“Yes, I can remember when he had that job,” she agreed ^. caustically. She turned her head slightly aside, raised her voice a little, as if she wished someone other than Lombard to overhear her. “They lose one job, and then they never move the seat of their pants off the chair from that day on to try and get another. They sit and wait for it to come to them!”
What sounded like the hoarse grunt of a trained seal came from somewhere in the interior.
“Someone to see you, Mike!” she bellowed. And then to Lombard, “You better go in to him yourself, he’s got his shoes off.”
Lombard advanced down a “railroad” hall that threatened to go on indefinitely, but didn’t. It ended finally in a room whose center was occupied by an oilcloth covered table.
Sidewise to this lolled the object of his visit, stretched across two straight-backed wooden chairs in a suspension bridge arrangement, the unsupported part of him curving downward. He had off a good deal more than just his shoes; in fact, his upper attire consisted solely of an oatmeal-colored union suit with elbow length sleeves, and immediately over that a pair of braces. Two white-toed socks tilted acutely upward from the chair seat opposite him. He laid aside a pink racing form and a rancid pipe as Lombard entered. “And what can I do for you, sirr?” he rumbled accommodatingly.
Lombard put his hat on the table and sat down without being asked. “A friend of mine wishes to get in touch with
someone,” he began confidentially. It would be poor policy, he felt, to overawe these people ahead of time with mention of death sentences, consultations with the police, and all that; they might become intimidated and chary of telling him anything, even if they were able to. “It means a lot to him. It means everything. Now. This is why I’m here. Can you recall a man and woman getting out of a taxi in front of the theater, while you were working there, one night in May? You held the door for them, of course.”
“Well now, I held the door for everybody that drove up, that was my job.”
“They were a little late, probably the last people you greeted that particular night. Now this woman had on a bright orange hat, A very peculiar hat, with a thin tickler sticking straight up from it. It swept right in front of your eyes as she got out, she passed so close to you. Your eyes followed it like this: slowly, from one side over to the other. You know, like when something passes too close to you, and you can’t make out what it is.”
“Leave it to him,” his wife put in challengingly from the doorway, “if it was anything on a pretty woman he’d do that anyway, whether he could make out what it was or not!”
Neither of the men paid any attention. “He saw you do that,” Lombard went on. “He happened to notice it at the time, and he told me about it.” He pressed his hands to the oilcloth, leaned toward him. “Can you remember? Does it come back to you? Can you remember her at all?”
O’Bannon shook his head ponderously. Then he gnawed his upper Hp. Then he shook his head some more. He gave him a reproachful look. “D’ye know what you’re asking, man? All those faces night after night! Nearly always two by two, lady and gent.”
Lombard continued leaning across the table toward him for long minutes, as though the intensity of his gaze would be enough to bring it back to him of itself. “Try, O’Bannon. Think back. Try, will you, O’Bannon? It means everything in the world to this poor guy.”
The wife began to draw slowly nearer, at that, but still held her peace.
O’Bannon shook his head once more, this time with finality. “No,” he said. “Out of my whole season there, out of all them people I opened car doors for, I can only recall today one single individjule. A fellow who showed up by himself one night, full of booze. And that was because he fell out of the cab face first when I opened the door, and I had to catch him in me arms—”
Lombard stemmed the flow of unwanted reminiscence that he suspected was about to follow. He got to his feet. “Then you don’t, and you’re sure you don’t?”
“I don’t, and I’m sure I don’t.” O’Bannon reached for the reeking pipe and the racing chart again.
The wife was at their elbows by now. She had been eyeing Lombard speculatively for some moments past. The tip of her tongue peered forth in calculation for an instant at the corner of her mouth as she spoke. “Would there have been anything in it for us. now, if he had been able to?”
“Well, yes. I don’t suppose I would have minded doing a little something for you, if you’d been able to give me what I wanted.”
“D’ye hear that, Mike?” She pounced on her husband as though she were going to attack him. She began to shake him strenuously by one shoulder, using both hands for the purpose, as though she were kneading dough or massaging a sprain. “Try, Mike, try!”
He tried to ward her off. backing an arm defensively before his head. “How can I, with you rocking me like an empty rowboat? Even if it was in me head somewhere, lying low, you’d shake it clean out of me mind!”
“Well—no go, I guess,” Lombard sighed. He turned away and moved disappointedly down the long defile of hall passage.
He heard her voice rise to an exasperated wail there in the room behind him, as she renewed her assault on her husband’s obdurate shoulder. “Look, he’s going! Oh, Mike, what’s the matter with you! All the man wants you to do is remember something, and you can’t even do that!”
She must have vented her disappointment on the inanimate objects about him. There was a roar of anguished protest. “Me pipe! Me handicap sheet!”
Their voices were loud in disputation as Lombard closed the outer door after him. Then, suspiciously, there was a sudden conspiratorial hush. Lombard’s face took on a slightly knowing look, as he started down the stairs.
Sure enough, in a moment more there was a swift onrush of footsteps in his wake along the inner hall, the door was flung open, and O’Bannon’s wife called hectically down the stairwell after him, “Wait, mister! Come back! He just remembered! It just now came to him!”
“Oh, it did, did it?” Lombard said dryly. He stopped where he was and turned to look up at her, but without making any move to reascend. He took out his wallet, ran his thumb tentatively along its edge. “Ask him was it a black or a white sling she was holding her arm in?”
She relayed the question resoundingly back into the interior. She got the answer, sent it on down to Lombard —slight hesitancy of voice and all. “White—for the evening, you know.”
Lombard put his wallet away again unopened. “Wrong number,” he said firmly, and resumed his descent.
12 The Fourteenth, Thirteenth, Twelfth Days Before the Execution
THE GIRL
SHE’D already been perched on the stool several minutes when he first became aware of her. And that was all the more unusual, in that there were only a scattering of others at the bar as yet; her arrival should have been that much more conspicuous. It only showed how unobtrusively she must have approached and settled into place.
It was at the very beginning of his turn of duty, so her arrival must have occurred only moments after his own taking up of position behind the bar, almost as though she had timed it that way: to arrive when he did. She had not yet been there when he first stepped out of the locker room in freshly starched jacket and glanced about his domain-to-be, that much he was sure of. At any rate, turning away from waiting on a man down at the other end, he became aware of her sitting there quiescently, and immediately approached.
“Yes, miss?”
Her eyes held his in a peculiarly sustained look, he thought. And then immediately thought, in postscript, that he must be mistaken, he must be only imagining it. All customers looked at him when they gave an order, for he was the means of bringing it to them.
In this gaze of hers there was a difference, though; the impression returned a second time, after having been discarded once. It was a personalized look. A look in its own right, with the giving of the order the adjunct, and not just an adjunct to the giving of the order. It was a look at him,
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br /> the man to whom she was addressing the order, meant for him in his own right. It was a look that said, “Take note of me. Mark me well.”
She asked for a little whisky with water. As he turned away to get it, her eyes remained on him to the last. He had a trivial and fleeting feeling of being at a loss, of being unable to account for her bizarre scrutiny, that evaporated again almost as soon as it had risen. That did not bother him much, it was just there and gone again at first.
Thus, the beginnings of it.
He brought her drink, and turned away immediately to wait on someone else.
An interval elapsed. An interval during which he did not think of her again, had forgotten her. An interval during which there should have been some slight alteration in her position, if only a shift of her hand, a raising or edging of her glass, a look elsewhere about the room. There wasn’t. She sat there not moving. As still as a pasteboard cut-out of a girl seated on a bar stool. Her drink was not touched, remained where he had left it, as he had left it. Only one thing moved: her eyes. They went wherever he went. They followed him about.
A pause came in his activities, and he encountered them again, for the first time since his original discovery of their peculiar fixity. He found now that they had been on him all the while, without his guessing it. It disconcerted him. He could find no meaning for it. He stole a look into the glass, to see if there was anything awry with his countenance or jacket. There wasn’t, he was as other times, no one else was looking at him in that prolonged steadfast way but she. He could find no explanation for it.
It was intentional, of that there could be no doubt, for it moved about as he moved about. It was no glazed, dreamy, inward mulling stare that just happened to be turned his way; there was intelligence behind it, directed at him.
Awareness of it having once entered his mind, it could not be dislodged again; it remained with him to stay and trouble him. He began watching her covertly from time to time himself now, each time thinking himself unobserved. Always he found her already looking at him when he did, always he left her continuing to look at him after he had already desisted. His sense of being at a loss deepened, became discomfort, little by little.
He had never seen a human being sit so still. Nothing about her moved. The drink remained as neglected as though he had not brought it at all. She sat there like a young, feminine Buddha, eyes gravely, uninterruptedly on him.
Discomfort was beginning to deepen into annoyance. He approached her at last, stopped before her.
“Don’t you care for your drink, miss?”
This was meant to be a hint, a spur to get her to move on. It failed; she blunted it.
Her answer was toneless, told nothing. “Leave it there.”
The circumstances were in her favor, for she was a girl, and girls are under no compulsion to be repetitious spenders at a bar, as a man customarily is if he expects to continue to be welcome. Moreover, she was not flirting, she was not seeking to have her check lifted, she was not behaving reprehensibly in any way; he was powerless against her.
He drew away from her again, worsted, looking back at her all the way down the curve of the bar, and her eyes followed him as persistently as ever.
Discomfort was settling into something chronic now. He tried to shrug it off with a squirming of the shoulders, an adjustment of his collar about the nape of his neck. He knew she was still looking, and he wouldn’t look over himself any more to confirm it. Which only made it worse.
The demands of other customers, the thicker they came, instead of harassing him, were a relief now. The necessary manipulations they brought on gave him something to do, took his mind off that harrowing stare. But the lulls would keep coming back, when there was no one to attend to, nothing that needed polishing, no glass that needed filling, and it was then that her concentration on him would make itself felt the most. It was then that he didn’t know what to do with his hands, or with his bar cloth.
He upset a small chaser of beer as he was knifing it atop the sieve. He punched a wrong key in the cash register.
At last, driven almost beyond endurance, he tackled her again, trying to come to grips with what she was doing to him.
“Is there anything I can do for you, miss?” he said with husky, choked resentment.
She spoke always without putting any clue into her voice. “Have I said there is?”
He leaned heavily on the bar. “Well, is there something you want from me?”
“Have I said I do?”
“Well, pardon me, but do I remind you of someone you know?”
“No one.”
He was beginning to flounder. “I thought maybe there was, the way you keep looking at me—” he said unsteadily. It was meant to be a rebuke.
This time she didn’t answer at all. Yet neither did her eyes leave him. He finally was the one had to leave them again, withdraw as discomfited as ever.
She didn’t smile, she didn’t speak, she showed neither contrition nor yet outright hostility. She just sat and looked after him, with the inscrutable gravity of an owl.
It was a terrible weapon she had found and she was using. It does not ordinarily occur to people how utterly unbearable it can be to be looked at steadily over a protracted period of time, say an hour or two or three, simply because it is a thing that never happens to them, their fortitude is not put to the test.
It was happening to him now, and it was slowly unnerving him, fraying him. He was defenseless against it, both because he was confined within the semicircle of the bar, couldn’t walk away from it, and also because of its very
nature. Each time he tried to buffet it back, he found that it was just a look, there was nothing there to seize hold of. The control of it rested with her. A beam, a ray, there was no way of warding it off, shunting it aside.
Symptoms that he had never noted in himself before, and would not have recognized by their clinical name of agoraphobia, began to assail him with increasing urgency; a longing to take cover, to seek refuge back within the locker room, even a desire to squat down below the level of the bar top where she could no longer see him readily. He mopped his brow furtively once or twice and fought them off. His eyes began to seek the clock overhead with increasing frequency, the clock that they had once told him a man’s life depended on.
He longed to see her go. He began to pray for it. And yet it was obvious by now, had been for a long time past, that she had no intention of going of her own accord, would only go with the closing of the place. For none of the usual reasons that cause people to seek a bar were operating in her case, and therefore there was no reprieve to be expected from any of them. She was not there to wait for anyone, or she would have been met long ago. She was not there to drink, for that same untouched glass still sat just where he had set it hours ago. She was there for one purpose and one alone: to look at him.
Failing to be rid of her in any other way, he began to long for closing time to come, to find his escape through that. As the customers began to thin out, as the number of counter-attractions about him lessened, her power to bring herself to his notice rose accordingly. Presently there were large gaps around the semicircle fronting him, and that only emphasized the remorseless fixity of that Medusa-like countenance all the more.
He dropped a glass, and that was a thing he hadn’t done in months. She was shooting him to pieces. He glowered at her and cursed her in soundless lip movement as he stooped to gather up the fragments.
And then finally, when he thought it was never coming any more, the minute hand notched twelve, and it was four o’clock and closing time had arrived. Two men engaged in earnest conversation, the last of all the other customers, rose unbidden and sauntered toward the entrance, without interrupting their flow of amicable, low-voiced talk. Not she. Not a muscle moved. The stagnant drink still sat before her, and she sat on with it. Looking, watching, eyeing, without even a blink.
“Good night, gentlemen,” he called out loudly after the other two, so that sh
e would understand.
She didn’t move.
He opened the control box and thew a switch. The outer perimeter of lights went out, leaving just an inner glow coming from behind the bar where he was, a hidden sunset creeping up the mirrors and the tiers of bottles ranged against the wall. He became a black silhouette against it, and she a disembodied, faintly luminous face peering in from the surrounding dimness.
He went up to her, took the hours old drink away, and threw it out, with a violent downward fling of the hand that sent drops leaping up.
“We’re closing up now.” he said in a grating voice.
She moved at last. Suddenly she was on her feet beside the stool, holding it for a moment to give the change of position time to work its way through her circulatory system.
His fingers worked deftly down the buttons of his jacket. He said cholerically, “What was it? What was the game? What was on your mind?”
She moved quietly off through the darkened tavern toward the street entrance without answering, as though she hadn’t heard him. He had never dreamed that such a simple causative as the mere sight of a girl quitting a bar, could bring such utter, contrite, prostrate relief welling up in him. His jacket open all down the front, he supported himself there on one hand planted firmly down upon the bar, and leaned limply, exhaustedly out in the direction in which she had gone.
There was a night light standing at the outer entrance, and she came back into view again when she had reached there. She stopped just short of the doorway, and turned, and looked back at him across the intervening distance, long and solemnly and with purposeful implication. As if to show that the whole thing had been no illusion; more than that, to show that this was not its end, that this was just an interruption.
He turned from keying the door locked, and she was standing there quietly on the sidewalk, only a few yards off. She was turned expectantly facing toward the doorway, as if waiting for him to emerge.
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