The Black Angel (16 page)

It made a man who happened to be waiting for the same train underground that I was the following evening and eyed me once or twice as he roamed about the tunnel platform just what such a thing would have always been to me, no more: a man who happened to be waiting for the same train underground that I was.

For danger was now foolishly locked in a watertight compartment, a cell, at Mordaunt's house and could not be anywhere else. Just a man in a nondescript suit, wearing a nondescript hat—I think it was brown; no, gray; no, I didn't know what it was—who stood before a mirrored chewing-gum purveyor clamped to a post and eyed his own face. Only his face was a little too far over to one side to be contained entirely within the mirror, and I was in the distance beyond, seated waiting upon the bench, so that his range of vision must have automatically taken me in.

He disappeared when the downtown train came fuming in; there were many cars to choose from, after all, but this was
post factum
in any case. He had already disappeared from my thoughts some time before; in fact, had never entered them.

And if, on changing over to the East Side line to get down to Canal Street he materialized a second time, in the closer confinement of the shuttle train, my quarantine of all danger within Mordaunt's house made this nothing, made it just a coincidence. Hundreds of people a day, every hour, changed from the West Side to the East Side lines. Why shouldn't he?

There were more cars to choose from again, once the shuttle was done with, and again he disappeared.

My decision to go down there, to carry out the unsavory expedition that had been assigned to me, was predicated upon the following line of reasoning: I needed at the very least another interview with Mordaunt, if possible several more. I had obtained nothing the first time, and yet I had obtained the promise of everything. He had known Mia Mercer; he had
not
acted in the capacity of personal physician to her but in some illicit relationship. There was every hope of a motive lurking there if I was just given time to unearth it. A motive, and perhaps even proof itself. A man who would interview an intended accomplice with a revolver bared upon the table would almost certainly not hesitate to smother one to death who had crossed him or jeopardized him in some way. Very well; I could not hope for a second interview with him unless I first discharged his errand. Therefore, I was on my way to discharge it this Sunday night, this night of peace and rest in New York.

Oh, I was under no illusions as to its basic nature. And yet I was curiously naïve, even after the lengthy scene that had passed between us. I realized perfectly that it was some sort of criminal enterprise; the sums of money I was to receive told that, and, above all, the elaborate precautions taken to preserve anonymity both on the parts of those I was to contact and on the part of myself. And yet, difficult as it is to believe, I was still unsuspecting of its exact category. I thought it must be money owed to him for some sort of unlawful services rendered—and this could have been anything from falsifying records to performing criminal operations—and that he could not safely collect otherwise than in this indirect manner. My mind, in the torrent of other details, had developed a curious blind spot; it glossed over those packets that had passed between us as a meaningless stopgap offered by him solely to make our interview plausible. In other words, should he be brought up short and queried, ever, he could say he had treated me only as a doctor treats a patient, had prescribed for me, had given me some sedative, headache powder, strengthener, or whatever it was, for my spells of dizziness and would have my word to corroborate his and perhaps some office or desk jotting to show for it as well.

Wise, therefore, and yet blind at the same time, I neared the Spotless Cafeteria. I looked in as one who takes a moment to decide what food she will select before entering.

It was surprisingly well filled with people at this hour; all the choicer tables near the front had their occupants, and though many seemed to have finished their collations long ago they lingered on, chatting in groups of two and three. It seemed to be used, like many such a place, almost as much for social purposes as for eating purposes.

I thought: “He wants me to go in here. I'm to get money in here.” I swung the circular door around and pulled a pasteboard tab from the dispenser that stood like a tollgate just within. A bell reverberated shrilly, but no one even turned his head to look; it pealed like that every-time anyone entered.

I took a tray and trucked it along the rail before the counters. The paper that he'd burned had said “shredded wheat.” I couldn't see any. When I had reached the end I even retreated back the way I had come for some little distance to make sure I hadn't overlooked it. Finally I had to call over the attendant behind the counter and ask him if they hadn't any.

“No,” he said, “but I can open a package for you; we got some inside for the morning turnover.”

He came back in a moment from their larder or whatever it was with two of the familiar little oblong cakes on a plate.

He said while he was punching my ticket, “We used to get calls for this late at night. A customer used to come in and ask for it like you every once in a while, but he hasn't been around in a long time now. It's really a breakfast food.”

I wondered if he knew that it was a signal. I looked at him and he didn't seem to, seemed to be talking just out of friendliness, but I couldn't be sure.

I put it on my tray and went over and sat down at the very last table against the wall.

The bell chimed and a man came in and went over and drew himself a cup of coffee from the spigot in the wall. His back was to me, but he looked vaguely like the same man I'd seen twice before since leaving my own place tonight. I decided that must be just a mistaken impression; coincidences don't run in threes like that.

I'd finished crumbling the substance, and it made a little mound, like dried leaves, in the middle of my platter. I wondered whether I was supposed to eat it. I wasn't particularly anxious to. Although I may not have been gripped by fright as I had been at the doctor's house, I was fairly tense and wishing it were over.

The man with the cup of coffee had submerged into the crowd of heads. However, remote as he was from me, there was a diagonal passage of clearance still left between us, so that I could still see him where he now sat, and he could have still seen me had he cared to. But he refrained from looking in my direction, became intent on his own immediate concerns, so that all I could see was the downturned crease of his hat crown. However, it occurred to me that there
was
a striking similarity in general vagueness between him and the person I had already glimpsed twice on the trains coming here ton——

Before I could pursue this speculative train of thought any further a newspaper had suddenly opened before me across the table, and there was someone sitting there. No bell had rung, so he must have been in the place already.

He was scanning a headline fixedly. It only takes a limited time to read a headline, but his eyes remained upon it steadily, never dropping down to the further matter below.

I could feel my heart quicken a little.

He was sitting sidewise to me, the way most readers do at confined little tables like that. I could see a segment of his profile in the gap between newspaper screen and the wall at the back of his head.

“Got it?” he slurred without twitching a facial muscle. For a minute I almost thought he was mumbling over something he'd read to himself, the way some newspaper readers do, it was emitted so deftly.

Before I could answer he had already tired of waiting.

“What's matter, didn't he tell you about me?”

“Yes, but I don't know who——”

Before I could finish speaking he had again tired of waiting.

“What's matter, ain't you got nothing? Didn't he give you nothing?”

“Well, he only gave me——”

He was conditioned to a hairspring tautness.

“Don't take so long. I can't hold this paper like this all night. There's other people in here. You new?”

“What do you want me to do?” I said helplessly.

“Push your bag over this way.” He raised one elbow from the table top to allow it passage underneath without disturbing his newspaper.

Mesmerized by the strangeness of the whole thing, I prodded it forward until it had overbalanced on his side. His legs scissored together and arrested it, still without fluctuating the outspread newssheet.

One hand left its margin, letting the table support it at that end. Though it wavered a little and threatened to crumple, it remained upright, stiffened by its own bulky width.

I heard the smothered sound of the catch snapping open. There was a sense of stealthy activity that remained invisible, was more in his breathing than anything else. Then suddenly, with vicious recoil, “Where's what he gave you?”

“He only gave me something for my——Pull that zipper across.”

The catch snapped closed again. His nostrils were pinched with the receding fury that had choked them for a minute.

The bag was suddenly back where it had been; his finger grip was back at the margin of the newspaper again. The two phenomena, black and pink, reappeared almost simultaneously, so swiftly was it done, though one must in the nature of things have preceded the other.

Before I knew it the enshrouding paper was gone; he was gone with the swiftness of a dream. Only the winged doors were spinning around empty, showing black night through them where he'd flitted out a moment ago.

I drew the retrieved bag down to my own lap and examined it under shelter of the table line. One of the packets the doctor had given me was gone. There was a bone-shaped crush of money down in its depths, tight at the waist, as if from long, convulsive hand pressure. Two hundred and fifty dollars, when I had paired and counted it.

I looked sightlessly up in a sort of belated terror only striking now. There must be something in those——“You knew,” I said to myself accusingly; “you knew all along, but you didn't want to admit it to yourself. You wanted to keep your conscience from hindering you in carrying through your own purpose, to which this is a necessary preliminary. So you stamped the thought down. You wanted to make it some crime you could disassociate yourself from, such as a fee for some illicit operation.”

I looked around me appalled, far more frightened now that he'd gone than I had been while I was still sitting scarcely two feet away from him.

No one in the place was looking at me. The busman behind the counter was busied at his duties, eyes down. The cashier within his little glass cubicle was reading a paper while he waited between departing customers. That man with the cup of coffee was holding it very steady, looking down into it, as though he had detected a speck in it. Not at me, into his cup. Then he went ahead and drank, completing the movement he seemed to have arrested for a moment. Detected. Arrested. That was simply my mind, using the first thought expressions that came to hand without stopping to examine them.

I got up and I made my way out in turn, sick and shaken and feeling a thousand years old; my shoulders clammy and weighted down, as if all the filthy, disinterred evil there was in the world had been dumped out upon them.

My resolve not to go on to the next place, now that I knew, was short-lived. Various factors played their part in canceling it, like snatches of inner voice, rallying me each one in turn. “I'd go ahead doing even this for you, Kirk.” “I've done it once already; there can be no greater harm in repeating it than there was in doing it the first time.” “I can't go back unless I do.” “These people are not the victims of it; they are the professional distributors, retailers, so to speak.” And lastly, there was a sort of glimmering of enlightenment that seemed to come of it, this hesitancy of mine, that did more than anything else in sending me onward.
She
had refused to go to the next place—metaphorically speaking, for she hadn't tramped from place to place afoot; she had been a luxurious lady—but she had refused to go onward at some point or other, and a pillow had come down over her face, to blot out any retained memory of that “next place,” to stifle any future revelation of it.

And if the very act of what I was engaged in produced the motive itself, intact, like that, so that all that was still needed was proof of the deed, how could I refuse to proceed? It would have been the grossest treachery to my own aims.

The Oregon Bar, then, on Third above Forty-ninth, in the first half-hour after twelve that same night. It was deep and narrow, like an alcove piercing the building it was situated in. It was dark with a sort of colored darkness that was the tint of it. Although there were lights, and they were dusky orange, copper-rose, and other similar feverish hues, it was the darkness you were conscious of more than them; its overall cast was dimness, a confettilike twilight.

It was not an unduly prosperous place, even of its kind. Though I was no connoisseur I could sense in its atmosphere something static, stagnant, as of an establishment keeping its head above water, no more, the moment I put my foot across the threshold.

There were only men at the bar, but on the other side of the narrow aisle that was all it provided for ingress or egress there were tables set within head-high partitions that came out from the wall like the teeth of a comb, though far fewer, naturally. At one or two of these sat women of the type, I supposed, you would find in a place like this. Shell-like and brittle and empty inside, where they were young; like those celluloid dolls they used to sell, weighted at the bottom, so that they reared upright again no matter how often you pushed them flat. Lumpy and doughy and filled with a sort of resentful despair, where they were less than young. They were not, for one thing, young or old, of the outright demimondaine type. One bloated, stringy-haired woman was obviously drinking beer with her own husband, and they would finish up the night by beating one another around the walls of their tenement flat until the police were called.