Fritz Leiber - The Sinful Ones

When Carr Mackay first caught sight of the frightened girl, he was feeling exceptionally bored. The offices of General Employment seemed a jail, time an unclimbable wall, life a straitjacket, the very air a slow-setting invisible cement. Even thoughts of Marcia failed to put any color in his gray mood.

He had just finished up with an applicant. The empty wire basket on his desk meant that he had nothing to do for a while.

The other interviewers were still busy with their share of the horde of job-seekers who trickled into Chicago’s Loop, converged on General Employment, and then went their ways again, as aimlessly as ants trailing into and out of a hole, and as defenseless in the long run against the turn of a giant heel.

Anything was more interesting than people, Carr felt. Yet a glance at the big clock told him it was only three-thirty, and the prospect of an empty hour-and-a-half seemed almost worse than one filled with people, no matter how stupid and lifeless.

It was just then that the frightened girl came into the waiting room. Without looking around she sat down on one of the benches, wooden and high-backed, rather like church pews.

Carr watched her through the huge glass panel that made everything in the waiting room silent and slightly unreal. Just a girl in a cardigan. College type, a bug affected, dark hair falling untidily to her shoulders. And nervous—in fact, frightened. Still, just an ordinary girl. Nothing tremendously intriguing or pretty about her.

And yet….it was as if Carr had been sitting for hours in front of a curtain that he had become quite certain would never rise, when suddenly something (who knows what?—a scrape of feet in the orchestra pit, a slight dimming of the light, the sense of an actor peering through one of the eyeholes in the ponderous cloth) made him feel that it might not be to painful to wait a little longer.

“Ow, my feet!”

Carr looked around. Miss Zabel’s features were contorted into a simulation of intense pain as she picked up the record cards on his desk.

“Shoes hurt?” he inquired sympathetically.

She nodded. Her topknot of unruly hair bobbed decisively. “You’re lucky,” she told him. “You can sit at a desk.”

“That can be painful too.”

She looked at him skeptically and teetered off.

Carr’s gaze flipped back to the frightened girl. There had been a change. Whatever she’d been doing—biting her lip, twisting her fingers—she wasn’t any longer. She sat quite still, looking straight ahead, arms close to her sides.

Another woman had come into the waiting room. A big blonde, rather handsome in a poster-ish way, with a stunningly perfect hairdo. Yet her tailored suit gave her a mannish look, she had a cruel mouth, and there was something queer about her eyes. Several job-categories jumped into Carr’s mind: receptionist, model (a shade heavy for that), buyer, private detective. She stood inside the door, looking around. She saw the frightened girl. She started toward her.

The phone on Carr’s desk buzzed.

As he picked it up, he noticed the big blonde had stopped in front of the frightened girl and was looking down at her. The frightened girl seemed rather pathetically trying to ignore her.

“That you, Carr?” came over the phone.

He felt a rush of pleasure. Odd, what the mere sound of a desired woman’s voice will do to you, when all your thoughts about her have left you cold.

“Oh, hello, Marcia dear,” he said quickly.

“Darling, Keaton’s given me some more details on the new business he’s planning. I think it’s a really sharp idea. And he’s all set to go ahead.”

“It did sound rather clever from the bit you told me,” Carr said cautiously, his first bit of warmth a bit dashed. As he searched his mind for the best way to put Marcia off, his gaze went idly back to the little drama beyond the glass wall. The big blonde had sat herself down beside the frightened girl and had taken her hand, seemed to be stroking it. The frightened girl was still staring straight ahead—desperately, Carr thought.

“And so of course I told Keaton about you. Darling, he’s very interested. He definitely wants to see you some time this week. It means a real job for you, Carr.”

Carr felt a not unfamiliar sag of dismay. “But Marcia…”

The fast, confident voice cut him off. “We’ll talk it over tonight. It’s really a marvelous chance. Goodbye, darling.”

He heard a click. He put back the phone and prepared to feel depressed as well as bored—God, if Marcia would only stop trying to make a success of him—a job for the job-purveyor, what a laugh!—when a flurry of footsteps made him look up.

The frightened girl was approaching his desk.

The big blonde had followed her as far as the door in the glass wall and was watching her from it.

The frightened girl sat down in the applicant’s chair. She half turned to Carr, but she didn’t look him in the eye. She gathered her wool jacket at the throat in a way that struck Carr as almost comically melodramatic, as I she were about to say, “I’m half frozen,” or “They wouldn’t hang me…would they?” or “Darling, your hands—I’m afraid of them,” or just “My God! Gas!”

Right there Carr got the feeling, “It’s started.” Though he hadn’t the faintest idea what had started. The big curtain hadn’t lifted an inch, but someone had darted out in front of it.

Another part of his mind was thinking that this was merely a rather odd applicant—as how many of them weren’t?—and he’d better get busy with her.

He twitched her a smile. “I don’t believe I have your application blank yet, Miss…?”

The frightened girl did not answer.

To put her at east, Carr rattled on, “Not that it matters. We can talk things over while we wait for the clerk to bring it.”

Still she didn’t look at him.

“I suppose you did fill out an application blank and that you were sent to me?” he added, a bit sharply.

Then he saw that she was trembling and he became aware of a hush that had nothing whatever to do with ordinary noises. There still came the rat-ta-ta-tat of typing, the murmur of conversation from the applicant-interviewer pairs at the other desks, the click of slides from the curtained cubicle where someone was getting an eye-test—all the usual small sounds of General Employment. And behind them Chicago’s unceasing mutter, rising and falling with the passing El trains.

But the other silence continued. Even the resounding click of the big minute clock on the wall, that sometimes caught Carr up with a jerk, did not break it.

It was if those sounds—the whole office—Chicago—everything—had become mere lifeless background for a chalk-faced girl in a sloppy cardigan, arms huddled tight around her, hands gripping her thin elbows, staring at him horror-struck.

For some incredible reason, she seemed to be frightened of him.

She shrank down in the chair, her white-circled eyes fixed on his. As his gaze followed her movements, another shudder went through her. The tip of her tongue licked her upper lip. Then she said in a small, terrified voice, “All right, you’ve got me. But don’t draw it out. Don’t play with me. Get it over with.”

Carr checked the impulse to grimace incredulously. He chuckled and said, “I know how you feel. Coming into a big employment office does seem an awful plunge. But we won’t chain you to a rivet gun,” he went on, with a wild attempt at humor, “or send you to Buenos Aires. It’s still a free country.”

She did not react. Carr looked away uneasily. The queer hush was eating at his nerves—a dizzy, tight-skinned feeling, as if he were coming down with a chill. He groped for the change in his mood. He knew there had been one, but it was so all-embracing that he couldn’t put his finger on it. The big names on the maps are always the hardest to find.