Black Curtain (10 page)

Question marks, question marks, nothing but question marks. They kept popping up in his mind like dollar signs in a cash register.

He turned the corner into Tillary Street--not without a fleeting look back at the house that held her--and covered the short remaining distance back to his own room. His walk was brisk, purposeful, for the first time on Tillary Street. He overtook, made his way around, and past those who blocked him, charted a swift course. No more dilly-dallying along the sidewalks, that much at least was over. Tillary Street couldn't have anything more than this to give him. He had hoped to extract a chance nod, a casual word in passing. He had achieved tears of reproach, a slap across the mouth, a kiss of unrequited affection.

The payoff had been delayed, but it had been well worth waiting for.

11

It had been dark for hours. He'd had the gas jet lit long ago--that was the most he could do for her in the way of hospitality--and it was dancing impatiently, halfway up the wall, waiting for her, a yellow angel on the head of a pin. And still she didn't show up. It must be over three hours by now. No, four. Just around the corner from here. What was this to be, another washout, another false alarm? Or something even worse. Was a net, guided by her, being carefully disposed around him; was that what was taking so long? The only reason he didn't harbor this last thought with any degree of consistency, but only at impatiently intermittent intervals, was that it was taking too long even for treachery. The whole thing would have been over by now, if that had been the cause of delay. It was taking her too long for anything but just a plain, old-fashioned stand-up.

He kept roaming back and forth, on the gently undulating floor boards. He kept doing things that had no connection with her expected arrival--turned the balky tap on, then off again--to vary the unending monotony of doing the things that did: peering out through the side gap of the shade at the street below, going over to the door, fanning it open (as though she were a current of air and that would bring her into the room more quickly).

Intermittent suspicions, like fire tongues, darted their way up and down in his brain. How do I know who she is? I evidently did something to her, treated her shabbily in some way, in the past; how do I know what it was? Maybe if I knew, she'd be the last one I'd trust. Suppose she takes this chance of paying me back? She -seemed- all right, but women are unreliable that way. One minute they can be all forgiving, the next haul out a knife they've been carrying sheathed in their hearts for you. Or maybe it's just a mercenary angle, maybe there's a reward out for me, and she's around at the neighborhood precinct house right now, taking the first steps toward collect--

Wait a minute. Was that a rustle out there on the stairs? He took a quick, lithe, catlike jump over behind the door, bowed his head to chest level, ear close to the seam, hand pressed to the key against treacherous entry. A breath of silk came threading through the keyhole.

"Dan."

First he was going to open at demand. Then he thought: make her say her name. Take this opportunity to find out what it is. "Who is it?" he insisted in a low voice.

She got around that, probably without any conscious intent. "Me."

He made a grimace of wry disappointment to himself, turned the key.

She came in. Already a little spark of amber jealousy was glinting in her eyes. "You must be having quite a few girls up, if you have such a hard time telling them apart."

He closed the door, said something that was literally quite true--and he was afraid that many of the things he was going to have to say to her weren't going to be. "You're the first person that's come up, outside of the landlord, since I've been here."

"Don't make me laugh," was all the belief she gave him on this. "You'd never be lonely very long, no matter where you were. Don't I know you? Wait a minute, don't close the door. I've got my things out there."

She hauled in a small, battered suitcase, and two or three paper parcels.

Just what had they been to one another, anyway? He carefully ignored the name "Virginia" trying to form at the back of his mind. He watched her without a word.

"I can go straight from here to the train," she said. "In the morning. Take the six-o'clock one up there."

His mind asked: the six-o'clock one up -where?- His voice asked: "What time does that get you there?"

"Seven-ten," she said. And then, half rebukingly, "You ought to know that by now."

One hour and ten minutes away. One hour and ten minutes away from the city was a place marked X. But in which direction of the compass? There were so many to choose from. 180 degrees. Only one direction was excluded: south and its variants. That gave you the open sea.

He daren't ask the name of the place. But there was something he could ask that might help him to get it for himself, later, without her. He formulated a second question dealing with this train of hers; carefully reserved it in his mind for later. It couldn't be asked right now because there was no excuse for it; it would have been too glaringly disconnected. But when the right opportunity offered itself, he'd pop out with it.

She had been glancing around the room meanwhile. "Oh, Danny, this is a sha-ame."

He quirked one brow, implying, "What can you expect?"

She drew him closer under the sallow nimbus of the gas flame. "Let me look at you."

He let her, standing passive.

She traced the outline of his face, as though, to get the "feel" of it. She didn't seem altogether satisfied. "Danny, there's something different about you. I wonder what it is?"

Townsend didn't risk an answer.

She sat down on the bed, still evidently missing some sort of harmony between them. He could tell that by the puzzled way she looked at him. "You sound so, sort of, cagey. What's happened to you, Danny? You act like you were afraid of saying the wrong thing."

I am, he thought. Oh, if you only knew how I am!

She opened the parcels she'd brought in, one by one. Groceries. A square object turned out to be a small gas burner. "I don't want you to have to budge out of here, from now on. You've got everything right here, there's nothing to take you on the street. You've got to quit taking crazy chances, like today. I want you to promise me you won't do that again."

She was bending down now, with her back to him, disposing the things along the baseboard of the wall, the only storage place in the room. Her shadow was cast on the wall before her. It loomed grim and ominous, like a prophet of doom. Then a born squawked somewhere outside in the street and shattered the illusion.

She went on talking. "They never give up, don't forget that. When they seem to be laying low, that's when you've got to watch your step the most."

-They-. Who were -they?-

Her handbag lay on the bed, partly beneath him. There wasn't anything in it to tell him what he wanted to know. Surreptitiously he snapped the catch closed again. There was a vogue for big initials, but there were none on this bag. No short cuts in this, it seemed.

She came back, stretched out alongside him, began to play with the wing tip of his collar. "What're you going to do, Danny? Have you thought?"

"I wish I knew," he answered, carefully evasive.

"It's a losing game, isn't it? Why didn't you think of that before?"

"There's no jackpot in it." You could say that about anything, so it was safe enough to say now.

She gave a mournful little laugh. "For me there isn't, that's a cinch." Her head sloped forward. Her cheek came to rest upon his chest. Her hair was like a soft, ruffled carpet under his chin. He stared out thoughtfully above her, listening to what she said. "It's funny, though. I wouldn't change places with any girl who has her fellow forever. Who knows no one's going to come and take him away from her any week, any day, any minute. I'd rather have you, Danny, than anyone else, even if I know I'm going to lose you one of these nights. Come around here and knock on the door, and no more Danny."

"No--no----" he drawled reassuringly, "we'll find a way." He knew he mustn't jolt her out of this kind of talk, with its infinite promise of revelation.

"I wonder if they smelled a rat over -there-," was the next thing she said.

The way she emphasized the adverb, he knew it was some place close by. The Watt Street flat, therefore, he supplied with a fair degree of certainty.

"Do you think they did?"

"I don't know," she said dubiously, "I don't know. Luckily my sister was in the kitchen giving one of the kids a bath, when I hollered out your name that time. I could have bitten my tongue off a minute later. But it popped out before I could stop it."

Her sister's flat, then. Her married sister's flat. She was visiting it from one hour and ten minutes away--in some one of one hundred and eighty approximate directions.

"She couldn't leave the kid even to watch the fire. But when I came back upstairs again later she said, 'Didn't I hear you holler out Dan a little while ago?' and gave me kind of a suspicious squint. I laughed and covered it up the best way I could. I told her that I hollered "Scram!" to some kids that was teasing a dog.'"

She waited a minute, then added apprehensively, "I only hope she believed me."

The conversation showed signs of lagging. She stirred a little. "It must be getting late. I don't want to miss my train in the morning."

He stretched his arm up overhead, along the wall behind them, turned the key on the gas jet. Nothing was left but that ghost window thrown upward from the street. Just that, and the murmur of their two voices, even lower now than before. Her mention of the train was the opening he'd been hoping and waiting for all along, the opening for that second question, held carefully in reserve until now.

"What track does it leave on?" he asked, as casually as he could.

He got a rebuke on it again, but he also got what he was after. "You ought to know, you took enough of those trains yourself. They all leave from the same track. Seventeen, lower level."

To get the answer to any given equation, you need at least two of its component parts. He had them both now. One hour and ten minutes away. Track seventeen, lower level, six A. M. That would give the name of the place.

She had put tracks and trains out of her mind now. Out of both their minds.

"You kiss me like you were thinking of something else."

Well as a matter of fact, he had kissed her from one hour and ten minutes away. He brought his thoughts back, kissed her again. "What's the matter with that one?"

"The mere fact that you've got to give out a testimonial with it."

He was wondering how he could find out her name. In almost every phrase he addressed to her, there was an awkward letdown at the end, where her name should have rounded it out. The tongue expected it. The ear expected it, too.

He rigged up a little trap, to see if he could snare it out of her. It was one of those questions that blended in perfectly with the circumstances of the moment. His voice was low, beside her ear. "If you could change your name, what would you rather have it be?"

It got him a name--his own, not hers. "That's a pushover, Mrs. Daniel Nearing."

He said it over to himself. Dan Nearing. Another key to the past.

He took a chance, suggested: "That would make it longer than it is now." Nearing was a fairly short name.

She had to figure it aloud, as he'd hoped she would. "Only one letter. Let's see. D-i-l-l-o-n, six. N-e-a-r-i-n-g, seven." Then with a little burst of petulance, "Say. what is this anyway, a spelling bee in the dark?"

"I was just talking," he tried to pacify her. "You know how it is--it's been a long time since we talked together. I like to talk to you."

"Sure, talking's all right," she agreed sulkily, "but there are other things besides conversation."

He didn't say anything more for a while. "How's this, for not conversing?" he asked her presently.

"For my part, you should never say another word."

In the morning he found his arm curved around nothing, giving emptiness a hug where she had been. But she'd be back again, the note said so.

-Danny Darling, I had to make that six o'clock, and I didn't have the heart to wake you. Until next Thursday, and please be careful in the meantime-.

    -RUTH-

Her name was Ruth Dillon, the place she trained to and from was one hour and ten minutes away, the train that took her there left on Track 17 lower level--and he felt as if he'd been pulled through a wringer.

12

He knew he was taking a chance. Stations are dangerous places to frequent, for those in hiding.

He came down the broad stairs from the upper level, chin ducked to shirt front, to conceal at least the lower part of his face. It was about the safest hour he could have picked, five forty-five A. M. The huge place was at its emptiest; there was less chance of unfriendly eyes spotting him than at almost any other time of the night or day. Conversely, his peril was increased by that very fact. He was conspicuous; there wasn't any crowd to blend in with; it was like being alone on a vast stage. You're bound to attract whatever eyes there are.

He was here at the exact hour of her departure the day before, because that was the only way to make sure the train going out now on 17 would have an identical schedule to hers.