The Sinful Ones (2 page)

“I still haven’t the ghost of an idea what you’re talking about,” said Carr. “What am I?”

The girl hesitated.

“Tell me,” he said.

She shook her head. “If you honestly don’t know, I’m not sure I should tell you. As long as you don’t know, you’re safe. Relatively safe, that is. If I had had the opportunity of not knowing, I know how I would have chosen. At least I know how I’d choose now. Oh God, yes.”

Carr began to feel like the anecdotal man to whom a beautiful woman hands a note written in French which no one will translate for him. “Please stop being mysterious,” he said. “Just what is it about me that’s so important? Something I don’t know about my background? Or about my race? My political leanings? My psychological type? My love life?”

“But if you don’t know,” she went on, disregarding his questions, “and if I don’t tell you, then I’m letting you run a blind risk. Not a big one, but very terrible. And with them so close and perhaps suspecting…Oh, it’s so hard to decide.”

“They’re killing me!”

Carr jerked around. Miss Zabel squinted at him in agony, dropped an application folder in the wire basket, and hobbled off. Carr looked at the folder. It wasn’t for a girl at all. It started, “Jimmie Kozacs, Male. Age 43.”

He became aware that the frightened girl was studying his face again, as if she saw something there that she had missed the first time. It seemed to cause her dismay.

“Maybe you never were, until today,” she said, more to herself than him. “That would explain your not knowing. Maybe my bursting in here was what did it. Maybe I was the one who awakened you.”

She clenched her hands, torturing the palms with the long, untapered fingers, and Carr’s sardonic remark about having been awakened quite early in life died before it was born. “To think that I would ever do that to anyone!” she continued. “To think that I would ever cause anyone the agony that /he/ caused me! Oh, if only there were someone I could talk to, someone who could tell me what to do.’

The black misery in her voice caught at Car. “What
is
the matter?” he pleaded. “Please tell me.”

The girl looked shocked. “Now?” Her glance half-circled the room, strayed toward the glass wall. “No, not here. I can’t.” The fingers of her right hand rippled as if they were playing a frantic arpeggio. Suddenly they dived into the pocket of her cardigan and came out with a stubby, chewed pencil. She ripped a sheet from Carr’s scratch pad and began to scribble hurriedly.

As Carr watched her doubtfully, a big area of gray cloth swam into view. It was Tom Elvested, come ambling over from the next desk. The girl gave Tome a quick, queer look, then went on scribbling. Tom ignored her.

“Say, Carr,” he began amiably, “Midge and I are going on a date tonight. She’s got a girl-friend I think you’d like. A swell kid, lot of brains, but sort of shy and retiring. We’d like you to come along with us.”

“Sorry, I can’t, I’ve got a date,” Carr told him irritably. It annoyed him that Tom should discuss personal matters in front of an applicant.

“Now, don’t get the idea I’m asking you to do social service work,” Tom went on, a little huffily. “This girl’s darn good-looking and a lot more your type than—” he broke off.

“Than Marcia, you were going to say?” Carr asked him. “At any rate it’s Marcia I’ve got a date with.”

Tom looked at Carr for a moment. Then, “Okay,” he said, fading back. “Sorry you can’t come.”

The frightened girl was still scribbling. The scratch of her pencil seemed to Carr the only real sound in the whole office. He glanced guardedly down the aisle. The big blonde with the queer eyes was still at the door, but she had moved ungraciously aside to make way for a dumpy man in blue jeans, who was looking around uncertainly.

The dumpy man veered toward Miss Zabel. Her top-knot bobbed up from her typewriter and she said something. His uncertainty vanished. He gave her an “I getcha, pal” not and headed for Carr’s desk.

The frightened girl noticed him coming, shoved aside paper and pencil in a flurry of haste, and stood up.

“Sit down,” said Carr. “That fellow can wait. Incidentally, do you know Tom Elvested?” She disregarded the question and quickly moved into the aisle.

Carr followed her. “I really want to talk with you,” he said.

“No,” she breathed, edging away from him.

“But we haven’t got anywhere yet,” he objected.

Suddenly she smiled like a toothpaste ad. “Thank you for being so helpful,” she said in a loud voice. “I’ll think over what you’ve told me, though I don’t think the job is one which would appeal to me.” She poked out her hand. Automatically he told it. It was icy.

“Don’t follow me,” she whispered. “And if you care the least bit for me or my safety, don’t do anything, whatever happens.”

“But I don’t even know your name…” His voice trailed off. She was striding rapidly down the aisle. The big blonde was standing squarely in her path. The girl did not swerve an inch. Then, just as they were about to collide, the other woman lifted her hand and gave the girl a stinging slap across the cheek.

Carr started, winced, took a forward step, froze.

The other woman stepped aside, smiling sardonically.

The girl rocked, wavered for a step or two, then walked on without turning her head.

No one said anything, no one did anything, no one jumped up, no one even looked up, at least not conspicuously, although everyone in the office must have heard the slap if they hadn’t seen it. But with the universal middle-class reluctance, Carr thought, to get mixed up in any trouble unless they were forced to, they pretended not to notice.

The big blonde flicked into place a shellacked curl, glancing around her as if as so much dirt. Leisurely she turned and stalked out.

Carr walked back to his desk. His face felt hot, his mind was turbulent. The office around him seemed out of key, turbidly sinister, a little like the scenery of a nightmare—the downtown gloom pressing on the tall, faintly grimed windows, the hazy highlights on the polished desks, the meaningless phrases hanging in the air.

The dumpy man in blue jeans had already taken the girl’s place, but for the moment Carr ignored him. He didn’t down. The scrap of paper on which the girl had scribbled caught his eye. He picked it up.

Watch out (it read) for the wall-eyed blonde, the young man without a hand, and the affable-seeming older man. But the small dark man with glasses is your friend.

Carr frowned grotesquely. “Wall-eyed blonde…”—that must be the woman who had been watching. But as for the other three—“small dark man with glasses is your friend…”—it sounded like a charade.

“Thanks, I guess I will,” said the dumpy man casually, plucking at something in the air.

Carr started to turn over the paper to see if she’d scribbled anything on the opposite side, when—

“No, I got a light,” said the dumpy man.

Carr looked at him and forgot everything else. The dumpy man had lit a match and was cupping it about three inches from his curiously puckered lips. There was a slight hissing noise and the flame curtsied as he sucked in. He smiled gratefully over this cupped hands at Carr’s empty chair. Then one hand shook out the match and the other moved in toward his lips, paused a moment, then moved out about a foot from his face, first and second fingers extended like a priest giving a blessing. After an interval the hand moved in again, the hissing inhalation was repeated, and the dumpy man threw back his head and exhaled through tightened nostrils.

Obviously the man was smoking a cigarette.

Only there was no cigarette.

Carr wanted to laugh, there was something so droll about the realism of the movements. He remembered the pantomimes in the acting class in college. You pretended to drive an automobile or eat a dinner or write a letter, without any props, just going through the motions. In that class the dumpy man would have rated an A-plus.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the dumpy man said to Carr’s empty chair, wagging his extended fingers over the brown-gummed ashtray.

Suddenly Car didn’t want to laugh at all. Obviously, as obviously as any such things can be, this man wasn’t an actor.

“Yeah, I did it about eight months. Came into it from weld assembly,” continued the dumpy man between imaginary puffs. “I was coming up from my second test when me and the wife decided to move here to get away from her mother.”

Carr felt a qualm of uneasiness. He hesitated, then slowly bent forward from where he was standing, until his face was hardly a foot from that of the dumpy man and almost squarely in front of it.

The dumpy man didn’t react, didn’t seem to see him at all, kept talking through him to the chair.

“Oh, it’s dirty work all right. I had my share of skin trouble. But I can take it.”

“Stop it,” said Carr.

“No, I passed it after I’d been there three months.” The dumpy man was amiably emphatic. “It was my full inspector’s I was coming up for. I was due to get my stamps.”

Carr shivered. “Stop it,” he said very distinctly. “Stop it.”

“Sure, all sorts of stuff. Circular and longitudinal magnetism. Machine parts, forging, welds, tie-beams…”

“Stop it,” Carr repeated and grabbed him firmly by the shoulder.

What happened made Carr wish he hadn’t. The dumpy man’s face grew strained and red, like an enraged baby’s. An intense throbbing was transmitted to Carr’s hand. And from the lips came a mounting, meaningless mutter.

Carr jerked back. He felt craven and weak, as helpless as a child. He edged away until he was standing behind Tom Elvested, who was engrossed with a client.

He could hardly bring his voice up to a whisper.

“Tom, I’ve got a man who’s acting funny. Would you help me?”

Tom didn’t look up, apparently didn’t hear.

Across the room Carr saw a gray-mustached man walking briskly. He hurried over to him, looking back apprehensively at the dumpy man, who was still sitting there red-faced.

“Dr. Wexler,” he blurted, “I’ve got a lunatic on my hands and I think he’s about to throw a fit. Would you—?”

But Dr. Wexler walked on without slackening his pace and disappeared through the black curtains of the eye-testing cubicle.

At that instant, as Car watched the black curtains swing together, a sudden spasm of extreme terror seized him. As if something huge and hostile were poised behind him, he dared not lift his head, look up, make a move.

It was like the momentary chill he had felt hen no one had reacted to the slap. Only much more intense.

His feelings were a little like those of a man in a waxworks museum, who speaks to a guide only to find that he has addressed one of the wax figures.

His paralyzed thoughts, suddenly working like lightning, snatched at the analogy and worried it morbidly.

What if the whole world were like a waxworks museum? In motion, of course, like clockworks, but utterly mindless, purposeless, mechanical. What if he, a wax figure like the others, had suddenly come alive and stepped out of his place, and the whole show was going on without him, because it was just a machine and didn’t care or know whether he was there or not?

That would explain the dumpy man going through the motions of an interview—one mechanical toy-figure carrying on just as well without its partner. It would explain why Tom and Dr. Wexler had disregarded him

What if it really were true?

What if the ends of the earth were nearer to you than the mind you thought lay behind the face you spoke to?

What if the things people said, the things that seemed to mean so much, were something recorded on a kind of phonograph record a million years ago?

What if you were all alone?

For an instant longer his thought-train—it had taken only a few moments—held him paralyzed. Then he came to himself with a start.

Life flooded back into the office. People moved and spoke. He almost laughed out loud at his ridiculous spasm of terror.

Why, what an idiot he’d been to get alarmed because Tom, who doubtless felt huffy toward him because of their last conversation, had momentarily ignored a mumbled, perhaps unheard, question? Or because the same thing had happened with Dr. Wexler, whose deafness and preoccupation were both notorious!

And how silly of him to lose his nerve just because he had got an applicant who was something of a psychotic!

He straightened himself and walked back to his desk, warily, but with self-confidence.

The dumpy man was still muttering at the air, but his face had assumed its original color. He didn’t look violent. Carr disregarded him and glanced at the application blank Miss Zabel had brought a few minutes earlier: “Jimmie Kozacs. Age 43.”

The dumpy man looked about that age.

A little farther down on the blank, his eye caught the words, “Magnetic Inspector.” If he remembered rightly the duties of the job in question, they fitted with the things the dumpy man had been saying.

The dumpy man got up. Again he plucked something from the air. “So all I got to do is show ’em this at the gate?” he remarked gravely. “Thank’s a lot, er…” He glanced at the nameplate on Carr’s desk. “…Mr. Mackay. Aw, don’t get up. Well, thanks a lot.”

Heartily the dumpy man shook hands with nothing, turned and walked off. Carr watched him go. A smile that was half nervous amusement, half relief, flickered around his lips.

Miss Zabel came limping by with a stack of file-folders.

“I swear I’m going to cut them off and donate them to medical research,” she moaned to Carr.

Carr chortled. His sense of normalcy was restored.

CARR TOOK THE brass-edged steps three at a time, crossed the lobby, pushed hurriedly through the revolving door which always made him feel like a squirrel in a wheel. He joined the crowd streaming toward Michigan Boulevard.

Street lights were beginning to supplement the canyoned twilight. Newsboys were shouting. Bus stops and islands of dubious safety were crowded, likewise the stairways leading to the long El platforms. From the wide doorways of multi-storage garages, cars were edging forward by stages, bluffing their way into the thick traffic. Other cars were being honked at while they paused to pick up riders. Lone pedestrians darted between bumpers in a way that would have made everyone flinch in a less punch-drunk city than Chicago.