Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

He was panting and his side had begun to hurt, something in his topcoat was growing heavier. It began to seem to him that the chase would never end, that the two of them would go skipping and staggering on indefinitely, always the same distance apart. The whole experience had acquired nightmarish overtones. They were rats scampering through the fact-walled convolutions of some giant metal brain on the far future. They were human specimens awakened too soon in a gigantic time-capsule and frantically seeking escape.

Carr lurched around a corner and there, not ten feet away, back turned, standing beside an old-brass-fitted drinking fountain that gurgled merrily, was his quarry.

Carr almost hiccupped a laugh between his gasps for air. Now, Carr decided, he’d slug the guy.

As he moved forward, however, it was inevitable that he should look beyond the small dark man at the thing at which the small dark man was looking.

Or rather, the person.

For just inside the next alleyway, gilt-buttoned brown suit almost exactly the same shade as the buckram bindings that made a background, lips formed in an eclipse of dismay that couldn’t avoid becoming a smile, stood Jane.

Carr found himself drifting past the small dark man as if the latter were part of a dissolving dream. With every step forward the floor seemed to get solider under his feet.

Jane’s expression did not change and her lips held the same shape. She just tilted her head as he put his arms around her and kissed her.

“Real, real, real,” was the only thought in his head. Real as the Masters of the Chessboard, R. RETI, just beyond her hair, or My System, NIMZOWITCH, beside it.

She pushed away, looking up at him incredulously. His nerves, soothed for a moment, reawoke with a jerk. He stepped back.

“Where’s he gone?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The small dark madman with the glasses.” He moved about quickly, looking down all the nearby aisles.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He has way of fading.”

“I’ll say he has!” He turned on her. “Though generally he tries to murder you first.”

“What!”

“Maybe he thought we had a suicide pact.” Carr grinned woodenly as he said it, but his hands were shaking. He could feel all his delayed reactions to the ride, to his painful awakening earlier, to her exasperating note—coming to the surface.

“Jane,” he said sharply, “what’s it all about?”

She backed away from him, shaking her head.

He followed her. His voice was harsh. “Look, Jane,” he said. “Day before yesterday your boy friend ran away from me. Last night he knocked me out. Tonight he tried to kill both of us. What’s it all about? I want to know.”

She made no answer. The fear in her eyes brought his exasperation to a boil. “What have you and he done? Who are those people after you? What’s wrong with your father and mother? Why did you lead me to that empty house? What are you doing here? You’ve got to tell me, Jane! You’ve got to!”

He had her backed up against the bookshelves and was almost shouting in her face. But she would only stare up at him terrifiedly and shake her head. His control snapped. He grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her violently.

It was a paroxysm of exasperation. He felt as if he were shaking the last two days, with all their enigmas and frustrations. This floppy brown doll in his arms somehow stood for the small man, his car, Miss Hackman, Mr. Wilson, the man with one hand, the whole bedeviled city of Chicago.

But no matter how violently her head snapped back and forth, her lips remained pressed tightly together. Suddenly he loosed her and turned away, resting his elbows on a shelf, burying his face in his hands, breathing heavily.

When he looked up and around she was still backed up against the shelves, smoothing her suit. She bit her lip when her hand touched her shoulder. She was looking at him. “Do I shake well?” she asked. “You know, it’s rather relaxing.”

He winced. “Sorry,” he said dully. “I’m acting crazy. But I’ve just got to know.”

“I can’t tell you.”

He looked at her in a misery of exasperation. “Jane!”

“No, I can’t.”

He submitted wearily. “All right. But…” He glanced around vaguely. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he said, jumping away from the shelves against which he’d been leaning.

“Why?” She was as uncomprehending as before, and much cooler.

“We’re in the stacks.” His voice automatically took on a hushed tone. “No one can come here without a pass. We made enough racket to wake the dead. They’re bound to come looking for us.”

“Are they?” She smiled. “They haven’t yet.”

“And then—Good Lord!—the traffic cops and who knows who else…they’re bound to!” He looked down the long aisles apprehensively.

She smiled again. “But they haven’t.”

Carr turned wondering eyes on her. Something of the charming willfulness of the night before last seemed to have returned to her. Carr felt an answering spirit rising in himself.

And it did seem the height of silliness to worry about being caught breaking library regulations just after you’d escaped messy death a dozen times.

“All right,” he said. “In that case let’s have a drink.” And he fished out of his pocket the unopened pint of whisky.

“Swell,” she said, her eyes brightening. “The fountain’s right here. I’ll get paper cups.”

Carr lowered his cup, half emptied.

“Listen,” he said. “There’s someone coming.”

He hustled Jane to the next aisle, which was unlighted.

The footsteps grew louder, ringing on the glass.

“Let’s go farther back,” Carr whispered. “He might see us here.”

But Jane refused to budge. He peered over her shoulder. “Damn!” he breathed. “I forgot the bottle. He’s bound to spot it.”

Jane’s shoulders twitched.

The he turned out to be a she, as Carr saw by patches through the gapes between the shelves. And a rather remarkable she, with a large, child-of-the-theater face, sleek long black hair cut in bangs across the forehead, and a tight, dark red dress. She walked staccato with a swish.

And she was making faces. Here in the privacy of the stacks, her face—surely it had been composed in childlike dignity back at the counters—was running a remarkable gamut: hatred, horror, smiling contempt, agonized grief, an idiot’s glee, tragic resignation, the magnetism of sex. And not just such fleeting expressions as any neurotic might let slip, but good full-blooded ones, worthy of some cruel Russian princess pacing in her bed-chamber as she contemplated an elaborate revenge against all her seventeen unfaithful lovers.

The expressions succeeded one another regularly, without pause. They looked to Carr rather like an exercise in acting.

The girl walked past their alley, stopped at the second one beyond. She looked up.

“Here we are, boys and girls,” they heard her say to herself in a loud, better voice. “Oh, in six volumes, is it? Is that all he expects at closing time?” She scribbled briefly on a slip of paper she was carrying. “Sorry, Baldy, but—out! You’ll have to learn about the secrets of sex some other day.”

And making a final face, apparently straight at Jane and Carr, she returned the way she had come.

Carr recovered the bottle. “Do you suppose she thought we were doing some research work?”

Jane said lightly, “She looked tolerant.”

She went into the next aisle and returned with a couple of stools. Carr pushed his trenchcoat back over some books. He chuckled. “That was quite an act she put on.”

“All people do that,” Jane said seriously. “As soon as the door closes and they know they’re alone, they begin to act out a little drama. Each person has his own, which he’s made up. It may be love, fear, hate—anything. Sometimes it’s very broad and melodramatic or farcical, sometimes it’s extremely subtle and restrained. But everyone has one.”