Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

It was like a little oasis, a breathing-spell, in the rush of the city, and yet it was lively, it wasn’t lonely in the way the park would have been. It was filled with a brightly dressed luncheon-break crowd, so thick they almost seemed to swarm like bees, and yet in spite of that it was restful, it was almost lulling.

She went back toward the private street that cuts across behind it, which for some highly technical reason is closed to traffic one day in each year in order to maintain its non-public status, and sat on the edge of the sunwarmed coping that runs around the sunken plaza, as dozens of others were doing. She’d come here once or twice in the winter to watch them ice-skate below, but now the ice was gone and they were lunching at tables down there, under vivid garden-umbrellas. Above, a long line of national flags stirred shyly in a breeze mellow as warm golden honey. She tried to make out what countries some of them belonged to, but she was sure of only two, the Union Jack and the Tricolor. The rest were strange to her, there were so many new countries in the world today.

And in every one of them perhaps, at this very moment, there was some girl like herself, contemplating doing what she was contemplating doing. In Paris, and in London, yes and even in Tokyo. Loneliness is all the same, the world over.

Her handbag was plastic, and not a very good plastic at that, apparently. The direct sunlight began to heat it up to a point where it became uncomfortable to keep her hand on it and she could even feel it against her thigh through the thin summer dress she had on. She put it down on the coping alongside of her. Or rather a little to the rear, since she was sitting slightly on the bias in order to be able to take in the scene below her. Then later, in unconsciously shifting still further around, she turned her back on it altogether, without noticing.

Some time after that she heard a curt shout of remonstrance somewhere behind her. She turned to look, as did everyone else. A man who up to that point seemed to have been striding along rather more rapidly than those around him now broke into a fleet run. A second man sprang up from where he’d been sitting on the coping, about three or four persons to the rear of her, and shot after him. In a moment, as people stopped and turned to look, the view became obstructed and they both disappeared from sight.

It was only then she discovered her handbag to be missing.

While she was standing there trying to decide what to do about it, they both came back toward her again. One of them, the one who had given chase, was holding her handbag under one arm and was holding the second man by the scruff of the coat-collar with the other. What made this more feasible than it might otherwise have been was that the captive was offering only a token resistance, handicapped perhaps by his own guilty conscience.

“Whattaya trying to do? Take your hands off. Who do you think you are?” he was jabbering with offended virtue as they came to a halt in front of Laurel.

“Is this yours?” the rescuer asked, showing her the handbag.

“Yes, it is,” she said, taking it from him.

“You should be more careful,” he said in protective reproof. “Putting it down like that is an open invitation for someone to come along and make off with it.”

The nimble-fingered one was quick to take the cue. “I thought somebody had lost it,” he said artlessly. “I was only trying to find out who it belonged to, so I could give it back to them.”

“Oh, sure,” his apprehender said drily.

A policeman materialized, belying the traditional New York adage “They’re never around when you want them.” He was a young cop, and still had all his police training-school ideals intact, it appeared. Right was right and white was white, and there was nothing in-between. “Your name and address, please?” he said to Laurel, when he’d been told what had happened.

“Why?” she asked.

“You’re going to press charges against him, aren’t you?”

“No,” she demurred. “I’m not.”

His poised pencil flattened out in his hand. He looked at her, first with surprise then with stern disapproval. “He snatched your handbag, and yet you’re not going to file a complaint?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I’m not.”

“You realize,” he said severely, “you’re only encouraging people like this. If he thinks he can get away with it, he’ll only go back and do it some more. Before you know it, this city wouldn’t be worth living in.”

“You shouldn’t be so good-natured, lady,” another woman rebuked her from the crowd. “Believe me, if it was me, I’d teach him a lesson.”

Yes, I guess you would, thought Laurel. But then, you have a whole lifetime ahead of you to show your rancor in. I haven’t enough time left for that.

The prisoner had begun to fidget tentatively now that this unexpected reprieve had been granted him. “If the lady don’t want to make a complaint, whaddye holding me for?” he complained querulously. “You got no grounds.”

The quixotic young cop turned on him ferociously. “No? Then I’ll find some, even if I have to make it loitering!”

“How could I be loitering when I was running full steam ah—” the culprit started to say, not illogically. Then he shut up abruptly, as if realizing this admission might not altogether help his case.

“Oh, won’t somebody get me out of this, please!” she suddenly heard herself say, half in wearied sufferance, half in rebellious discontent. She didn’t want to spend the little time there was left to spend standing in the center of a root-fast, cow-eyed crowd. Above all, she didn’t want to spend it making arrangements to have some fellow-wayfarer held in a detention-cell overnight until he could be brought before a magistrate in the morning. She hadn’t meant it for anyone to hear; she’d only meant it for herself. A plea to her own particular private fortunes of the day and of the moment.

But the man who had salvaged her handbag must have caught it and thought it was meant for him. He put a hand lightly under her elbow in guidance and opened a way for her through the ever-thickening crowd.

“Sure you won’t change your mind, lady?” the cop called after her.

“I’m sure,” she said without turning her head.

Once detached from the focus of attention, they continued to walk parallel to one another along the flower-studded, humanity-studded promenade or mall that led out to the Avenue. Past and past.

“You let him off lightly,” he remarked. “Not even a lecture.”

She nodded meditatively, without answering. It’s so easy to be severe, she thought, when you’re safe and intact and sure of yourself, as you probably are. But me, I feel sorry for the whole world and everyone in it, today, even that poor cuss back there.

“I remember, in Chicago once,” he was saying, “I had my wallet lifted out of my back pocket right while I was standing in line outside the ticket-window in Union Station—”

They’d reached the Avenue. With one accord, without even a fractional hesitancy or break in stroll, they turned and continued on northward, back along the way she’d originally come. It was done as unselfconsciously as though they’d known each other long and walked along here often. As naturally as though they had a common destination agreed upon beforehand.

She noticed it after a moment, but didn’t do anything to disrupt it. On any other day, she realized, she would have been alerted, taut to separate herself from him. Not today. Until he said something, or did something, that was out of order — not today. It was better to walk with somebody, than to walk with nobody at all.

“—Things like that happen in all large cities, far more than they do in smaller places. I guess the huge crowds give them better cover.”