Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

They were halfway across the rotunda when a beam of light began to bob through the archway ahead. Carr pulled Jane toward the information booth.

“What’s the matter?” she mumbled, resisting. “What are you doing?”

“The watchman!” he whispered urgently, dragging her along.

She said foolishly, “Who cares?”

“Shh!” He pulled her into the both and down into a crouch beside him.

The light swam closer. The tread of rubber-shod feet became audible. The light swung around slowly, poking into shadows. Once it swept across their hiding place, like an enemy searchlight over a foxhole, showing the grain in the oak counter just above Carr’s head. And once it leaped to the ceiling and mystically spotlighted the golden name of Corneille.

A cracked voice began to hum softly, “I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old Dad.”

Jane started to peek over the counter. Carr managed to pull her down noiselessly. In doing it, he glimpsed an old man half turned away from them, with a clock strapped to his belt.

Once again the light brushed across their retreat. Then it and the footsteps started away.

“He wants a girl,” Jane whispered and giggled.

“Shh!”

“I won’t unless you stop hurting my wrist.”

“Shh!” Nevertheless he let go of her. A few seconds later he raised his head until his eyes were above the level of the counter, but just at the moment he heard Jane scramble over it at the other end of the booth. Forsaking caution, he gave a push at what he thought was the swinging door, smacked solid wood instead, and without bothering to hunt any further, vaulted after Jane.

Weaving behind her down the broad white stair, he felt the contagion of her recklessness. They might be prince and princess stealing from a marble castle, bound on some dangerous escapade.

Then Carr realized that Jane had got through the door to the street. He followed her and halted, entranced. For there, beyond the white sidewalk, was a most fitting, even through anachronistic, continuation of his fantasy—a long low limousine with silvery fittings and softly glowing interior.

Then he saw that approaching it at a stately waddle came two well-fed couples in top hats and bright feathery capes. Under the street light, the features of all four were screwed up into that expression of germicidal abstraction which is the customary mark of the Four Hundred. While they were still some yards away, a chauffeur opened the door and touched his visored cap.

Jane had scampered down the stairs. Now Carr watched in growing amazement as she headed straight for the sedate waddlers, veered off at the very last moment, but in passing them reached out her hand and deliberately knocked off the nearest top hat. And the old fool wearing it marched on without even turning his head.

It hit Carr with all the instant impact of that crucial drink which opens the door to wonderland. It was as if his spirits had exploded like a fountain from his chest. There at his feet and Jane’s lay the city—a playground, a zoo, a nursery, a congregation of lock-stepping fools, afraid to show any reaction, even to outrage. Their eyes glued on advertisements, their hands clutched on pocketbooks, their thoughts shuffling stupidly as devil-dancers around a monolith of infantile inhibitions and frustrations. It was just as Jane had told him! You could do anything! No one could stop you! You were free!

With a whoop he raised his arms and ran lurchingly across the sidewalk at a wide angle that caught him up with Jane so that they raced around the corner hand in hand.

And now they were prince and princess no longer, but wizard’s children, sorcerer’s apprentices with stolen cloaks of invisibility, charter members of some modern and magical Hellfire Club. Under their winged feet the pavement sped. Neon signs caressed their cheeks with ruby, topaz and sapphire. Motors and horns struck up a dulcet, nerve-quickening music, suitable for acrobats preparing their star turn.

Across their path a theatre lobby spilled a gabbling, cigarette-puffing, taxi-hailing horde. Oh, the beautiful joy of rushing through them, of jostling powdered shoulders, of hopelessly tangling half-donned overcoats, of plucking at ties and shawls under the glare of yellow light-banks, of bobbing up and gibbering like apes into faces too staid or startled to dare let on they saw you. Then spinning into the clear like broken-field runners, crouched, seeing-eye blind man, to sprinkle him with a handful of pennies, to hurtle into a band of stragglers from a 1925-rococo movie palace—the same den of shadows he and Jane had deserted for chess two evenings ago—and to serve them just as you’d served their wealthier co-fools down the block.

Next, in an exhibition of hair-raising daring and split-second dexterity, to spring from the sidewalk and dark between speeding cab and green sedan, to jeer at the drivers, almost to slip and sprawl on gleaming tracks in from of a vast rhinoceros of a streetcar, to regain balance deftly and glide between moving chromium bumpers just beyond, finally to gain the opposite sidewalk, your ears ringing with a great shout such as might have greeted Blondin on his first tight-wire crossing of Niagara Falls—and to realize that you had uttered that shout yourself!

Oh, to hiss into the ear of a fat woman with smug suburban face, “The Supreme Court has just declared soap-operas unconstitutional,” to scream at a solemn man with eleven-dollar shirt, “The Democrats have set up a Guillotine in Grant Park!” to say to a mincing, dopey-eyed sweater girl, “I’m a talent scout. Follow me,” to a well-dressed individual with an aura of superiority, “Gallup Poll. Do you approve of Charlemagne’s polices toward the Saxons?” to a slinking clerk, “Burlesque is back,” to a hod-carrier, “Free beer behind the booths, ask for Clancy,” to a fish-faced bookie, “Here, hold my pocketbook,” to a slim intellectual with a briefcase, at court-stenographer speed, “Watch the sky. A wall of atomic catastrophe, ignited by injudicious Swedish experiments, is advancing across Labrador, great circle rout, at the rate of seventeen hundred and ninety-seven miles an hour.”

And finally, panting, sides needled by delicious breathlessness, to sink to the curb near a busy intersection and sit with back resting against metal trash box and laugh and laugh, gaspingly, in each other’s faces, doubling up after each new glimpse of the hustling crowd on the conveyor-belt called a sidewalk, every single face too proper or blasé-blind to look at you—and the equally wooden visages behind the wheels of the endless stop-starting string of cars that almost pinched your toes as they went grunting by.

Just then a police siren sounded and a large gray truck grumbled to a stop in front of them. Without hesitation, Carr scooped up Jane and sat her on the projecting backboard, then scrambled up beside her.

The light changed and they jounced across the intersection. The siren’s wail rose in volume and pitch as a paddy wagon turned into their street a block behind them. It swung far to the left, around a while string of cars, and careened into a pocket just behind them. They looked into the eyes of two red-jowled coppers. Jane thumbed her nose at them.

The paddy wagon braked to a stop at the curb and several policemen poured out of it and into a dingy hotel.

“Won’t find us there,” smirked Carr. “We’re high-class.” Jane squeezed his hand.

The truck passed under the dark steel canopy of the Elevated. Its motor growled as it labored up the approach to the bridge.

“I’ve a private barge on the river,” said Carr airily, “Unpretentious, but homey. And a most intellectual bargeman. Physical and mental giant. He’ll carry us to the ports of Hell and back and talk philosophy with us all the way.”