Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I caught him doing that — no one with him — walking back and forth, one hand in his pocket like when you’re broke, one hand hooked around the back of his neck like when you’re at a loss. Sour in the face, disturbed, discouraged, disgusted — I couldn’t tell what it was. Some other case, not mine. Mine was over; mine was squared. I didn’t owe the law anything, anymore.

You know how lawyers are. They have dozens of cases. Some of them fizzle; some of them go wrong. You know how lawyers are — they have cases by the carload. He stopped his pacing and looked up to see who had come in. He said the funniest thing to himself. I heard him. He said, “Oh merciful God.”

Then he asked me, after watching me, “What are you doing here? I thought they refused the parole.”

“No parole.” Triumph bubbling, escaping into the open. “A pardon.”

He kept watching me. “How’d you come down here?”

“First by train and then by taxi. “I wondered why he’d asked that. I was here — that was all that mattered — or should have mattered.

“Did it have a radio? Was it on?”

I frowned. “It had a two-way radio, steering it to pickups by its dispatcher. Why?”

“Oh, that kind.” He seemed to lose interest — in the radio, not in me. “Did you tell her to expect you?”

“No, that was the whole idea.” I whipped the thing D’Angelo had signed out of my inside pocket, pushed it at him. “Don’t y ’ want to see what I’ve got here?” The jubilation was back. I was jabbering staccato. “Don’t y’want to read it? I’m free, like I was born. Free, like I’ll die. Free, like I was meant to be—” My voice slowed and started to dwindle. “Doesn’t it matter?” was the last thing that came out. Then it faltered, and it died.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t say it didn’t, but he showed it didn’t.

He took the paper the statement was on, pleated one end of it like he was making a paper dart out of it, poised it over his desk wastebasket, and speared it in.

I was jolted. “What’d you do that for?”

He just looked at me. Everything that anyone was every sorry for was in that look. You could see it there.

“I can’t tell you. I’ll have to let the radio do it for me. They can do it better.” He went over and thumbed the knob. “I’ll see if I can get one of the all-news stations. It’ll come around again. Sit down a minute.”

He took a cigarette out of a gold-tooled desk box and put it in my mouth — even lit it for me. He put his hand on my shoulder and pressed down hard, as if to say, “Brace yourself.”

In the background familiar names began to sound off dimly, names that were far away, that had nothing to do with me. Hanoi — Cape Kennedy — Lindsay — U Thant — Johnson—

He opened a drawer and took out a bottle of Hanky Bannister. I hadn’t known he kept anything like that there. He didn’t drink himself, not in the office, I mean. He kept it there for clients, I guess, and for sufferers who needed it for imminent shock, like he seemed to think I was going to. He passed me a good-sized drink.

I drank it down, still in happiness, although the happiness was now a little dazed — not dimmed, but dazed by his peculiarity. Even with the happiness I started to get scared by all this indirection— Like a guy waiting for surgery without knowing what form it was going to take.

It came. It hit. Before I knew it, it was already over. And the slow-spreading after-sting had only just started in.

He brought it up — the sound. I mean. Touched it with his finger. And I noticed as he did so he didn’t look at me but looked the other way, as if he didn’t like to look at me right then — couldn’t face my face.

“... Mrs. Janet Evans took her own life early today in the apartment in which she had been living on East Seventy-eighth Street. Mrs. Evans, whose husband had been serving an indeterminate sentence in connection with the death of singer Dell Nelson, left a note which is in the hands of the police. The death occurred sometime between four and six A.M. when the body was discovered...”

The cigarette fell out of my hand. Nothing much else happened. How much has to happen to show your life just ended, your heart just broken? Nothing shows it — nothing. Your cigarette falls on the carpet. After a while your head goes down lower, then lower, then lower. You stare, but you don’t see. No words, no tears, no anything. It’s a quiet thing. It’s a your-own thing that no one else can share. You reach up behind you and turn your coat collar up and hold it close to your throat in front with your fingers, though you know the room is warm for anyone else.

You’re cold, you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you’re scared, you’re lonely, you’re lost. And you’re all those things together at one time.

“I saw her only two days ago,” I heard him saying. “I spoke to her. I think she tried to tell me then what was going to happen, only I didn’t catch on. ‘It’s too late now for both of us,’ she said. ‘We can’t win anymore now; we’ve already lost. Get together again? Two strangers hardly knowing each other, grubbing around in the debris looking for something they once had? Two ghosts sitting in the twilight, with a bottle somewhere between them? After a while, if we didn’t swallow the bottle, the bottle would swallow us. Both of those are worse than any prison is.”

I looked up at him and I complained. “I hurt all over.”

But he couldn’t help me. He wasn’t a bandage.

I stood up finally and turned to the door, and he said, “Where are you going?” and he tried to hold me back.

“Home. I’m going home.”

“You can’t. You know that, Cleve. There isn’t any home anymore for you. Stay here in the office awhile first. Lie down on the couch. I’ll take you with me when I leave. I’ll put you in a hotel for a week or two, pay all the expenses, see that you’re taken care of until the worst is over.”

“No. I’m going home. Home.”

And when he tried to hold me, I shrugged him off. And when he tried to do it again, I swerved violently, flinging his hands off.

“I’m going home. Don’t stop me.”

“Or come up with me for a week to my place. We live in Bronxville. I have two kids, but we’ll keep them away from you — you won’t hear them. You don’t even have to have your meals with us.”

“No,” I said doggedly. “I’m going home.”

“But you haven’t any anymore, Cleve.”

“Everyone has — someplace.”

The last thing he said to me was, “You’ll die, left on your own. I hate to see you die, Cleve. It seems such a waste; you loved so well and so hard!”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him gravely. “Don’t worry about me, Steve. I have to meet someone. I’m going out tonight. I’m late for it now.”

And I closed the door behind me. And he didn’t try to come after me, because he knew every man must find his own peace, his own answers. There is a point beyond which no man can accompany another, without intrusion. And no man must do that. It’s not allowable. That’s about all we’re given, our privacy.

As I went hustling down the corridor (which had become very short again now), I heard a curious sound from inside where I’d left him. It sounded like a whack. I think he must have swung his fist around, punching into some leather chair with all his might. I wondered why he’d do a thing like that, what its meaning was. But I didn’t have time to figure it out.

In the second taxi, the one that took me away from there, the driver did have his radio going this time. Unlike the one coming over, the one that Sutphen had asked me about, this one was only playing music — I guess to take the edge off the traffic sounds the cabby lived in all day long.