King Coffin: A Novel

by Conrad Aiken

  He had come up the sloping ramp of concrete from the Arlington side, walking rather slowly, with his head a little down; he seemed to be hesitating; and when he had arrived almost as far as the telephone booths, having passed the barrier, he stopped for a moment and stood still. He looked straight before him with a half-smiling fixity, his hands were in his overcoat pockets, his overcoat was unbuttoned and hung loose at the sides with an effect of habitual carelessness, the gray tweed hat was rather far back on his head. He was obviously wondering whether to turn around or not. Something had been forgotten; or some plan had been, or was about to be, altered. That much was clear, it was amusing to watch the whole affair transacted so shamelessly in the open, as on a trans-lux screen, but it was also plain enough, from the continuous little smile, a slightly stupid smile, that whatever the thing was it wasn’t of very great importance. The moment of irresolution passed, he gave a little cough and turned briskly toward the platform. He walked with an odd jauntiness, his feet turned out, and his head on one side. There was something birdlike about him, and the shape of his coat, which was too long for him, and had a heavy collar of cheap fur, somehow accentuated this. Lowering one shoulder, he turned neatly into the door of the train.

  Pausing just inside the door, he looked quickly left and right, evidently saw that the forward end was the less crowded of the two, began to edge his way through the double row of passengers: to watch him from outside, and the slight patronizing smile with which he ingratiated while he made his way, was also to be able, without appearing to follow or any risk of attracting attention, to join him by entering at the front of the car. Accordingly, Ammen walked parallel with his victim: saw the gray hat appear and disappear: saw the hand go up once to touch a handhold and drop again: once glimpsed the half-turned smiling face, noticed for the first time the little mustache. Entering, he found himself almost too close to the little man, who had found a seat and sat down. But by standing opposite, with his back turned, it was easy to pivot slightly in order to watch him. It was also possible, by stooping, to see his reflection in the dark luster of the window glass. He could not leave without being seen—that much was at any rate certain. And that was all of course that was necessary. The danger always arose there: it had happened several times. In the case of a hurried exit at a more or less crowded station, it was necessary to be close at hand.

  Revolving a little now, with his two hands above him on the white enameled handhold, he discovered that he could look obliquely between two swaying shoulders, and over a lifted newspaper, directly at the man’s face. This was perfectly safe, for the blue eyes behind their frameless spectacles were turned studiously downward: with complete absorption, the little man was making notes with a red pencil in a red notebook. The first impression of smallness and neatness was at once corroborated. The face was not young, it was obviously somewhat worn, showed unmistakable lines of care and age—he was perhaps thirty-five—there were sallow hollows under the eyes, which on calmer inspection looked tired, but in contrast to all this was a quite definite boyishness and delicacy in the small neatness of the head, the features, the short-clipped mustache. It was a boy grown old; a boy hardened prematurely, by whatever chemistry, into a man. The maturity, or the appearance of it, might be artificial or forced, but it was unmistakable, just the same: the calm laconic assurance which had been evident in his gait was again evident in the clear and detached precision, the obvious efficiency, with which he was giving his whole attention to the making of notes in a notebook. There was conceit in it too. He thought well of himself, he was pleased with his ability to abstract himself from his surroundings, just as he had been pleased with the sharp little foresight with which he had found himself an empty seat in a crowded train. The entire impression was that of a child-actor’s trained, and somewhat callous, small competence. When he looked up, presently, closing and pocketing the notebook and pencil, and glanced idly and again half-smilingly right and left, but not upward towards the face that watched him, his self-satisfaction was immense. He knew what he was doing, and that what he was doing was important.

  Important?

  But the importance was perhaps false.

  The importance was simply a shell, the carefully elaborated defense of a weakling: it had no reality. The frog and the ox, as in Aesop’s fable! Nothing could be clearer than that the little man’s life was bound in shallows, if not in miseries, at any rate in smallnesses, and that the bright little notebook, the sharp little pencil, the detached little air of foresight and wisdom, all that careful assumption of precision and weight, were nothing at all but the feeble compensations of a barren and limited experience, a small body, a restricted mind. Already it was possible to begin the process of surrounding him: and exactly as it was easy to look down at him in the hurrying train, to study his mouth, his eyes, his hands, the large mole at the outer corner of the right eyebrow, the brown feather in the hatband of the cheap tweed hat, so also it was becoming absurdly simple to see the background, the suburban shabbiness and pretentious meanness, of his life. That life began already to lie open: with a single powerful glance one found its essential tissue: two suits of clothes, two pairs of shoes, dull lithochromes on the walls, a dirty tooth brush and a clean one, the cracked mirror over the kitchen sink, a comb always carried in the breast pocket of the coat, an umbrella stand in the front hall, in the zinc base of which was an old pair of rubbers. Or perhaps two, perhaps he was married. Perhaps even—and Ammen smiled at the advertisement at which he found himself staring, Morning Mouth Never Bothersome—he had children.

  When the train climbed into the sudden sound of wind, the flood of daylight, on the Cambridge Bridge, sun flashing on windblown and dancing water, the sound of the train itself diminishing, it became possible to see the sallowness as more marked, the hollows beneath the eyes as more pronounced. And also a something melancholy or disillusioned in the eyes gave the lie to the amused impudence of the mouth. The eyes were a good blue, very deep, but inward-looking: self-centered. The mouth, under its short fair mustache, had about it a small air of authority. A tyrant in his own Lilliputian world: a domineering ant. A little bully.

  At Park Street, it was easy to follow him, for as before he walked slowly and reflectively, hands in pockets, he seemed to be in no hurry, and to be enjoying the crowded scene, the cross-rush of opposed currents of pedestrians, some towards the North-bound cars, some to the South, himself sauntering beside the train, and now and then glancing into it, as he moved toward the escalator. Arrived on this, he stood quite still, did not turn, allowed himself to be borne upward to the surface with complete immobility. There he stepped off and turned to the left.

  The thing was going perfectly: it could not have been better. And if now, as appeared likely, he was going to walk to his destination, it would be extremely simple. This was the advantage of great height. It was easy to follow because it was easy to see. Lagging fifty feet behind, one could observe every movement of one’s victim as from a tower. Unless he took a taxi—but he had already passed the Park Street stand—there could be no difficulty. Except for the matter of turning corners, following people in the street was simplicity itself: but when they turned a corner, one must be prepared to run. More than once, on such an occasion, he had found that in the interval between the disappearance of the stranger round the corner, and his own arrival there, the stranger had vanished: and into any one of so many possible doors that further pursuit was impossible. This time there must be no such mistake.

  At the corner of Bromfield Street—and it amused Ammen to reflect on the literalness with which his own path of last night was being followed—the tweed hat hesitated, as if about to turn to the right, but then proceeded. It crossed Tremont Street to the graveyard, sauntered slowly along beside the railings, turned once to look in at the pigeons and squirrels, but without pausing, and presently had crossed Beacon Street. It was curious: the fellow positively seemed to have the air of knowing that he was followed. That turn of the head, the pecu
liar way he had hesitated at the corner of Bromfield Street, and moreover the almost studied insolence and self-consciousness of his back—! Was it possible? No, certainly not. Any watched person looks watched. A suspected person looks guilty. Just the same, it would be as well to be careful. He remained on the other side of the street, strolled slowly beside the gray churchyard of King’s Chapel, his eyes fixed on the little bobbing hat, and suddenly found himself thinking of Breault. Breault! This little man was like Breault—why hadn’t that occurred to him before? Absurdly like him. The same sort of little homunculus, the enforced dignity of the man small of stature, the pathetic truculence of the weak. The sort of ridiculous boldness which is quintessentially an invitation to death: the one-who-wants-to-be-killed. The one who wants to be killed!

  And why not Breault?

  There would indeed have been a special and beautiful irony in choosing an anarchist—and a Chicago anarchist to boot. As if one had managed to murder Louis Ling. Or Czolgosz.

  And odd how that the pattern should thus be turning round on itself, himself now again passing Tremont Temple thirteen hours later, with the echoes of that scene still whispering on those stairs, in that absurd room, still ordering the separate behaviors of those ridiculous people! Mrs. Taber, with her feather duster, was at this minute probably talking about it in the C Bookshop to Miss Gerber, the lumber merchant’s daughter. At half past ten the shabby little fake analyst would come in—Meyer—to pick up gossip or blab the dirty secrets of his patients, throwing out dark hints as to their social importance. He would be told about it, and snigger, and recount for the hundredth time his story of the dinner he had given at the “Athens,”—that experimental dinner when he had provided a department-store salesgirl for each one of his highbrow guests, with instructions to try to seduce them, so that he could observe their behavior—and particularly the behavior of Ammen. “And Ammen never said a word. He just sat here and never said a word. Do you think he’s human, Mrs. Taber?”

  Suddenly he found himself running.

  At the Beacon Theater the hat had stopped, pivoted, and then with accelerated pace proceeded once more in the direction from which it had come: seeing that a change of traffic signals at the foot of Beacon Street was imminent, the little man had himself begun to run. As it was safer to run behind him than parallel with him, Ammen zigzagged through the traffic of Tremont Street, was just in time to drop to a walk again at the corner entrance of Houghton and Dutton’s and to cross ten feet in his rear: a little too close for comfort. A narrow escape, and it turned out, immediately, to have been even narrower than he thought: for at once the hat swerved to the right and entered the door of S. S. Pierce. Another moment and he would have been too late: caught by the stream of traffic, he would perhaps have been unable to see in what direction his quarry had gone, or into which of a multitude of doors. As it was, there was no great danger in following him into the store, which was reasonably crowded; there was plenty of excuse for dawdling, as if for inspection, first at one counter and then at another. The hat preceded him, with a firmness of purpose obviously born of familiarity, to the wine and spirits department at the back. A small bottle—to judge from its size and color a pint of whisky—was there procured, paid for, and pocketed; and this done the little man once more advanced to Tremont Street, once more resumed his interrupted journey towards Scollay Square, this time pausing just perceptibly at the entrance of the Beacon Theater to glance at the posters of the movies. Two facts had thus been learned about him: perhaps not quite facts so much as the possibilities of facts: one, that he drank, but with some indication that it might be on a minor and retail scale: two, that he might be a movie fan. A third seemed to be that whatever his job was—always assuming that he had one—it must be somewhat flexible; it was well after nine o’clock, and he still appeared to be in no hurry, but to be sauntering, and looking about him, as if his purpose was at most a half-purpose, and the mere killing of time not unpleasant.

  This became more evident when he arrived at Scollay Square.

  He stopped at the corner opposite Epstein’s, stood still for what might have been three or four minutes, his hands deep in his pockets, the tweed hat turning first right and then left, but clearly not with any regard to the question of crossing the traffic lines. No, it was obvious that he simply hadn’t made up his mind where he was going: or perhaps at any rate that he wasn’t anxious to get there. For a moment, he half turned towards the right, and seemed to be looking fixedly down Court Street: but then he reversed his direction and began to ascend the slight hill to the Court House. It was all very peculiar: but the oddity of it was in a sense its most interesting and exciting feature. That he should be unpredictable, as much in behavior as in appearance, was of course of the very essence of the stranger: but while it was to be expected in outline, or expected in its unexpectedness, the details must naturally, like this, be surprising. No less odd was again the curious recapitulation of the events of last night. To come again past the Temple, and now to proceed by exactly the path which must have been taken by Sandbach and Breault and Mrs. Taber, to be moving as if by conscious design towards the C Bookshop, toward Sandbach’s room—all this fitted beautifully, it was his own thought made manifest, it was once more—and the vision sharpened almost painfully—as if his own awareness had been simply externalized like a life-size model of the city itself. It was like a repeated dream, but with a difference,—for it was under control, it was being directed. The whole thing was simply his own chess game, projected: it advanced or developed before him exactly as he wished, just as helplessly as the smoke which he now blew from the pipe which he paused to light, all the while watching the tweed hat above his sheltering hand. Let him go as far as he liked; let him even round the corner at the top of the Square, turn towards Ashburton Place: let him, in fact, go where he liked: he was now under control, he would never escape. He was now—and the feeling was positively physical in its sureness and power—fastened. What was even surer than that he would turn to the right or left was that whichever direction he chose he was walking deliberately towards death. He was in the act of finding his grave.

  At the back entrance of Houghton and Dutton’s, a truck was being unloaded. A heavy crate fell from the tailboard to the sidewalk with a sharp clap, a pistol shot of sound, and the sound was at once echoed by the simultaneous slapping of a hundred pigeon wings as the startled birds took whistling flight from the sooty window ledges of the Court House. Round the Square they circled, and vanished northward at the far end of the Court House, his eye following them out of sight; and in that instant the tweed hat had vanished also, turning to the left at the top of the hill. No need to worry—he would still be there—but he quickened his pace, glanced hurriedly over the crowded array of second-hand books in the window of the Rebuilt Bookshop, noting one title, Erring Yet Noble, and presently, keeping close to the window of the Waldorf, turned the corner and looked down toward Beacon Street. The little man had disappeared: he was not there.

  Impossible!

  But yes, of course, possible.

  He must be either in the Waldorf, at his left elbow, or in the shoe-shine parlor beyond: the Waldorf, at this hour, seemed improbable, but to inspect the interior through the large windows was simplicity itself. And sure enough, the tweed hat was standing at the counter, was in the act of receiving a heavy china mug of coffee, came forward with it, stepping cautiously, sat down at a table without once having raised his eyes, dipped sugar from the sugar bowl and began stirring the cup with a spoon.

  A retreat, and a wait, becoming necessary, Ammen bought an American from the newsboy at the corner, crossed the street, stood with lifted paper by the door of the Newsboy Foundation. PICKETERS HELD IN CONTEMPT. Holy Year O. K.’d by Pope. NAZI SPY GANG IS UNCOVERED. Bootleggers, dope peddlers, and other racketeers, driven into temporary retirement by repeal and other causes, are back of the Boston welfare swindle, it was charged today. Mother Faber, a tiny slip of a woman, today stood in humbled pride
on the witness stand.… The question now is whether the state trial should have proceeded, with habeas corpus proceedings pending in federal court. Fliers Hop for Rome Tomorrow.

  The wind whirled the pages, the paper flapped against his arm in its effort to escape, a tall spiral of dust went spinning past the City Club. For a moment the sun flashed downward, filled the dull streets, sparkled on the cars, then was again dimmed by heavy clouds. He looked upward, watched the clouds in swift procession, ragged and gray, but not rain clouds, it would not rain. From Park Street Church came, with clamorous loudness, immediate and strange, the eight bells of the half hour, windborne and irregular. Half past nine.

  The whole thing was peculiar: he had started a good fox, and no mistake. Perhaps he had no job at all, was going nowhere. Either out of work, or of independent means. But surely not the latter?

  Picketers and racketeers.

  Or of course he might be an “outside man” for some firm or other, whose hours were more or less his own——

  This time, when the little man reappeared, it was with a new air of purpose and a noticeable quickening of pace. In a few minutes he had reached Beacon Street, Ammen keeping fifty feet behind; and then suddenly the hat had turned left into a narrow doorway which appeared to lead into a barbershop. Hurrying forward, Ammen found that it was not in fact the barbershop, but the entrance to a flight of shabby marble stairs which led to the upper floors: business offices of the humbler sort. Listening, he could hear the footsteps climbing above, and at once, taking three steps at a time, and without making a sound, he followed. The hall on the second floor was vacant: ground glass doors of an insurance office, a dealer in real estate: the footsteps were again ascending, and as he reached the bottom of the second flight of stairs he saw the feet just arriving at the floor above. They disappeared, he could hear them slowing, then a jingle of keys, the turning of a lock, the opening of a door. The door must be the one immediately opposite the stairhead. He waited a moment, listened, heard the door close, and mounted swiftly. Behind the gray glass he could see the moving shadow of a man in the act of removing his coat, very close at hand. The stenciled letters on the door said: Acme Advertising Agency. K. N. Jones and T. Farrow.