Power, The

by Robinson, Frank M.

  What was it Marge had said?

  I’m ready to build a little shrine in my living room just as soon as I know what to put in it.

  “I’ve voted the straight ticket all my life … .” the woman was saying.

  He sighed, bought himself a paper from the candy butcher and tried to bury himself in it. The same old news, he thought, blinking to keep awake. The same minor wars, the same tensions, the same murders and rapes and thefts—only the names had been changed, but not to protect the innocent.

  Why did Adam Hart want anything to do with it?

  And then he thought of the one person who might know, the innocent bystander who probably knew as much about Adam Hart as Olson himself. The one person who would know because she had been there … .

  Olson’s sister.

  Petey.

  He dozed during the afternoon, partly because he was tired and partly because he wanted to get away from the conversation of the woman next to him. He had supper in the crowded dining car, read a few optimistic articles in a professionally optimistic magazine, and was wide awake when the train came into Chicago. It was early evening and a light fog had rolled in from the lake so the city looked like a dark, gray mass of cotton, shot through with black shadows and with a million lights glowing from the depths—lights that were yellowed and diffused by the damp fog.

  The train slowed and abruptly the gray night was replaced by the brilliance of the train shed. The aisles filled with people struggling into their coats and stretching to get down their luggage from the luggage racks. He tipped down a battered aluminum suitcase for his seat companion, then pulled down his own and sat back waiting for the aisle to clear.

  Outside, baggage men were driving their small trucks past the slowly moving train, porters were waiting to step aboard to help old ladies with their luggage, and a hundred people lined the concrete platform waiting for Mom and Dad or Uncle Harry and Sister Ellen.

  The line started moving down the aisle and Tanner watched the people on the platform greet those getting off. The car was half empty before he noticed the two men standing on the platform, a little to the rear of the pressing group of greeters. Two men in brown business suits and conservative ties and well-shined shoes who intently inspected everybody as they got off but greeted no one. They were waiting, he thought.

  For whom?

  Now the aisle was almost empty. The two men outside had moved closer to the stream of people getting off. At the far end of the coach, a colored woman started to sweep down.

  The palms of his hands felt wet against the upholstered arms of his seat. He didn’t know who they were or what they wanted but he was convinced it concerned him.

  He made up his mind and ran to the opposite end of the car from the exit door.

  “Hey, mistuh, you goin’ de wrong way!”

  He brushed past her and ran into the next empty car. At the far end, he worked frantically at the door away from the platform. It swung open and he dropped the few feet to the concrete rail bed, bending his legs slightly to take up the jar.

  The shed was so damned bright … .

  He stood there for a brief moment in an agony of indecision. His suitcase … his clothes and his service pistol … everything he owned … left behind … .

  He started running down the tracks.

  “Stop that man!”

  A whistle split the air of the shed. The police, he thought chaotically. For some reason they were in on it. He frantically tried to run a broken field down the rail bed.

  Spang!

  Cement chipped from a nearby pillar and he doubled his speed, the cool night air burning his lungs. The concrete of the rail bed showered chips once more and then he was running in cinders and he was out of the train shed. For a brief moment he was silhouetted between the fog outside and the bright lights of the shed. Something tore into the fleshy part of his thigh, almost dropping him to his knees. He staggered, then the thin tendrils of fog floated between himself and the shed and he was plunging down a cindered embankment.

  The gritty cinders shredded the skin in the palms of his hands and ground into the side of his pants where he slid. He ended in a tangle of weeds and saw grass and oily water at the bottom of the slope. He lay there a moment, shaking, the greasy water seeping through his coat and shirt and crawling down his chest.

  I can run for it, he thought. But beyond the embankment there was only a well-lighted, broad avenue where he would make the perfect target.

  He flattened himself out in the ditch. There were noises overhead and the slight rattle of rolling cinders as men walked along the rail bed ten feet above him. A flashlight cut through the fog and outlined a clump of ragged bushes two feet from his head. The light hovered for a second, then continued on down the track.

  “I thought I saw him run on down …”

  “Look for blood—I think I winged him.”

  “None here. This damned fog—he must’ve gone off the side some place.”

  The night was closing down and the fog was moving in thicker. The voices were a hundred yards down the track now but he knew in a moment they’d start back, watching the sides of the embankment. If he was going to leave, it would have to be now.

  He got to his knees, wincing at the pain in his leg, and silently crawled the few yards to the sidewalk, taking advantage of the cover some bushes offered. The avenue beyond was a one-way street and cars were parked on the other side.

  Forty feet of boulevard to cross, with no cover but the drifting fog.

  He took off his shoes and felt around on the ground for a fair-sized stone. He threw it diagonally across the embankment so it clattered down the other side a good fifty feet from where he was.

  “You hear it? Over here!”

  “Where?”

  “Down here—this side!”

  The light bobbed towards him, then cut down the other side of the embankment. He stood up, crooking his arms so he held his shoes in front of him, and ran frantically across the street.

  There was no sound but the soft slap of his stocking feet on the asphalt.

  The cars, and then the blessed shadows … He turned south, to an alley, stopping for a moment in the darkness to wipe his hands on his trousers and probe the wound in his leg. A flesh wound that hurt like hell. He’d had a tetanus shot in preparation for the diggings in Colorado, but it would still have to be washed and bound.

  He put on his shoes and cut through the alley for two blocks, then walked down to Madison Street. Skid Row, where nobody asked questions and where a man covered with blood and cinders wasn’t worth phoning the police about. He sidled through a rundown bar to the stinking washroom, scraped most of the dirt off himself, and combed his hair. The wound would have to wait until later. Washing it would start the bleeding again and he couldn’t travel through the city dripping blood.

  He searched through his pockets. Half a dozen coins and a couple of bills and after that he’d have to pass the hat.

  He walked back out to the bar and over to the phone booth. There was one person it was probably safe to call, though he couldn’t expect much help. He dropped in a coin and dialed.

  “Hello?”

  He leaned close to the mouthpiece. “Eddy? This is Bill Tanner.”

  “bill!” Deep silence for a moment. Too dead, as if somebody had put their hand over the mouthpiece. Then a jittery, almost hysterical, “Long time no hear, pal. Where the hell are you?”

  “Why are the police after me, Eddy?”

  “Police? You’re kidding.” Dead silence again, not quite muffling the sound of a door slamming. A screen door as somebody ran out to the neighbor’s to make a phone call? “What do you mean the police are after you?” Pause. “Where are you?”

  DeFalco had let him down at the funeral, he thought. Now he was turning him in.

  “Bill? Something wrong? Why don’t you answer? Bill? Where are you?”

  He had maybe five minutes before they traced his call and the police arrived. Maybe a little more
than that.

  He quietly clicked down the receiver and dialed again.

  “Marge?”

  She knew his voice but she didn’t hang up and she didn’t scream bloody murder. “I want you to know that I’m going to call the police just as soon as you’re through talking.”

  “Why are they after me, Marge?”

  Her voice was dull. “For murder.”

  “Whose?”

  “John Olson’s.”

  “Do you believe I killed him?”

  “I’m trying hard not to; I’m trying very hard.”

  There was a sharp click at the other end of the line.

  Hart had sicced the police on him, he thought, shaken. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Hart to forge evidence, to implant convictions that he had killed Olson. The rest of the committee members knew better but like DeFalco they had seen the handwriting on the wall and were scared to death. They were willing to go along, to throw him to the wolves … .

  He left the tavern ten seconds before the sirens started to sound.

  Chicago after midnight.

  A million lights and a thousand voices along Randolph and State. Theaters and night clubs and drugstores and the open-all-night jewelry shops that specialized in zircons you couldn’t tell from real diamonds. Couples heading home from the show and sixteen-year-old hoods on the corners, hair thick with Vaseline and combed straight back, their sport coats too long in the sleeves and too big in the shoulders. The life and lights and sounds of a city after dark …

  Three blocks over, the concrete and marble cliff dwellings of La Salle Street, silent and dark with only the faint street lights filtering through the fog. The glass caves that looked with empty eyes at the deserted sound stages of the metropolis.

  The lights marched out from the Loop along the empty streets, marking them with thin threads of luminescence that quilted the night into gigantic squares; the squares of a chessboard with himself pitted against the master player.

  Some place in the darkness was Adam Hart, Tanner thought. Sleeping? Prowling the city? He wished he knew.

  He stepped out into the street and hailed a cab.

  Petey wasn’t home.

  He pressed the buzzer again, then walked over and tried the door leading to the apartments. It wasn’t locked. The moisture and the heat of summer had swelled the wood so the door had caught without closing all the way. He went up the stairs to her apartment but he wasn’t as lucky the second time.

  He could wait until morning to see her, he thought—then realized he might not have until morning. And the empty apartment might tell him things that Petey wouldn’t.

  He tried the knife-blade routine between the door and the frame and discovered that the door had two locks, only the first of which was a spring arrangement. He glanced down the hall. It wasn’t a new building. The wallpaper was discolored and the rose-figured rug was faded in spots and there was the indefinable odor of age. With luck, the building had probably been erected before the every-room-with-bath era.

  He tried the apartment next door and managed to spring its lock. He waited a tense moment for noises from within—for the half muffled voice, thick with sleep, to mumble, “Who’s there?”

  But there was no sound at all and he slipped quietly into the darkened room.

  It was a bachelor-girl’s apartment, dimly lit by light from the kitchenette. The sofa had been folded out into the bed and the covers were turned back, a pair of rumpled silk pajamas laid out on top. There was a faint noise coming from the kitchen that he hadn’t heard before and he froze for a moment, listening. A radio, turned low, and a midnight disc-jockey show.

  Nothing else. No sounds of anybody moving around out in the kitchen, no sounds of dishes clattering in the sink.

  He walked quietly over and looked in. The icebox door was ajar, the makings of a sandwich on the table. There was bread, butter, lettuce, and a few slices of liver sausage. A half-glass of milk had been poured and he picked it up and sipped it.

  Sour. The girl must have gone down to the delicatessen for another carton—and she’d be back any minute.

  He went back to the living room, saw the door leading off of it, and tried it. The connecting bath.

  He flicked on the light, then turned and locked the door he had just come through. He ran water into the bowl, let down his trousers, and sponged gingerly at the flesh wound. The caked blood washed away and the wound started to bleed again. He found gauze and tape in the cabinet and bound his leg tightly.

  It wasn’t until he put the tape back that he noticed what was wrong with the bathroom.

  Face powder and talcum and bath salts and cologne and a fringe of nylons hanging from the towel racks. There was nothing unusual about it, not even the fact that the colognes and powders were of two different brands and the nylons of two different sizes. So two girls shared the same bathroom and had different tastes.

  Except that Petey wasn’t the cologne-and-powder type and she preferred lisle stockings to nylons.

  He turned off the light and slipped into the other apartment. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the dark and then he found a floor lamp and flicked on the night light set in the base—enough light to see the room with but not enough light to be seen from the street.

  It looked pretty much like the apartment next door. Which was all wrong because there were too many details that didn’t match up with Petey’s character. The pink, tufted chenille bed-spread—a little too frilly, a little too feminine for the grimly efficient machine he knew was his secretary. The same thing went for the curtains and the drapes.

  For a brief second he thought he was in the wrong apartment, then saw a photograph of Petey on top of the dresser. A smiling, laughing Petey with her hair down and her teeth showing, keeping company with a table-top army of perfumes and lotions and lipsticks.

  It didn’t make sense. Petey wasn’t the type.

  He pulled open the dresser drawer and ran his hands through the garments in it. They matched the bottles on top. Feminine as all get-out. What the hell, he thought, Petey doesn’t make a practice of showing off her underwear anyway. An efficient secretary with a grim exterior who probably liked to be feminine underneath.

  The closet told him he was kidding himself. The suits and the cotton dresses and the drab wool ensembles were there, all right. But so were flowered prints and taffeta evening dresses and a black-lace creation with lots of skirt, no back, and a minimum of front.

  Petey had been leading a double life, and nobody had suspected it. And then he wondered: Why?

  There were muffled footsteps down the hall and the metallic jiggling of a key in the lock.

  He turned off the night light and stepped back into the shadows of the closet.

  She flicked on the ceiling light and closed the door behind her, then threw her wrap on the bed and stretched, shaking out her thick, brown hair and arching her neck. It was amazing what drab clothes and dresses had done, Tanner thought clinically. She had a figure and she knew how to dress it. And the way she moved. Not the sharp, awkward movements she used to make that made her seem like a cubist painting come to life, all squares and angles … . She was smooth, lithe, animalistic.

  She had started to unloosen the straps on her high-heeled pumps when he said softly:

  “Hello, Petey.”

  She froze for a second, balanced on one foot. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just visiting.” He took out his tobacco pouch and pipe. “You look pretty when you’re all dressed up. Go dancing much?”

  She kicked off the shoe and straightened up, one hand brushing back her long hair that had usually been worn in a bun at the back of her neck. “That’s none of your business.”

  “So soon after your brother’s death, too.”

  “You don’t mourn a person forever.”

  “Not even for seven days?”

  Her voice was ice. “I was your secretary at the university but you don’t work there any more. And you’ve no
right to pry into my private life.”

  He sat down on the bed and ran his hands over the sheets. Silk. You didn’t buy silk sheets on a secretary’s salary.

  “Who replaced me, Petey?”

  “Van Zandt, who did you think?” She deliberately turned away from him and walked over to the closet. She put her hands behind her back and unloosened the eyelets and stepped out of her dress. “Getting an eyeful, Professor? You don’t seem like quite the rube you used to be.”

  Secretaries, he thought slowly, didn’t buy slips of black nylon and lace on their salaries, either.

  “Why didn’t you tell your folks about John’s death so they could have been there?”

  “I told them later on. They couldn’t have made it to the funeral anyway.”

  “Your father could have made it.”

  She glared at him. “You went up there?”

  “I went through the whole town. I talked to everybody, from the little girl who waits behind the counter at the hotel to the math teacher who shows chubby little farm boys how to shoot baskets. They knew John very well. They knew Adam Hart, too.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He smiled faintly. “Come off it, Petey. You gave yourself away the minute you stepped into this room.”

  She looked bored and started to roll down her stockings. “How?”

  “I called up DeFalco and Marge when I came back. They knew the police were after me, they knew the police were convinced that I had murdered John. I don’t think they believed it themselves but … something had scared them to the point where they were willing to throw me to the wolves. You’re not scared, Petey. You’re not scared at all. Because you’re on pretty good terms with that ‘something’? You not only know I didn’t kill your brother, Petey, I think you know who did.”

  Coldly: “So what?”

  That’s right, he thought to himself. So what? So her brother is dead and I stand a chance of being killed any day. And it wouldn’t matter to her. It doesn’t matter a damn whether I live or die. And it hasn’t made any difference to her that her brother’s been killed.