He hadn't realized that before.
There were probably a thousand people within a block of him. The drunken sleepers sprawled in doorways and alleys. The good citizenry in their third floor flats. The bartenders and drinkers in every way-side tavern.
But he could go to none of them with his trouble. He couldn't even define it. Just that a girl he knew had failed to meet him for a date and then people had said there wasn't any such girl. That he had talked to a kid in a lunch-counter who told him the girl's name. And ten, no five minutes later the kid denied he'd even talked to him.
He looked behind him on the street. Two men stood in the middle of the block. Must have come out of one of the buildings. They hadn't been there a minute ago, when he was looking for a cop.
He turned, again, and began walking, forcing himself to go slowly. Forcing himself not to peer into each shadow, each dark doorway before passing it. Forcing himself not to whistle.
There was an overpowering silence about the street. The silence of a hot night. A New York silence. A silence made up of a monotonic million sounds: The auto-horns, the distant rumble of a trolley, the whistle of a ferry on the river, the conversation of men in saloons, the hiss of tires on pavement, the mournful howling of a train. Noise continuous and raucous. But distant and lacking meaning--and still silence.
The myriad of little pawn-shops, swap shops, barter-stores, barbershops, hardware stores, were all closed. The delicatessens--the inevitable, middle-of-the-block delicatessens--were dimmed-out to avoid the heat of the electric bulbs, and their proprietors sat silently staring on cane-bottomed chairs beside the doorway.
It was silent.
He could heat the sound of his feet scuffing the hard pavement. For a while he listened to the muffled echoes of his feet from the walls beside him. That was how blind men walked--listening to the echoes of their feet and their canes as they resounded from the buildings about them. Telling, from that micro-sonic echo, that they were approaching a curb, passing a lamp post, reaching an intersection.
He would listen to the sounds. The single sounds of his feet, and the multiple sounds of the city, distinguishing them as he walked, and thus reassuring himself of reality.
One by one he picked them out. A car, crossing a manhole, on the next street over; a woman chattering in a knife-sharp voice from a third story window; passing footsteps across the street; an automobile on a cross street, starting its engine, shifting into first, and into second, and then going silent. The hiss of a struck match in a dark doorway. A train whistle--anywhere, that might be. The clack of a closing door. The shrill tones of a husband-wife family debate. Giggling laughter from somewhere around the corner. A car passing--he almost hadn't noticed the car itself in his interest in its sound-effect. The hiss of the airbrakes of a Second Avenue bus. The hum of a highpowered motor. One by one, in procession, he singled out the sounds ... the sounds that proved he was not alone. The bounds that were his connecting link with reality in the grimness of the Bowery by night.
A girl's voice. Someone whistling.
And the footsteps. A million footsteps--a whispering thunder of footsteps. Hundreds, thousands, millions of footsteps, clattering all over the city.
One by one he separated and analyzed them: The tick-tock, tick-tock of a man's leather heels; the rubbing sound of soft leather, bending at each step: the scuff-scuff of another.
Millions, billions of footsteps.
And a double-footstep--the foot-sounds of two men, paralleling his own. Following him. Moving in the same time and pitch as his own soft-heeled shoes. A little more noisily, but at precisely the same speed. He glanced behind him, and saw the two men, walking together. Perhaps they were the same two he had seen before.
He stopped to listen again.
They stopped. Their double-footfall picked up again-- barely distinguishable over the sssspt-clack of someone's loose heel.
The traffic-light was against him at the next corner. Automatically, from habit, though there was no traffic, he stopped.
Behind him, too, the footsteps ceased.
When the light changed he went on.
The footsteps resumed their rhythm. His, and those others. What if they were following him? Imperceptibly he tightened the pendulum swing of his own walk.
The footfalls behind changed their tempo in perfect imitation.
He stopped. Dead.
For one second, two seconds, three seconds, the following steps came on--and quit.
He turned about--dragging courage from the bottom of his stomach--and went toward them. For three paces, four paces, five, nothing happened. Then, from a shadow, perhaps a hundred feet away, two figures appeared; began walking, slowly, in the same direction.
He twisted around, walked rapidly. Stopped suddenly. The steady, rhythmic footsteps behind him were gone. He heard a sound that might have been bending leather. A scuff, that might have been someone walking on tip-toe.
But no. That was too silly.
He went on. Hurrying a little. But forcing himself not to go too fast. At Canal he climbed the steps of the El two at a time. Not from haste, but because his legs were too long to take the single step comfortably.
The El station was brightly lighted. The grimness was dissipated. The darkness was relieved.
He had come through the valley of the shadow and emerged intact--even through an imaginary valley of the shadows--even if the valley wasn't real, but only an illusory thing brought on by Lois, the telephone and the man with the gun.
He exchanged coins with the man at the little window, dropped his nickel in the slot and, still acutely aware of sounds, noted unconsciously the chain-rattle sound of the El turnstile as compared with that of the subway.
The first faint rumble of an approaching up-town train came drifting along the rails.
Figures appeared from nowhere and lined the platform. Male and female. Singly and in groups.
Down the track the train's headlight became visible, and then, below it, the oblong lighted opening crossed by the three chains that kept people from falling out the front end of the car.
It was slowing, now. The grinding sound of the motor lowered in pitch, and the El-platform quivered with the weight of the approaching cars.
There was a hiss as the brakes went on and the train slid to a jarring stop, and over it the sound of late-comers, pounding up the stairs and clattering through the turnstile.
He realized it was that sound he had been waiting for. That rush of footsteps on the stairs. That hurried pound of feet arriving just as the train pulled out. Timed to the second.
Pursuit.
He thrust himself through the narrow doorway into the El-car, and almost panted waiting for the doors to close. The passing seconds seemed endless.
He stared through the glass at the platform. The turnstiles clattered, and two figures burst on the platform, racing for the car just as the doors slammed shut.
He almost burst into laughter--hysterical laughter. The two figures were--sailors.
He felt himself breathing rapidly, a relaxed breathing after tension. He felt weakness, limpness spreading through his body--the let-down of the fox who has escaped the hounds.
It had all been very silly. No one was following him. Why should anyone follow him? Perfectly ridiculous. He had no money. He held, in his possession, no melodramatic secret. He had stumbled, unlike a Hitchcock thriller character, on no colossal international plot to blow up the left front corner of City Hall--though. God knew, a little blowing-up would do the left front corner of City Hall no end of good.
He moved forward in the car and sat down on one of the cross-wise seats,
Sitting there, facing him. were two men. The face of one was familiar.
Too damned familiar!
A face with thick features and a spread nose. The hair rose at the back of his neck, and a trickle of cold water dripped along his spine.
Chapter IV
THERE IS NO REST ...
He had it all figu
red out. If this was the way they wanted to play--whoever they were--let them. If they wanted to chase him, O.K. he'd give them some place to chase him to.
He'd go straight to a police station when he got off the El. They could chase him there.
That was the idea. No sense in trying to fight this thing --whatever it was--out alone. That was the mistake they always made in the movies and the detective stories. They set up some flimsy barrier to keep the protagonist from going to the cops and left him to fight out his battle alone. Ridiculous.
He got up from his seat and went back to the end of the car where an unhappy individual who opened the car-doors at every station was trying to read one whole picture-caption in the News before they got to the next station.
Graham said: "Pardon me but where is the nearest police station to 42nd and Third Avenue?" [Why were people always so careless about knowing where to find the nearest police station to their homes?]
The trainman looked up at him: "How the hell would I know?"
"Aren't you supposed to tell people these things?" Graham demanded.
"I dunno," the trainman said. "Might be able to find it for you. Wait till after this station." He got up and stepped into the space between the two cars, leaning far out to watch the platform. Graham waited patiently while the train pulled in and out of the station. His mind registered the signs on the platform automatically: 28th Street.
The trainman came back, opened the rear motorman's booth and pulled a shiny navy-blue coat from a hook inside. He fumbled through the inside pockets while Graham tried to hold down the flame of impatience flaring within him.
At length he pulled out a little red book from the pocket and began, stumbling, to thumb through the pages. Graham could hear him muttering, over and over again: "Police Departments, mmm, Police Departments, mmm."
The train reached the peak of its motion, and slowed for the next stop, 34th. "You'll have to wait till after this station," the trainman said, starting to replace the book in his pocket.
"Let me look it up," Graham said.
"Oh, sure. O.K." The trainman handed him the book and clambered back between the cars.
The cover said: "Complete Street Guide to New York." He opened it to the table of contents, holding the book close to his eyes to read the lettering. The type was bad and worn with many printings. He ran his finger down the alphabetical listings: "Picture Galleries, Piers, Points of Interest, Police Departments, 189."
He thumbed through the thin paper of the book for page 189, forcing himself not to watch the two men sitting in the front of the car.
The car stopped with a jerk that flung him down on a seat. The two pursuers had risen from their seats.
He watched them coming up the car, hurrying to beat the closing of the doors. Through the window he saw them emerge on the platform.
He snapped the "Complete Street Guide" closed in his hand. All imagination. Everything. They weren't following him. Of course not. He remembered, now, that he had first seen the man getting on the trolley with him at 38th St. Now the man was getting off at 34th on the way back. Perfectly natural.
And yet--the man with the spread nose had gone into the lunch counter while he was walking up Barker St. He was the only one to see the kid in the lunchstand between the time he would talk and the time he wouldn't... No. It was all perfectly silly. Nobody could want to follow him.
Anyway, nobody could follow you from an El station away. And that settled it.
He felt his knees trembling with weakness and exhaustion. He pushed his hair back from his forehead, feeling the moisture on his brow. It would all straighten itself out in the morning. Everything would be fine. All you had to do was get home and you felt perfectly safe. He made an automatic gesture, checking in his trousers pocket for his keys. They jingled reassuringly. Funny how safe you felt once you got home. There was always the fear you'd get cut off from home without the nickel to get there. Of course there was the rumor that a cop will always give you a nickel to get home. But it might be just a rumor.
You were safe when you got home. That was what they meant in games. The safety zone was always "home." "Home." "Home-free." Even if it was just a furnished room. You could go in and lock the door and things belong to you. The house had to burn down before they could throw you out.
Graham looked at his watch. It was twelve-thirty. No point in going to the police now. He'd wait until morning. There might be a letter or a phone-call from Lois by them. Anyway, you could figure things out better if you slept on them--if you could sleep.
He clumped down the steps from the elevated to the street, into an open-all-night world. The four newsstands, one at each corner, glowed with the coloration of brilliant magazine covers under the strings of bulbs. There was a constant clamor of wheels on switches from the trolley terminus, a jangling of bells, a grinding of motors. From below came the subterranean bellowings of the Queens trains, and from above the hissing crash of the El.
There was a police car parked at the curb down near the News Building on 42nd. Graham hesitated, on the verge of approaching it. But he thought better of it.
He faced firmly down Third Avenue; walked precisely, with masculine weight.
In a half a block the night-time violence of 42nd was swallowed in the gloom of the Avenue.
The air was still--hot, muggy and still. He thought: No relief tonight. Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy and Warmer. Possible Light Showers.
Ahead of him, down the Avenue, there was no one. Not even the flatfooted movement of an officer. The Press Bar was empty. The bartender, lonely in his white uniform, was reading a paperback novel.
Even the side-streets were silent. Too hot for talking. Night of shadows and heat.
There was a cotton-wool feeling inside Graham's head. An ache that wasn't really an ache. His clothes were soggy with sweat. He pulled out his shirt-tail all round. He thought: Women are lucky--open at the bottom in the summertime. Open at the bottom, like a bell-jar, like a can of hash. Open at the bottom. There was no breeze now. The glowering night panted quietly over the city.
There was a throbbing at the back of Graham's neck. He was hungry. That was it. He hadn't eaten since six. Oh well, it didn't matter. Too much trouble to eat now.
His footsteps crashed through the silence of the Avenue. Ahead of him two figures appeared under the lamp-post on the far side of 39th.
The impact of sudden fear struck him full in the chest. The two men from the train? His heartbeat speeded suddenly. His legs were rubbery.
He forced the thought down. After all, you couldn't go around suspecting every two men you saw on the street. You just couldn't. He forced his feet to move steadily. Right, then left, then right, then left. It was like marching. Like marching.
The men ahead were not moving. They stood under the lamp--leaning against the post. Men with time on their hands.
It became more and more difficult to move ahead. There was the feeling of walking into a trap. What if they were the men from the train? What if they were waiting for him? And if they were, what for?
Not to kill him.
Nobody wanted to kill Larry Graham. He had no money. My God, he was talking to himself like a child, now. After all, he was a man: Twenty-six next October. You gave up being frightened on dark streets by that time--didn't you?
Of course you did. Anyway, he wasn't frightened. It was just nerves. Too many screwy things had happened lately. Better get home and get some rest. That was it. Rest. That took care of everything. [Knits up the raveled sleeve of care--was that the line? Well, something like that.]
He thought, again, of the police station. No. If he turned back now to look for a police station it would be just an excuse to walk toward those men under the lamp post. Childish fears. It would be all right when he got home.
The two men moved away from the lamp post, back against the building; fusing with the shadows--dissolving in the night.
Anyway, they were on the other side of 39th. He turned on this side. He
wouldn't have to go near them.
He reached the corner and swung sharply to the left.
He hated the dark pits in front of each house on the block--those step-down entrances to the basement apartments of the brown-stones. He hated the black railings of iron around each set of steps. There was a menace poised against him in each shadow. But it would be all right in a second. He could see the steps, now. Home.
He slowed down, not looking behind him. Consciously not looking behind him. Across the street there were lights in the squat building--used to be a brewery. You could see the great wooden vats looking in through the windows of the unoccupied part.
He climbed the steps at his door, fitted his key into the lock, pressed against the spring that closed the door automatically, stepped inside.
The hallway was dimly lit--all halls were dimly lit by night: landlords saved money on the lights in halls.
The door snapped closed behind him, and the safe feeling welled up inside him and spread its weakness through his chest and arms and legs--loosened the tension in his diaphragm, severed the strained knee-tendons in his legs, left him quivering with deflation.
He was home. He climbed the stairs slowly, forcing himself up the long flights. His door was the top floor right-rear. Automatically he sorted the keys with his fingers in the dimness of the hall, automatically he thrust the selected key at the lock ...
And stopped! Short!
The key-hole rejected the key.
Wrong key? He looked down at the bunch in his hand. No.
He tried again.
Wrong floor? He looked to his right, down the hallway. No. No further stairs went up. Top floor. Right door. Right key. Wrong lock.
His eye caught a little card tacked on the jam of the door. It read: "Mary Martha Wilson."
But this was wrong. It was his room. He lived here. He couldn't be locked out--wait? The wrong house? Had he gone into the house next door by mistake? The hallway looked the same. But didn't all these halls look the same? Maybe his key fitted both houses--his own and the one next door. Of course. That must be it. He raced down the stairs, holding himself from tripping on the loose carpet that masked the hard wood.
Madman on a Drum Page 3