The Black Angel (21 page)

“You from out there yourself?” he asked.

“Certainly am.” Then, as if preparing to end the exchange, which was simply a trick in reverse to make him wish to prolong it, I said, “Well, now that I've done my duty I guess I may as well——” And I nicked the lip of the telephone mouthpiece with my nail to make the sound carry.

His voice quickened. “Hey, wait; you haven't even given me your own name yet.”

I was becoming more sure of myself at every phrase. They say the art of being a gentleman is to inspire ease in others. Then the art of being a gentleman's voice is to inspire confidence in those who converse with it. And his was surely a gentleman's voice. “Oh, I thought you knew it,” I said. “I wasn't supposed to introduce myself quite cold like this. I didn't realize I was. Then in that case his letter didn't reach you yet?”

“No,” he said. “No, I haven't heard from him in God knows when.”

“I was afraid of that,” I grieved primly. “I bet he forgot to send it at all. And here I've been——”

“Oh, come on, I don't need a letter of introduction to be glad to meet people.”

“Yes, but I don't like to just foist myself on——I might be anyone at all, for all you know; I might be some little hustler that thinks she's smart and just wants to——”

“I carry insurance against that,” he said indulgently. “And one way of proving you're not, you know, would be to——”

“I'm sorry; I still haven't, have I? I'm Alberta French.”

“So now we're friends. You doing anything for dinner tonight?” Then, as I hesitated, “Look, we both have to eat, anyway. If we don't like each other, well—we haven't lost anything. We've each had our evening meal.”

“There is something in that, isn't there?”

He'd already rushed on past that point. “How'll I know you?”

“Well, for that matter, how'll I know
you?”

His voice had a grin in it. “I asked you first. Tell you what. Is there a flower shop handy to you where you are?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, get hold of something good and big so that I can't miss it. A chrysanthemum. Put it on your shoulder.”

“Yes, but that still doesn't take care of you.”

“I don't think you'd like me with a chrysanthemum. Look, I'll just be the fellow that comes up to you and tips his hat and says, ‘Are you you?'”

I knew what he wanted, all right. He wanted to see me first from a safe distance. If I didn't pass muster he wouldn't come near me; I'd never see hair or hide of him again. Glasses, maybe. Or a little too high up in the age brackets. I didn't blame him, really. I had him out there on the fringes. It was up to me to pull him in the rest of the way.

“That's it, then,” he said. “Now I'll tell you where. I know a little room, a midget cocktail bar, just around the corner from the Ritz. Can't miss. It's called the Blues-Chaser. And it's like that, really. There's never too much of a crowd there, and that way we won't have to run too much interference. We have a date now, don't forget.”

“All right, we have a date.”

The last thing he said was, “Remember the password. ‘Are you you?' Don't go off with the wrong guy.”

The last thing I said was, “I'll let you do the worrying about that.”

I'd have to play it his way. He was setting the tempo, not I. And the tempo was chaff, badinage, light flirtation. Maybe he was that age. Or maybe it was that he'd always be that age; it was a state of mind. Well, so be it then.

I didn't do much. I looked at myself in the glass before I was ready to leave and thought: “I don't know what he wants. So he'll have to get what I have.”

I bought the chrysanthemum, a bursting yellow one, and had them pin it on. High enough so that I could nestle my cheek against it if I turned that way. Then I went over there about a quarter to five.

The place itself was intimate, confidence-inspiring, made to order for just such a rendezvous as ours. A regular postage stamp of a cocktail lounge; I'd never yet been in one as small. Heavily carpeted and hushed, but hushed in a relaxing, cozy way, not depressingly hushed. It was a little gem of a place, and I wonder now if it's still there.

The only discordant note was the rather wretched-looking attendant who came over as soon as I had seated myself. He was suffering from some skin disorder that necessitated his wearing some half-dozen tiny cross patches of court plaster scattered liberally all over his face and then, to cap the climax, one larger strip, slantwise, nearly sealing the outside corner of one eye. He came at a sort of shamble, without lifting feet from the carpet, and I refrained from looking directly at him after the first devastating glance. He was enough to spoil any apéritif he brought. There was a second, far more prepossessing one at hand behind the bar, but he confined himself to waiting upon those who sat directly before him, and I had drawn this one.

He
wasn't in the place yet. I'd expected that. I'd felt fairly sure he'd purposely delay arriving, in order to allow me to get there first and be able to study me at leisure, preferably without coming all the way in. I made this as difficult as possible for him by selecting a seat that was as removed from the entrance steps as the limited confines of the place would allow. Which wasn't much. But at least he would have to show himself a few paces within the door to be able to get a comprehensive look at me. Even if he turned around and bolted directly out again afterward. I disposed my shoulder so that from that side I was mostly a burgeoning yellow chrysanthemum topped by an eyebrow and a hatbrim.

“Yes mum, what'll ye be liking?” the depressing-looking figure at my elbow asked with a brogue you could cut with a knife.

I rejected the wine card. “A glass of dry sherry.”

“Yes mum.” He went away and let me alone.

I thought: “He mayn't come at all. He may have out-feinted me at my own game without my realizing it.” The mere fact that he stipulated an outside rendezvous, instead of calling at my hotel for me, shows that he accepted me with reservations. These open, hale, guileless voices can experience mistrust as readily as the more wary, evasive kind. Why not? The only difference is that they don't show it outwardly. True, I always knew where I could reach him again, but that was valueless. This was one of those cases in which, if the first skirmish was lost, the whole campaign had been thrown away; there was no use pursuing it any farther.

I couldn't call him a second time, not even with an attempted change of identity. He already knew my voice. He had retained his freedom of action. I had already lost mine before I'd even gained contact with him.

“Ah yes,” I reflected, “he isn't quite the unsuspecting soul he seemed.” I wondered why that hadn't occurred to me sooner than this. There must have been some magic in that voice of his.

My sherry came back, and with it, as he set it down, there was a small folded leaf of white paper inserted between the base of the glass and the platter it stood on. I thought it was the bill at first, but when I'd taken it up and opened it—

Are you you?

it said on it.

“Wait a minute, where did this come from?”

He looked down at it in stupid astonishment himself. “I don't know, mum. Sure, it wasn't there when I set the glass onto the tray just now.”

“But you came over here in a straight line from the bar to me; I saw you. It couldn't have been put on after you started over with it. It was
under
the glass.”

I looked around covertly. “Wait a minute, don't move away. I want you to stand here just as you are, in front of me. Did you rest the tray on the bar for a minute before you picked it up and started out?”

“Well, just for a minute, mum, but then I always do. Only just long enough to jot the order down on my tab, so I have it on the bill later.”

“At which end of the bar were you when you did that?”

“Over there by the wall; that's the only way you can come out from behind.”

“Is it that man sitting there with a vacant place on each side of him?”

He looked over. About as subtly as a steam calliope revolving full blast. “Maybe it was, at that. It was by him. Shall I ask him, mum?”

“No, don't, you fool,” I said with more candor than politeness.

I wondered why I let it irritate me, why I didn't take it in good part. It might have been that I didn't like the realization that I was up against something smarter than I'd bargained for. He'd been in here all along. And since no one had entered after me he'd already been here when I arrived. My face must have been naked to him the whole while, and I didn't like that thought. He must have sat there quietly watching me while I transparently sat marshaling my strategy about me.

I didn't like his looks, if that were he. And by elimination it must be. For all the others were in twos, girl and man or man and man. He was the only single.

I didn't like his looks. He belied his voice completely, but that was the least of it. There was a merciless shrewdness there, a cold sort of calculation that I could sense I was going to be no match for. Nothing came of itself. Nothing was casual, first time, unthought of. Every abstract turn of his head in some new direction than before, every lift of his glass, every draw of his cigar conveyed the impression: “Is it to my advantage to do this? Is there some gain in my doing it? Very well, then, I'll do it.”

If he was playing at billets-doux with me, at hide-and-seek, then there was some motive in it other than just youthful gaiety, high spirits, I could be sure.

He'd been born old, that man there at the bar. Old and cruel. He'd never wasted a move in his life. He should have had everything in the world already by mere dint of lifelong rapacious application. But maybe there were many things he didn't want at one time, then wanted at another; that was all that kept him going.

I dropped my eyes and sipped my sherry and knew defeat ahead of time.

I wondered why he was playing with me like this. I bore the chrysanthemum. He'd sent the note, so he wasn't trying to pretend he wasn't here. He just let me sit on there. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. Cruelty without provocation, just for its own sake.

I couldn't get up and go. I couldn't scuttle my own undertaking. I had to sit and wait out his pleasure. He had me. And if he had me this early what would it be like later?

I'd sipped to the bottom of my glass. I'd lit a cigarette and put out its fingernail-length remnant. The table-barman, taking more pity on me than he, for all his ignoble blemish-studded physiognomy, came back again unsummoned, perhaps drawn by my dejected, trapped mien.

“Would you be wanting another, mum?”

“Yes, bring me another.”

I thought: “Since I know it's he and he won't come over to me, why don't I get up and go over to him and have an end to it?” I thought: ”He wants me to do that. That must be what he's waiting for. And with a man like that, anything he wants you to do it's better not to do, since there's some purpose there you can't fathom.”

I must have been looking at him too long. He'd turned full face toward me on his stool, now, and there was a sort of challenge in the cold, steady way he held my eyes.

The barman cut between us just as the look was turning into something else; what, I couldn't see yet. He was lifting his feet this time as he traveled. He'd brought somebody else's order back with him, along with mine.

He put my glass down, then put the second one down at the vacant place opposite me. Then he discarded his tray on an unused table behind him and suddenly was sitting there with me in informal sociability.

“Here, what do you think you're——!” I started to say.

He grinned, called over his shoulder, “Here's your spare jacket back, Matt, and thanks for the loan of it.”

I glanced over at the bar, and the cold-faced man was settling back onto his stool again. He turned away, unemotional as ever.

“That guy was slow,” he chuckled.

I turned back to him again. “You
wanted
me to——?”

“Just for the fun of it.”

Matt came over with his own coat, solicitously helped him into it.

“How was I?” he asked him cheerfully. “You'll find the orders I took in the pocket—if you can make out my writing.”

“Not bad at all, Mr. Mason. You can have a job here any time you say the word.”

“Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.”

I saw them touch palms briefly. I didn't see what it was. I suppose it was quite a large amount.

He saw me looking at his face. “Oh, I forgot something,” he said to me. “This is going to hurt; it was easier going on than taking off.”

“I'll do it for you, Mr. Mason,” Matt offered. “Just hold still. Do it quick is the best way.”

He recoiled, especially at the paring of the big one across the rim of his eye. “Art for art's sake.” He winced. The skin was clear under all of them as soon as the temporary irritation was gone. It had been clever of him. Though they had been individually tiny—each one had occupied no more than a minute area of his skin surface—they had drawn the eye so, as those things do, that they had broken up his face by optical illusion into something quite other than it was. Just like those photographs transmitted by radio, composed of consecutive dots instead of unbroken lines.

So that, though it had been just a matter of four or five midget wens of plaster, and he had been in the same room with me all the while, only now for the first time was I seeing him as he actually was.

My first thought was: “He looks awfully wholesome and friendly to kill a woman.”

I studied him as carefully as though life and death depended on it. They did. Kirk's life and death. Here he was, then, at this first meeting of ours: the line of the table and a glass with scotch watered to straw color in it. An idle hand beside that, half curved around nothing. Not brutish, as Mordaunt's had been, yet good and strong. A gold seal ring on one finger, holding a flat square stone with a crest engraved on it. An onyx, it appeared to be. The nails neat-looking and trimmed short with a pair of scissors, possibly, but not professionally manicured, not glossy from a buffer; in other words, just as they should be in good taste.