American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (90 page)

The man disappeared into the night, with the surveillance team trying to keep up behind him.

The microphone, left on the stairs, was still listening.

“Mommy—Mommy—who’s Lucas?”

The woman’s voice was very low. “It doesn’t matter, honey. Not any more.”

“All right,” Rogers said harshly, “let’s get going before he gets away from us.” He braced himself as the technician yanked his microphone back on its spring reel, thumbed the starter, and lurched the car forward.

Rogers was busy on his own radio, dispatching cover teams to cross the man’s path and pick up the surveillance before he could outwalk the team behind him. Finchley had nothing to say as the car moved up the street. His face, as they passed under a light, was haggard.

The car rolled past the nearest A.N.G. man. He looked upset, trying to walk fast enough to keep the hurrying man in sight and still not walk so fast as to attract attention. He threw a quick glance toward the car. His mouth was set, and his nostrils were flared.

Their headlights touched the bulky figure of their man. He was taking short, quick steps, his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He kept his face down.

“Where’s he going now?” Rogers said unnecessarily. He didn’t need Finchley to tell him.

“I don’t think he knows,” Finchley said.

In the darkness, the man was walking uptown on MacDougal Street. The lights of the coffee shops above Bleecker lay waiting for him. He saw them and turned abruptly toward an alley.

A girl had come down the steps of the house beside him, and he brushed by her. He stopped, suddenly, and turned. He raised his head, his mouth falling open. He was frozen in a pantomime of surprise. He said something. The car lights splashed against his face.

The girl screamed. Her throat opened and she clapped her hands to her eyes. The hideous sound she made was trapped in the narrow street.

The man began to run. He swerved into the alley, and even in the car, the sound of his feet was like someone pounding on a hollow box. The girl stood quiet now, bent forward, holding herself as though she were embarrassed.

“Get after him!” Rogers, in turn, was startled by the note his voice had struck. He dug his hands into the back of the front seat as the driver yanked the car into the alley.

The man was running well ahead of them. Their headlights shone on the back of his neck, and the glare of reflected light winked in the rippling shadows thrown by the flapping skirt of his trailing coat. He was running clumsily, like an exhausted man, and yet he was moving at fantastic speed.

“My God!” Finchley said. “Look at him!”

“No human being can run like that,” Rogers said. “He doesn’t have to drive his lungs. He won’t feel oxygen starvation as much. He’ll push himself as fast as his heart can stand.”

“Or faster.”

The man threw himself against a wall, breaking his momentum. He thrust himself away, down a cross street, headed back downtown.

“
Come
on!” Rogers barked at the driver. “Goose this hack.”

They screamed around the corner. The man was still far ahead, running without looking back. The street was lined with loading platforms at the backs of warehouses. There were no house lights, and street lamps only at the corners. A row of traffic lights stretched down toward Canal Street, changing from green to red in a pre-set rhythm that rippled along the length of the street in waves. The man careered down among them like something flapping, driven by a giant wind.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” Finchley muttered urgently. “He’ll kill himself.”

The driver jammed speed into the car, flinging them over the truck-broken street. The man was already well past the next corner. Now he turned his head back for an instant and saw them. He threw himself forward even faster, came to a cross street, and flailed around the corner, running toward Sixth Avenue now.

“That’s a one-way street against us!” the driver yelled.

“Take it anyway, you idiot!” Finchley shouted back, and the car plunged west with the driver working frantically at the wheel. “Now,
catch
him!” Finchley raged. “We can’t let him run to death!”

The street was lined with cars parked at the crowded curbs. The clear space was just wide enough for a single car to squeeze through, and somewhere a few blocks ahead of them another set of headlights was coming toward them, growing closer.

The man was running desperately now. As the car began to catch him, Rogers could see his head turning from side to side, looking for some narrow alleyway between buildings, or some escape of any kind.

When they pulled even with him, Finchley cranked his window down. “Martino! Stop! It’s all right. Stop!”

The man turned his head, looked, and suddenly reversed his stride, squeezing between two parked cars with a rip of his coat and running across the street behind them.

The driver locked his brakes and threw the gear lever into reverse. The transmission broke up, but it held the driveshaft rigid. The car slid on motionless wheels, leaving a plume of smoke upon the street, the tires bursting into flame. Rogers’ face snapped forward into the seat back, and his teeth clicked together. Finchley tore his door open and jumped out.

“Martino!”

The man had reached the opposite sidewalk. Still running west, he did not stop or look behind. Finchley began to run along the street.

As Rogers cleared the doorway on his side, he saw the oncoming car just on the other side of the next street, no more than sixty feet away.

“Finch! Get off the street!”

Their man had reached the corner. Finchley was almost there, still in the street, not daring to waste time and fight his way between the bumper-to-bumper parked cars.

“Martino! Stop! You can’t keep it up—Martino—you’ll die!”

The oncoming car saw them and twisted frantically into the cross street. But another car came around the corner from MacDougal and caught Finchley with its pointed fender. It spun him violently away, his chest already crumpled, and threw him against the side of a parked car.

For one second, everything stopped. The car with the crushed fender stood rocking at the mouth of the street. Rogers kept one hand on the side of the F.B.I. car, the stench of burnt rubber swirling around him.

Then Rogers heard the man, far down a street, still running, and wondered if the man had really understood anything he’d heard since the girl screamed at him.

“Call in,” he snapped to the F.B.I. driver. “Tell your headquarters to get in touch with my people. Tell them which way he’s going, and to pick up the tail on him.” Then he ran across the street to Finchley, who was dead.

The hotel on Bleecker Street had a desk on the ground floor and narrow stairs going up to the rooms. The entrance was a narrow doorway between two stores. The clerk sat behind his desk, his chair tipped back against the stairs, and sleepily drooped his chin on his chest. He was an old, worn-out man with gray stubble on his face, and he was waiting for morning so he could go to bed.

The front door opened. The clerk did not look up. If somebody wanted a room, they’d come to him. When he heard the shuffling footsteps come to a stop in front of him, he opened his eyes.

The clerk was used to seeing cripples. The rooms upstairs were full of one kind or another. And the clerk was used to seeing new things all the time. When he was younger, he’d followed things in the paper. It had been no surprise to him when the Third Avenue El was torn down, or cars came out with four headlights. But now that he was older, things just drifted by him. So he never was surprised at anything he hadn’t seen before. If doctors were putting metal heads on people, it wasn’t much different from the aluminum artificial legs that often stumped up and down the stairs behind him.

The man in front of the desk was trying to talk to him. But for a long while, the only sound he made was a series of long, hollow, sucking sounds as air rushed into his mouth. He held onto the front edge of the desk for a moment. He touched the left side of his chest. Finally he said, laboring over the words, “How much for a room?”

“Five bucks,” the clerk said, reaching behind him for a key. “Cash in advance.”

The man fumbled with a wallet, took out a bill, and dropped it on the desk. He did not look directly at the clerk, and seemed to be trying to hide his face.

“Room number’s on the key,” the clerk said, putting the money in the slot of a steel box bolted through the floor.

The man nodded quickly. “All right.” He gestured selfconsciously toward his face. “I had an accident,” he said. “An industrial accident. An explosion.”

“Buddy,” the clerk said, “I don’t give a damn. No drinking in your room and be out by eight o’clock, or it’s another five bucks.”

It was almost nine o’clock in the morning. Rogers sat in his cold, blank office, listening to the telephone ring. After a time, he picked it up.

“Rogers.”

“This is Avery, sir. The subject is still in the hotel on Bleecker. He came down a little before eight, paid another day’s rent, and went back to his room.”

“Thank you. Stay on it.”

He pushed the receiver back on the cradle and bent until his face was almost touching the desk. He clasped his hands behind his neck.

The interoffice buzzer made him straighten up again. He moved the switch over. “Yes?”

“We have Miss DiFillipo here, sir.”

“Would you send her in, please.”

He waited until the girl came in, and then let his hand fall away from the switch. “Come in, please. Here’s—here’s a chair for you.”

Angela DiFillipo was an attractive young brunette, a trifle on the thin side. Rogers judged her to be about eighteen. She came in confidently, and sat down without any trace of nervousness. Rogers imagined that in ordinary circumstances she was a calm, self-assured type, largely lacking in the little guilts that made even the most harmless people turn a bit nervous in this building.

“I’m Shawn Rogers,” he said, putting on a smile and holding out his hand.

She shook it firmly, almost mannishly, and smiled back without giving him the feeling that she was trying to make an impression on him. “Hello.”

“I know you have to get to work, so I won’t keep you here long.” He turned the recorder on. “I’d just like to ask you a few questions about last night.”

“I’ll be glad to help out.”

“Thank you. Now—your name is Angela DiFillipo, and you live at thirty-three MacDougal Street, here in New York, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Last night—that would be the twelfth—at about tenthirty p.m., you were at the corner of MacDougal and an alley between Bleecker and Houston Streets. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me how you got there and what happened?”

“Well, I’d just left the house to go to the delicatessen for some milk. The alley’s right next to the door. I didn’t particularly notice anybody, but I did know somebody was coming up MacDougal, because I could hear his footsteps.”

“Coming toward Bleecker? On the west side of the street?”

“Yes.”

“Go on, Miss DiFillipo. I may interrupt you again, to clarify the record, but you’re doing fine.” And the record’s piling up, he thought. For all the good it does.

“Well, I knew somebody was coming, but I didn’t take any special notice of it, of course. I noticed he was walking fast. Then he changed direction, as if he was going to go into the alley. I looked at him then, because I wanted to get out of his way. There was a streetlight behind him, so all I could see was that it was a man—a big man—but I couldn’t see his face. From the way he was walking, I didn’t think he saw me at all. He was headed straight for me, though, and I guess I got a little tensed up.

“Anyhow, I took a short step back, and he just brushed my sleeve. That made him look up, and I saw there was something odd about his face.”

“How do you mean ‘odd,’ Miss DiFillipo?”

“Just odd. I didn’t see what it was, then. But I got the feeling it had something wrong with it. And I guess that made me a little bit more nervous.”

“I see.”

“Then I saw his face. He stopped, and he opened his mouth —well, his face was metal, like one of those robot things in the Sunday paper, and it was where a mouth would be—and he looked surprised. And he said, in a very peculiar voice, ‘Barbara—it’s I—the German.’ ”

Rogers leaned forward in surprise. “Barbara—it’s I—the German? Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, sir. He sounded very surprised, and—”

“What is it, Miss DiFillipo?”

“I just realized what made me scream—I mean, what
really
did it.”

“Yes?”

“He said it in Italian.” She looked at Rogers with astonishment. “I just realized that.”

Rogers frowned. “He said it in Italian. And what he said was ‘Barbara—it’s I—the German.’ That doesn’t make sense, does it? Does it mean anything to you?”

The girl shook her head.

“Well.” Rogers looked down at the desk, where his hands were tapping a pencil on the blotter. “How good is your Italian, Miss DiFillipo?”

“I speak it at home all the time.”

Rogers nodded. Then something else occurred to him. “Tell me—I understand there are a number of regional Italian dialects. Could you tell which one he was using?”

“It sounded pretty usual. You might call it American Italian.”

“As if he’d been in the country a long time?”

“I guess so. He sounded pretty much like anybody around here. But I’m no expert. I just talk it.”

“I see. You don’t know anyone named Barbara? I mean—a Barbara who looks a little like you, say?”

“No . . . no, I’m sure I don’t.”

“All right, Miss DiFillipo. When he spoke to you, you screamed. Did anything else happen?”

“No. He turned around and ran into the alley. And then a car followed him in there. After that, one of your F.B.I. men came up to me and asked if I was all right. I told him I was, and he took me home. I guess you know all that.”

“Yes. And thank you, Miss DiFillipo. You’ve been very helpful. I don’t think we’ll need you again, but if we do we’ll be in touch with you.”