The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  It was excruciatingly hard to get rid of him at the door.

  “Words are curious things, aren’t they?” I said through the narrowing gap I’d finally achieved. “Their meanings are so often just the opposite to what you think they are. To like someone, to think a lot of someone, then, that means to force yourself on them, to make them unhappy and cause them distress, to harm them and make them ashamed. Doesn’t it? I must remember; I didn’t understand that until now.”

  He looked down at the floor. “No,” he said almost inaudibly. And all of a sudden he was sober, penitent; all the champagne was gone.

  “Good night,” I said with warm friendliness. I closed the door slowly and cut his face in half, in quarters, into nothingness. I drew the finger bolt across.

  After a long time I heard someone go away on the other side of it. I’d been thinking of Kirk; my innermost thoughts couldn’t remember who it was for a minute. Someone outside their pale, someone out there on the other side of the door.

  It was effortlessly easy to get rid of him outside the door.

  “Don’t stand there looking at me like that, McKee. I have no answer for a look like that, and you know it.”

  “Don’t be sore at me. You’re like an angel fading from view. Just smile at me once more before you close it. Is that asking you so much, a smile through a door as you close it?”

  I closed the door slowly and cut the smile in half, in quarters, into nothingness. I drew the finger bolt across. After a long time I heard someone go away. I’d been thinking of Kirk; I wasn’t sure who it was. Just someone on the other side of my door.

  The sit-down falls had ended since the night I’d first met him. All I did was stand there now with a line behind me doing the work. Not literally stand there, but that was all it amounted to practically. He’d got hold of someone to teach me a few simple turns and dips and bends. Just enough to give the illusion of dancing. “No one looks at anything but your face when you’re out there, so just if you move across the floor a little, that’ll do,” as Dolan had said.

  Not a word was breathed in the back room. The combustive violence of the suppressed thoughts, however, made it dangerous to strike a match in there. Once somebody wrote in eyebrow pencil “Du Barry” across my section of the glass. I hadn’t known there was anyone that literate in there. I didn’t care; what did I care?

  And then one night this arrangement ended too. As dramatically as everything else that happened with him.

  We were in the middle of it, and he’d just come in. With Skeeter and with Kittens, of course, never alone. He stood there for just a moment, looking at me. Something got him. I don’t know what it was—jealousy, some possessive instinct or other.

  Suddenly, in the music-underscored silence, his voice boomed out, shattering the illusion like a hand grenade tossed onto the floor. “Kill that music! Kill that spotlight! Hey, you back there, take that spotlight off her, hear what I say? If you don’t I’ll come back there and make matchwood out of your whole booth!”

  The music died. The spotlight dimmed. The girls behind me stopped, knees elevated. I stopped, and the swirling black mists settled about me.

  He was wild-eyed and I was scared; I couldn’t tell what was the matter. It wasn’t drink; though his face was mottled, his hair, his tie, his clothes still retained the perfect grooming of sobriety.

  His voice was a bay that shook the walls of the confined place. “Get ’em outta here! Clear the tables! Never mind settling their bills; get rid of ’em! They’re not gonna look at her any more! I won’t let ’em look at her like this every night!”

  Skeeter was trying to hold him back by one arm. And yet trying not to be too obtrusive about it too. I think he was afraid he’d draw a gun.

  In another minute there would have been a full-fledged panic on. Already a two-way rush had started in, was gathering headway. Some of the more timorous customers were making for the front entrance; the floor girls all started spilling toward the back, in toward the dressing room.

  “What is it, hop?” I heard one of them breathe frightenedly to another, directly behind me.

  I heard the answer too.

  “No. Love.”

  That cold slug of fear I’d experienced the first day I walked in here bedded itself in me again. I stood rooted there where I’d been originally, almost the only one in the place who wasn’t on the run.

  The club manager was pleading, “Mr. McKee, don’t! We’re doing a landslide business. Mr. McKee, think what you’re doing. Take the young lady out of here if you want—I’ve sent someone back for her coat—but at least let me go ahead serving them; let them dance with each other. What harm is that?” And then he kept wheedling interrogatively, “All right, Mr. McKee? All right, Mr. McKee?” over and over.

  “All right!” he raged back at last. “Let ’em dance; let ’em drink till they can’t see straight; I don’t give a——what they do! But they’re not going to look at her any more! Nobody’s going to look at her any more—but me!”

  The club manager snapped his fingers in an urgent aside. “Boys! A quick rumba. Hurry up, before we lose any more of them!”

  Somebody put my coat around me from behind, just the way I was, angel outfit and all, and I was gently but insistently pushed toward him by about six or eight hands at once. The way a noontime meal is prodded gingerly toward a raging lion’s maw.

  Those few straggling steps I took across the floor—that was the flare path leading to him that I was crossing at last. And at the other end of it he stood waiting with his arms extended to receive me, to shepherd and take me in tow.

  And as I reached him, as we came together, there in that crowd around us, suddenly—I don’t know—he was so docile; he was so contrite; he was all over again just what he’d been all along, someone I could wrap around my little finger.

  He adjusted my coat about me, put his arm around behind my waist. “Come on, Angel, don’t be frightened,” he said with husky solicitude. “It’s only that I’m taking you out of here with me.”

  I’d made it all right. But it occurred to me to wonder how I was ever going to manage the return trip—away from him again—when the time came.

  It was a strange place he had. A fantastic place. High up on a turret on Central Park West. New York has more than a few such, I suppose, but not more than a few people ever get into them and see them. It was hard to say what there was about it that called for the adjective “strange.” Hard to put your finger on what it was. It wasn’t its size; the Mason apartment had been even larger. It wasn’t any definite freakishness or bizarreness of appointment; he seemed to have turned over the entire job to a decorator, and it didn’t sin particularly in that respect, although it may have been a little too coldly formalized, as such jobs usually turn out to be. The trouble was there was a certain discord to it. The setting and the occupants didn’t blend, clashed at every turn.

  You would stop before this impeccable, carefully atmosphered drawing room, and at a glance the whole thing would fly to pieces around the figure of a man sitting there coatless, shirt sleeves flowing through the arm-holes of his vest, a bottle of beer standing on the floor at his feet, playing solitaire upon a knee-high inlaid table.

  Or you would come upon a guest bedroom, tailored for masculine occupancy, perfect in every detail, and he’d widen the already partly open door to display it to you with pardonable pride. “This is one of the boys’ rooms.”

  And the boy in question—Kittens or the other one—would be sprawled sidewise athwart the bed with a pipe cleaner in one hand, a loosely dangling revolver in the other. He’d flip it up by the trigger, blow through the bore. And on the wall, superimposed along with the carefully chosen hunting prints that had originally been placed there, a startling photograph of a nude, clipped from some art magazine.

  Whereupon my host ejaculated testily, “Cover that thing up—what’s matter with you?—I want to show her your room!”

  The room’s owner got up from the bed, went
over to it, planted one outspread hand strategically in the middle of it, and stood there like that, waiting for our visit to be completed.

  I felt neither embarrassed nor yet secretly amused, but only supremely silly. I worked in a night club, after all.

  That sort of thing. A certain discord between the occupants and the surroundings.

  He didn’t try anything.

  He only said, unobtrusively at one point, “You could have all this.”

  I didn’t pretend not to have heard. I merely closed my eyes briefly, opened them again.

  I stayed there about an hour.

  There was a slight crackling sound from the pocket of my coat when I got back and took it off and threw it carelessly down.

  I put my hand in and found a check that hadn’t been there yet when I went up to his place. It was signed “Jerome J. McKee” and endorsed on the back, as a sop to my scruples: “For one year’s salary in advance, for professional services to have been rendered, Club Ninety.” It was for ten thousand dollars.

  I had become the most highly paid performer in New York in one night.

  I knew how to use it most effectively. He was putting my own weapons into my hands.

  I put a stamp on an envelope and addressed it to him. I put some red on my lips and made a print of them just under the endorsement. I wrote beneath that: “But no.” I put it in the envelope and mailed it back.

  That meant I would be getting the highest possible return out of my money.

  Twice a day, for several days past, he’d been calling me up about this party, reminding me I’d promised him to be there, urging me not to fail to keep my promise; I didn’t quite understand why. That it was to be more or less in my honor, I gathered, but his insistence almost seemed to go beyond that, as though I were actually sponsoring it along with him.

  “I want you here good and early. I’ll send the car for you, say about six; how will that be?”

  “You don’t have to do that. I can get over there all right——”

  “I should say not. I wouldn’t think of it. You’re coming in the car.”

  Then he went on: “Will you do something for me? Wear the angel dress again. Have you still got it? I want them to see you just like I do.”

  I said to myself, even while I was still on the line, talking to him, “The safe is built in above the fireplace in that little study or whatever it is; I saw it in there.”

  “All right,” I said.

  He was like a kid; I’d never heard anything like it. “I can hardly wait until tonight. Gee, it’s still so long away until tonight; what am I going to do until then?”

  “It will come,” I said evenly. I thought: “It always does.”

  He was in a dinner jacket when I arrived, and the place was swarming with florists and caterers. He was standing there supervising a great long table they were arranging in the dining gallery for about twenty or thirty people.

  He was still like a kid. Skeeter had been standing unobtrusively by, looking on with him, and as McKee came forward to greet me Skeeter crept a stealthy foot nearer the table. McKee immediately whirled on him in a sort of righteous fury. “You touch another one of them salted almonds after I told you not to, and I’ll bust your jaw so you won’t be able to use it at the meal!”

  Skeeter retreated guiltily to where he had been before.

  I had to tell myself: “These men have killed people.”

  “What is it, your birthday?” I asked him.

  “Better than that, much better. I’m not going to tell you ahead; you’ll find out when the time comes.”

  The other one, Kittens, came in harassed. “Hey, I can’t get this tie on right. I must be nervous or something. We never gave a formal party like this before, just brawls.”

  “Here, I’ll do it for you,” I offered, so McKee would find me charming.

  He stepped up close to me. His face smelled a little of tangy shaving lotion. “How strange,” I discovered to myself with a sort of wonderment; “they’re no different from other men, except that the moral sense is gone, and you can’t see that from the outside.”

  When I finished McKee was crowding at my elbow. His face had a slightly sulky look to it, and his own tie, which I could have sworn had been intact a moment before, was drooping invitingly down. He was jealous of his own henchman!

  Within the next half-hour his past came to life before me, came in the door in twos and threes. No, not the past. Who knew where that actually was at this moment as he stood beside me greeting arrivals? A lumpy torso huddled ankles to throat in a rotting sack in a lime pit somewhere. A wavering, undiscovered thing down under the waters of the harbor, feet in a cement cast. A skeleton under a cement garage floor that would be dug up some far-off day when this lawless age was a forgotten moment in a distant past.

  His present, then, came to life before me, came in the door in twos and threes. In a sort of strained demureness that was their new-found respectability still sitting uneasily upon them. The men were too meek and brittlely polite; you couldn’t move but what they moved a chair to accommodate you. The women were too subdued and kept porcelainly smiling at nothing, just to keep smiling for the sake of smiling. Dolls that the men had brought with them. That slightly heightened excitement of voice and vivacity of movement that women ordinarily bring to a party that is a party were entirely lacking in them. A faux pas would have warmed the rarefied air, but they were all alike in dread of one.

  He had me at his right.

  I kept thinking, “The safe is in the study, over that way, to my right. Tonight is the time, with all of them here. Far safer for it than if I were alone.”

  His voice broke in upon me: “I didn’t get you one because—you’re more than just a guest. And I have something else for you later on.”

  I looked around, and they were all exclaiming over little gold powder compacts. I hadn’t even missed not having one.

  The conversations were ludicrous, but I wasn’t there to be amused, to take social notes. Who was I, after all? I asked myself. Just a desperate, stealthy creature sitting in their midst, less secure than they were even.

  Then from one of the wives, in tactful arbitration, stemming perhaps from some long-haunting memory of a small dispute that had once grown beyond bounds and ended in a tragedy: “Oh, don’t let’s talk politics. It’s not nice at the dinner table. After all, we’re all good Americans here, I’m sure. Don’t you agree with me, Miss French?”

  “You’re right. Of course we are.” I smiled cordially.

  They had so many taboos, their new state of grandeur must be hell for half of them.

  He had risen.

  Kittens went “Sh!” to the person next to him. Skeeter went “Sh! The boss is going to say something” to the man across the way from him.

  He looked at me privately, then at them. “I’d like to make a little speech to you. I suppose you wonder why you’ve all been brought together here on this particular night. Well, it’s like this. Everyone finds someone. But most men, they just find women. I’m a man in a million. I’ve found an angel.”

  They all looked at me and applauded delicately.

  “Give me your hand, Angel.”

  I stretched it out mechanically, already beginning to be a little afraid even before I knew what was coming next.

  It hadn’t been there a minute before. I don’t know whether somebody had just passed it to him from behind his chair or it had been concealed underneath something on the table itself. Suddenly there was this plush box. There was a snap and the box split open. There was a flash from the satin lining for just a second, and then the box was empty.

  Something cold, cold as death, that struck a shudder into the very deeps of my heart slipped down my finger.

  The flash came from there now. Kept coming from there. Came from there permanently. I’d never seen a diamond that size before.

  It went up to his lips and down again, and the kiss now struck the same cold shudder into me that the ring had.
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  “I want to announce my engagement to Miss Alberta French. Our engagement to be married.”

  The pupils of my eyes felt like taut exclamation marks stretched from lid to lid. Under cover of the hand clapping and din of congratulatory ejaculation that churned around the table he leaned over toward me. “Say something to them. What’s matter; did I startle you? Look at her, how white her face is. Was it too sudden for you? Don’t be frightened——”

  I kept saying to myself, “This isn’t real. This isn’t so.”

  They were subsiding now. They were waiting. He was waiting. I had to do something. What did you do when you were suddenly told you were engaged? Jump up and run from the table? Say “No, I decline the honor with thanks”?

  “Say something to them. Come on, say something to them.” He had me by the elbow now.

  If Kirk’s face would only get out of the way——

  I found myself standing suddenly, so I must have risen. I didn’t look at him, nor at them. I raised the champagne high until I could see the ceiling lights turn gold through it. I didn’t point it at him. I pointed it upward, through the lights, through the ceiling, toward—whatever it was up there.

  “To my husband,” I said in a steady voice.

  “Keep it on,” he coaxed in the study. “Are you supposed to take it off like that? I think I once heard somewhere it brings bad luck.”

  “That’s the wedding band,” I improvised, “once the ceremony’s been performed. Not this. I’m worried about it. There are so many people here—and you never know. Look, it’s a little loose, and I don’t want anything to happen. Let me put it in your safe while I’m here. I’ll put it on again when I’m ready to go.”

  He found me charming. If I’d stood on my head he’d have found me charming. “So that’s why you wanted to get me alone in here. You’re a sentimental little lady, aren’t you? I didn’t know you thought that much about it. All right, give it to me; I’ll put it in for you.”