The Faceless Adversary

by Frances

  John went into the bar still feeling a kind of stiffness, a consciousness of inimical eyes all about him. Al Curtis was alone near an end of the bar, as he had promised he would be—promised cheerfully enough, after only a momentary pause—when John had got him on the telephone. He had, to be sure, and after that first momentary hesitation, suggested another meeting place. It had been John who had said that he’d much rather they made it the club, and had added he would explain later.

  Because, John had decided, in the emptiness of his apartment, what had happened at the club on Saturday afternoon was the simplest, and the most immediate, place to start. The police had been right on that; they had, unfortunately, seemed to be right about almost everything. Whoever had laid the trap had needed to know one thing: that, at between three and four o’clock Saturday afternoon, John could not prove his whereabouts. And that knowledge probably had been gained at the club.

  (It was conceivable, of course, that the murderer had merely chanced to see John sauntering along Fifth Avenue, window shopping at jewelers, and had moved quickly, the trap being ready and only its springing to be done. But this would have been leaving much to chance, and it appeared that, in other respects, the murderer had left little.)

  “Hi, John,” Al Curtis said, and he made no pretense that he did not know. He went so far as to pat John’s shoulder while, briefly, they waited for drinks. But the good-fellowship of that was only formal; Curtis’s face remained without expression, there was constraint in his eyes. (Standing side by side at the bar, John thought, we are almost precisely of a height. Perhaps Al is a few pounds heavier. His eyes are gray and his hair is lighter than mine.)

  By agreement, unspoken, they took their drinks to a table. On the way they passed a larger table, at which half a dozen men sat—older men, known to John only as members he had seen before, usually in the bar. But one of the men looked up as they passed and then, as a result, presumably, of some comment softly made, the others looked. They looked carefully at John Hayward, and it seemed to him that all their eyes narrowed; that suspicion, even a kind of resentment, emanated from the eyes of the men at the table. He felt the muscles of his neck stiffen again, and he looked away from the men at the table.

  “I’m in a hell of a spot,” John said, when they were seated.

  “Yes,” Curtis said. “So I gather. Anything I can—” But he did not finish, and his tone was detached, committed him to even less than the half-made offer.

  “There might be,” John said. “They’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  Al Curtis nodded to that, but he said nothing. John told him how things stood, or told him enough. A good deal depended, obviously, on Saturday afternoon.

  “When the girl was killed,” Curtis said. “Yes, I should think it might.”

  John felt his nerves tighten at the tone. But he could not let them.

  “It was deliberate,” he said. “It was planned the way it’s working out. So, there was one thing somebody had to know.” He told Al Curtis what it was.

  “In short,” Curtis said, “did you tell me that you were going to take this—walk?” His eyes narrowed. “You’re not getting ideas, are you? About me?”

  “I’m trying to get things straight,” John said. “I haven’t got any ideas about anybody. You see—” He paused. “Look,” he said, “I want you to help me piece it out. It didn’t have any importance then. Sometimes, things like that—unimportant things—two people can remember. Maybe something somebody said will remind one of—”

  “All right,” Curtis said. “I know what you mean. All right—as I remember it, you said something like that. Yes.”

  “We came out of the dining room,” John said. “Started toward the door and you said something—wait a minute. You’d started on ahead—”

  “Yeah,” Curtis said. “I turned around and said something about, could I drop you somewhere. You said no because—” He shrugged. “Hell,” he said, “it was pretty damn trivial. How d’you expect anybody—”

  “Wait,” John said, “wasn’t it this way? Didn’t you say you’d drop me and didn’t I say something about doing some shopping? Or—first that I thought I’d walk home and then, that maybe I’d do a little shopping on the way?”

  “I guess it was something like that,” Curtis said. He watched John.

  But now it had come back; most of it had come back.

  They had still been inside; there had been several other men within earshot, drifting from a leisurely lunch toward the street, toward a leisurely afternoon. (Toward bars, toward girls, toward homes and wives.)

  “I said I guessed not,” John said. “That I thought I’d give my legs a stretch. That I had one or two things I wanted to pick up. Don’t you remember that?”

  “It sounds right,” Curtis said. “I remember you came out about the same time I did, and I got a cab and—yeah, I remember you were walking up toward Fifth.”

  “Pit Woodson,” John said, “there were several around. He was one of them. But—did I say anything to him about having a date?”

  “Don’t remember you did,” Curtis said, but then he shrugged slightly. “But it is something one says to Pit. Good old Pit.”

  “Who else?” John said. “You remember anybody else?”

  “No,” Al Curtis said, but then he said, “Wait a minute. Dick Still was around. Maybe he was the one told Pit he had a date. And your pal Roberts. Wasn’t he around?”

  “Hank Roberts? No, I don’t think—”

  “Sure he was,” Curtis said. “Just coming in from the bar. You’d have had your back to him, probably. He had somebody with him—Princeton man. Named—hell, I met him. Morton or something.”

  “Russ Norton? Was that who it was?”

  It sounded right, Curtis said. Anything special about a Russ Norton?

  “Friend of a friend of mine,” John said. “No, nothing special.”

  (A man who, a year or so ago, had seen a good deal of Barbara Phillips. Had taken her places and—)

  “Hank Roberts,” John said. “Dick Still. Pit—looking for a fourth.”

  “Probably,” Curtis said, “for a second and a third, too.”

  “This man who was maybe Russ Norton. Anybody else you remember?”

  “Who could have heard you? Two or three others, I’d think. And—I heard you, I was the one you were talking to.”

  “All right,” John said, “where did you go, Al? When you drove off in a cab?”

  Curtis looked at him for some time.

  “It’s none of your business, is it?” Curtis said, finally. “But—I went to see a girl friend. I had a very pleasant afternoon. And—she doesn’t live in the Village. And she hasn’t got red hair. And, oh yes, she’s still alive.” He looked at John again, from expressionless eyes. “Very, very much alive,” Al Curtis said. “If you know what I mean, Hayward.”

  There was enmity in Curtis’s voice and to it, John realized, he had no answer, could make no apology. It was only for himself, John thought, that the order of things had broken down, and with it the established reticencies. To Al Curtis, what one did, and whom one saw were matters not to be enquired into by outsiders; for him, that had not changed. Intrusion—particularly when it might be interpreted to involve suspicion—was still something to be surprised at, and to resent.

  And yet, John thought—sipping his drink, not directly answering—I don’t know it is only that. I don’t, actually, know Al Curtis. I only know about him—that he is my age or near enough, and went to Harvard; that he has a place in the country with a tennis court, and that he knows a good many of the people I know. But when you come to it, John thought further—lighting a cigarette—I don’t know them, either. They are merely familiar—familiar shapes and faces, familiar voices, familiar opinions and habits. Pit Woodson lives for bridge, but I don’t know why. Hank Roberts is a Democrat, and I don’t know why. Russ Norton—

  “Well?” Curtis said, from across the table.

  “Oh,” John said. �
�Sorry, Al.”

  “It’s all right,” Al Curtis said. “Only, don’t get ideas. Ready for another?”

  John wasn’t. But he was about to say he was, so to make conventional amends, when a club servant came through the bar, looking from table to table. He found what he sought, as John had, suddenly, known he would, and came to their table and said, “Telephone, Mr. Hayward.”

  John stood up at once and said, “Thanks, Al,” and followed the servant. He went into a booth and said, “This is John Hayward.”

  “The signals you and Dad worked out,” Barbara Phillips said. “They’re off. I’m a girl won’t be protected.”

  He could not answer for a moment. Her voice was too clear, came too clearly from a remembered hour.

  “So,” Barbara said, seeming entirely to understand his silence, “you buy me a drink, and dinner and then we go to work on this. Together.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s bad enough for you already.”

  “Oh,” she said, “don’t you know anything? Not anything?” Although she did not raise her voice, there was a cry in it. But at the same time there was, evidently, irritation. “Don’t you see I can’t be left out? Won’t be left out?”

  “Your father was right,” he said. “Don’t think I—”

  “There’s no right or wrong about it,” she said, not waiting. “To him, I’m a daughter. He can’t help that. To you, I’m—whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what you do call it. But to me, I’m me. Where will you meet me?”

  “I promised your father—” he said.

  “You’re unpromised, then. I’m at the Algonquin. There? Or, shall I come and picket the Harvard Club?”

  In spite of everything, he smiled at that. She was here, there and everywhere, and lovely. And, as the smile faded, it was because a moment of tender amusement was submerged, engulfed, by his great longing to see her, to hear her voice close, not thus strained through mechanism.

  “And,” she said, “I told my father. He’s wiser than you. A little. He knows, now, that it won’t work.” She paused, for an instant. “And before you say it,” she said, “I won’t have you stuffy. Standing on ethics. Where?”

  It was no good. He had known it would be no good. Something sang in his mind because it would be no good.

  “Not the Algonquin,” he said. He had been there only once or twice; he thought it would be full of gossip columnists, of writers—probably of people who wrote for newspapers. She, at any rate, they would recognize; perhaps from his picture, they would recognize him. (Although I look like everybody.) He could avoid that, or try to. He said, “It shouldn’t be anywhere. I know that, if you don’t. But—you know Monet’s?” It was a small place in the East Fifties, near Third. It had a tiny, uncrowded lounge—uncrowded, at any rate, until later.

  She knew Monet’s.

  “I’ll meet you there,” he said. “In the bar. In about half an hour.”

  “Why you don’t merely walk down the street—” she began, but then said, “Oh, all right. Perhaps you’re right.”

  He left the booth. At a table near it, Pit Woodson had assembled his second and his third and his fourth. “Four no trump,” Pit said. He was quite changed at the bridge table, particularly when in pursuit of a slam. Hank Roberts was Pit’s partner. He said, “Five hearts.” It appeared that they might be on their way, although Roberts was by no means as good as Pit.

  John went out into the late light of Forty-fourth Street. Across the street, doing nothing in particular, was a tall man with a drooping face. This was unanticipated. But, thought about, it was, of course, something to be expected. On bail or not on bail, he was also on a string. Detective Nathan Shapiro, of the sad eyes, was part of the string.

  It was instinct, or seemed to be, that sent John’s hand up in signal to an approaching cab. It was luck the cab was empty.

  It was not rational—or could be rationalized only as an effort, still, to keep Barbara out of it. Why, he wondered, even as he said, “Grand Central” to the cab driver, am I doing this? This is a kind of running. I’ve—well, paid my dues. For the time being. But then he realized why. It was not impossible that that particular segment of time had run out; that Shapiro was on hand to pick him up.

  Well, he would see Barbara first, however he ran for it—whatever it looked like to Shapiro and Miller and the rest. At any rate, he’d try.

  He looked back, through the rear glass. He could not see Shapiro. But it was unlikely that Shapiro would be easily shaken off, if he wanted to stay on. Probably he had a car ready, or a cab.

  John’s own cab stopped for the lights at Fifth. It stopped again at Madison; at Vanderbilt, a traffic patrolman held up his hand against the cab. Shapiro wouldn’t need transport; he could keep up on foot. Finally, they stopped in the station’s cab port.

  John went down the stairs, by no means running—going no faster than a man might with a train to catch. At the bottom of the stairs, he turned sharply right and then, after he had passed Schrafft’s food shop, left. He went through a narrow door, down steep stairs, to the bar-restaurant. But he did not actually go into it. He went left into the corridor outside the men’s room on the lower level. He went through and came out on the lower level.

  He walked through the concourse, not hurrying now; now stopping to take a timetable from a rack, and so making an opportunity to look back. He saw a good many people, but not Shapiro. It was possible that he had been shaken off. (It was also possible that he had not really intended to stay on. It was conceivable that he had had other business across the street from the Harvard Club. John had no knowledge as to how many irons a policeman might keep simultaneously in the fire.)

  John went through the lower level concourse, and through a passage to the East Side subway. The rush hour had waned, but the platforms still were crowded. He walked the length of one platform, through the crowd, and up the stairs and back to the street again. He bought a newspaper at a stand, and took time to look about. There was no sign of Shapiro. He got a cab, after a little waiting on the corner, and was driven to Monet’s.

  It had not really taken half an hour, but she was there. She was at a table in a corner of the small room, and the corner would have been dark if she had not been there.

  For a moment she did not seem to see him, and in that moment, John felt again that peculiar coldness in his mind. What would he see when he looked into her eyes? In spite of all she said, what would her eyes betray? For eyes betray; he knew that now. It was one of the things he had learned since, less than forty-eight hours ago, he had seen her last.

  John walked through the dim room toward the light in the corner.

  She saw him, then. As he came toward her, she held out both hands across the table. For a moment he stood looking down at her, looking into her dark eyes. Although she smiled, there was sadness in her eyes. But there was no doubt in them.

  It is not difficult to believe when you are not alone.

  John leaned down to her and, for an instant, her lips seemed to leap under his.

  He sat down, then, opposite her.

  “For one who’s not the public kissing type,” Barbara Phillips said, and it was as easy as that—as casual seeming as that, and as close as that. “We can do with a drink,” she said and then, absurdly, her voice trembled a little. Of all the absurd things, Barbara Phillips thought. I do all right and then I ask for a drink and then—then of all times. “Can I,” she said, quite steadily, “have a whiskey sour?”

  “I don’t approve,” John said. “But—yes.”

  It was as easy as that, again. Their drinks came, and she started to drink a little rapidly, and stopped herself. He was watching her across the table. He looks older than he did, she thought. But his face hasn’t changed.

  “Was it awful?” she said. “Tell me, darling.”

  She used the word “darling” often, as many do. She did not often use the word in this special way.

  He told her. It took considerable time. It took another dri
nk, and when, upstairs, in a booth, they had finished dinner, it still was not all told.

  Finally it was.

  “Who was the girl?” she said, and for an instant the question startled him. She saw the surprise in his eyes, patted his nearer hand, told him not to be an idiot. “You think it’s against you,” she said. “Perhaps it is. But—why? And—why not against the girl?”

  He shook his head.

  “The police wonder that,” she said. “And—need to know. That must be why they did it this way—let you go, as a witness. Instead of keeping you in jail. Isn’t that true? Because there’s a gap in what they know?”

  “Probably,” he said.

  “John,” she said, “why did you keep the key?”

  He was not entirely clear, he told her. He’d thought that, somehow, he might use it. Then he said, “That picture of me. If I knew where it was taken, it might—” He spread his hands a little. “It won’t be there now,” he said.

  “When I was quite a small girl,” Barbara Phillips said, “my father had a saying. ‘You never know till you try,’ he used to say. A good many people say that, I suppose. Father is usually more original. Still—”

  “Not you,” John said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

  “I,” Barbara said, “am a girl won’t be protected. I thought we were clear on that.”

  VI

  It had grown dark when they left the restaurant. But complete darkness is not permitted on Manhattan’s streets. There was light enough, as they waited for a cab, for John to look around—look first across the street, and then to right and to left. He did not see Shapiro, or any of the others. But, to his right, a man was standing looking into a lighted show window. John wondered what engrossed him, and thought that New York has many detectives. But then a cab came.

  If they wanted him, they would get him, later if not now—at his apartment if not on the streets.

  “Was that the man?” she said. “Shapiro?”

  “No,” he said. “Nobody I ever saw before.”

  She came close to him in the cab, and he held her close.