Jack Finney - Time and Again

I was around the corner now, out of his line of fire. He was far behind, probably just getting to his feet, and I knew I'd make it to Second Avenue if my wind held out. I had to walk the last dozen yards gasping, looking behind me, but he was nowhere in sight. At Second I turned south, knowing that — no radios, no patrol cars, hardly any phones — I was temporarily safe again.

Four blocks down I walked into a saloon, ordered a stein of beer, took a couple of sips, then walked back through a dim hallway to the toilet, and killed six or seven minutes just standing there. I came back and had a couple more sips of beer; there were half a dozen men standing at the bar, paying me no attention. Then I walked to the free-lunch table and took a ham sandwich, with two hard-boiled eggs and a dill pickle, back to the bar, and ate them with the rest of my beer. And when I left I had two more hard-boiled eggs, and a thick cheese sandwich, which I'd sneaked into my overcoat pocket.

I spent fifteen minutes standing in an alley in a locked doorway; occasionally, in case anyone was watching from an upper story somewhere, I hauled out my watch and looked at it, as though waiting for someone. Then I walked again, down Second. Twice a horsecar passed but I was keeping off them now; I wanted to be ready to move in any of four directions. At Thirty-seventh Street I saw a cop ahead, and turned off Second and went back to Third, then headed south again. Seven or eight blocks, and a cop came walking out of Twenty-ninth Street not ten yards ahead, looked toward me, said, "Hey!" and began to walk quickly in my direction. I stopped. He was far too close for me to run; I'd have been shot in the back. A few steps ahead and at the outer edge of the walk near the curb, a man and a woman had stopped, too. And now the cop, pulling off his helmet, stopped before them. As I walked past — my steps as quiet as I could make them — trying to shrink myself into invisibility, he took his photographs out of the helmet, and I saw that the couple was young and that the girl's dress, the hem visible under her coat, was the same color as Julia's though not the same shade and the man's overcoat was vaguely like mine. But they matched the description Byrnes had dictated, and as I turned onto Twenty-ninth Street I heard the cop order the man to turn his head, and I knew he was comparing his face to my photograph. As fast as I could without drawing attention, I walked over to Lexington Avenue. There a pair of lamplighters were moving down the street, touching each lamp into light, and before I reached Gramercy Park, at Twenty-first Street, it was dark.

The fenced-in rectangle of Gramercy Park lay between me and Number 19. I stood in the shadows between two streetlamps, and through the bare branches and black iron bars of the fence I looked across its snow-covered grass and bushes to watch the house. The lower-floor windows — parlor, dining room, kitchen — were all lighted, and so were two of the upper windows. I'd seen someone, either Byron Doverman or Felix Grier, pass a front lower window, a newspaper in his hand. And now a light upstairs went out. Then, barely visible through the intervening shrubs, fencing, and trees, I saw the cop on the other side of the square. He was walking slowly past the house.

He walked on to the corner of the square, then turned and walked back just as slowly, on past the house again to the opposite corner. He turned to walk back, and I hauled out my watch and timed him. It took just about a minute and a half to walk past the house once more, up to the corner again, and turn; and it took the same time to walk back. Six times, watch in hand, I watched him walk that beat, back and forth in the same path, and as regular as my watch he did it in a minute and a half each time. If I timed my movements with his, it would be perfectly possible to walk around the corner of the square toward the house, and then — behind his back as he walked slowly past the house — to silently cross the street, hurry up the steps, and with my own key unlock the front door and slip inside before he turned to walk back again. Up the stairs to my room, the rest of my money in my hand within seconds. Then down again, watch the cop through the door crack, then out and across the street behind his back once more.

But I didn't move: Was it really going to be that easy to outwit Byrnes? The man had set a trap for me and Julia, overlooking nothing so far. Was this cop, so easy to sneak past, only what he seemed? I stood watching him, and again he walked his beat in precisely the same way, and then again. Maybe he was what he seemed — just a cop, not Byrnes himself; a human being doing a tiresome job and falling into a regular pattern. I moved a few yards along my fence, stood watching again, and suddenly I saw him. Entirely motionless — he must have been chilled through no matter how many layers of clothes he wore — a man sat on a bench inside the park facing Number 19. He was dressed in dark clothes, his coat collar up, and, motionless in the darkness there inside the park, he was almost invisible. There he sat, waiting for me or Julia to cleverly time our movements to the slow metronome of the cop's walk and cross the street as he watched. Then, the street door closing, a low whistle, and the cop strolling the sidewalk suddenly turning to run to the house.

I actually backed away from the park for a step or two, then I turned and walked off. It was only a few blocks to Madison Square, and though I walked them warily I knew now that we were going to be caught. Unless I simply deserted Julia, which I wasn't going to do, Byrnes had us — bottled up, trapped. Without money for food, even holing up somewhere was useless. He had us as planned; as he'd known he would since even before he'd picked us up. Did he want us killed? While "avoiding detention"? Maybe; it would be a simple and very quick way to the meeting in Carmody's Wall Street office. Or did he want us caught? It probably didn't matter to him; our «escape» proved our guilt, or at least disproved any claim to innocence. For two powerful people like Byrnes and Andrew Carmody to actually convict us of a charge of murder after our attempted escape wouldn't be hard in an 1882 courtroom. And all I could do about it was stick with Julia; I had to do that and just hope against hope, I didn't even know for what.

I saw her enter the square from Fifth Avenue, walking briskly, purposefully, along the curve of a path, her long-skirted silhouette sharp against the light from an overhead standard, then blurring in the shadows, sharpening again as she walked into the next cone of pale yellow light. I met her at the downtown end of the park, she smiled with relief when she saw me, and I took her arm, and we walked toward the other end as though we knew where we were going. As we walked I told her what had happened, that we still had no money, and for a moment she closed her eyes, and said, "Oh, God."

"What's wrong?"

"I'm so tired, Si; I simply cannot continue endlessly walking." Then she smiled, squeezing my arm under hers, and I smiled back; I had nothing to encourage her about. She'd stopped at a messenger-service office, she said, soon after she'd left me, and sent a handwritten note by messenger boy to her aunt. She was all right, it had said; she'd be away for a time; she'd explain when she returned; meanwhile her aunt wasn't to worry. "Of course she will," Julia said, "but at least she's heard from me, and it was the best I could do. I wish — " Under my arm, hers moved sharply, and I saw the cops, a pair of them, crossing Fifth toward the square, and we turned right around to walk just as purposefully back in the direction we'd come from, hoping they hadn't yet seen us through the trees and shrubs. It seemed useless yet we instinctively postponed being caught.