Finchley shrugged. “That’s the job, isn’t it?” He picked up the piece of Danish pastry left over from supper, swirled his cold half-container of old coffee, and took a swallow. “I’ve got to admit I hope this doesn’t happen every night. But I can’t understand what he’s doing.”
Rogers toyed with the blotter on his desk, pushing it back and forth with his fingertips. “We ought to be getting another report fairly soon. Maybe he’s done something.”
“Maybe he’s going to sleep in the park.”
“The city police’ll pick him up if he tries to.”
“What about that? What’s the procedure if he’s arrested for a civil crime?”
“One more complication.” Rogers shook his head hopelessly, drugged by fatigue. “I briefed the Commissioner’s office, and we’ve got cooperation on the administrative level. It’d be a poor move to issue a general order for all patrolmen to leave him alone. Somebody’d let it slip. The theory is that beat patrolmen will call in to their precinct houses if they spot a metal-headed man. The precinct captains have instructions that he’s to be left alone. But if a patrolman arrests him for vagrancy before he calls in, then all kinds of things could go wrong. It’ll be straightened out in a hurry, but it might get on record somewhere. Then, a few years from now, somebody doing a book or something might come across the record, and that’ll be that. We can’t keep the publishers bottled up forever.” Rogers sighed. “I only hope it’d be a few years from now.” He looked down at his desktop. “It’s a mess. This world was never organized to include a faceless man.”
It’s true, he thought. Just by being alive, he’s made me stumble from the very start. Look at us all—Security, the whole A.N.G.—handcuffed because we couldn’t simply shoot him and get him out of the way. Going around in circles, trying to find an answer. And he hasn’t yet done anything. For some reason, Rogers found himself thinking, “Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.” Emerson. Rogers grunted.
The telephone rang.
He picked it up and listened.
“All right,” he said finally, “get back to your partner. I’ll have somebody intercept and pick that paper up from you. Call in when your man gets to wherever he’s going.” He hung up.
“He’s made a move,” he told Finchley. “He looked up an address in a phone book.”
“Any idea of whose?”
“I’m not sure . . .” Rogers flipped the Martino dossier open.
“The girl,” Finchley said. “The one he used to know.”
“Maybe. If he thinks they’re still close enough for her to do him any good. Why did he have to look up the address? It’s the same as the one on the wedding announcement.”
“It’s been fifteen years, Shawn. He could have forgotten it.”
“He may never have known it.” And there was no guarantee the man was going to the address he’d copied. He might have looked it up for some future purpose. They couldn’t take chances. Everything had to be covered. The phone books had to be examined. There might be some mark—some oily fingerprint, wet with perspiration, some pencil mark; some trace—
Six New York City phone books. God knew how many pages, each to be checked.
“Finch, your people’ll have to furnish a current set of New York phone books. Worn ones. We’re going to switch ’em for a set I want to run through your labs. Got to have ’em right away.”
Finchley nodded and reached for the phone.
4.
A travel-worn young man, lugging a scuffed cardboard suitcase, came into the drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Seventh Street.
“Like to make a phone call,” he said to the druggist. “Where is it?”
The druggist told him, and the young man just managed to get his suitcase through the narrow gap between the counters. He bumped it about clumsily for a few moments, and shifted it back and forth, annoying the druggist at his cash register, while he made his call.
When he left, the druggist’s original books went to the F.B.I. laboratory, where the top sheet of notepaper had already checked out useless.
The Manhattan book was run through first, on the assumption that it was the likeliest. The technicians did not work page by page. They had a book with all Manhattan phones listed by subscribers’ addresses, and they laid out a square search pattern centering on the drugstore. An IBM machine arranged the nearest subscribers’ addresses in alphabetical order, and then the technicians began to work on the book taken from the store, using their new list to skip whole columns of numbers that had a low probability under this system.
Rogers hadn’t supplied the technicians with Edith Chester’s name. It would have done no good. By the time the results came through, the man would have reached there. If that was where he was going. Furthermore, there was no proof he’d only looked up one address. Eventually, all six books would be checked out, and probably show nothing. But the check would be made, and no one knew how many others afterward.
Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.
5.
Edith Chester Hayes lived in the back apartment on the second floor of a house off Sullivan Street. The soot of eighty years had settled into every brick, and industrial fumes had gnawed the paint into flakes. A narrow doorway opened into the street, and a dim yellow bulb glowed in the foyer. Battered garbage cans stood in front of the ground floor windows.
Rogers looked out at it from his seat in an F.B.I. special car. “You always expect them to have torn these places down,” he said.
“They do,” Finchley answered. “But other houses grow old faster than these get condemned.” His voice was distracted as though he were thinking of something else, and thinking of it so intently that he barely heard what he was saying. He hunched in his corner of the back seat, his hand slowly rubbing the side of his face. He paid no attention when one of the A.N.G. team that had followed the man here came up to the car and leaned in Rogers’ window.
“He’s upstairs, on the second floor landing, Mr. Rogers,” the man said. “He’s been there for fifteen minutes, ever since we got here. He hasn’t knocked on any door. He’s just up there, leaning against a wall.”
“Didn’t he even ring a doorbell?” Rogers asked. “How’d he get into the building?”
“They never lock the front doors in these places, Mr. Rogers. Anybody can get into the halls any time they want to.”
“Well, how long can he stay up there? Some tenant’s bound to come along and see him. That’ll start a fuss. And what’s the point of his just staying in the hall?”
“I couldn’t say, Mr. Rogers. Nothing he’s done all day makes sense. But he’s got to make a move pretty soon, even if it’s just coming back down and starting this walking around business again.”
Rogers leaned over the front seat and tapped the shoulder of the F.B.I. technician, wearing headphones, who was bent over a small receiving set. “What’s going on?”
The technician slipped one phone. “All I’m getting is breathing. And he’s shuffling his feet once in a while.”
“Will you be able to follow him if he moves?”
“If he stays in a narrow hall, or stands near a wall in a room, yes, sir. These induction microphones’re pretty sensitive, and I’ve got it flat against a riser halfway up the first floor stairs. I can move it in behind him, if he goes into an apartment.”
“Won’t he see it?”
“Probably not unless it’s in motion when he looks. And we can tell if anyone’s facing toward it by the volume of the sounds they make. It looks just like a matchbook, and it’s got little sticky plastic treads it crawls on. It doesn’t make any noise, and the wires it trails are only hairlines. We’ve never had any trouble with one of these gadgets.”
“I see. Let me know if he does anyth—”
“He’s moving.” The technician snapped a switch, and Rogers heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the sagging hall floorboards. Then the man knocked softly on a door, his knuckles barely rapping the wood before he stop
ped.
“I’m going to get a little closer,” the technician said. They heard the microphone scrape quietly up the stairs. Then the speaker was full of the man’s heavy breathing.
“What’s he upset about?” Rogers wondered.
They heard the man knock hesitantly again. His feet moved nervously.
Someone was coming toward the door. They heard it open, and then heard a gasp of indrawn breath. There was no way of telling whether their man had made the sound or not.
“Yes?” It was a woman, taken by surprise.
“Edith?” The man’s voice was low and abashed.
Finchley straightened out of his slump. “That’s it—that explains it. He spent all day working up his nerve.”
“Nerve for what? Proves nothing,” Rogers growled.
“I’m Edith Hayes,” the woman’s voice said cautiously.
“Edith—I’m Luke. Lucas Martino.”
“Luke!”
“I was in an accident, Edith. I just left the hospital a few weeks ago. I’ve been retired.”
Rogers grunted. “Got his story all straight, hasn’t he?”
“He’s had all day to think of how to put it,” Finchley said. “What do you expect him to do? Tell her the history of twenty years while he stands in her doorway?”
“Maybe.”
“For Pete’s sake, Shawn, if this isn’t Martino how’d he know about her?”
“I can think of lots of ways Azarin could get this kind of detail out of a man.”
“It’s not likely.”
“Nothing’s likely. It’s not likely any one particular germ cell would grow up to be Lucas Martino. I’ve got to remember Azarin’s a thorough man.”
“Edith—” the man’s voice said, “may—may I come in for a moment?”
The woman hesitated for a second. Then she said, “Yes, of course.”
The man sighed. “Thank you.”
He stepped into the apartment and the door closed. The F.B.I. technician moved the microphone forward and jammed it tightly against the panels.
“Sit down, Luke.”
“Thank you.” They sat in silence for a few moments. “You have a very nice-looking apartment, Edith. It’s been fixed up very comfortably.”
“Sam—my husband—liked to work with his hands,” the woman said awkwardly. “He did it. He spent a long time over it. He’s dead now. He fell from a building he was working on.”
There was another pause. The man said, “I’m sorry I was never able to come down and see you after I left college.”
“I think you and Sam would have liked each other. He was a good deal like you, orderly.”
“I didn’t think I ever showed much of that with you.”
“I could see it.”
The man cleared his throat nervously. “You’re looking very well, Edith. Have you been getting along all right?”
“I’m fine. I work. Susan stays at a friend’s house after school until I pick her up on my way home at night.”
“I didn’t know you had children.”
“Susan’s eleven. She’s a very bright little girl. I’m quite proud of her.”
“Is she asleep now?”
“Oh, yes—it’s well past her bedtime.”
“I’m sorry I came so late. I’ll keep my voice down.”
“I wasn’t hinting, Luke.”
“I—I know. But it is late. I’ll be going in a minute.”
“You don’t have to rush. I never go to bed before midnight.”
“But I’m sure you have things to do—clothes to iron, Susan’s lunch to pack.”
“That only takes a few minutes. Luke—” Now the woman seemed steadier. “We were always so uncomfortable around each other. Let’s not keep to that old habit.”
“I’m sorry. Edith. You’re right. But—do you know, I couldn’t even call you and ask if I could come see you? I tried, and I found myself imagining you’d refuse to see me. I spent all day nerving myself to do this.” The man was still uncomfortable. And as far as anyone listening could tell, he hadn’t yet taken off his coat.
“What’s the matter, Luke?”
“It’s complicated. When I was in their—in the—hospital, I spent a long time thinking about us. Not as lovers, you understand, but as people—as friends. We never knew each other at all, did we? At least, I never knew you. I was too wrapped up in what I was doing and wanted to do. I never paid any real attention to you. I thought of you as a problem, not as a person. And I think I’m here tonight to apologize for that.”
“Luke—” The woman’s voice started and stopped. She moved in her creaking chair. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I know I’m embarrassing you, Edith. I would have liked to handle this more gracefully. But I don’t have much time. And it’s almost impossible to be graceful when I have to come here looking like this.”
“That’s not important,” she said quickly. “And it doesn’t matter what you look like, as long as I know it’s you. Would you like some coffee?”
The man’s voice was troubled. “All right, Edith. Thank you. We can’t seem to stop being strangers, somehow, can we?”
“What makes you say that— No. You’re right. I’m trying very hard, but I can’t even fool myself. I’ll start the water boiling.” Her footsteps, quick and erratic, faded into the kitchen.
The man sighed, sitting by himself in the living room.
“Well, now do you think?” Finchley demanded. “Does that sound like Secret Operative X-Eight hatching a plan to blow up Geneva?”
“It sounds like a high school boy,” Rogers answered.
“He’s lived behind walls all his life. They all sound like this. They know enough to split the world open like a rotten orange, and they’ve been allowed to mature to the age of sixteen.”
“We aren’t here to set up new rules for handling scientists. We’re here to find out if this man’s Lucas Martino.”
“And we’ve found out.”
“We’ve found out, maybe, that a clever man can take a few bits of specific information, add what he’s learned about some kinds of people being a great deal alike, talk generalities, and fool a woman who hasn’t seen the original in twenty years.”
“You sound like a man backing into the last ditch with a lost argument.”
“Never mind what I sound like.”
“Just what do you suppose he’s doing this for, if he isn’t Martino?”
“A place to stay. Someone to run errands for him while he stays under cover. A base of operations.”
“Jesus Christ, man, don’t you ever give up?”
“Finch, I’m dealing with a man who’s smarter than I am.”
“Maybe a man with deeper emotions, too.”
“You think so?”
“No. No—sorry, Shawn.”
The woman’s footsteps came back from the kitchen. She seemed to have used the time to gather herself. Her voice was firmer when she spoke once more.
“Lucas, is this your first day in New York?”
“Yes.”
“And the first thing you thought of was to come here. Why?”
“I’m not sure,” the man said, sounding more as if he didn’t want to answer her. “I told you I thought a great deal about us. Perhaps it became an obsession with me. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have done it, I suppose.”
“Why not? I must be the only person you know in New York, by now. You’ve been badly hurt, and you want someone to talk to. Why shouldn’t you have come here?”
“I don’t know.” The man sounded helpless. “They’re going to investigate you now, you know. They’ll scrape through your past to find out where I belong. I hope you won’t feel bad about that—I wouldn’t have done it if I thought they’d find something to hurt you. I thought about it. But that wouldn’t have stopped me from coming. That didn’t seem as important as something else.”
“As what, Lucas?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were y
ou afraid I’d hate you? For what? For the way you look?”
“No! I don’t think that little of you. You haven’t even stared at me, or asked sneaking questions. And I knew you wouldn’t.”
“Then—” The woman’s voice was gentle, and calm, as though nothing could shake her for long. “Then, did you think I’d hate you because you broke my heart?”
The man didn’t answer.
“I was in love with you,” the woman said. “If you thought I was, you were right. And when nothing ever came of it, you hurt me.”
Down in the car, Rogers grimaced with discomfort. The F.B.I. technician turned his head briefly. “Don’t let this kind of stuff throw you, Mr. Rogers,” he said. “We hear it all the time. It bothered me when I started, too. But after a while you come to realize that people shouldn’t be ashamed to have this kind of thing listened to. It’s honest, isn’t it? It’s what people talk about all over the world. They’re not ashamed when they say it to each other, so you shouldn’t feel funny about listening.”
“All right,” Finchley said, “then suppose we all shut up and listen.”
“That’s O.K., Mr. Finchley,” the technician said. “It’s all going down on tape. We can play it back as often as we want to.” He turned back to his instruments. “Besides, the man hasn’t answered her yet. He’s still thinking it over.”
“I’m sorry, Edith.”
“You’ve already apologized once tonight, Lucas.” The woman’s chair scraped as she stood up. “I don’t want to see you crawling. I don’t want you to feel you have to. I don’t hate you—I never did. I loved you. I had found somebody to come alive to. When I met Sam, I knew how.”
“If you feel that way, Edith, I’m very glad for you.”
Her voice had a rueful smile in it. “I didn’t always feel that way about it. But you can do a great deal of thinking in twenty years.”
“Yes, you can.”
“It’s odd. When you play the past over and over in your head, you can begin to see things in it that you missed when you were living it. You come to realize that there were moments when one word said differently, or one thing done at just the right time, would have changed everything.”
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 70