Black Curtain (12 page)

"But if I said I didn't, would you still believe I did?"

"Gee, I'd try harder than ever not to. I don't know if I could or not."

"And if I said I didn't, would you try to help me prove I didn't? Would you try to help me find out who really did?"

"Oh, Danny, I'd do -anything!- But how? What're you going to do?"

"I'm going back there. Right back where it happened. That's the only way to prove it. And you've got to help me."

She left his arms, and even the bed, almost in one unbroken, streamlined bound. She stood there aghast, before him in the dark. Her voice was a pin-stuck squeak. "To New Jericho? To the Diedrich place? D'you know what they'll -do?- No, Danny! Don't---please!- For me. Stay here, where at least you've got a chance."

"I've got to. That's just it. I -have- no chance while I stay here. It's up there that my only chance is."

"But, Danny, it'll be like sticking your head into a trap. They'll turn you in so fast--"

"-If- they see me," he said doggedly. "That's where you come in."

"Danny," she faltered, "it can't be done; we'd never get away with it--"

He cut her short. "I've been thinking it over for days, and my mind's made up. If you don't help me, then I'm going anyway, on my own. It'll be just that much tougher. -I know I didn't do that-. Don't ask me to back that up. I can't. I know three people saw me. I know it's in the papers, and on the cops' blotters. I don't care. I don't care if the whole world says I killed that man. -I- say I didn't. The -me- that's in me says I didn't! I won't lie down and let them tell me different. Not while there's a breath left in me. I won't lie down and take it. I'm going back. It's going to end where it began. One way or the other. Now are you with me or against me? Are you on my side or on theirs? Will you help me or will you let me go hang?"

She bent down toward him in the dark. Her hair swept forward, rippling over his shoulders like soft, warm rain. Her lips sought his, and just before they met, in a kiss that was a pledge, she murmured: "You don't have to ask me that. Don't you know I'd help you, Danny, even if it was the last thing I ever did!"

BOOK III

Behind the Curtain

16

This was the night set for his return to yesterday. The last train out, at eleven. All the necessary details had been arranged between them on her last visit, the week before. She was to bring in some clothes for him to put on, to alter his appearance as much as possible. She was to come straight to the room, from the station. Up -there-, she had remembered, there was a sort of disused lodge or cabin. Nobody ever went near it. It would do to conceal his presence.

Darkness had fallen on Tillary Street, and for the last time the lambent ghost embrasure flickered on the room wall. It seemed, while he Waited and she became longer and longer overdue, to mock at him, as if it were saying: "You'll never make it. You'll never get out of here."

He couldn't stand it finally, and badly as he wanted to watch for her from the window he jerked down the shade to kill the blasted mirage. Of a window where there was no window. Of a way out where there was none.

But that didn't bring her any faster. He craned his neck, peering out through the side of the shade, until it ached from the distorted position. The sidewalk crowd below seemed to be toiling up and down a ramp that descended toward his vantage point.

She should have reached the city hours ago. She had said she would join him by midafternoon at the latest, even though, for safety's sake, they weren't going to try to start back until the last train.

He needed her more than she realized. She thought he'd been up there before. His body had, but his mind hadn't. He couldn't move an inch without her. He was as helpless as a blind man trying to cross a street without a guide. He couldn't make it without her.

And she wasn't coming any more, you could tell that. She would have been here by now. She'd let him down, not purposely, but that didn't help. He knew now there was no question of treachery, of disloyalty, involved. She was all for him, as much as Virginia herself could have been if she'd been called on to play this part. Some unforeseen slip-up must have occurred. Maybe she'd broken a leg up there, groping her way around the littered interior of that shack, trying to get it ready for him. Maybe there'd been a tie-up of train service on the way down. But even so, four or five hours was a pretty long time for anything of that sort to last. Maybe she'd reached the city safely and then been run down in the streets on her way down here to him. She might be laid up helpless right now in the accident ward of one of the hospitals.

There came that chime again, from some buried little steeple hiding among the tenements. He counted it, although he knew what it was going to add up to.

-Clongg, Clongg, Clongg---eight, nine, ten. Just one hour left. Enough time, if he left almost at once, to get that train. The point was, if she hadn't come by now, there was no use counting on her, she wasn't coming at all any more. What was he going to do then? Stay and rot here for another week? She mightn't come next week either. For all he knew, -he might never see her again-.

How could he make it without her? How could he possibly hope to run the gantlet of recognition? They must know him so well, up there at the other end. The very first person he approached to ask directions--and he would have to ask directions--might turn him in. Even walking around down here in the city was risky. That was why she'd been bringing in concealing clothes for him. Railway stations were the worst places for him; brightly lighted, always alive with -them-, on the lookout for people trying to escape. They couldn't know that he was trying to return to the past. You had to file in through narrow, easily watched gates to get to the trains.

To tackle the undertaking, alone and unaided, was more than inviting arrest, it was -making certain- of it. But--

He was going to do it.

He couldn't put on a wig or dye his face, but there must be something he could do, to give himself a fighting chance to pass unnoticed. Wait a minute, that old furrier down on the ground floor. The one that salvaged scraps of worn-out, discarded fur and matched them together with shears and glue and then went peddling them around among the neighborhood drudges at fifty cents and a dollar a throw.

A moment later he was looking in at him through the open door, the door always left open because of the smell of the glue he used in his work. "Listen, I want to play a trick on my girl. You know, just for fun. Put me a dab of glue here, on each side, just in front of my ears. And one on each eyebrow. Then take a few thin pieces of dark fur, the ends you don't need, and see if you can make them look like they were growing there."

The fur repairer waved outraged arms. "Funny business I got no time to make."

"Here's a quarter. Listen, you're good at that, you can do it."

The peddler sounded the quarter against the bare floor board, then accommodatingly poised an agglutinated brush toward Townsend's face. "The way this glue makes you smell, your girl ain't going to like you so much," he warned.

It took them too much time to get a halfway naturalistic effect. His hat, pulled down low so that only the thinned-out sealskin sideburns and eyebrows showed beneath it, took away a good deal of the curse. His coat collar, upped in back, covered the neck hair. He'd even tried out a few strands against his upper lip, but that was no good, had to be discarded.

It was the most he could do for himself, and it was little enough. Anyone that already knew him would know him at once. This was just for those who mightn't be sure at first sight. This was just his fighting chance, in a crowd, with luck.

He went back to his room again for a minute, hoping against hope she'd still come, even this late. The room was empty. He'd have to strike out on his own.

He took a deep breath, rubbed himself briskly down both arms at once. "Well--here goes." He reached up and tweaked out the gas cockade pinned onto the jet.

Tillary Street sank from sight, returned into that past from which he'd so patiently dredged it.

17

A retrieved newspaper, held spread out inches away from his eyes throughout the subway trip, had helped. But he couldn't hold it in that position on his way to and from his seat, and it was in those brief exposed passages that the danger lay. Having to walk between those two endlessseeming rows of upturned, idly-inspecting faces. But nothing had happened. Doom must have been pulling its punches, saving them for the rounds ahead.

Now the station, gained by underground causeway, a lesser risk than the streets above. As he came out into the vast expanse of the main waiting room, the symptoms of agoraphobia struck him full blast. He felt as though the walls were a thousand miles away from him on all sides. He felt as though he were walking alone, with not another moving object to mar his conspicuousness, across this immense expanse of marble and cement. He felt as though a spotlight were focused squarely on him from head to toe, following him across this tremendous amphitheater every step of the way, with nothing to hide behind, nothing to break the -openness-. And all around him, unseen, in a hideous circular line-up, faces scanning, scrutinizing, staring at him.

He got over to a ticket window, saw that it was the wrong one. Moved on to another. "Gimme a ticket to New Jericho."

"Dollar eighty-four."

He kept looking around while he scooped money out of his pocket.

But the ticket seller kept the pad of his finger pressed down on the oblong stub, even after Townsend had thrust every coin in his pocket across the slab. "You're a penny short. Dollar eighty-four."

"That's all I have on me. I must have miscounted. Can't you--?"

"I can't sell you a ticket unless you give me the exact amount for it."

"But it's only a -cent-. Only a penny. That can't hurt. I'm not trying to do this purposely--" That damned eyebrow stunt was to blame for this! He would have had twenty-four cents over what he needed if it hadn't been for that.

"D'you know I can lose my job if I sell you a ticket for less than the amount stamped on the face of it?" Maybe he was new at the job. Maybe they really weren't supposed to.

Already somebody had come up, was standing behind him on line, getting a beautiful chance to study him at leisure. "Listen, don't make me lose that train, will you, all over a penny! It's two to, now!"

The ticket seller had hard crullers of stubbornness around his eyes. "The full amount of every ticket I give out has to come back to me through this window. I don't care if it's a penny or what it is! What do you expect me to do, shell out of my own pocket for -you?-" Townsend saw him turn aside and spear the thing back into the rack he'd pulled it out of.

The man behind jostled him slightly, and suddenly he found himself too far forward past the wicket to continue arguing. He turned and shuffled off, hugging the line of ticket windows closely. A break came in them, and he glimpsed a smaller, pocket-sized waiting room, tiered with benches. He slunk in there. Anything to get out of that big, open rotunda. Anything to get away from his own desperate helplessness.

He sidled around the outside perimeter of the place, trying to get to the farthest back of all the rows of benches, to sit the night out and wait for-- nothing.

There was a man standing in his way, shaking or worrying at something. Somebody else's voice said, "Come on, we haven't time!" and the man thrust hurriedly by him. That cleared a narrow strip of mirror, in which Townsend saw his own reflection. He stopped and eyed it, as though seeing a stranger. He looked with impersonal interest at the subterfuge eyebrows. Below the mirror, one of the three rods that operated the slot machine was held back at quarter length, caught fast in some way. It had no definite meaning to him. He hit it instinctively, trying to make it even.

The rod ricocheted to its full length. A penny, a very black and time-worn Indian head, clicked down the little chute where packaged gum should have issued.

He turned and fled back to the ticket window with it, at forty-five seconds to eleven.

Hatred was still at red heat between them. "Here's your penny. you son of a bitch!" Townsend said bitterly.

"And here's your ticket, you bastard!" the man behind the grille flared back at him.

He squeezed through the gate just as they were closing it. He careened down the ramp and caught hold of a vestibule handle bar just as motion had set in. The conductor reopened the door and let him in.

It was the last train of the night, and it was full. He treaded through the car he'd boarded, and there wasn't a seat to be had. He kept moving: toward the locomotive, trying to find a place to sink down in out of sight. In the third car up he nearly blundered into catastrophe.

Two things saved him. Two more of. those trifling variations which had so consistently saved him.

The chair backs of these day coaches operated on the swivel principle, could be faced whichever way the train was going. All but one of them in the whole car, on both sides of the aisle, was facing forward. -All but one-. Either it had jammed or else had been purposely turned that way by its occupant, so that he could converse more conveniently face to face with the two people opposite him.

The second miracle was that the occupant of the fourth seat provided by this double arrangement was Ruth Dillon. Perhaps she had had difficulty in finding a seat and had taken what she could get, even if it meant riding backwards. She, and the stranger next to her, busily talking to his friends opposite, were the only two people in the entire car facing Townsend; in a position to see him before he blundered on past them into irretrievable exposure.