aside in refusal. “I could have done it myself,” he said dryly. “But you were afraid to let me get at the blade.”
“Look at your hands,” Shawn reproached him mildly.
The one that had been vibrating on the edge of the wash-stand slipped off, hid itself under the towel Shawn had hung from his subject’s shoulders. But then the towel itself continued to throb, above the place where the hand had secreted itself, as though there were a live pulse concealed there.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 24