Dark Tunnel (18 page)

“You’ll have a chance to prove self-defense,” Sale said. “Now I got to take you to the station.”

“Just a minute. I’ve got proof here that this man was a spy.”

“Go and get it and give it to me,” Sale said. I looked at him over my shoulder. He was standing three feet away with his gun leveled at my kidneys. My kidneys are important to me.

I stepped over Schneider’s head and shoulders into the inner room. The oilskin envelope and paper and the Lüger were gone from the table, but something else was there that made me feel sick. The gilded horseshoe was lying on the table. One end of it was splattered with red blood flecked with white. And the rest of it was covered with my fingerprints.

I thought of the green eyes in the stair-well at the end of the hall. I hadn’t been quick enough. Ruth Esch was very quick indeed. Perhaps she was as quick as Peter Schneider. My stomach heaved and I was sick on the floor.

Sale stood and watched me silently with his gun on me. When I had finished he said:

“Where’s your evidence, professor?”

“It’s gone.”

“Is this what you used to kill him?” He pointed at the horseshoe.

“Somebody used it to kill him,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s right,” Sale said. “You just laid him out and he died naturally.”

“Better take it with you,” I said, and picked it up.

“Put that down, you bastard,” Sale yelled. “Fingerprints!” He started towards me. I was facing him with the horseshoe in my right hand, my back against the table. I leaned to the left as if to replace the horseshoe on the table on my left side.

When it was nearly touching the table, I threw the horseshoe backhand at Sale’s gun. The two pieces of metal clanged and the horseshoe ringed his wrist. The gun went off and dropped to the floor and I dropped after it.

Sale got me in the side with the toe of his boot but I got the gun. He put up his hands as I stood up with it.

“Nice work, professor. Just an old horseshoe pitcher, eh? But you’re crazy, professor. You can’t get away.”

I wasted three words, “I’ve been framed.”

“Sure, sure. We’ll get you, professor.”

The conversation bored me and I picked up the flash and locked him in the inner room, which had a heavy oaken door. I had to move Schneider to do it.

Before I reached the head of the stairs, I heard a police whistle.

I was a fool. He could whistle out of the window. But what could I have done to him? Tie and gag him? Sure, and suffer for it later. But I had his gun.

I ran down the steps to the basement as fast as I could in the dark. If Shiny was at the corner, I might get away in his cab before the police arrived. I didn’t know where to.

I ran out the door at the back and around the corner of the building. No cabs in sight. Far down the street, I saw two policemen running towards McKinley Hall.

I thought of the open door leading into the steam-tunnels and ran back into the building. When I got to the door it was closed and the light behind it was out. Could there be a janitor here this early? Maybe Sale closed it and turned out the light.

The door wasn’t locked and I opened it. Nothing but darkness. I still had the flashlight and turned it on and flashed it down the steps. The concrete basement room at the foot of the stairs was bare and the door in the grey wall which led into the tunnel was closed.

I heard a sound of running feet behind and above me on the first floor of the building and put out my light. The bulb which lit the stairs from the first floor into the basement corridor was switched on. I stepped inside the door and closed it except for a crack through which I could watch the lighted stairs. A bareheaded man with a gun in his hand came down the stairs two at a time.

I recognized the wide grey shoulders and the sullen Indian face. He paused at the foot of the stairs and looked up and down the basement corridor, his gun following his glance. Then he turned and ran out the back of the building.

Christ, was Gordon after me already? I thought of following him and throwing myself on his mercy—he was probably more intelligent than the local police—but I dropped the idea as soon as I picked it up. I was in a box that it would be hard to argue myself out of. The only way to get out was by running.

There was a pounding on the double doors at the west end of the corridor, and then the crash of glass. The police. I closed the door quietly and went down the concrete stairs into the steam-tunnel.

T
HE BASEMENT WAS HOT
—perhaps the steam was on: it was just past the equinox and the weather was turning cold. As soon as I opened the second door, I knew the steam was on. It was like opening the door of a moderate hell. The air rushed out to take me like black flames. I closed the second door behind me and switched on the flashlight.

The two huge steampipes, green-painted, hung before me like twin segments of impossible serpents glowing with impossible energy. To my right and left they were lost in darkness in the endless man-made cave. I chose the left at random and started down the tunnel, the flashlight beam dancing before me like a wild hope. Then I remembered the closed door I had left open and the dark light I had left on.

Somebody might be waiting for me at the first turning. I put out the light and, with the unlit flashlight in my left hand and the gun in my right, went on in darkness. The concrete roof nearly brushed my hair as I walked and I felt the whole building above me like a weight on my neck. The sweat ran down in my eyes from the heat and I couldn’t stop to take off my coat.

I went faster as my senses grew used to the darkness. At least I heard no one following. I half-turned my head to listen and walked into a wall. The clang of my flashlight against the concrete sounded like a gong.

I switched it on—it wasn’t broken—and saw that the tunnel jogged to the left. Something on the tunnel floor caught my eye, a shining object. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a small metal cylinder, a lipstick. Women go everywhere nowadays, I thought. I put the lipstick in my pocket in case I should meet a woman, and held my gun cocked for the same reason as I went on.

I turned out the flash and went on in the hot darkness of the forest-floor of the twentieth-century jungle. The forest that bears no fruit, the rivers of steam and brooks of sewage that quench no thirst. I remembered something Alec had said about the carnivores creeping on rubber tires in the urban valleys. The blessings of civilization, I thought.

Not that I couldn’t have done with a small armored motorcycle. Or even my car would do. If I could get to my car, I could get away into the country. But my car was parked on the campus and I didn’t dare try to reach it.

I barely raised my feet and my leather soles hissed along the concrete. I walked with my hands held out to protect my face, like a blind man in an unfamiliar room. I felt as if I had walked a mile; the hot air was palpable and seemed to resist movement like water.

I switched on the flash for a moment and saw a dark open arch in the left wall about fifty feet ahead of me. I walked to it with the light on and the gun ready.

There was a sign stencilled on the wall in black letters at the side of the opening: Natural History Museum. It was nice to know where I was but I hadn’t gone as far as I thought. Hardly more than a quarter-mile. At least the museum wasn’t on the campus, which might now be surrounded by police. It stood in its own grounds across the street from the campus on the north side. It was a chance to get away.

I found the door out of the tunnel and beyond it the stairs leading up into the museum. I mounted them cautiously and opened the door at the head of the stairs. No light and no noise. I stepped out into the hall.

Across and down the hall from where I stood, there was pale light like moonlight falling through a great arched doorway. I tiptoed to the doorless arch and looked in.

Fixed lights from outside, street-lights probably, shone through the high windows into a huge hall that seemed to have no ceiling. Impossible monsters, one of them twenty feet high, watched me from every side. You’ve got the jungle on the brain, I said to myself. Out of one jungle into another.

I recognized the room. The tall monsters were the mounted skeletons of prehistoric saurians. I could see the light shining bleakly through their ancient ribs.

There was a slight rustle on the other side of the room and I stepped out of the doorway and sidled along the wall into dark shadow. I heard no other sound. Probably the noise was a prehistoric mouse no more than five feet tall.

I shifted my position and looked along the opposite wall. In a dark corner, almost facing me, four human figures crouched. I huddled down against the wainscoting like a six-foot mouse. Then I remembered the exhibition in that corner of the room, several life-size dummies painted and dressed like Neanderthal men, holding stone weapons and squatting over a cold fire in an imitation cave.

But I didn’t remember
four
dummies. I leveled my gun and walked to the roped enclosure where the cavemen sat on their heels. They didn’t move.

I stepped closer and looked down at the bushy papier-mâché heads. The light was weak, but I could see that two of the heads were black and one was lighter and one was almost white. I felt as if I jumped a foot but I didn’t move. My back was to the windows and my face was in shadow.

I lingered a moment, reining the wild horses in my legs, and then moved away. As I moved I saw with the edge of my retina that the caveman at the end was looking at me from under tousled red locks, out of live green eyes. He held a stone hatchet shaped like a gun.

I sauntered back to the other side of the room, feeling I had a fifty-fifty chance of not being shot. Peter and Ruth could have shot me then, but I was their scapegoat for Dr. Schneider’s death. And they didn’t know I’d seen them.

I stepped into the striped shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton, drew a quick bead on the head at the end of the roped enclosure, and fired. I must have missed because two flashes answered my shot simultaneously and two shadows came over the ropes towards me.

I turned and ran through the arch and heard two more shots as I turned the corner. I clattered down the tiled hall and found another corner to turn and then another. The feet behind me were light and quick like cats’ feet.

I ran into a door with a bar across it like an exit and it flew open under my weight. I staggered out onto a concrete loading-platform at the back of the museum, slammed the door behind me, and jumped to the ground.

The corner of the building was quite near and I turned it as I heard the door spring open. I sprinted across a lawn, keeping in the shadow of bushes and trees, towards the circular building surrounded by cages, where the museum kept its live animals. I put this building between me and the cave-dwellers, but I heard their light feet running towards me on gravel.

I passed a fox curled up asleep behind his wire netting, and I envied him his nice, safe cage. I wanted one of my own. I could have one if I could get into it before the feet came around the animal-house. Across from the fox-cage there was a pit perhaps four feet deep where the snakes and turtles were kept. I vaulted the iron fence around it and landed on my hands and knees on the gravel floor. I scuttled against the concrete wall like a frightened crab and a black snake slithered away from under my hands. I crouched there trying to control my panting, and heard the running feet go by above my head.

When the sound had ceased, I climbed out of the pit like an ambitious turtle and ran back to the museum. The back door was still open and I scrambled up on the loading-platform and went in, leaving the door open behind me. The corridor I had dashed through three minutes before seemed longer on the way back. I found the door at last and went down into the tunnels again. They wouldn’t come back to the museum. Someone must have heard the shots and the police would soon be here.

I flashed my light in the sub-basement and saw a chart on the wall. McKinley Hall, the Little Theatre, the Women’s Building, the Graduate School, the Natural History Museum circled in red. A network of blacklines crisscrossed the chart. It was a map of the steam-tunnels.

The university powerhouse was about as far from the museum as McKinley Hall, but in the opposite direction. I got my bearings and went into the tunnel. As I closed the door behind me, I heard loud feet like policemen’s feet on the floor of the building above me, and a sound of voices. I set out for the powerhouse. Powerhouses have always interested me.

My shirt was still sopping and my coat began to get wet. My heart was beating hard from the sprint and the darkness swelled and contracted around me like black blood in an artery. It slithered like a snake past my sightless eyes. Suddenly, I noticed that I had no gun. I must have left it in the reptile-pit.

As soon as I bumped into a wall and turned a corner, I used my flashlight. There could be no one in front of me now until I reached the powerhouse. I quickened my pace and trotted along on the left side of the green pipes, sweating like a wrestler. My feet clattered on the paved floor and I let them clatter.

I heard feet behind me far down the tunnel and I stopped for an instant and looked back. There was a faint light on the wall where the tunnel turned and shadows like grey fingers reached out towards me. I switched out my light and ran on blindly in the dark with heavy footsteps reverberating behind me.

Something struck me across the chest like a falling tree and I leaned against it gasping for breath. I felt searing heat against my body: it must be the steampipe. I crawled under the pipes where they turned into the wall and ran on with one hand scraping the wall, feeling for the door that must be there.

Flashlights came around the corner on pounding feet a hundred yards behind me. I saw my shadow leaping ahead of me like a frantic mimic of my fear. And I saw a door.

A man’s voice shouted, “There he is,” and a gun went off with a sound like vessels bursting in my brain. The bullet ricocheted from the wall behind me and passed me like a droning bee. I have always hated bees.