Black Curtain (8 page)

He had been looking over to the other side at that moment, and even in the brief flash of time it took him to swerve his head around, the un known greeter had already blended indissolubly into the crowd. He couldn't tell which one of those immediately ahead of him it had been. None were turning to look back, to see if the salutation were acknowledged. The direction of the roughly friendly hand and the trailing direction of the brief snatch of voice that had accompanied it told him that the person had been going the same way he was, but at a good deal faster gait; therefore he was before and not behind him by now. That was all. He hadn't thought quickly enough to call out an automatic answer, which would have been the only sure way of fixing the greeter's attention on him an extra moment or two. He had been taken too much by surprise.

Here was the chance contact, the thing he had been hoping and praying for, and which might never recur, slipping through his fingers. He ran ahead, desperately accosting those in the lead of him one by one, pulling them around short by their sleeves and coat edges, demanding breathlessly: "Say, was that you just now? Did you just wallop me on the shoulder?"

All he got was dull, uncomprehending shake of the head. But somebody had done it, somebody must have! It had been a good, solid impact. He was about ready to fly with crazed helplessness, when suddenly the fourth man he tackled answered with somewhat sheepish reluctance: "'Scuse me, I mistook you for somebody else. You fooled me from the back for a minute." He pried his sleeve away from Townsend's convulsive grip and went on.

Townsend stopped dead for a minute while the sluggish tide of humanity flowed on around both sides of him; the sudden letdown was so cruelly deflating.

It had been on a Monday, a Monday-morning daybreak, that he had first reached Tillary Street. Tuesday passed and Wednesday; Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Those first few he was sure of. After that they began to telescope themselves a little, lose their sharpness of identity. It was harder to keep track of the days down here. Having no job might have had something to do with it, or the blurring monotony of the routine he had set for himself. There came the day when his landlord accosted him at the foot of the stairs on his way out, and he knew he had been there a full week and it was Monday again.

He had been eating very sparingly and irregularly, but he discovered when he tried to pay for the coming week that he had only two-odd dollars left.

He handed over two, said, "I'll have the other fifty for you by tonight or tomorrow," wondering to himself at the same time how he'd manage to.

But he did have it by that very night, when he returned toward midnight; handed it over with finger tips puckery and red from long immersion, after an agonizing afternoon- and evening-long session washing the dishes in that place he'd eaten in the day of his first arrival. They had had a temporary need for someone, luckily. There was enough left to tide him over the next day or two, but he knew that, however else he managed, he'd never wash a dish again as long as he lived. He could still feel the greasy scum of reeking water, lapping up his arms to the elbows, for days afterwards.

He'd already finished his casing of the shops several days before this. And although he'd left a bad impression as a time waster, maybe even as a potential shoplifter, on many of the proprietors, and got dirty looks from then on whenever he strolled past their premises, he had nowhere gained the impression that any of them had seen him before.

His clocklike pacing of the street, day after day, up one side, down the other; then down the one, up the other, was undoubtedly making him familiar by sight to dozens of the denizens of Tillary Street, but it was all current familiarity, none from before, and to keep from getting tangled up and mistaking the one for the other, he held himself strictly aloof from overtures of new vintage, rebuffed them where they seemed about to be tentatively put forth for the first time.

Eventually, of course, a law of diminishing returns was going to set in against him. If he stayed on around here long enough for new familiarity to become seasoned, a time would come when he would no longer be able to differentiate recognition having its inception in the immediate past from that of the more distant past that he was trying to re-enter. But that point hadn't been quite reached yet.

He was haunted now at times, alone in his barren room at nights, with the ghost window square cast by the street lights wavering on the wall before his eyes, by a looming sense of failure, of the futility of the whole thing he was attempting.

Perhaps it was based on a faulty premise in the first place. He might have just been traversing Tillary Street at random, that day that the curtain had suddenly been drawn upon the past; might have happened upon it in the course of a hap. hazard, meaningless digression. He might be mistaking an erratic diversion for his regular orbit. How was he ever to find out, in that case, where he had been going or where he had come from? He might be just a block or two from a sector that would have paid him real dividends if he had begun to investigate it. Or he might be the whole span of the city away.

Or even suppose his premise was the correct one, and Tillary Street had played a fixed part in one phase of his past life? Even so he was relying on the laws of chance, of coincidence, wasn't he? And they might just not work out in his favor. For instance, suppose the one or two people around here who could have reoriented him had themselves drifted away by now? If they weren't around here any more, then the street was no earthly good to him just as a street. Or those who had had reason to seek him out down here, if there were any such, might have already done so--during the interim of his absence. Not finding him, they might take it for granted he was gone for good and would never come back to Tillary Street. He might stay here a thousand years without ever getting a glimpse into that unknown past.

One night, hopeless with continued lack of success, he charted a rough map of the immediate vicinity and tried to determine by a rough system of surveying just which near-by points of departure and destination might use Tillary Street as a short cut, or timesaver, or line of least resistance. But it wouldn't work out. Too many outside factors, that were still beyond his knowledge, entered into it. He would have had to know what his own former habits were, the nature of the errand he had been on at the time, and so on. He didn't know any of those things. In itself, as a mere geographical convenience, the use of the street as a short cut seemed to be ruled out. You could go down the parallel streets on each side of it just as quickly and a very great deal farther. It led from nowhere to nowhere. It began where it did for no reason and ended where it did just as irrationally, after four blocks of existence. It wasn't even a diagonal or transverse linking two nonparallel points; it adhered to the same foursquare pattern as all the other intersections about it.

He crumpled up the sheet of paper and threw it away, after long, laborious hours of struggle. The past wasn't easy to regain. There were no road maps showing you which way it lay. And meanwhile time was running out.

Although his lodging was taken care of for a while yet, the residue of the dishwashing money petered out within two days. He struggled on for another twenty-four hours after that without a penny, living on gratuitous cups of coffee slipped across the counter to him, when the boss wasn't looking, by employees of the various places where be had been a paying customer until now. They couldn't be expected to repeat that more than once, however. Tillary Street lived on a shoestring, and the five cents would have been taken out of their own wages if they had been detected. The fortuitous circumstance of a restaurant being without a dishwasher, or a shop being without a sidewalk barker at the precise moment when he needed a job, didn't recur a second time and wasn't likely to. That had been just a freak of timing. He wasn't looking for permanent employment--he had his full-time job cut out for him-- so he didn't go out of the neighborhood. And in it, there was nothing to be found. But still he had to eat. The first day, already, of this forced abstention he was starting to feel hollow in the pit of the stomach and weary at the back of the legs as he prowled his useless, elusive beat.

He'd had all along, and still had, on him that flashy-looking cigarette case that had turned up in his pocket on this very street after the accident that day. He had kept it on his person all the weeks he'd been back living with Virginia, instead of hiding it away somewhere in the flat. Possibly to spare her the worry the sight of its strangeness might have caused her if she'd found it. It had accompanied him automatically the night of his flight, and it was the only thing on his person now that had even a potential intrinsic value. So he decided he'd try to raise something on it. He had no idea of its probable value, but it might help to tide him over another week or two, and meantime, any day--any day--

There was, strangely enough, no pawnshop located anywhere along Tillary Street itself, but he found one about a block and a half down Monmouth Street, to the right. He pushed his way into its camphor-reeking interior, empty at the moment, took out the case, blew on it, and polished it against his coat sleeve.

The pawnbroker, attracted by the sounds of entry, came out of a storage room at the back, gave him the sharply appraising look of his kind as he advanced along the inside of the counter to the point where Townsend stood. "Well?" he said noncommittally.

Townsend passed him the case, winged opens through the small orifice in the wire mesh that separated them.

The broker made no effort to test it, weigh it, examine it closely in any way. Townsend should have noticed that, but for some reason failed to. The technique of hocking was new to him.

Suddenly the broker had spoken, casually in intonation but with explosive implications. "This again, hm?" he said weariedly.

Townsend wasn't expecting it. He was caught off guard, inattentively off guard. It was like flashlight powder going off. It's over with before you even have time to jolt. He blinked as the meaning hit him, then he paled a little, then he gripped the edge of the counter a little tighter. This -again-. -Again-. He had that sudden, strange, glimmering sensation that comes when you've been in a pitch-dark room and a door begins to waver slightly open, admitting the first peering light backing it.

He must have been in here with this same case before.

His voice shook a little, much as he tried to steady it. He tried to make himself sound plausibly forgetful, no more. "Oh, uh, was this the--the same place I brought it to before? All hockshops look alike to me." He hoped this didn't sound as lame to his vis-à-vis as it did to himself.

The broker sniffed disdainfully. "I ought to know this case by heart already. Three times you been in here with it now, haven't you?" Meanwhile he was holding it extended as if in rejection. Then, with an inconsistent time lag, his offer followed. "All right, four dollars."

Townsend saw an opening, and clutched at it desperately. "That wasn't what you let me have on it before."

The broker immediately took professional umbrage. "So what're you going to do, argue? Four dollars is what it's worth. Why should I give you any more this time than the time before? It ain't any more valuable to me now than it was then, is it?"

Townsend's voice was tense. "Do you keep the--the ticket stubs, or whatever you call 'em, after the article's once been redeemed? I mean the part that the customer signs his name and address on, and that you hold until the loan is repaid?"

"Sure. You want me to look it up? What do I have to look it up for? I know this case by its pattern. I tested it for you before. Look at that." He showed him a little mark made by the drop of reagent acid. Townsend had thought it was a worn spot. "So you were raising a big holler, remember? Fourteen carat you tried to tell me it was. Silver, gilt. Four dollars."

Townsend was pleading almost abjectly by now. "Well, just to convince me, just to make sure. Go ahead, see if you can dig it up. I just want to see with my own eyes."

"You telling me I don't know my own business? I ought to know how much a piece of security is worth to me." The pawnbroker was maddeningly interested in the question of the amount involved. "When were you in here with it last?"

He'd come back to Virginia on the tenth of May. He took a chance, faltered: "In April, this year. Look it up in your ledger, you must have it down."

The broker went into the back again, snapped on a light. There was a long wait. For Townsend an agonizing one. He was leaning against the counter, letting its edge cut into him across the middle, as though the physical hurt dulled the other torment.

"April eighteenth," the broker said suddenly, from inside. "Silver-gilt cigarette case. Black enamel, silver stripes. Ticket Number mumblemumble---four dollars-. Was I right?"

"Bring the canceled ticket out, I want to see the canceled ticket," Townsend called. There was a desperate urgency in his voice.

The broker came back with an oblong bisque pasteboard and looked at him curiously. "Here. Maybe you'll tell me now I'm wrong. Is this you or isn't it?"

Townsend cocked his head to match the angle at which the pawnbroker was holding the stub, searching for the penned fill-in on the printed form. The handwriting wasn't recognizable as his, but that was to be expected. If memory wasn't transferable, nothing was.

The name was George Williams, and he knew at sight that it was spurious. Something about it, it was too glib, too pat. Not that there weren't people called George Williams, but he hadn't been. His hatband had been initialed D N. The address was down as 705 Monmouth Street. Was that also fictitious, to match the name? There was a chance it hadn't been.