“Yes,” she thought. “I’d better.”
She arose and went into the bathroom and turned on a light. Her face reflected in the mirror above the lavatory seemed somehow the face of another person, not of a stranger but of a person she had known a long time ago in another place and could not now clearly remember. She felt sorry for the face, for the person it belonged to, and she wanted suddenly to cry and tell the face how sorry she was. Instead, she took off her pajamas and showered and went back into the bedroom and dressed and began to brush her hair. She sat on the edge of the bed and brushed with short, quick strokes, her head tilted first to one side and then the other, and as she brushed she began to think about the voice, which did not now respond to her thoughts, and about Hugo Weis, whom she was going to kill.
The voice had told her so, the very first time it had spoken to her, at the same time she had first become aware of Hugo Weis as a monstrous evil. She had been critically ill, had endured extreme fevers, and after her illness there was nothing much to do during a long recuperative period, except to think and read and wait for the long days and nights to pass, and on the morning of this particular day she had opened a newspaper that had been brought to her room by her mother, and there on the front page was a picture of Hugo Weis. She had known about him before, of course, for everyone knew about Hugo Weis, but it was the first time she had ever seen a picture of him, or at least the first time she had ever been really aware of seeing one. He was being investigated by a grand jury for his connections with a vice ring, supposedly international, and there under the black banner of the story was this picture. Only his head and shoulders were shown, and the picture must surely have been blown up from a shot snapped on a street or somewhere by an alert photographer, for Hugo Weis never would have sat for a studio portrait or have voluntarily permitted his picture to be taken anywhere.
He was incredibly ugly, which was not in itself anything to condemn him for, but his ugliness was abnormal, almost terrifying. His face, she thought, was a gross obscenity. Sitting there in her room and staring at the picture, she had studied intently the flat nose with exposed nostrils like black holes burned through the flesh, the mouth like a raw sore about to bleed, the coarse skin pocked by disease. The eyes were almost completely hidden behind lowered lids. She felt in her own flesh a cold and subtle crawling, and she wondered how a man so monstrously marked by evil ugliness could have acquired in his way so much power over other men. It was then, as she wondered, that the voice spoke to her for the first time.
“Hugo Weis must die,” the voice said, “and you must kill him.”
She had known instantly that it was no hallucination. The voice was real. She could hear it. It spoke clearly and softly from a point just behind her right ear, and it would have been futile to try to convince herself, even if she had wanted to, that it was no more than an echo of her own thoughts. And so, after the first shock of fear and wonder, she accepted the voice quite calmly, almost as if she had been expecting it unconsciously all these years, had been waiting for it to come.
“Why is it I who must kill him?” she wondered.
“Because it is you who have finally answered me.”
“Will no one else listen?”
“It’s not a question of listening. It’s a question of hearing.”
“Am I, alone in all the world, the only one who can hear you?”
“You are the first, at least.”
“What gives me the power to hear you, and you the power to make me hear? Has my recent illness had anything to do with it?”
“I don’t know the answer to your questions. What is the explanation of any miracle, except that it is not a miracle at all, but only the rare effect of natural causes we don’t understand? I speak and you hear and that’s enough.”
“Who is speaking to me?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know that, either. I am, as a voice, merely the expression of an unconscious imperative. I express the imperative, but I can’t have knowledge of the source from which it has sprung.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Never mind. I’ll speak to you again later.”
That was the beginning of her relationship with the voice. She had never thought about killing anyone before,, and it was truly remarkable how she had been able to begin thinking about it, with a kind of detached serenity, as if it were someone else thinking and planning, someone else entirely who listened to the voice and lived at ease with thoughts of violent death. There was apparently no hurry, however. The voice did not urge her or force her to commitments she was not prepared to make. She began in a rather leisurely way to gather all the information she could find on Hugo Weis, and there was very little to be found and still less to be relied upon, for Hugo Weis was elusive, preferring to operate through others while remaining in the heavy shadows of obscurity. He was the son of a laborer. By cunning, treachery and Machiavellian ruthlessness, all working through a strangely compelling personality in an ugly, stunted body, he had made himself the greatest power in the state. He controlled the city in which he lived. He controlled the governor of the state and most of its lawmakers. There were men of consequence in Washington who listened carefully when he spoke. And he spoke always in whispers, behind his hand. The grand jury investigation never came to anything, of course. One witness died in unusual circumstances, another lost his memory, and another disappeared. In any event, it was doubtful that an indictment would have been returned.
It was in the spring that it all began, and that summer the voice kept returning, speaking to her when it pleased, with no consistency of time or place. In the fall, she resumed her duties as teacher of a sixth grade class in an elementary school near her home, and occasionally the voice visited her during school hours, which some times turned out to be embarrassing. It was necessary to become instantly quite still in order to hear what the voice said, it spoke so softly, and these periods of sudden withdrawal, in which she sat or stood as immobile as stone in an attitude of intent listening, were noticed, naturally, by the students. She was afraid that she was gaining a reputation of being odd, but it was impossible to explain that her apparent lapses were actually quite normal and necessary, for no one would have understood, and after awhile she found that it no longer mattered what anyone thought about her.
By this time there was no doubt, if there had ever been any, that she would eventually kill Hugo Weis. She did not feel messianic about it. It was simply something that had to be done. For awhile the possible consequences to herself were disturbing, even frightening, but soon she found herself unable to think beyond the act of killing, as if her own life would also end in that instant and make her eternally invulnerable to earthly harm. It amused her at night, lying in her bed in her dark room, to think of Hugo Weis, wherever he was, doing whatever he might be, completely unaware that he would surely soon die by the hand of a woman he had never seen and would never really know. It was amusing, very amusing, and she laughed softly to herself in the darkness, a whisper of sound in the still room. The face of Hugo Weis floated above her like an ectoplasmic obscenity, ugly and evil.
In March she bought a gun, a 32 caliber revolver, explaining to the local hardware dealer from whom she bought it that it would give her a sense of security, even though she had never fired a revolver in her life. Since she and her mother lived alone in a large house, she said, it seemed unwise to be without any kind of protection at all. The dealer agreed and suggested that she practice firing the revolver in the country Sunday afternoons. He sold her several boxes of cartridges for the revolver, and she carried the revolver and the cartridges home and put them away carefully in a drawer of the dressing table in her room. She did not practice firing the revolver Sunday afternoons, however, for it wasn’t necessary. Whatever was necessary would be taken care of in its own time.<
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Early in June, soon after school was let out for the summer, the long period of waiting came to an end. It ended abruptly, without warning, one afternoon in the reading room of the public library. Freda had gone there for no particular reason, except that the public library was a pleasant place to be, quiet and restful with sunlight slanting in through high windows, and she had been going there regularly for almost as long as she could remember. She was sitting alone at a table by a window, a book open before her, but she was not concentrating, was only dimly conscious of words between long intervals of dreaming, and she could not later remember the name of the book or anything in it that she had read.
“It’s time now to do it,” the voice said softly and suddenly.
“What?” she thought.
“It’s time to kill Hugo Weis. We have waited long enough.”
“How?”
“With the gun. Didn’t you buy the gun?”
“Yes. The gun and cartridges.”
“Good. It will be quite simple, really. You’ll see.”
“What should I do?”
“First you must go to the city where he is, of course.”
“What then?”
“Go to a hotel. Later, at the right time, you will go to his office. He sees all sorts of people there, mostly people who come for favors, and no one will think it odd that you have come too. Have you learned where the office is?”
“Yes. It’s on the south side of the city, near the railroad station. On Euclid Street.”
“So it is. I see you have been preparing yourself well.”
“Won’t I have trouble getting in to see him?”
“Probably none at all. He makes a point of trying to see personally all the supplicants who come to him. It’s a trick. He sustains much of his power that way.”
“What will happen to me afterward?”
“Never mind that. Don’t worry about anything.”
Having asked the question, what would happen to her afterward, she felt for an instant a terrible fear, but in the next instant the fear had passed, and she arose and returned the book to the stacks and left the library. Home, she told her mother that she had decided to go up to the city for a day or two, which was something she had done occasionally ever since she had been old enough, and then she went upstairs to her room and at once began to pack the loaded gun and a few things in a small bag. She had no feeling of having come to a point of crisis in her life, not the beginning of anything or the end of anything or even a radical change from what had been. There was a train, she knew, that left for the city at five o’clock, and having packed and said good-by to her mother, she called a taxi and reached the station with several minutes to spare.
That was yesterday and last night, and now here she was in a room of the hotel to which she’d come, and it was, she saw by her watch, nine o’clock in the morning. She stopped brushing her hair and stood up and put on the light coat she had worn on the train. After putting on the coat, she stood quietly with her head bent forward in a posture of abstraction, as if, now that she was prepared to leave, she had forgotten where she was going or for what purpose. Then, moving all at once, she took the loaded revolver from the small traveling bag and put it in her purse and went out into the hall and downstairs. She walked down, ignoring the elevator, and she walked slowly, not like one reluctant to reach a destination, but with a kind of implicit aimlessness suggesting no destination at all.
She had, in fact, plenty of time. It was over a mile from the hotel to the office of Hugo Weis, and it would not be wise, she thought, to get there too early. From the lobby of the hotel, she passed into a coffee shop and sat down at a small table in the rear. A waitress came with a breakfast menu, but she was not in the least hungry, although she had not eaten since noon of the day before. She ordered only a cup of coffee. She drank the coffee so slowly that it was quite cold before it was half gone, and then she sat on over the cold cup for another ten minutes before leaving. By that time it was just past nine-thirty.
Reaching Euclid Street, carrying the purse under her arm and still walking with the implicit aimlessness of one with no place in particular to go, she turned south in the direction of Hugo Weis’ office. She could not recall exactly how she had learned where the office was. Probably it was something she had known for a long time. It was a rather famous location, after all, and had received a lot of publicity at various times. It was the first office Hugo Weis had ever had, two dark rooms in a shabby building in a poor section, and it was evidence of his great vanity that he had remained there all these years, exercising his swollen power and gathering a fortune in the same place where he had begun. It was another trick, she thought. A lie. An illusion of humility sustained by a monster of conceit.
Walking along the street, she felt wonderfully good, almost exhilarated. She felt, indeed, rather gaseous, hardly touching the concrete pavement with her feet, on the verge of rising and floating away with every step. She had felt this way sometimes as a girl, especially early in the morning of a spring day when she had got up ahead of all the others and gone alone into the yard. And there in the window of a department store was a thin dress of palest blue that was just the kind of dress for the effervescent girl that she had been and now wasn’t. She stopped in front of the window and gazed at the dress for several minutes, clutching under her arm the purse, and the gun in the purse, and then she turned away and walked on and came pretty soon to the certain shabby building in the poor section. On the street outside the building, as she waited before entering, the voice spoke to her for the next to the last time it ever would. As always, it was a voice of poignant beauty, with a whisper of sadness running through it.
“Here you are at last,” the voice said. “It took a long time.”
“Yes,” she thought. “A long time.”
She continued to wait, her head inclined and cocked a little to one side, but the voice did not speak again, and after a minute or two she crossed to the entrance of the building and went into a dark hallway from which a narrow staircase ascended through shadows to the second floor. She went up the stairs, hesitating for a moment at the top, then turning back toward the street along a kind of narrow gallery at the edge of the stair well. There were two doors spaced along the gallery, each with a pane of frosted glass on which nothing was printed. She went past the first to the second, the one nearer the street, and opened it and entered a small room that seemed to make a special point of its drab bareness. The floor was uncovered, blackened and greasy from the application of sweeping compound. A dozen straight chairs stood at intervals against three walls. On one chair sat an old man in a stained and wrinkled seersucker suit, his withered hands twisted together in his lap. On another chair, against the opposite wall, sat a woman with bright yellow hair who was wearing an expensive fur piece around her shoulders and a bored, carefully detached expression on her face.
These two appeared to be the only occupants of the room, but then Freda saw a man behind a desk beside a door in the fourth wall. She crossed to the desk and stood looking down at the man. He had a thin face with a long nose above a lipless line of a mouth. His quality of deadliness was as discernible as scent or sound, and although he was serving as a receptionist, his first function was obviously that of bodyguard. Looking down at him, Freda had a feeling of immeasurable superiority, a singing sense of exhilaration that was the climax of the effervescence she had felt on the way to this place. No one, she thought, could prevent her from doing what she had come to do. No one on earth.
“I would like to see Mr. Weis,” she said.
“Your name?”
“Freda Barkley.”
The man looked up at her with a glitter of contempt in his eyes and down again immediately at his hands lying spread on the desk as if they were fingering silent chords on an invisible keyboard.
“Do you have an
appointment?”
“No, but I’ve come a long way, from out of town, and I would like to see him only for a few minutes. It’s very important.”
“It’s always important. Always.” The man shrugged and folded the fingers of his hands. “Have a chair over there. He’ll see you, all right. He sees everyone.”
She turned away and sat down on the nearest chair. She sat erect, primly, her ankles together. Her purse lay in her lap under her hands, and she could feel the gun in it. Once she even opened the purse enough to slip a hand inside and touch the naked steel. It was an intensely intimate and exciting gesture, like touching the flesh of someone loved, and she nearly whimpered in the excitement of it. But then she must have become quite abstracted and withdrawn, for after awhile, however much time had passed, she became aware that the old man was gone, and the woman with yellow hair and the fur piece was crossing to the door to the next room and was quickly gone also. She continued to sit primly on the chair, no longer exhilarated as before, but quietly assured in a feeling that was more like resignation than anything else, and very soon the man at the desk looked across at her and jerked his head slightly toward the door behind him.
“You can go in now,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
She wondered what signal he had received to tell him it was time. Perhaps there was a little light on the front of the desk. Something of the sort that made no sound. Standing, her purse held in both hands in front of her, she walked over to the door and into the next room, from which the yellow-haired woman had apparently gone directly into the hall, and there behind an old desk of dark oak beyond six feet of bare floor was Hugo Weis, whom she would shoot dead in exactly sixteen seconds.
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 28