It never occurred to me that there was someone, somewhere in a hollowed-out concrete block, could have been proud of this. I had no leisure to think of it that way.
There, it was three away now. There, it was two away. There, it was the next one. This foot was trying not to move, to stay back where it had been. Now the other one was trying not to. Smart feet. But they weren’t married to Kirk Murray; just my head and heart were.
Oh, it was so dark along this street. Just that hooded, half-dimmed light on the other side, too far behind me to do any good any more. Looking downward into the little pool of its own reflection, like a discreetly retiring eye refusing to see what happened to me. And that little cross of punctured green pin points down the other way at the corner below, like a spark floating a little above the curb, that sometimes turned red and then came back to green again. A car passed once in a while, but even that was nothing, just a swift black shape hastening along on the black tide with a glint of silver at its prow.
I was up to it now, and there it was waiting: black eyes in triple rows, protruding teeth formed by the stoop steps, seeming to say, “I knew you’d come; I knew I’d get you.”
I hadn’t even told Flood; I don’t know why. I hadn’t even taken that most elementary, most ordinary precaution—to let someone else know I was coming here; I was going into this place. So that in case I didn’t come out again——
Because I had nothing definite to tell him as yet, I suppose, other than that Mordaunt had told me to come back a second time after dark. Because I was afraid of ridicule, I suppose, and would almost have rather faced this thing, whatever it was to be, alone than have him turn up the palms of his hands and say: “Almost every doctor you go to see asks you to come back a second time.” Or shrug and say: “Then if you’re afraid to go there don’t go there. No one’s making you. Why come running to us? We can’t give you a police escort to every doctor who makes evening appointments or happens to look across his shoulder as he’s seeing you out the door.”
Now I was here, and the time for what I should have done and what I shouldn’t have done was over; this was how I was going to do it.
The parlor floor and the two above it were dark. But now that the impediment of the preceding stoop was out of the way, I saw that the double window in the basement, deep within the areaway, niched within the projection of the two stoops, was showing a sullen brown-orange through a thick, almost opaque, shade. So he was waiting down there, as he’d said.
I didn’t even have anything on me to—well, in case anything happened. The lack was only relative, after all. A protective knife, for instance, was only as strong as the wrist behind it. A gun? I had no gun. A whistle, perhaps. Yet what chance would even a whistle have of reaching out here to the street from the deeps, the unsuspected recesses and keeps, of that jealously sealed house? Less chance than my own unaided scream, and that had little chance enough.
I played a forlorn game that kids know well, procrastinating, marking time, saying: “As soon as this next man coming along on the other side goes by I’ll go down the step and ring the bell.” Then, “He didn’t count; he passed too fast. Well, as soon as this next one goes by, then I surely will.” And then, “He didn’t count either; he turned in somewhere before he got here.” Until, in sudden helpless discovery, “There’s no one else coming. Now I have to go!” And through it all a grown-up voice, the voice of me grown up, scoffing in my ear, “Coward! Coward! Then why did you come here at all? Why didn’t you drop the whole thing when you got safely outside the other day?”
I forced myself down into the coal-black sunken pit of the areaway at last. “Kirk, look after me. I’m going in.” I knew he was helpless many miles away, buried in steel and concrete, but I had to have some talisman to see me through.
When I’d found the bell I rang it in such a strange way, had anyone been able to see me through the layers of dark. Collared my wrist with my other hand and thrust it home by that means, as though in itself it were atrophied, had no power to move.
Yes, it was childish, I know. It was the last lingering childishness in me giving up the ghost. There would be no more of it left in me after this. This was Alberta Murray, growing up as she stood before this house waiting to go in. Making her debut into an adult world such as she had never dreamed she would enter, such as she had never dreamed existed: a world of jungle violence and of darkness, of strange hidden deeds in strange hidden places, of sharp-clawed treachery and fanged gratitude, where compunction and conscience were just other words for weakness and used as such. Strange debut.
It made a faint sound far back inside, not the usual sound of a bell, a sort of angry, wasplike buzzing. These basement entryways in New York had, or have where they have still remained unaltered, a single common feature : a grilled iron gate giving in under the stoop structure. Then within that, at right angles, comes the wooden house door itself. This, I suppose, was to make access more difficult in the old days. The gate itself is a full-sized door in every sense of the word: it reaches from top to bottom of the embrasure, save that it is slit, can be seen through when it is daylight or when there is a light within the inner passage.
There was no sound of the inner door opening or of anyone coming out. He must therefore have already been in position, standing there concealed in the dark, watching me through the grille the whole time. His voice when it sounded, though it was low and meant to be reassuring, was so close to my face just the other side of the barrier and came so unexpectedly, it made my heels go up. “Good evening. I’ve been wondering how much longer you were going to take.”
Then, and then only, there was noise enough as he unfastened the heavy obstacle and swung it back for me. A little carbolic, a little uncleanliness came out unseen in the dark.
“You should never do that,” he said. “For fully five minutes you stood up there on the sidewalk, as if you couldn’t make up your mind. It—it doesn’t look right, gives a bad impression. When you are coming anywhere, especially when you are coming here to see me, go right in, don’t stand around like that outside.”
So he’d been watching me the whole time, probably had been on the lookout since before my arrival, like—like some sort of anthropoid lurking behind those iron bars.
I couldn’t help commenting to myself, “Where would you have been now if Flood had sent someone with you as an escort, for instance, and you had parted from him within sight of the house? Or even exchanged some unobtrusive signal with him from a distance?”
I dredged up what I thought a plausible enough excuse to cover the hesitant behavior that he didn’t approve of, though whether he believed it or not, I couldn’t tell. “Oh, I’ll tell you why that was, Doctor. I found out from a clock that I passed on the way over here that I was five minutes ahead of time, and I didn’t want to be too early. I’m funny that way. I like to keep an appointment to the minute, so I waited outside to——”
“Well, as a matter of fact, you’re five minutes late.”
“Then the clock must have been slow.”
He had not, meanwhile, stood back to admit me. He had instead come out past me to the sunken rim of the areaway and peered out over the two upright brownstone slabs that formed a sort of guard for it, first up the street in one direction, then down it in the other.
It was done with an assumption of casualness, even inconsequence, as though he were no more than an ordinary householder who, once summoned to the door, takes the opportunity of savoring the fresh air for a moment as long as he is out that far. But it didn’t mislead me. He wanted to make sure that my ingress should pass unobserved.
“Go ahead in, don’t stand there.” In itself the remark was innocuous enough; it was the way he uttered it without turning his head toward me, keeping his gaze steadily forward on the street, that made it a conspiratorial something else again. Everything he said and did, he did so——I didn’t know what the exact word was myself. Sinisterly.
I would have to go in in another moment anyway,
I knew, so long as I was this far, but I grasped at any delay, no matter how fleeting. “But I don’t know where the light is, Doctor. I can’t see my way.”
“Go in without it. It’s just a straight hall; you don’t need it. I’ll be right there.” Again he didn’t turn his head. He wanted to be sure the street was sterile.
I knew. Oh, I knew; any fool would have by now. What doctor receives his patient without a light, scans the street after her as she goes in? The Finnish woman was out of the house, as he had known she would be, as he had planned she should be, and there was something grim going to take place here.
I was too frightened to back out of going in any more. I was too frightened to do anything but go ahead. There are times when that is no figure of speech. I was afraid if I balked now he would overpower me and drag me in with him by main force. And I had at least that little slack left yet to my rope; I was still a free agent for a moment or two longer, provided my direction was forward and inside.
I sidled in backward, feeling of the wall with my hands, shifting my body along it under the stoop embrasure like an ebony portcullis that blacked still further the already seemingly impenetrable blackness there had been beyond it. Through the second door opening, until my feet found wood under them instead of cement. The carbolic was stronger in here; he had lingered so long and it was so confined.
His tread scraped the gritty areaway, returning; the iron barrier creaked, clashed into its frame, and riveted closed, and all further freedom of choice in the thing had been taken out of my hands.
I was in now. Good and in.
His foot came down heavily on one of mine in passing. It felt for a minute as though several of those brittle little bones out at the end of it had been pulverized. He didn’t apologize, though he must have felt it.
“It’s so dark, Doctor. I can’t see.”
He was already ahead. “Just follow me,” he said ungraciously. “You can do that much, can’t you?”
I moved after him along warped wooden flooring. I thought from footfall to footfall he’d stop and turn without warning and I’d feel those cruelly powerful hands closing in a pincers movement at my——
The shaft wall of an enclosed basement stair sidled past to one side of us. I could feel the lathe and plaster encroachment it made on our right of way and guess what it was by its shallowness and yet continued length.
“Aren’t we going up to your office, Doctor?”
“What for?”
That clipped “What for?” sent a redoubled chill through me. He wasn’t even making a pretense of continuing the other day’s consultation, sketchy as it had been. Whatever was to happen to me was to happen down here, safely belowstairs, where no marks of struggle—or accomplishment—would as readily meet the eye of the Finnish woman or anyone else.
Suddenly the passageway was at an end; we had arrived. I had a single moment in which to notice a difference in texture of the flooring underfoot—the foot can be wonderfully acute in the dark. It was as rotted as before, but perhaps the planks had been laid in a different direction or there was a thin layer of worn-out oilcloth covering them. Without any further warning than that a light suddenly flashed on, and his hand came down again to his side, leaving it swaying restlessly to add to its blinding effect.
A protector of ordinary brown wrapping paper had been rigged around it, and this helped temper its devastating suddenness still further, once the first shock on the eyes had worn off. But it also created a curious tidal mark of shadow evenly around the walls, at about half height, giving a macabre overtone to the scene. Above all was gloom, and we were as in an illuminated pit or fish tank. Then, too, unless we stood directly centered under it, it cut off our heads and upper parts at varying lengths, so that I had the additionally terrifying experience of confronting a half being with a pair of disembodied eyes glimmering wanly in the dun oblivion above the rest of him.
We were in a windowless room at the back of the basement, used either for storage or debris originally and now both. It was impossible to tell which purpose had preceded the other, since there was an equal amount of both categories in sight. There were cans and small sacks of provender, empty glass jugs filmed with dust that must have once been receptacles for the more common medicinal ingredients and solutions, rusted in tin olive-oil drums, broken chairs. I noted, among other things, a discarded sewing machine rusted to a spiny reddish skeleton that once must have made leg-of-mutton sleeves and skirts that trailed along the floor under the diligent fingers of some long-gone feminine dweller in this place.
“Close that,” he said tersely. “Where’s your head?”
I drew the door after me and shut us in.
There was a small table there, grimy with age but apparently still reserved for use down here where it was, for it was placed right side up and stood clear. He made several short, swift trips to the outer dimness, so that the shadow severed him like a guillotine knife each time, returning with what looked like a shoe carton, which he placed upon it. And then a slip of paper, which he retrieved from some safekeeping place known only to himself in the surrounding litter and too quickly for me to detect where it was, had I been intent on doing so. And finally, moving between me and the table briefly, but in such a way that I couldn’t tell whether it had come from his person or from some shallow drawer beneath, as it cleared into view again it suddenly bore a revolver where there had been none before. It lay at his cuff’s end as he seated himself, and, perhaps by accident, its vicious snout was pursed directly at me.
He saw the rotary swirl of panic the pupils of my eyes gave, then glanced at the gun as if identification of the cause were necessary to him. “I always have that in here,” he said. Which, if intended for explanation, was no explanation at all.
He shot his sleeves back to more comfortable length. “Now,” he said. He said it flatly, as though: “The preliminaries are over; now we begin.”
“Sit down on something. That packing case.” The shoe carton, if that was what it was, had descended to his lap, out of my sight. The small oblong of paper he held in one hand; tattooed it diagonally on one point, as though seeking to blunt it against the table top.
“Do you know anybody?”
I moistened my lips, unable to answer. It might have seemed, though, as if I were racking my memory.
“Anybody that would be any good to us?” he added.
I still couldn’t find my voice.
“Well, you said the other day that you didn’t know anybody she did. I simply wondered if you had any—any contacts of your own.”
This time he answered for me. “No, you haven’t.” Then, “It doesn’t matter. I can keep you busy.”
From the unseen shoe carton, apparently—though I had no direct proof of this—he took a small envelope. It was the diminutive size that a visiting card or a gift card would be enclosed in. Or perhaps a doctor’s prescription, written on a once-folded leaf from a small tab. It had not, however, been left open. The flap was sealed. And so firmly sealed that the mucilage had rippled the edges of the flap a little in drying. It was lumpy with some uneven content, the envelope, so that it was rather bloated at the bottom, squat, but at the top paper-thin, flat, as it was meant to be. Yet as he tendered it to me its gravity of weight shifted so that, receiving it upside down from him, in my hands it became clogged at the top, paper-thin at the bottom, with a sensation of granular shifting.
“How often should I——?”
Sometimes you are saved by the slightest things. He answered me too quickly; that was all that saved me. I had been about to ask, “How often should I take this?”
“As often as you conveniently can.” He was already extending a second one to me.
Simply to free my hand of the first I opened my handbag and mechanically prodded the packet in.
“What’re you going to do, carry it in there?” His tone was irritably uneasy, I thought.
There was a semihidden compartment in it, as in many bags, controlled by a zipp
er running along under the frame on the inside. I drew the zipper across to show him. “Will this be all right?”
“Let me see it.” He took the bag from me, probed with four fingers down within this newly provided orifice. Then he removed the entire bag from my sight, lowered it to his lap in company with the carton. I saw his upper arm moving slightly in its socket, as though its lower extremity were engaged in some transaction. Then I heard a familiar snapping sound I knew by heart, as if the jaws of my bag were being closed by him.
A moment later he had returned it to me, inscrutably shut. “There,” he said, “that’ll do for now.”
When my head came up from replacing it on my own lap he locked eyes with me. “Two hundred fifty dollars, understand?”
I didn’t. I looked at him.
He said sharply, “Well, don’t look at me! Two hundred fifty dollars, understand?”
My mouth said, “Yes, Doctor.”
His finger tips left the slablike handle of the gun; it was only as they quit it they first revealed to me they had been on it, so deftly had they sought it.
He handed me the slip of paper. “Now memorize this list a minute and then burn it.” I righted it and looked at it. I heard him say, “After a while you won’t need it.”
He waited. “Got it? Now say it back.”
I cleared my throat, recited uncertainly like a kid in school: “Spotless Cafeteria on Canal Street, between eleven and twelve, shredded wheat, the last table against the wall as you go toward the back——”
“You know how to eat shredded wheat, don’t you?” he interrupted. “You crumble it up between your fingers until it makes a little pile of crumbs on the plate; don’t dig into it whole with your spoon the way some people do. Now go ahead.”
The Black Angel Page 11