The Night People

by Edward D. Hoch

  “We’re nearly there,” Green said. “Do you have the other hundred dollars?”

  “Of course. Does Maria get it?”

  Green gave a harsh laugh. “Don’t be foolish. She wouldn’t know what to do with it. Would you, dear girl?”

  Maria, obviously uneasy, shifted in her seat. “I only want to help, to tell the truth about Ramon Mandown.” After a few moments’ silence, she said, “Stop right here.”

  Green pulled the car off the road, its headlights pointing out a little weed-strangled graveyard by the side of a church. Kane stared through the darkness with distaste. “It doesn’t look like it’s been used in a hundred years.”

  “This is the place,” the girl insisted, hopping out of the car on her side. Kane and Green followed her. She led them up a rise of soft damp ground, past tumbled tombstones that caught and held the glow from Harry Green’s flashlight. “Here!”

  It was a low grave, a sunken rectangle of earth and grass with only a simple stone marker flat against the earth. Ramon Mandown—Carla Mandown. Only that, without dates. Kane read the words, and his heart beat faster.

  “Should we dig them up?” Green asked.

  “For another hundred dollars?” Kane knew that, much as he might want to, he could never desecrate the great poet’s grave. Perhaps fifty years from now someone might open it, but not yet.

  Harry Green shifted the flashlight to his other hand. “There’s somebody coming,” he said.

  A powerful spotlight cut through the night from the direction of the road, pinning them in its path. “Green!” a voice shouted.

  The bearded man’s hand came out of his pocket, holding a tiny automatic pistol. But he was blinded by the light, and before he could take aim the muffled splatter of an automatic weapon split the damp night air. Harry Green toppled backward over a gravestone, and Maria started screaming.

  As the light turned toward him, Kane dived behind the gravestone too and felt in the grass for Green’s fallen gun. Up on the road there were men talking, at least two of them. One was unmistakably Captain Pallato. After a moment’s frantic searching, Kane’s fingers closed around the gun. He aimed it at the light, and then thought better of it. He was no hero, and their weapons could spray the entire area with bullets.

  The girl’s screams had settled into a dull sobbing as she scampered away among the gravestones. Kane put a hand on Green’s chest, searching for a heartbeat, but there was only gently pulsating blood, coming from a line of massive wounds. If the bearded man was still alive, death was very close. Kane gave it up and hurried after the girl. Behind him, he could hear Pallato and the others moving in to inspect their kill.

  Kane caught Maria back in the woods, grabbing her arm and pulling her to him. “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered harshly, aware that his actions hardly fitted the words.

  “They killed him,” she sobbed.

  “It was Captain Pallato. Was Pallato one of the twelve men who called on Mandown that night?”

  “No—no. They were all from the village.”

  “Can you take me to Juan Vyano’s house?” Suddenly he remembered that his right hand was still clutching Harry Green’s gun. Without thinking, he dropped it into his pocket. Green would have no further use for it.

  She led him through thick underbrush, avoiding main roads, until they were in the more populated area that Kane remembered from his earlier visit. “That is his house,” she said, pointing toward a pinpoint of light that came from a nearby window.

  “Thank you, Maria. Go home now, and tell nobody what happened. You’ve seen more than your share of death, and it may be dangerous for you.”

  He hovered by the side window of the house until he saw Juan Vyano appear in the circle of light. Then he stepped onto the rickety porch and knocked at the door. When Vyano opened it, Kane showed him the gun. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “This is just for my protection.”

  Vyano stepped aside to let him enter. “You hardly need it here.”

  “I’ve been shot at already tonight.”

  “You are the man from the cemetery yesterday—the one who asked the questions.”

  “And got a lot of wrong answers to them. You said Mandown’s grave was unmarked, and I’ve just come from looking at it.”

  Juan Vyano hesitated, running a damp hand through his graying hair. “Who took you there?”

  He decided not to mention Maria. “An American named Harry Green. He was followed to the cemetery by a policeman named Captain Pallato, and shot down in cold blood.”

  Vyano nodded sadly. “Green was an evil man. I suppose he deserved it.”

  “He thought he’d be safe from Pallato outside of Puerto Vale,” Kane said.

  “He was safe from Pallato only in Puerto Vale. The police captain could not kill him like that in his own territory, but as soon as Green left the city, Pallato must have seen his chance to do what the courts could not do.”

  “Is that the way of justice here?”

  The man shrugged. “It is the way of public safety. Green corrupted the youth and subverted the adults. Pallato did the right thing.”

  Kane held the gun steady. They were standing in the center of the shabby room, seeing each other only by the light from the single naked bulb that burned in one corner. It might have been a poor man’s home, except for the bookcase of expensive volumes along one wall. Kane wondered if any of them were Green’s special stock. “What about Mandown?” he asked. “I suppose you did the right thing with him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ramon Mandown was murdered.”

  “That would be difficult for you to prove.”

  “Give me a shovel and I’ll dig up the grave. You know what I’d find. Skeletons can still show bullet holes.”

  “There is no need for that,” Vyano said quietly. He shifted his position slightly and Kane brought up the gun.

  “You admit they were both shot?”

  “Yes,” he said reluctantly.

  “You went there, Vyano. You and eleven other men from the village. Did you eat a last meal with him, listen to the great man’s words one last time before you all killed him?”

  Juan Vyano closed his eyes for a moment, with something like an ultimate sadness. “You do not understand the way we live here. You are a stranger from a strange land.”

  “I understand that Ramon Mandown had a sort of greatness you couldn’t comprehend here. I understand that you killed him for it.”

  “Killed a man because he was intelligent and famous and saw poetic beauty in these poor valleys? Is that what you think?”

  “That’s what I’ll tell the world when I get back. That’s what I’ll write about.”

  “Are you married, sir?”

  “I’m on my honeymoon.”

  “Then you are too young to understand. Too lacking in worldly experience.”

  “I understand murder. I understand Harry Green shot down in a graveyard. I understand Mandown and his wife in their grave together.”

  Juan Vyano sighed. “Do you really think Mandown was a great man?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then put away your gun. I will tell you the truth, and you will never print it.”

  Kane stared hard into the bleak eyes. “What truth do you mean?”

  “The truth about Ramon Mandown’s death. You see, we didn’t hate him for his fame. We tried to protect that fame, and we succeeded until you came here with your questions.”

  “Why did it need protection?” Kane asked, and suddenly he didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “What do you do when a great man sins?” Juan Vyano asked, with a touch of sadness in his voice. “Is any man so great that he is above the law?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. And yet, here in our little village, we could not subject our leading citizen—our greatest man—to the shame of a scandal. Just as Captain Pallato had his ways of justice, so did we. Justice was served, and yet the fame of Ramon Mandown lives on.”


  “Tell me,” Kane said, putting the gun in his pocket.

  “We did not murder Ramon Mandown that night. We were only twelve jurors. Ramon Mandown was tried, convicted and executed for the murder of his wife.”

  The Empty Zoo

  HE USED TO PLAY there often as a child, especially on those summer days when the muggy heat drove others to the beach. Then, scorning their imagined friendships, he hurried over the hill to the grove of towering leafy trees that sheltered the single whitewashed building.

  “Why would any boy want to play in an empty zoo?” his mother had asked once; but she never asked it again because she didn’t really care about the answer. She didn’t really care about him.

  Once, of course, the zoo had not been empty. It had sheltered a score of various animals during the depression-ridden years, when the city could afford nothing better. Tommy had been so young he could hardly remember those years; hardly remember being pulled along screaming in between his father and mother to see the animals he feared and thus hated.

  Perhaps that was why he started going there alone once the animals had been moved to the new, larger zoo across town. He soon learned that the fence was easy to scale, and that a watchman patrolled the grounds periodically at best. Thus he established himself easily as king of the place, walked unafraid between the rows of empty cages with their gradually rusting bars, and even occasionally swung from the bars themselves in an open gesture of defiance.

  He was always careful not to vandalize the place openly, and he left as little evidence as possible of his comings and goings. If the city fathers ever suspected that the empty zoo was becoming a playground, they did nothing about it. A brief opposition flurry about the deserted building faded into growing years of forgotten neglect.

  The grass grew taller where the occasional power mower from the city failed to cut, and the watchman’s job had been given over in time to routine checks by a police patrol car. Tommy grew with the grass, and sometimes with the coming of high school whole months would pass when he did not venture into the forbidden territory. But always, in the bleakness of a broken date or the tension of a tough examination, there was something to drive him back.

  He didn’t need to climb the fence any more, because smaller children had discovered the place and trampled a path across the worn wire links. One night, long after the early autumn dark, he found that they’d imprisoned a cat in one of the ancient cages. He freed the frightened beast, though for a moment his own fear had almost stampeded him.

  Grown, he no longer prowled and crept in the cages, no longer swung on the bars. But still there was that overwhelming, driving urge to visit the place. He still lived at home, though his father had died, and often on a night when his mother hounded him, he would leave the house to walk once more over the hill to the old building.

  It was on such a night, with the moon full but obscured by breeze-driven clouds, that he encountered another trespasser for the first time. Her name, he learned later, was Janet Crown—and she was eleven years old.

  The bars were like the zoo and they closed him in on all sides until he could no longer think or feel or breathe. And always under the glare of the unshaded overhead bulb there was the rasping voice of the detective, and the milder voice of the assistant district attorney, and later the mildest voice of all which belonged to the prison psychiatrist.

  “The girl will live,” they told him first. “You’re lucky.”

  Lucky.

  His mother never came to see him in prison, but then he didn’t really care. He passed the time thinking of the zoo, imagining himself now as one of those caged animals he’d feared so much. It was easy to think of animals in general, but he found it sometimes more difficult to concentrate on a particular one. A lion, perhaps? Or a prowling jaguar? Or maybe only a feathered owl to fly by night.

  It was a long time before he came back to the city that was home. A decade had passed and the very contours of the city had changed. He’d changed, too, because prison and the hospital were certain to change anyone. Toward the end, he hardly ever thought about the zoo, and they said that was good. But he wondered sometimes if it was, wondered if the hours of staring blankly out the window without a thought in his head really meant he was cured.

  He was past thirty now, a grown man who was far from unattractive. He’d been in town only two weeks when he met Carol Joyce.

  She was tall and blonde and very beautiful, and when she spoke, he listened. He’d met her one day in the toy department of the store where they both worked, and since then a noon-day friendship had gradually blossomed.

  “Tommy Lambert,” she said, repeating his name one day in that soft velvet voice he’d come to love.

  “That’s me.”

  “I think you might have gone to school with my brother, Bob. Are you from the city?”

  “Yes,” he admitted, “but I don’t remember your brother.”

  “Of course he was lots older than me. And better looking.”

  “I doubt that,” he offered honestly.

  She flushed a bit at the compliment. “How do you like it at the store?”

  “It’s a job,” he answered with a shrug. “What department have they got you in today?”

  “Sportswear,” she said, making a face that was expressively “I wish I were in toys with you. I like working with children.”

  “I hardly ever see them, Carol. All I do is move stock around. Stuffed animals, toy trains. All day long.”

  Finally the daily chats blossomed into lunch, and that was really the beginning of it. He started seeing Carol Joyce one or two nights a week, on outings that were almost—but not quite—dates. When she celebrated her twenty-first birthday (only twenty-one?) a month later he sent her an orchid and took her out to dinner. She was making him feel young again, making him forget the past.

  “Have you lived here all your life?” she asked him one night, over an after-theater drink.

  “Most of it. All my childhood. I was away for ten years, almost.”

  “In the army?”

  “No. I was sick.”

  Her face reflected concern, but it quickly passed. “You’re the healthiest sick man I ever saw.”

  “I’m cured, I guess.”

  In the week that followed, he was drawn to her by a feeling very much like love. He found himself watching the clock until their noontime meetings, planning little surprises that he knew would please her. But then something happened to bring back all the old doubts. She’d come up to the toy department to meet him after work one day, and when he returned from washing up he found her playing with a stuffed giraffe in the stockroom.

  “Having fun?” he asked with a smile, always pleased to see her happy.

  She nodded, turning her tanned, eternally expectant face toward him. “I love animals. Always have. We should go to the zoo some Saturday.”

  “Zoo? I thought it was closed.” The words came tumbling out before he fully realized what he was saying. He was back there, among the empty cages.

  “Closed? Whatever gave you that idea?” And then, after a moment, “Oh, you must be thinking of the old place. I keep forgetting you were away from here for ten years. Come to think of it, though, that old zoo’s been closed longer than that.”

  “I used to go to the old place when I was a child. I still think of that as the real zoo.”

  “Well, we can go there if you like. But there aren’t any animals.”

  His blood seemed to freeze at the unexpected words. What was she saying? Was she actually suggesting a visit to that place? “Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “It would be a fun place for a picnic before they tear it down.”

  “Tear it down?”

  “They’ve been fighting about it in the city council for years. Now it’s going to be the site of a low-rent housing project. They’ll start tearing down the old zoo next month.”

  “So soon?”

  “It’s been empty for twenty years, Tommy.”
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  “Yes, I suppose so. I suppose I just hate to see the old things going.”

  And that Saturday, after further urging from Carol, they packed a picnic lunch, and a few cans of cool beer, and went off to the place that had once been so important to him. They went off to the empty zoo.

  It stood much as he remembered it, lonely in a field of summer weeds, with blue wildflowers growing about in clusters. Even from a distance, the whitewashed walls were spiderwebbed with cracks, and the bars of the outdoor cages had taken on a permanent reddish-rust color. Otherwise, the only change was in the disappearance of the wire fence, which had been replaced by a high board barricade bearing the elaborately painted announcement: Future Site of Spring Gardens Low-Rent Housing Development—Another Sign of Community Progress!

  The general area, though, seemed even more remote and isolated than he remembered. From the top of the hill overlooking the zoo he could see for miles in every direction, and what he saw was a soiled spot on the suburban landscape. Preliminary work of clearing trees for the approaches to the development had already been completed; and on the city side, where shoddy rows of apartments had been creeping toward the zoo for years, there was now only a massive field of rubble.

  “No one ever comes here any more,” Carol told him. “Not even the children to play. They don’t even bother with the guards since they put up the new fence.”

  “How will we get in?” he asked a bit doubtfully.

  “There’s always a way,” she reassured him. And there was. A door in the wooden fence stood partly ajar, its padlock broken loose by some vandal with a rock.

  They picnicked on the side of a grassy slope, lolling away the afternoon with tales of half-remembered childhood adventures. It was a summer sort of day, perfect for reminiscing with the softness of uncut grass against their faces. “I used to play here a lot as a child,” he said.

  She looked down at the crumpling building with distaste. “I think there’s nothing more horrible in the whole world than an empty zoo.”