The Black Angel (7 page)

“If the voice is dry, lifeless, worn out, the opening wedge is: ‘I have some information which I feel may interest you.' The key is a suggestion of pecuniary or personal advantage.

“If the voice is brisk, businesslike, impersonal, then the best approach is likewise direct, impersonal, without shadings or overtones. ‘My name is so-and-so; I would like to speak to you personally for a few moments.'

“If the voice is indeterminate, cannot be analyzed, fits into none of these categories, then the third approach, the direct, businesslike one, is still the best.”

I had stopped parading now. I had it memorized.

I sat down before the instrument and braced myself, one hand stiffly to each end of the small table it sat on.

I thought of
him
, as I did each time. “Wish me luck, darling; maybe this will be it.” I took a deep preparatory breath. The dial wheel oscillated beneath my finger, and my thoughts oscillated with it. “If the voice is young, vibrant——If the voice is dry, reserved——If the voice is businesslike——”

“Hello?” There wasn't enough to tell by.

“Is Marty there?”

“Marty who?”

“Just Marty.”

“You'll have to give me the last name.”

I'd known I would; I'd been afraid of that, but I didn't have it to give.

I parried evenly with the question I'd prepared myself. “Who is this I'm speaking to, please?”

“This is the desk of the St. Albans Hotel.”

“Oh——” So all the rehearsal had been wasted. “Well, I have no second name. I'm trying to reach someone whom I know only as Marty. Couldn't you help me just from that? Couldn't you tell me if you have anyone registered with you whose first name is Marty?”

“I don't see how,” he said rather ungraciously.

In this, from beginning to end, there was to be no acceptance of defeat. I knew already it must be that way. My mind was made up. There would be no such thing as a refusal, a slight, a rebuff. Or rather, they would have no power to hinder me.

“I don't see how I can help you. I'm rather busy at the moment.”

I made my voice pleasantly reasonable. “This is important to me. It's not a frivolous matter. It's a serious matter. If I come down there myself, instead of taking up your time on the phone, won't you please try to help me trace this person?”

His own voice relented. “If you drop in I can have someone look over the registers for you.”

It was a pleasantly prosperous-looking place, a residential-type hotel. Just under the upper brackets of ultra-smartness, perhaps, but spelling a sort of solid, substantial, middle-class affluence. That was likely to prove a point in my favor, I realized immediately as I stepped in. This type hotel attracted a very small percentage of transients. It would have a far slower and less continuous turnover than an ordinary commercial hotel, and the guests individually would be far more likely to be known personally to the management and to be recalled by name even after they had gone.

They were courteous to me. Sight at firsthand evidently improved my status. The assistant manager himself came out to me.

“I'm sorry, Miss——?”

“Miss French.”

“I'm sorry, Miss French. As the desk already told you, there is no one registered with us at the moment whose given name is ‘Marty' or Martin. I've had someone go over the register. Are you sure that's all the information you can give us?”

“I'm afraid that's all.”

“Could you give me an idea of what the person looks like?”

“I'm afraid not,” I had to admit. “You see, the person is not known to me. But it's very important that I get in touch with him. And this first name and the address here are the only clues I have.” At least I was able to impress him with my earnestness, if nothing else; I could see that.

“I'm sorry, I'd be only too glad to help you.” He stroked his immaculately shaven jowls. “But I don't see how I can.”

I did, and I didn't hesitate to make the suggestion. “I don't like to impose, but if I wait out here, couldn't you have someone go back through your back registers—just for a short distance—and see if such a person was here formerly?”

“Well——” he said. “Well——” And then, “Just a moment.”

He left me sitting out there while he went in to give the order to someone. So I knew I'd won that point, at least.

It took quite some time, and while I was sitting there I tried to form a composite impression of this mysterious “Marty” by piecing him together from the other habitués of the place. Not, I knew, that there was any guarantee he need necessarily resemble the others just because he had formerly dwelt here; he could have been a different type altogether who simply had happened to live in the same building for a while. But there
is
a degree of truth after all in the old saying about birds of a feather, and I felt he would not have lodged here at any time if he had not had a certain something in common with those I now glimpsed about me here and there passing through from the elevators to the street and vice versa, stopping for a moment at the desk or to chat with an acquaintance in the lobby.

This, then, was how he would be if he ran true to form: a man already past the financial hazards of the twenties and entered now upon the prosperous calm of early middle age, when money, if it is to be made at all, has already been made. That is to say, not that the process of making it is discontinued, but the system of making it is set, runs more or less under its own momentum, releasing the individual from a great many of the earlier strains and stresses. He would be jovial, complacent, a little self-assertive (and entitled to be). Beginning to round a little at the waistline, but not enough as yet to worry about it overmuch. Hair beginning to thin a little, but that would still be a secret between him and his barber. He would stroll about, preceded by an expensive Havana cigar, and he would have an appreciative eye for the female stranger that would grow stronger as time went on. Not one of them failed to look me over, though not in a blatant, disconcerting manner.

Well, that would be about him. A little of all that would enter into his personality, and then there would be other elements, of course, particular to him as an individual.

The assistant manager had come out to me again. He had something jotted on a card that someone had evidently transcribed from the register at his behest.

“I wonder if you could mean either one of these?” he said. “I had them go back three full seasons. Unfortunately—or perhaps I should say fortunately—we seem to have had a scarcity of guests with the given name of Martin during recent years. Now there's a Martin Ebling who was with us some time ago. He left as his forwarding address Cleveland; that was at that time. Whether it's still valid, of course, I don't know. Then the other is Martin Blair. He left as
his
forwarding address another hotel here in the city.” His lip curled in a sort of professional disdain. “The Senator. I think you'll find that farther downtown.” He sounded as though it were some sort of blemish that was liable to erasure from one day to the next.

I took them both down and I thanked him and left.

It was only when I'd reached there and gone in that I fully understood that lift of his lip.

“I wonder what happened to him?” I thought. “From the St. Albans to the Senator.” It was more than a step down; it was a vertical drop.

They didn't look you over here; they practically disrobed you optically. With them the process of
not
making money was all that had carried over from the twenties, continuing all the earlier stresses and hazards. In partial compensation they had retained youth's slimness of waist and, on the average, their hair was thicker. Why this last should be, I don't know, unless it was because they couldn't afford to have it cut and singed and treated preventively as often, and therefore lost less of it. Or perhaps only with peace and perfect security comes the beginning of decay. They stalked around sucking cheap cigarettes, and there was something lean, avid, wolflike about their movements.

Not that they were all carbon copies of one another, you understand; it's just that that was the general atmosphere of the place. They were even more self-assertive than the other group, but with this difference: no one listened.

The clerk had a badly decayed front tooth and eyes that had looked on everything vicious there was under the electric lights.

“Marty Blair,” he said. “Yeah, I remember him.” The memory was unwelcome. His eyes creased at the corners, and his mouth did too.

“Is he still here?” I asked.

“He was put out a long time ago. We got tired of carrying him.” He chuckled scornfully. “Once wasn't enough. We had to keep putting him out over and over. He kept trying to sneak back in again each time, even after the door was locked. Finally we wore him out.” He gestured with his hand in dismissal. No pity there, no mercy.

I wondered what
he'd
been trying to hang onto so desperately, to keep coming back like that each time. Respectability, I guess; even the tattered shreds of it that were still to be found in this place.

“Then you don't know where he went?”

He eyed me bleakly. “Wherever they go,” he said, “when they're down and out for the tenth count. The Bowery, I guess.”

“The Bowery?” I said helplessly. “How do you look for them along the Bowery?”

“Once they hit that,” he said, “they're usually not worth trying to look for any more. Nobody bothers. That's a living graveyard.”

It was just the words of a song to me; I had so much to learn about everything. “I'll never go there any more,” something like that.

“But suppose he still
was
worth trying to look for, then what would I do?”

“Just go in one smokehouse after the other until you see him in one of them—if you can recognize him any more.”

I didn't even know what he'd looked like to begin with.

“Lady, you've got yourself a job,” he said when I'd told him this. He was too world-wise and weary to even ask me what I wanted him for, what I was trying to find him about. It was bound to be just a variation of some tale he'd heard before. For him there was nothing new under the electric lights. And I wondered if I'd ever be that way myself someday.

“He was just an ordinary guy, a dime-a-dozen guy,” he said. “Gee, this is going to be hard. But I helped put him out myself two or three times, so I think I can——Thin and tall, kind of. Light hair, light brown hair. That's about all I remember.”

Thin and tall. Light brown hair. He was right; I had a job.

They were looking at the backs of my legs from all over the place; I could feel them, and I wanted to get out. “Thanks,” I said.

“Lots of luck, lady,” he said mournfully.

Nothing new under the electric lights. It must be terrible, I thought to myself, to know as much as he did about the less appealing aspects of human nature.

Flophouses, they were, I guess. They called themselves hotels; their signs offered rooms at twenty-five or thirty-five cents a night, and there were scads of them along there. The entrance was always one flight up, never on the street level. And in the background you would see a long bare room with these hopeless figures sitting around, reading papers, or just rocking back and forth, rocking themselves slowly into their graves. Figures that had once been human beings.

It wasn't a matter of outward appearance, of the clothes they wore. This was a thing that came from inside. A living man could have been in worse rags than they wore, and he would still be a living man. One of them could have been put into the swankiest apparel to be found and he would have still remained—what he was. A lamp with the wick burned out. A bulb with the filaments worn out. Something still intact but that no longer gives off light.

There were so many of them along there. End to end they were placed. Because, after all, that is the one thing that must continue, even in this twilight world—sleep. At first, when I'd come back again each time the following night, I was never quite sure of where I'd left off the night before; they all looked so alike. I found myself overlapping a little. So I brought along a little piece of chalk and I marked a little check, a pothook, on the doorway of the last one as I was quitting for the night. And then when I came again the following night I knew where to begin. At the next one after that.

Over and over and over. Up the dimly lighted stairs to the little niche or cubicle with a slab before it that served as a payment desk. And then the wordless gasp that always followed when they looked up and saw who it was that had been making that toilsome ascent. And then the inevitable blanket dismissal before I was even able to open my mouth. “Sorry, miss, we don't accommodate ladies.”

“I know, but I'm looking for someone. Marty, his name is Marty. He's tall and thin, light brown hair. Blair's his other name, Marty Blair.”

Yet I found, for one thing, that it was easier along here to ask for him just by his given name. This was a place where the second name dropped away again. Whether it was that they were ashamed and kept it to themselves, or that there was no longer any need for it now that they had all reached this common level, they seemed to be known to one another more by their first names and, more than that even, by nicknames that the Bowery had fastened on them.

He'd look through the haphazard, pencil-scrawled book of admissions they kept, and sometimes he'd call to someone sitting near by for information: “Is Porky's real name Martin, any of you know?”

They'd scratch their heads and finally someone would say: “No—Marvin, I think I once heard him say. He ain't who the lady wants anyway; he's a short, fat little guy. Don't you 'member him? He was in here only a couple nights ago, had the bed right across from mine.”