Blue City (18 page)

The next building was the Public Library, and memory or instinct led me around the back of it to the other side. There was a rusty old fire escape here, with an iron ladder nine or ten feet from the ground. I jumped for the bottom rung, went up hand over hand till I got a foothold, and climbed to the platform at the second story. The window was partly open, and the room inside looked deserted. From the direction of the church I heard a rhythmic pounding and then a smash, as if they had forced the back door. I hoisted my legs over the sill and locked the window behind me. I stood against the wall for a minute or two, breathing the peaceful smell of furniture oil and old books, and listening to my heart slow down.

Three of the four walls of the big square room were lined with bookshelves. Against the fourth there was a semicircular counter with a swinging door at the side. A sign propped on the counter said: “Children’s Department: Circulating Desk: Hours from 3 to 5:30
P.M
.” I breathed easier. It looked as if nobody would be here in the morning. There was a bulletin board beside the open door, and I scanned the notices nervously. The largest was a hand-painted invitation to: “Come and Hear Miss Flicka Runymede’s weekly Series of Readings from Andersen and
Grimm”; Thursday’s tales were to be “The Little Match Girl” and “The Ugly Duckling.”

A pair of dragging feet began to ascend the creaky stairs on the other side of the door. I ran across the room on my toes, vaulted the circulation desk, and sat down behind in between piles of books. The footsteps dragged across the landing and the door squeaked open. “That’s goshdarned funny,” an old man’s voice said to itself: “I was goshdarned sure I opened that window this morning.” I began to regret the impulse that had made me close it.

The feet crossed the floor so slowly, as if time itself had creeping paralysis, that I wanted to get behind him and push.

“I’ll be goldarn goshdarned,” the old man sputtered to himself. “I didn’t even unlock the goldamned thing.” I heard him fling the window wide open. “This time, stay open, see? I got more to do than going around opening windows the whole Jehosophat day.”

Somebody shouted outside: “Hey, there! Did you see anybody running past here?”

“Nope,” the old man said. “I ain’t seen nobody nohow. Who you looking for?”

“An escaped murderer. An insane killer that killed a woman up the street.”

“A murderer?” the old man quavered at the window.

“You think I’m kidding, grandpa? Did you see him or hear anything?”

“I didn’t hear nobody or nothing.”

“Well, if you do, just sing out. We’ll be around here searching.”

“Certainly will, officer. Yes, sir. But I hope to Moses he don’t come around here.”

The old man’s feet recrossed the room in a syncopated shuffle and creaked back down the steps. When I could no longer hear him on the stairs, I climbed out from behind the counter and followed him out the door. Because I didn’t dare go back to the windows, I had to find another way out. By leaning on the banister and shifting my weight gradually from step to step, I kept the stairs from creaking. There was a landing halfway down, from which I could see that the stairs led into the main entrance hall of the library. I was weighing the chances of making a run for it when I saw the back of a blue policeman’s uniform at the front door.

Opening off the landing was a door with a groundglass window which bore the lettering: “Storage Department.” I tried the knob, found that it gave, and went through into a dark corridor. At the end of the corridor was a second door that opened into a long, low room. Shelves of yellowing newspapers and books with worn bindings rose from floor to ceiling between narrow aisles. I had a wild impulse to browse among the old newspapers, perhaps to find an account of my father’s murder, or his wedding, or the last party he threw. It was the impulse of a man who had no time to lose and nothing to gain by saving it.

At the far end of the room, between green-blinded windows, there was a shelf labeled: “These Books Are Not To Be Circulated.” Some of the titles I noticed were
Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Sentimental Education, To Have and Have Not, The Wild Palms
. It was somehow comforting
to know that the good people of the town that supported Kerch were protected against the lubricity of Rabelais, the immorality of Flaubert, the viciousness of Hemingway, and the degradation of Faulkner.

There was a circular iron staircase in the corner to my right, leading down into darkness. I descended by it to the next floor, where I found myself among dim bookshelves, probably the main stacks of the library. The iron stairs led down further, and I followed them for two more flights and felt a cement floor under my feet. The basement windows were small and placed high in the concrete wall, but I started towards them to see if they opened. The longer I stayed where I was, the more thoroughly I’d be encircled and the more certainly caught in the end.

Before I reached the first of the row of windows, the polished black leather legs of a motorcycle cop strode across it. The sight of them was like a blow in the face, which sent me backwards across the room to the opposite wall. I backed into a door, found the latch, and went through it into the next room. This was a toilet and washroom, lit by a naked bulb which hung on a cord from the ceiling above a cracked mirror and sink.

So many faces had passed, so many things had happened before my eyes in the last twelve hours that I had forgotten I had a face myself. When I looked at it in the clouded mirror, I would have been willing to settle for none. I was pale under the streaks of dirt, and the black beard coming out of my cheeks and chin made me look paler. There was a dark abrasion on the left angle of my jaw. Worst of all were my eyes, a blue sludge color framed in pink, as if I had spent
the night carousing and having a hell of a time. I didn’t like my face. It didn’t have any frank, boyish charm at all. With the dark-red spatter on my shirt, I looked like a refugee from a murder rap. A little crazy, too, in a sly way.

I washed my face in cold water and combed the front part of my hair with a pocket comb. The back of my head was a stiff and tangled mass which hurt to the touch. Then I cautiously opened the door and looked through into the next room.

It was a windowless cell with several open lockers along one wall, and along the other a row of hooks from which hung two or three hats and topcoats. I tried each of the coats and found a worn Oxford gray that would go over my shoulders without tearing. The greasy old fedora that went with it was too big for me, but I needed a hat. My own had been lost somewhere, I didn’t know when. So I jammed it on my head with the brim resting on my ears. To complete the disguise, I found a dusty pair of rimless spectacles on the top shelf of one of the open lockers, and a big leather book in another. The spectacles blurred my vision, even after I had wiped them, but that was all to the good. Maybe they’d make my eyes look different.

I went back through the washroom and peered over the spectacles into the mirror. I recognized myself all right, but perhaps I looked a little like an impecunious scholar, and even a trifle Jewish. I hoped that native fascism hadn’t progressed in the city to the point where the police would think I was a suspicious character because I looked Jewish.

I retraced my steps across the basement, up the spiral staircase, through the storage department, and out onto
the landing above the entrance hall. The policeman was still standing with his back to the door. I felt shaky and conspicuous, like an inexperienced diver about to go off the high board for the first time. But I hunched my shoulders in what I hoped would look like a scholar’s stoop, and went down the stairs to the door.

I pulled open the heavy glass door and mumbled: “Excuse me, officer,” to the policeman’s broad back.

“Pardon me.” He stepped aside out of my way.

I walked down the stone steps in front of him, using all my self-control to keep from breaking into a run. There was a police car parked at the curb, which contained a man in plain clothes listening to his short-wave radio. There were two more policemen and a group of civilians on the corner in front of the church. I crossed the street in front of the parked car and walked away in the opposite direction from the church. When I reached the corner I refrained from looking back. I turned downtown and started walking faster. Main Street would be a tough gauntlet to run, but the only person I could go to for help lived in the Harvey Apartments, on the other side of the business district. And even she was an off-chance.

I passed a number of people and none of them paid any attention to me. The life of the city was going on as if Floraine Weather had never died, or never lived. There was a bus parked on the next corner, headed in the direction I wanted to go, and I joined the line of passengers and got on.

“How much?” I said to the driver.

“Five cents in the downtown zone. Say, it sure looks as if you’re gonna read a book.”

“Yeah.”

I found an unoccupied seat in the back and opened the book in my lap. It was St. Augustine’s
City of God
, in Latin. At the next stop, which was Main Street, most of the passengers got off and left me feeling kind of naked. I stayed where I was, pretending to be engrossed in Latin I couldn’t read.

“Hey, bud,” the driver said. “You with the book. It cost you another fare if you want to stay on.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“To Farmers’ Square and up Fenton Boulevard. That where you want to go?”

I got off in a hurry, hugging my book. The policeman on the corner glanced at me curiously, looked away for a moment at the traffic, and looked back at me with renewed interest. I went in at the first open door I came to. It happened to be a barbershop.

The barber standing beside an empty chair at the back snapped a towel like a lion tamer who has seen a lion. “Shave or haircut, sir?”

My nerves recoiled at the thought of spending half an hour in a barber’s chair, with a policeman just outside. “I just came in to get some hair tonic. I’ve been troubled by dandruff.”

“Would you just mind taking your hat off, let me look at your scalp?”

“Yes, I would. I just want you to sell me a bottle of hair tonic.”

“Very well, sir. O.K. What kind would you wish?”

“That kind.” I pointed at a bottle with a purple label.

“Yes, sir. Virility Violet. Very effective for dandruff, Virility Violet. That will be one dollar, and three cents tax.”

I set my book down on a table and took out my wallet to pay him. As I did so, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the policeman watching me through the window.

“Is there a back way out of here?”

“Yes, sir. Right through there. You sick or something?”

“Yes,” I said, and left him.

“Hey, you forgot your tonic! You forgot your book—”

The door closing behind me cut off his voice, but I could still hear the police whistle in the street.

The rat in the maze was getting tired but as the experiment proceeded, the stimuli were becoming more powerful. I ran down a dark corridor, saw daylight under an ill-fitting door, and came out in an alley. Forty or fifty feet from the back door of the barbershop an old delivery truck stood shuddering, with its back doors swinging open. There was nobody in sight just then but there soon would be. I sprinted for the truck and crawled in. Behind the driver’s seat there was a pile of old burlap bags, and I covered myself with them and lay still, breathing the odor of rancid coffee beans.

In a few seconds I heard somebody come out and, with a straining grunt, lift something heavy onto the back of the truck. Then a door slammed open and several pairs of running feet came down the alley.

“Did you see a man in a dark-gray coat? He just came out of the back of the barbershop.”

“Not me, officer,” a boy’s voice said. “I been loading this here truck and I didn’t see nobody.”

“He must’ve gone the other way,” the barber said. “Out
on Randall Street. I thought there was something funny about that character—”

“Who?” asked the delivery boy.

“He’s a murderer. He chopped up a woman into little pieces.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Let’s go!” the policeman said. “Maybe we can head him off.”

Their heavy footsteps went away like a receding doom. The boy ran into the building and left me the action of my heart to listen to. After a while he came out and climbed into the driver’s seat. The idling motor took hold and the truck began to move.

“Hey, wait a minute!” somebody yelled, and the driver slammed brakes on the truck and my breathing. My hand moved up my thigh, across my hip, and found the gun in my pocket.

“What you want, Pete?”

“You goin’ up past Gormlay’s?”

“Yeah. I can drop you there. Hop in.”

The door was flung open and the other seat creaked under weight. Two people in the front made it too bad for somebody. Probably me. But at least the truck was moving again, away from the danger zone.

“That was a pretty slinky little blonde I seen you with last night,” the driver said.

“Her?” The other boy’s voice was scornful. “I can take her or leave her alone. But she’s crazy about me, and that always helps. I give her a break every now and then.”

“Any time you don’t need her, you can drop her on my doorstep. I got a use for slinky little blondes.”

“I thought you was makin’ out with Rose?”

“Sure, I see her regular. But what I always say, variety, you know, the spice of life. I figure I’m a little young to settle down for keeps. I wanta look ’em over first. Like in business now.”

The truck bumped down a curb and turned left into a roaring stream of traffic. Minute by minute it was getting harder for me to lie still. Though I was probably getting enough air through the loosely woven burlap, I had the feeling that I wasn’t. I felt like a Turk in a sack on his last ride to the Bosphorus.

“What’s it got to do with business? Pleasure is what I call it.”

“Look at it this way,” the driver said. “I got something to sell, in a way. Does a guy that’s got something to sell let it go to the first bidder? No sir, not the way I do business! It’s the same with a dame. My plan is to look ’em over first and take the best I can get.”