A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Mannequin

As usual Leone was well in advance of the nightly seven o’clock stampede to quit work and go home. She was the first of them all to reach the bronze statuette with its spray of flesh-colored light-bulbs at the foot of the stairs on the main floor, while the rest of the girls were still only working their way down from the upper floors. Their clamor could be heard coming down the staircase ahead of them, they were like a bunch of noisy school-children when the dismissal-bell has rung.

“Take it easy there!” a voice ordered with phony severity as her feet came off the last step onto the marble floor with a flat, slapping impact.

Startled, she turned her head around, but without stopping, for seven o’clock was seven o’clock. It was only the lift-boy, grinning at her. “Who for? You?” she called back with arrogant unconcern as she rushed on ahead to meet the evening.

Then she remembered just in time, and stopped short while still shielded by the projecting stone-trim framing the street-entrance. Cautiously, she extended just the tip of her nose and the width of one eye out beyond it for a moment’s precautionary look beforehand out where she intended going.

There he was again, big as life, waiting a few yards down the sidewalk from her, shoulders leaning back up against the building-wall. She had an unappealing (to her, anyway) glimpse of a loose-fitting knee-short olive gabardine topcoat, of a yeast-pallid complexion with a cigarette stuck into it, like a thermometer taking its owner’s temperature.

Every night now for — how long? More than a week, wasn’t it? And maybe even longer, for most likely she hadn’t noticed him right away from the start.

She’d had men hang around and follow her before — every girl does — but not like this. They’d close in after a short distance, a few yards, a block or two, tip their hats, make an opening remark — and promptly get brushed off good and solid. He didn’t do anything like this: never came any closer, never spoke or tried to speak to her. And most significant, and most unsalubrious, of all, after one or two long, hard, almost-paralyzing stares on the earlier nights, now he pretended not to be looking at her at all. She could never catch his eyes, even though she knew they had been on her only a second before, making her own respond in automatic reflex. It was this part of it that was the scariest and creepiest part of the whole thing. Being stalked is one thing, but this turned it from an amatory into a jungle-kind of thing.

In other words, he didn’t give her any chance to defend herself. How can you defend yourself when no offense has been committed — yet?

What did he want with her? What was it all about? Was he one of these screws, these oddballs, that get their kicks just looking at girls from a distance without going near them at all, and then go home and dream their dirty little dreams?

Whatever he was and whatever it was he was after, he kept gaining ground, encroaching on her more and more as night followed night, while still keeping the distance between them fixed and unbridged, as it was now. The first couple of nights, for example, she’d managed to disengage herself from him at the crowded bus-stop where she took her bus, simply by waiting until the last possible moment before she jumped on, and thus leaving him stranded back there in the crowd. After that he knew which bus she took, so it wouldn’t work anymore. Then she shook him off by a reverse twist, maneuvering so that she succeeded in keeping him on the bus while she bolted off it without warning at her rightful getting-off place, and he was sent riding on foolishly past her to a destination that hadn’t even been his in the first place. But it was a hard thing to do, and now he knew her right departure-point this wouldn’t work a second time either. From there on in, it was a case of following her along the street at a carefully held-back distance, just enough to keep her in sight the whole time, and seeing which house she went in. She knew he was back there somewhere every step of the way, even though she couldn’t see him at all times. All that remained now was for him to come up openly to the door and try to get into the house after her. And the moment he did that, the tables swung all the way around and the law was suddenly over on her side.

But for tonight at least the problem remained, there before her, a few yards away.

She had to get the bus to go home down that way, past him. If she turned and went up the other way, she stood a good chance of slipping away unnoticed, he might not recognize her from the back. But this meant walking around all four sides of a very long block, in order to get back to where the bus-stop was. And after a hard day, on her feet most of the time since early that morning, she couldn’t face the thought. A better idea suddenly occurred to her. She turned and went back in again, almost as quickly as she had come out just now. She had to fight her way upstream against the surging tide of girls who were now pouring out the front entrance.

“Forget something, Leone?” a passing voice asked.

She didn’t bother to answer.

She accosted the lift-boy whom she’d passed a moment ago on her way out. “Emile, are you finished with that newspaper you have stuck in your back-pocket?”

“Not quite,” he said reluctantly. “I don’t get much chance—”

She reached out and pulled it away from him anyway. “Don’t be so stingy. I’ve shared parts of my lunch with you often enough, haven’t I?”

“All right, keep it,” he consented grudgingly. “Since when are you getting so studious? Next thing, you’ll be reading a book.”

She went back to the outer edge of the doorway again, keeping herself in just far enough out of sight of the waiter staked-out out there. She folded the paper over three times, so that it had bulk enough to stand upright by itself without sagging over at the top. Then she raised it to the approximate level of her face, covering the side of it that would have to pass closest to him, and held it that way with one hand. As if she was reading with her head turned aside to the paper, while she was walking along. It looked a little grotesque, but not to the point of conspicuousness.

She looked behind her and waited until a group of three had come out together, all going the same way obviously because they had their arms linked in comradely relaxation after the long hard working-day. She attached herself to them with a long swing around to their outermost side, and the four of them passed him abreast. Looking under the bottom of the newspaper, she could see his shoes standing there up against the building.

Curious, how you could read shoes, what they could tell you. She had never thought of this before. And in this particular instance, it was a shivery kind of lore. Shoes could indicate a whole bodily movement, could even indicate thoughts, even though you couldn’t see any of the rest of the person, from the insteps up.

Black shoes, these were. Not expensive, plenty rundown. They’d been around a lot, today and every day. They had a patina of dust all over them. The hubs had a line of perforations running around them and in the center a design like a musical clef-sign, she wasn’t sure what it was called.

One was flat on the ground toe-to-heel, the way any shoe usually is. The other, crossed over in front of the first, was balanced on its toe, the heel lifted clear. The fixed waiting position, waiting for her to show up, waiting for her to pass by. And as she did so, it went back to where it belonged, on the opposite side of its mate, and flattened out. The readying position: He sees someone. Is it me? Sure. Who else would it be? Now she was past. Looking backward, but still from under the newspaper’s bottom, the hubs of both had swiveled, pointing themselves after her. The alerted, about-to-start-out position.

It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t really expected it to. It was just, she hadn’t known what else to do, what other way to try to cover up.

Oh God, she thought with a sickish sinking sensation in her stomach, do I have to have that all over again now for the rest of the evening, until I can pull my flat street-door closed after me?

She couldn’t look back anymore, not without turning her whole head around, which would have given her away (she was already given away, to him anyway: he had singled her out, he had isolated her from the rest of the crowd; what she didn’t want to give away was the fact that she was on to this, knew that he had spotted her; she wanted to hang onto this one last flimsy buffer for whatever slight advantage there might possibly be in it). She didn’t have to look back anyway, to know that if he hadn’t already started on the prowl after her, he was going to from one minute to the next.

I may live a long time, I may live only a short one, she told herself with a bitter inward shudder, but somehow I’ll never be able to look at a pair of men’s shoes and not have a little bit of recollection of tonight come back to me.

At the corner she diverged from the other three. They kept going straight ahead, and she turned aside and went over to where the bus-stop was, just a little past the intersection. It was packed, this was the time for it to be that, and she wedged herself into the bee-swarm of people standing there all clustered together. Then later-comers, who kept coming every moment, closed her in and soon she was in the very core of the mass. You couldn’t see anyone’s shoes, there wasn’t spread enough above to look down.

The first one wasn’t hers, and then the next one was. She debated whether to hang back and let it go by. But this wouldn’t fool him, he’d already been on it with her, he’d only hang back himself and let it go by. And of the two evils, she didn’t want to be left there with him in a smaller crowd, or in no crowd at all. Which would soon happen if she let too many go by.

It was so packed you couldn’t get inside it anymore, but she managed to get onto the round back-apron, which was left open except for a guard-rail, so that people actually bulged out over its sides. She put her newspaper up alongside her face again, this time with a weary, disheartened gesture, as if to say, what good is this doing me? Her head inclined a little, as part of the same mood.

Alongside her were a pair of snub-toed mouse-colored pumps. And over right next to them — hubs with a design like a musical clef-sign. Like a handwritten capital S with a slanting line through it.

The stops came and the stops went past, and they all quivered and jittered a little in unison, like in a toned-down version of that dance that once was called the Twist. Electricity turned the sidewalks into a dazzling beach, so that even the particles of sand mixed into the cement glittered like spilled sugar. Red, blue, green, white neons warred and clashed in a long perspective that finally ended with a blurred, flashing, spinning Catherine-wheel-effect as its focal point. Inside lighted show-windows wax figures engaged in Leone’s own profession, that of modeling clothes, stared down their noses haughtily at the real people going by. Most of the show-windows were oblongs, but a few were ovals with the excess space left over outside their frames blacked-out, as if you were looking into a magnified peephole. Then as they left the more affluent section of the city behind and gradually worked their way into a lower-income district, these status-symbols became fewer and finally disappeared altogether. A movie-theater marquee blazed up like a real, live fire licking up the walls in back of it, proclaimed GIGI for an instant, and then was gone again as suddenly as it had appeared.

A teen-ager on a bicycle caught hold of something on the back end of the bus, lifted both legs to a near-horizontal position, and let it do her work for her and tow her along, blonde pigtailed hair slapping up and down behind her. The man sitting beside the nearest window to her turned his head her way and cautioned her with a typical middle-aged mildness. She gave a wild yell of derision for an answer, let go, and began to pedal madly and to actually outpace the bus and pull ahead of it. It was starting to slow for a stop ahead, anyway.

People had to get off, and this dispersed the pattern of the feet arranged around Leone as they pushed their way through and past them. Then when it had re-formed itself again, she saw that he had taken advantage of the wider amount of space now offered to move — not closer to her still, but further away, all the way over beside the opposite platform-railing. He was holding onto one of the upright stanchions and staring studiedly out and away from her on that side of the bus. All she could see was the back of one ear-rim and the nape of his neck. And a very thin sliver of profile, thin as the peel of an onion.

This was his technique for throwing her off-guard, for trying to keep her from noticing him, for seeming not to be doing the very thing he was doing. And it was a poor, pitifully poor technique indeed, she said to herself scornfully. What kind of a fool did he take her for, to expect her not to be aware of him, when he was always somewhere in the background, wherever she went, whichever way she turned. He must be a dope, among all the other things he was. But in this kind of situation, she reminded herself apprehensively, dopes can be a real danger, rather than not.

He had the inevitable cigarette fixed in his mouth, that he never seemed without, as though it were a part of it, like a malformed tooth projecting. Smoking wasn’t permitted, even on the open, back parts of the buses, and for a moment she wondered half hopefully if this mightn’t be a means of having him thrown off. Then she saw that it wasn’t burning, it was dry, and the conductor noticed it too at the same time. She could tell that by the way he craned his neck out a little, to get a look around to the front of the offender’s face, then went back to his own affairs again without saying anything. But what it indicated was an implicit breaking of the rules and disregard for restraints, an outlaw type of attitude. And that, too, wasn’t a good factor to involve in a situation like this.

Her face was white and stony-hard with a mixture of fear and hostility, the fear of the pursued, the hostility of the put-upon, that marred and muddied all its usual good looks. Her nerves were being drawn more taut all the time. Each evening she felt less confidence than the evening before, felt more of a desire for no reason at all to run and hide away. At times she could feel approaching panic lapping over her feet like a cold slowly rising tide that had to be held back, fought down. One of these times, if it kept up too much longer, control would burst and she would suddenly scream out in the middle of everyone and everything and go all to pieces.

And so the bus swept along, like a majestic ocean-liner, scattering the shoals of taxis and lesser cars before it as though they were tugs, while he looked out on his side at the buildings streaming endlessly by, and she looked down on her side at the platform-floor and brooded, eyes intent and furtive.

Her stop was coming up, there were only fixed stops on the buses, not improvised bell-signaled ones like in some other large cities, and the usual cat and mouse play was about to begin. Each one waiting to see the other move first. He didn’t turn his head around, she didn’t lift hers up from looking at the floor, and yet there was an electrical current of awareness going back and forth between them that almost prickled the skin and made stray hairs stand up singly.

She could feel the bus come to a stop under her feet with a soft slurring sensation and then a final shudder, and she heard the conductor call out the name of the stop.

She didn’t move a muscle, didn’t blink an eye. The shoes with the clef-signs were inert over there, too.

It was no use trying to pin him onto the bus by waiting to the last minute and then jumping for it. He could do that far easier than she could, with her stiletto-heels. She might fall and turn her ankle or something.

She suddenly came to life and gave herself a push away from the railing by main force, almost like a violent fling around the other way, like when you cannot tear yourself away from something, have to exert every ounce of will-power to do so. And sprang down to the ground just as the bus got started once more.

She didn’t have to turn around to see if he had followed her off; she knew he had. She knew what he was doing now, because he had done it each time before. He would stand there at first, kill time there, so that she could get far enough up the street, put enough distance between them, to make his coming after her less conspicuous. In other words, so that he wouldn’t be treading right at her heels. Her street was straight and sloped slightly upward, so that it was perfect for his purpose: He could keep her in sight without any difficulty from a distance of a whole block behind her.

His ways of marking time until she had gained enough of a lead were various. She had seen him do each one in turn, so she knew what they were. One was to gaze steadfastly in the direction in which the bus had gone, as if he intended walking along that way himself. Only he never did. Another was to actually start out in the reverse direction from her, going down the other way. Only to turn and retrace his steps once she was far enough off. One time he had gone behind a kiosk with a circular outer shell papered with colored three-sheets that stood on the twin corner to the bus-stop. From below the protective outer-rim, she could see his shoes standing there motionless, as she made her way up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. But they were pointed the opposite way. They were pointed outward. That told her it was a sham, in itself.

At the head of the second block to her flat — there were only two between it and the bus-stop — there was a neighborhood place where she always stopped in to eat when she came home from work. It couldn’t be dignified by being called a restaurant, although it did have three or four little round white pedestal tables ranged along one wall. But these were mainly for reading your paper over a beer, or playing checkers, or honking your concertina for a quiet evening’s relaxation. Everybody sat at the counter. It was run by a husband-and-wife team; she did the cooking, and he did the carrying and setting-out. The prices were sensible, for people who didn’t have money to throw around.

Leone always sat on the third stool from where you came in. For no reason, just one of those little human habits that soon become fixed and firm. It became known as “Leone’s stool.” If it was taken when she came in, and she had to sit somewhere else, as soon as it was vacant she would move herself and her food back over to it again.

I shouldn’t have to put up with it, she kept telling herself while she sat there waiting for her order to be prepared. But if she went up to a policeman and complained, That man keeps following me everywhere I go, she knew what the outcome would be. Has he come up to you and spoken to you? No. Has he stopped you in any way? No. And even if he were halted and questioned, she knew what the answer there would be, after he gave his side of it. He has a right to take the same bus you do. The buses are free for anyone to ride on. He has a right to walk along the same street you do. The streets are free for anyone to walk on. And the policeman would stroll off with a rebuking shake of his head.

If he would only do something, that I could get my teeth into! she whimpered inwardly. But he was just like a shadow. And like a shadow, he left no mark.

When she had eaten, she opened her handbag to pay for the inexpensive little meal, which had been fish, because it was a Friday. (She didn’t claim to be a good Catholic, but she did claim to try to be one as far as possible, without going overboard.) What was left over in the bottle of the wine that had come with it, he put away for her for the next night. She wasn’t a drinker.

While she was waiting for her change to come back, she held the top flap of her handbag propped up and looked at her face in the mirror that was pasted to the underside of the flap. It was more a reflex of habit than a conscious act, an inattentive idle manipulation without any real meaning. And then suddenly she looked more closely, a second time. For, in the mirror, she saw not one face but two. Her own and — her persecutor’s. Hers was in the foreground, enlarged, so that just a cross-section of one eye and cheek showed. His was in the background, a small-scale, peering in through the eating-place window. Yellow in the face of the light and shaped like an inverted pear. Or like a child’s toy balloon beginning to sag because of losing some of its air. She couldn’t see any of the rest of him, his face seemed to hang there disembodied against the night, to one side of the reversed letters E F A. Perhaps this was because he was bending over sideward to look in, and the rest of his body was offside to the plate-glass. It made him look like an apparition, a hallucination. Then suddenly, as he sensed that he had caught her eye, his face vanished.

She drew a deep breath of helpless frustration. Every move she made, watched. Every mouthful she swallowed. And she couldn’t fight back, shake him off, there was no way. “He has a right to glance into a restaurant-window as he’s passing by outside, anyone does,” they would say.

He had a right to go here, he had a right to go there, he had a right to do this, he had a right to do that. He had a right to do everything, it seemed. But he didn’t have a right to make her life miserable like this and put such fear into her like he was doing now!

She banged her empty coffee-cup down into its saucer so angrily that the owner of the place heard the sound and came over to her.

“What’s the matter, coffee no good?” he queried solicitously. She was a good, steady, nearly everynight customer, and he didn’t want her to be displeased.

“It’s not the coffee that’s the matter, it’s something else that’s the matter,” she answered gloomily. “I was just thinking to myself, that’s all.”

He shrugged and spread his hands out, much as to say: Well, we each have a right to our own problems, after all.

She got up and went over to the door, and looked around from there, before stepping outside. Gone. There was no sign of him. Or more likely he was covered up in some doorway, and she couldn’t distinguish him from here.

There was very little distance left to cover now, but she liked this last lap least of all. On the bus, there were people. In the eating-place, there was the proprietor. But the street was not an overly populous one, and this last had to be made all by herself, strictly on her own.

She almost ran the final few yards until she got safely to her own door. She blew a breath of relief. “Made it once more,” was the thought in her mind. And the inevitable corrollary to it was, but some night I won’t. The pitcher goes to the well once too often.

One foot safely within the open door, she leaned back far enough to turn her head and scan the street, down along the way she had just come from. Nothing, no one. But in a black door-embrasure a few houses down she thought she saw a wavy line that ran up and down one side of it, instead of being clear-cut and straight-edged like the other side was. That must be him, right there. She didn’t hang back to investigate. The door closed after her, and the street kept what it knew to itself.

Winded from the long climb, it was a walk-up of course, she let herself into her own individual flat, and went over to the window to investigate before putting on the lights. She’d been doing this for the last few nights, now. She didn’t need the lights to guide her, she knew the place so well, where everything was and how to go around it to avoid it.

The one thing he still might not know was which floor she was on and which window was hers, and she wanted to keep that final protective margin of error for as long as she could.

She went over to the side of the curtain and looked through from there, instead of dividing it in the middle, which might have been noticeable from the street.

She could see him down there, standing still down there. The olive topcoat stood out palely against the dinginess of the night. He wasn’t moving. Only one thing moved about him, and that moved while remaining in a still position. That is to say, it pulsed or throbbed; it glowed and dimmed and glowed again. It had a beat to it. The little ember-dab at the end of his immovable cigarette. There was something freezing and horrid about the way that nothing moved about him but that. It had in it a suggestion of leashed ferocity. Of hot-breathing, crouched bated-ness. Of a mauler snuffing and scenting its prey-to-be.

She put her hands up to the sides of her head and pressed them hard. She told herself: I’m walled-in here. If only there were another way out of here, a back way, a side way, any way at all. I’d like to run and run, and never stop. To the ends of the night. To the ends of the earth.

Then she said to herself: Stop thinking things like that. This is your place. You belong in it. Nobody has the right to drive you out of it. He can’t come in here. He can’t come any nearer than he is now.

She bunched a fist and pounded it down against the top of a chair-back in helpless remonstrance. Why couldn’t it have been any of the other girls I work with? Why did it just have to be me? That’s not a very charitable thought, I know, but being in a fix like this doesn’t give you time to be very charitable.

That’s not love, down there. It can’t be. Love sends you different kinds of messages. Love begins with talking first, with smiling. Love turns its face toward you, soft and shining, not hides it away from you. Love wants you to know it, not skulks in doorways in the dark.

It’s not just ordinary everyday sex, either. That sends you different kinds of messages too. Blunt maybe, but honest and open in their crude way. A hard meaningful body-stare. A look that asks you, How about it? You willing? A jostling in the crowd. A brushing of the elbows, a nudging of the foot. Maybe an opening remark in a slurred undertone for no one else to catch.

No, this isn’t that, either. This is something clammier than that.

He’s sick inside his head. What else could he be but that? Some kind of a maniac. And if people like that once ever get their hands on you— She winced with superstitious horror.

After some time had passed she finally closed the door, which she had left slightly ajar so that its slender wand of outside hall-light would somewhat alleviate the total darkness of the room, and put on the lights. Enough of a time-lapse had now occurred for him not to necessarily connect her entry into the building with the going-on of the lights behind these particular windows. Or so she felt. And the dark held its own nervous terrors, anyway.

She had a little radio there, not much of a thing, but at least it worked. It coughed a lot, and it spit when you turned on any nearby light-switch, but at least it banished the silence of alone-ness. In a croupy, asthmatic, but better-than-nothing way.

She thought maybe a little soft music would take the edge off her nerves, she liked Viennese waltzes in particular, but a news-break was winding up just as she turned it on.

“... meanwhile the war continues, no immediate end to it in sight.

“Back here at home, the second of three men who broke out of the penitentiary at (cra-a-ack, cra-a-ack, cra-a-ack), the so-called escape-proof jail, almost ten days ago has now been recaptured. His condition is serious from a gunshot wound suffered at the time of the break-out, during which two guards were also wounded. The third man, who is still at large, is considered especially dangerous, as he is believed to be armed. An all-out alert has been sounded...

“The weather for the metropolitan area for tonight and tomorrow promises to be fair and...”

Her eyes had started to widen even before she reached out to the knob and closed it off. Her fingers remained on the knob long after the sound had died, while without realizing it she turned her head slowly toward the window and stared at it, her eyes now following the direction her thoughts had already taken swift minutes ago.

She took her hand away from the radio at last and started to go over toward the window. And without knowing it she was holding one hand clasped around her own throat, in the immemorial gesture of feminine fear and trepidation.

It couldn’t be. There could be no connection. The one thing had nothing to do with the other. How could a runaway, a wanted man, to whom every moment counted, for whom cover-up was essential, how would he have the nerve to hang around a bus-stop night after night in full view of dozens of people, then ride the crowded bus with any number of faces pressed close to his?

And yet, who knows? A man in prison for any length of time becomes sex-starved, which is the same thing as insanity, if only temporarily. She happened to cross his path, his eyes fastened themselves on her and couldn’t let go, his thoughts fastened themselves on her and wouldn’t let go. And the rest of the sequence followed from there on in natural order. He started to follow her around. Since the sex-drive is stronger than thirst and stronger than hunger, perhaps, at least in his case, it was stronger also than his fear of being recognized, being recaptured, and being taken back to jail. A man in his condition has no sense of precaution, he loses it, it is blotted out, inevitably.

But all this was no solace. This was an explanation only but not a solution.

She had the edge of the curtain back a little now, and was looking down into the street.

He wasn’t there, he’d gone, he’d moved on. Maybe he was still watching her from someplace else where she couldn’t see him now, but there was no sign of him where he’d been before. The street was empty, and showed up in two shades of gray: a silvery-gray where the street-light washed over it in a wide ellipse that climbed partly up the walls of the nearer buildings, and a dark pewter-gray elsewhere. Then a taxi vibrated through it, making looming yellow moons that went out again after it had passed, but that was another matter.

No, he wasn’t down there any longer. It was over for tonight. She phrased a little prayer to her guardian star, her destiny, her luck, whatever it was. Someone, something: “Oh, don’t let it happen again tomorrow night. I can’t stand any more of it. I’m ready to — Please, not tomorrow night. No more... No more...”

She started to cry. She hadn’t cried since she was a little girl. Twelve, eleven maybe. Or if she had, not like this, not ever like this before. All of a week’s accumulated and compounded terror started to pour out of her, like when a sluice-gate is suddenly pulled open, in gushes that ran down her cheeks, and when her hands went up as if to stem them, in trickles that still crept through the crevices between her fingers, while her body writhed and twisted with her own sobs and suppressed, stuttering breaths, her head supine on the seat of a chair and her legs drawn out on the floor.

And with that, as if in direct and vengeful rejection of her prayer, as if her pleas had cabalistically produced the very thing she wanted to avert, came the stealthy indicating-signal of someone there outside the door. It wasn’t a knock, or even a tap; it was like someone stroking the door with the nails of two fingers, trying to make as little sound as possible and yet attract her attention.

“Are you in there?” a hushed voice wanted to know, mouth pressed up close against the door-seam.

She jumped erect so swiftly that the whole thing was like a coil shooting free; one single motion and she was up and straight and quivering like the feelers of an insect caught under somebody’s palm.

She didn’t answer, she couldn’t have, but maybe the stunned silence betrayed her. Such things can happen. There is a silence that vibrates, that speaks, that tells things.

It came again, the rasp, about like a match flicking sandpaper. And then a hiss to punctuate it, to attract.

“Sst. Are you in there?”

She went over by it on hushed tipped feet and stood there close to it, face lowered intently, her balance in flux but afraid to touch it for support even from the inside.

Then it breathed a name, the door, it spoke a name.

“Gerard.”

And suddenly no door had ever opened so fast. Suddenly there was no door anymore. Just two in love, trying to make themselves one. Suddenly all the world was heaven, noon-bright, and there was no such thing as fear, even its very definition had faded away from the language-books and left just a blank space where it once had been.

She didn’t even wait to see if it was he. There was no time to look at him, scan his face. It didn’t matter, her heart knew. Her arms went around him like the back-fling of a cracked whip. Her head was on his shoulder, her face was beside his face, and all she saw was blank wall opposite, but her heart knew him just the same.

His voice was low and cautioning in her ear, and a slight move his head made told her he had looked over his shoulder guardedly. “Not out here. Hurry up, let me get inside first!”

She reclosed the door after them. He went over to a chair, fixed the top of it with his hand first as if afraid it would get away from him, and then sank into it loose as a puddle of water. She thought she never had seen such exhaustion before. It was a collapse.

She couldn’t take her eyes off him. She moved first to one side of him, then to the other, then directly before him, slightly crouched, her hands to her knees. “I can’t believe it, I can’t, I can’t! When did you get out?”

He raised his head, which had sunk low almost to his chest with weariness, and looked at her. “I didn’t. I broke out.”

She gave a quick head-turn across the room, then back again. “God in heaven! You’re one of those three, on that broadcast I heard—? I never dreamed— They didn’t give any names.”

“They never do,” he said dully. “We’re just people without names. That’s so anyone on the outside who might know us, want to help us or hide us, won’t hear about it.”

“I didn’t even know where they’d sent you.”

“I didn’t want you mixed up in it at all. Did you get that note I smuggled out to you, after I was picked up and being held for trial?”

“A woman I didn’t know sat down next to me one night, at that little place I eat down the street. She folded her arms on the counter, and with the outside one slipped it to me underneath the one that was next to me. Then she got up and walked out without a word.”

“That was Malin’s wife,” he said without emotion. “He was the one killed a week ago Monday. Three little kids.”

“It wasn’t in your handwriting, but I knew it must be—”

“He passed her the message on from me, and had her write it down.”

“I can still remember every word of it by heart,” she said devoutly, like when you recite your rosary. “ ‘Stay out of it. Keep away from the trial. And if I’m sent up don’t come down and try to say good-bye to me before I go. If they question you, you don’t know me.’

“I kept it for two whole days, and then I did away with it,” she said tenderly, as if she were speaking of a love-poem.

“That was the thing to do,” he approved.

Outside in the hall before, without looking at him at all, she had known him. Now, inside and looking at him, she almost didn’t know him anymore. The terrible changes the thing had brought to him. The dust of the wayside and the soot of the box-car that were no longer just surface grime anymore but gave the appearance of having gotten under his skin and made him look permanently dingy. The deep sweat-etched lines of intolerable strain and tiredness that would never quite go away again. The hunger of the indrawn cheeks and the out-staring eyes.

He’d been so young once and been so spruce and eye-pleasing. He wasn’t now. And strange is the way of the heart: She loved him now more than she ever had then.

She saw him dipping two fingers into the patch-pocket of the caked, bedraggled blue denim shirt he had on, trying to locate a cigarette. All he could find was a charred butt, put out short to save for the next time.

“Wait,” she said, and got hold of a box of them she had in the place there, took one out and lit it for him. Then she passed it to him from her own mouth.

“You didn’t used to smoke,” he remembered.

“I still don’t, much. I’ve had these, I don’t know how long. One of the girls at the place gave them to me once, in a fit of generosity. They weren’t her brand, or something.”

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked it over, and it seemed to suggest some other train of thought to him.

“You haven’t been going with anybody while I’ve been away?”

She looked him quietly and simply in the eye. “Is there anybody but you — to go with? I didn’t know, you’ll have to tell me.”

She thought of that man on the street and on the bus — and he already seemed so long ago and half-forgotten, like something in a last week’s dream — and she decided not to tell him about it. Men were a little peculiar about some things, even the best of them, you had to understand that. He might think, even if he didn’t come out with it, that she must have given him some slight encouragement in the very beginning to trigger the thing off like that, and she didn’t want him to. It was all over now, anyway. She wasn’t alone anymore.

“How’d you get into the house here? Did she see you, downstairs?”

“I’ve been in it since early this afternoon. I came along intending to take just a quick look and see if I could figure out from down below whether you still lived up here or not. Then I saw this junk-cart standing out at the door, and two men were unloading somebody’s furniture and taking it into the house—”

“That’s the flat on the floor below,” she explained. “The old lady there died last week. And it’s been rented over.”

“So on the spur of the moment, while they were inside, I picked up a chair from the sidewalk and went in after them. I walked right by her. She thought I was with them, I guess. Then when I got up to the floor they were on, I put it down outside the door while their backs were turned, and came on up here to your floor. I found a closet at the back of the hall for keeping rags and pails, and I crouched down inside it. She came to it once and tried to get the door open, but I held onto the inside of the knob with both hands, and she gave up finally and went away again mumbling something about getting a carpenter to come and plane it down.

“I knew if you still had your modeling-job, you wouldn’t be back until much later. Then when the people started coming home from work, I had to try to translate their footsteps on the stairs. A man came up first. Then a woman; I knew it wasn’t you, because I heard her call out to some kid on the inside, ‘Open the door for me, I have my arms full of bundles.’ Then I heard a young step, a girl’s step, and it seemed to go in right about where your door was, so I waited a couple minutes more and then I took a chance and came out.”

“When did you eat last?” she asked him.

“So long ago I can’t remember,” he said dully. “While I was still out in the open country, it was easier. Farm-women would give me handouts sometimes, if I was careful how I came up to them. But once I’d worked my way into the city, that stopped. In the city they don’t give you anything without money. And how could I stand still long enough to earn any? I snatched an orange, I think yesterday morning. I ate the skin and all.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, appalled.

“I have to get these things off,” he said, bending down to his ravaged shoes. “My feet are like hamburgers.”

Then when she saw the stains of the old blood that was already black and the newer blood that was still rusty-colored, “Oh those feet!” she moaned in unutterable compassion, clapping her hands together.

She got a basin of water and some cloths, and getting down on her knees before him gently tried to treat and soothe them. And when she had, wrapping a towel around one, held it up and pressed the side of her face against it. “Cut it out,” he said embarrassedly. “What am I, a baby?”

“I’ll have to go to the pharmacy and get some kind of a salve.”

She heated up and brought him coffee-and-milk, and some bread and other stuff that she always kept there for her own use in the mornings, and sat opposite him at the little pushed-over-to-the-wall table, watching him eat. Once she reached over and stroked back a tendril of hair that had come down before his eye.

“What are you going to do?” she murmured finally, low, as if afraid to hear the answer.

He blew out the match he was holding. “One thing I’m not going to do, is ever go back there again alive. For me, that’s over.”

“But how—?” The worry on her face finished it without words.

“All I need is a breathing-spell, one day or two, to rest up and clean myself up.”

“You’ll stay here with me,” she said briefly, as if there were no sense in even discussing that part of it. “We’ll manage it somehow. But then—?”

“I know a guy who’ll fix me up some fake papers. With them, I can get some job on a ship, outbound. Jump it at the other end, and start all over again clean. It doesn’t matter where. Then as soon as I get my bearings, you — you’ll come, won’t you?”

“Anywhere,” she said fiercely. “The minute you say the word.”

“It’s asking a lot,” he admitted, as if telling it to himself.

“What is a lot?” she said. “And what is a little? There are no measurements when you — care. It is all one, one-size.”

He sat staring into the distance, hunched over his own lap, hands folded together across his knees. She wondered what he saw there — their future?

After a while she told him about it. This was the time to, to make them more one. When he needed somebody to be close the most. “I’m going to have your baby. Our baby.”

“You fool,” was what he said to that at first. “You could have gotten out of that. You’ve been around.” And then he took the hardness out of the words by putting the flat of his hand on top of her head and rumpling her hair in a rough-neck and yet an almost tender sort of way, and scraped his knuckle past her chin.

“I didn’t want to,” she said softly. And left the “get out of it” part unsaid.

He was testing it in his mind. “A guy likes a kid of his own. To show that he passed through this world at least once. Imagine, me. Me of all people. A kid of my own. How the old crowd would laugh. Lejeune, that was too fast for any cop. And too slick for any woman. Well, the cops got me first. And a woman’s got me now.”

He looked grimly up at her from under his thick black lashes, which were the only thing left of his old looks. “You take good care of it, hear? You watch over it careful. If anything happens to it, I’ll break your loving jaw.”

She framed his face with her hands and kissed him, laughing but with a softness in her eyes that was more than just the light in the room shining back from them.

“You haven’t even got it yet, and you’re already growling like an old, experienced father.”

When she put out the light, they lay close to one another for a while, quiet and happy just to be together. Then in the darkness, his soft murmur sounded in her ear.

“Let’s make doubly sure, shall we?”

Tomorrow was the big opening, the most trying day of the year for a fashion-house mannequin. Like an opening-night is for an actress. She had to be there early, she had to be on her toes. And she’d been rehearsing all day, today just past. But — he was Gerard, her Gerard and nobody else’s.

“Let’s,” she whispered back to him in the dark.

Later, he was asleep but she was still awake, thinking about them and what their chances were. Something from the radio broadcast came back to her: “This man is believed to be armed.” And then something that he had said himself. “I’m never going back there again alive.” She wondered if he really had a gun on him or not. She hadn’t thought about it the whole time until now. Now that she recalled, she hadn’t been able to see one anywhere on him. But if he did have one on him, it might cost him his life. Men were so quick about using things like that, and he in particular was so hot-headed, she knew that well.

He was sleeping with his shirt on, turned toward her, lying on his side. She reached out carefully and felt his shoulder, the uppermost one, through the wide-spread gap of his shirt-front. There were several bands of tape spliced around it and going through his armpit. She reached around to the back, to his shoulder-blade, and the gun was there, bedded in some kind of a makeshift holster. She couldn’t tell what it was (canvas perhaps or gunnysack fiber, hurriedly put together along the way) except that it held it there, so that he could swing his opposite arm up overshoulder and pull it out with one swift move.

She started to ease it slyly out, a millimeter at a time. There was nothing to impede it, the impromptu holder or sac had no top to it, there was no lid to snap up as a leather one would have had. Then when it was halfway out, she stopped and began going over the possible consequences of what she was about to do.

No, it wasn’t fair to do this, disarm him in his sleep this way like a thief in the night, leave him vulnerable to his enemy. It wasn’t fair; he had to have his chance to defend himself. Right or wrong, she wouldn’t be the one to do this to him. If their positions had been reversed, she couldn’t see him doing this to her, she knew his attitudes too well.

She let the gun slide back in again, and he went on sleeping, never knowing.

In the morning she dressed swiftly and quietly, and left him there still sleeping in the pale-blue early morning light, his face looking like a pale-blue terra cotta, with a little scribble alongside the bed for him to find in case he awoke.

“I’ve only gone down the street a minute to get some foodstuffs. If you hear someone at the door, don’t jump at them, it’s only me. L.”

On her way back inside, burdened with bags and bundles like an overladen coolie, she ran into the fat woman who was in charge of the house.

The latter grinned with a wizened monkey-like expression as she saw her go by. “It pays to buy in large quantities like that, it’s more economical,” she observed. “You almost have enough there for two people.”

Leone halted and whirled around to face her. “Have I?” she challenged.

“One shouldn’t be alone too much,” the woman went on.

Now what does that mean? Leone wondered, beginning to tighten up inside. She said, “If you mean me, haven’t I always been? What about it?”

“After a while you — you know, you start talking to yourself.”

She overheard us, last night, Leone told herself, with a cold stricken sensation taking hold of her around the heart. “What do you do, come up and listen outside my door?” she flared up angrily. “Well, the next time, let me know what I say to myself! I want to know how good I sound!” And she swung around and continued on up the stairs, but with a chipper indifference she was far from feeling.

He was still asleep; he’d never even heard her leave. She put her things down, and then went over to where he was lying and stood looking at him for a moment. One of those gravely sweet, inscrutable looks that love can give at times. Then she bent over and kissed him, soft as a petal dropping, on the forehead.

His lids flickered and started to go up several times, then lost their battle and settled down once more. But a spark of consciousness had been ignited that was slower in dying down again. He went “Mm,” and his head stirred a little, and she knew that he could understand her, even though he seemed not to. Or he would remember what she had said when he fully woke up.

“Listen, I have to go now. I’ll be late getting back, this is our big day. Are you listening? When you get up, lock the door on the inside. I’m going to try to fix it with the old woman downstairs, to keep her from coming up here, if I can. And keep away from the windows, don’t go near them and try to look out. There are some cigarettes in there, I put them where you can find them, and everything else you need. I brought you in a couple of magazines, too, to help pass the time with. On my way home I’ll try to stop off and buy you a clean shirt and underwear, if I can find a place that’s still open. Now rest, rest all you can. I only hope God keeps His eye on you for me.”

She bent and kissed him twice more, this time once on each cheek. From the open door she looked back. His arm, which had been too near the edge of the bed, over-balanced and fell loosely down and dangled there limply over-edge.

She went back a moment, lifted it, and put it back under the cover. Then she tucked it a little to hold it.

Then she went out and closed the door behind her. At the head of the stairs, before starting down she opened her handbag and took out some money. About all she had, all she could afford, leaving just a little over for the bus and to buy him a shirt. She folded it tactfully out of sight under her palm and went down the stairs.

“Here,” she said going over to the fat woman, and held out her hand.

“What’s this for?” the fat woman said, looking at it. “You’re all paid up until the first.”

Leone said off-handedly: “You don’t need to go up to my place to look after anything today. In fact I wish you wouldn’t. It’ll hold. Some other time. I’ll let you know.”

The superintendent pinned her with a look that was undecided between being shrewd and sympathetic.

Leone suddenly threw discretion aside. It seemed the only thing to do. “Look, you’re a woman. There’s a time in life when — well, someone means a lot to you. You had the time come to you once too, yourself. Try to remember it now and — make an allowance, will you?”

This unkempt, heavily-fleshed hostile, with a shadowed upper lip and a mole on one cheek, who could be so shrill about disturbing noises and so steely about an overdue rent, showed a surprising streak of empathy that Leone hadn’t known she’d even had in her until now.

“We’re all sisters, all of us,” she said. She prodded money back down into the slashed hand-pocket of Leone’s raincoat. “All in one big family.” She chopped the edge of her hand reassuringly against Leone’s upper arm.

As she went on out to the street Leone knew, at least, that she had her on her side.

When she got to the job, Leone raced up the stairs to the dressing-rooms as though she were pursued by devils. Those same stairs she had come bounding down so buoyantly at seven the night before. So much had happened to her in-between, her whole life had been altered. Here too, the place had changed almost beyond recognition from its workaday look. The huge alabaster vase at the back of the ground-floor corridor was filled with fat, puffy chrysanthemums in deftly blended tones of orange, rust, and copper. The glass doors leading into the display-room stood wide open, with a uniformed attendant stationed outside to collect invitations, and a discordant buzz of voices coming from inside, punctuated intermittently by the chirpy, twittering sounds of a small stringed orchestra tuning up. On the stairs and in the lower hall, there was a long roll of blue-velour carpeting that began on the floor above and stretched like a rivulet of escaping fountain-pen ink right down to the front door-sill. It stopped there so abruptly you almost expected it to continue out into the street beyond, but it didn’t.

There was no one in sight at the moment who could clock her lateness, only the impudent lift-boy, at Prussian-stiff attention before his cage and not at all impudent today. On the stairs she narrowly missed running head-on into a butler or caterer of some sort carrying a hamper of champagne-bottles, who was coming down them just as she hurled herself up. An agile swerve, and the collision was averted.

Everybody was already in the dressing-room and in their places when she came hustling in. The “daytime-wear” group were all dressed already and ready to parade on out. Leone’s own group, the “evening-wear” group, were all undressed already and having their faces made-up by a man in shirt-sleeves with a portable kit on his lap, untroubled by all the nudity about him. Renard did nothing by halves. He had it all jotted down on a chart with which she had supplied him; each triangular combination of mannequin’s complexion, color of gown, and make-up required to go with them, had been worked out days before.

Paradoxically though, while he gave each face that came before him the expert touch it needed and passed it on improved, a bluish growth showed on the lower part of his own, hairs sprouted at right angles out from his eyebrows and from the pits of his ears, and the creases ridging his forehead were emphasized by grime that looked as if soap had not disturbed it for weeks. But then he wasn’t to go on public view, in one of the greatest selling competitions in the world.

One arm recurrently out to the wall to help her keep her balance in the jostling crowd around her, Leone stripped, literally down to the skin — for a Paris original always carries along its own indicated foundations — stuffed her personal things into her locker, pinned a towel around her waist, for the sake of comfort on the hard-surfaced wooden bench if not modesty, and sat down to wait her turn, elbow resting on the mirror-shelf in back of her and head propped in her upraised hand.

When the make-up man had finished work on her, he brushed off some excess powder that had fallen over her breasts with a completely impersonal swipe of the hand that set them dancing for a second or two.

A moment later the hairdresser took over, began switching her head this way and that as if her hair was taffy that he was pulling.

Suddenly the head of the establishment, Renard herself, stood behind her, studying her face and hair-do in the mirror before them both. Leone’s that is. She nodded approval, gave an upward hitch with one finger. Leone stood up. A brassiere was brought, attached.

“She’s too hefty,” Renard complained. “This number calls for a moderate bosom, not a pair of ostrich-eggs like that. Tighten it up a little.”

Leone’s eyes crossed briefly and inadvertently as the already tourniquet-like constriction was redoubled around her.

“Hold it in. Hold it in. Breathe in!” Renard said sternly, giving her a slap across it.

Leone went “ifffff” like the up-swing of a bicycle-pump handle.

Then finally, like the rains of April it was named for, the creation, the original, descended on her and drenched her in slanting streaks of bead-raindrops and fuming mists of silver-gray tissue. And the magic that Renard always wrought had come to pass. A bewildered, skinny, dead-for-sleep girl became a thing of mystic allure. Every man’s dream of Woman, that dream he never overtakes. Every woman’s dream of herself, that she never achieves.

Everyone’s hand was on her. They backed away, they closed in, they pulled, they pushed, they tucked, they tugged, they smoothed, they crimped. They could do nothing with it. It had been perfect to begin with.

Surrounded by a cluster of people still busily fussing at her, she was led out to the top of the stairs and poised there, as though they were about to throw her headlong down to the bottom.

The customary time-table, or pace, was that as one girl completed two entire circuits of the show-room, the next started down the stairs. They usually met and passed on the lower steps. This gave the briefest pause between numbers, just long enough for the viewers to adjust their minds for the new selection but not long enough to create an awkward delay or gap.

The go-ahead signal was given, and Leone took her first, baptismal step down, with the hypnotic, pavane-like slow-motion of the professional mannequin, feeling her way with the tip of her foot as though she were blindfolded.

There was an urgent, surreptitious follow-up footfall on the stairs behind her, someone thrust a catastrophically forgotten show-handkerchief into her hand, and then whoever it was retreated again into safe anonymity.

She and the other mannequin passed one another. They didn’t look at each other, they weren’t supposed to.

She reached the foot of the stairs, her course leveled off, and the display-room was now hers alone.

There were some people standing out here, in the space between the stairs and the display-room entrance, all men, who either had shown up late and found all the seats taken, or who wanted to hold private discussions of their own out here, or whatever the reason was.

Those who had their backs to her, and some did, turned around to face her as she started to glide past them. All but one; he kept himself turned away from her. But the man he was standing in front of, looked at her hard and steadily. They all were doing that of course, but there was this difference: The rest were looking at the gown she was merchandising, he was looking at her face and only her face. Then the corner of his mouth moved a little, saying something secretive to the man with his back to her. And she saw the latter nod his head, she could see him do that from the back. And right after that, he turned, too.

And they were looking at each other again, she and that face from the crowd, that was always there, wherever she went, each night now the whole week past. Outside the door here where she worked, and on the bus, and peering into the cafe, and under the windows of her flat.

She faltered in her stride, she couldn’t help doing so, and gave a sagging little knee-dip for a moment, then picked up her swing again and went at a stylized stroll into the packed salon behind, but with a feeling as if there was a knife in back of her poised between her shoulder blades.

She heard a voice introduce: “April Rain, for the important moments of your life,” and thought, This is one of mine, but it isn’t a good one.

All she was conscious of was tiers of pinkish-beige ovals looking her over from all sides. Even when she felt secure and at ease, she never looked directly into their faces, she had been taught not to. It would have injected a personal note that would have been out of place; more to the point, it would have distracted attention from the very thing she was trying to draw attention to. And now, after seeing him standing out there, she wouldn’t have dared look into their faces, it would have broken her up in no time. So she fixed her eyes on an imaginary guide-line along the walls just high enough to miss the tops of their heads, and kept them on it whichever way she turned. And all the while she kept thinking, I have to pass him a second time, on my way out, to get back to the stairs: oh, my God!

There were murmurs of admiration and interest as she moved around the room, which swelled now and then to a sustained buzz or a spattering of applause. Individual remarks stood out here and there. “Very good!” “A natural!” “She always comes up with something!”

In the meantime she kept trying not to swallow (which would have been noticeable along her throat-line), and her tongue felt as if it were drowning in her own fears.

Every now and then she had to make a complete turnaround, to show off the back of the gown as well. The whole routine or technique was a simple one, that could be picked up in fifteen minutes. She had. What your job depended on more than that was word-of-mouth reputation, of having been known to work at one of the other big houses previously. In other words, once you were in, you were in. Until you were in, you couldn’t get in.

One corner was past, now the second. There remained only one more and then she would be back to the door, that dreaded door, again. And he was waiting out there beyond it. Whoever he was and whatever he was, one thing was sure, he wasn’t good. He wasn’t good news. Maybe if she — just went by fast, without stopping to think about it and without looking at him, he wouldn’t have a chance to — do whatever it was he was going to do. And the other one with him, who was he? Birds of a feather? Maybe he was just some fellow-standee he’d struck up a conversation with. There was a certain freemasonry among men of that kind.

She was out through the door now and about to break into a headlong spurt. And then she suddenly had to slow it down again. Renard was standing there, come to drink in her own triumph. People all around her showering congratulations, but her eye didn’t miss a trick. Her behind-the-hand whisper reached Leone as she was about to go past her. “Don’t hurry so. You may catch that on something and damage it.”

The voice of authority, that could not be disregarded. She tapered to a gracious walk, and one of the two men immediately made a signal to her. Not him. The other one.

She didn’t stop for it, so they came over to her instead, stood alongside her one on each side, peering closely with professional interest and professional pitilessness. Not at the gown this time, but at her. Only at her. She halted, with fear-glazing eyes.

“Your name Leone Aubry?” said one, pointing with a slim putty-green cigar he was holding between his fingers.

“What do you want?”

“Is your name Leone Aubry?”

“Yes, but what do you want?”

“You’re coming with us, is what we want.”

Then he showed her something, in a sort of wallet-carrying-case that split open across the top and uplidded, instead of opening along its edge like the usual money-carrying wallet does. She could make out the city’s coat-of-arms, then he squeezed it closed, with the same hand he was holding it in.

The police. She knew now who they were. She clapped both hands to her mouth, and held them there, at cross-angles to one another. People started to turn and look curiously at her. Finally she let her hands drop again, so that she could speak without impediment. “What for? What have I done?” she asked them, in a sort of piteous, passive, boxed-in panic.

“We don’t stand and talk to you here, in a place like this.”

And the other one, the one who had been at her heels for a week, surly: “We didn’t come here to buy our wives dresses, you know.”

“Can’t I go upstairs and change for a minute?” Just a minute more, anything for a minute more. You don’t value freedom when you have unlimited lengths and stretches of it. Then when you don’t have it anymore, how sweet just one extra minute of it is.

“No delays, you’re coming right as you are. Put a coat on over you.”

“But I can’t take it out of here. It belongs to the house. I’m not allowed to.”

Renard intervened. “What’s the trouble? Is this an arrest?”

“An interrogation.”

“Then please, gentlemen, no commotion. We’ve all worked too long and too hard for this, to have it spoiled.” And with that typical logic which had made her the successful business woman she was, she pointed out: “The dress is my property. You can’t take it out of here unless you have an order for its confiscation. Which you don’t have. Therefore the dress and the girl must be separated first before you can take the girl.”

One of them scratched his head and mumbled in an aside to his partner something about “not only designs clothes but she’s a lawyer in the bargain.”

“Go upstairs, Leone,” Renard said with a sort of localized sympathy. That is to say, a sympathy that was given freely and for the asking, until it collided with or obstructed her own one and only concern, the making and selling of dresses. Then it stopped and didn’t go any further. “Maybe it’ll work itself out all right. Let me hear from you, if you can.”

The three of them stood and stared after her, watching her heels flicker up the stairs like little flesh-toned mallets tacking down a carpet.

Upstairs in the hall, where there were no longer guests to be reckoned with, she made a bee-line for the dressing-room door, elbowing everyone aside and almost stumbling in her haste to get in there. The door clapped shut after her.

“Somebody help me to get out of here, quick!” she gasped. They all turned on the long dressing-bench and stared at her with one accord.

“There’re two men down there—”

“Two?” one girl said. “There must be twenty-five.”

“This isn’t anything to joke about. These two are cops. They’re standing right down at the foot of the stairs. They’re waiting to take me with them.”

“How do you know it’s you?”

“They said so right in front of Renard.”

She had the dress off now. She was shivering from head to foot, and not from the cold, either.

“By why you? What’ve you been up to?”

She summed the whole tragic little story up in just two words. “My fellow.”

“What is he, a loser with the cops? I had one like that once. Funny, how those guys always make the best kind of—”

Somebody gave a scream of synthetic modesty, of protest actually more than modesty, and one of the two from downstairs was standing in the open doorway motioning to her with his head. “Are you going to come out of there, or do you want me to come in and get you?”

The inescapability of the thing made her lose her nerve for a minute; the brief reprieve to get out of the dress was now over, there was no chance of any further out, and she was right up face to face with the most precarious of all prospects: apprehension by the police on a provable and grounded charge. Anyone would have quailed.

She looked around at each of the other girls in turn, in a last-minute appeal for aid that was sunk even before it was spoken. “Marthe! — Desi! — Nico! — We all work here together. I see your faces day-in day-out, and you see mine. Isn’t there one of you will stand up beside me now and help me, when I need it the most? I don’t want them to take me, I don’t want to go!”

They just looked at her helplessly. One of them lamented: “What can we do?” And another advised with sorrowful resignation: “Go with them, Leone. You have to anyway, and it takes all the fortitude out of it if you welsh.”

The ghost of a mannequin, a few minutes ago so radiant and chic and lovely, came out of the dressing-room door and stood there looking at the two men who were waiting for her outside it. Not fashion-show johnnies though, by any means.

She was immediately boxed-in between them and trundled along. They were not gentle, not gentle men, because it was not their business to be. “All right, hup, downstairs we go.”

“What is it?” someone asked as she went past the crowd on the lower floor.

“She’s being arrested. First time in the history of a fashion show that’s ever happened, I’d like to bet.”

They took her in an unmarked police car back to the street where she lived. It knifed along glossy-black and somber, and above the jurisdiction of the stop-and-go lights, its siren moaning a dirge that fitted this terrible death-ride. Hope and love and freedom all in one going to their funerals.

And when they turned in there the street was jammed, packed with people, she’d never seen it like that before. Not even on the Fourteenth of July. Not even when another country’s President came on a visit.

But they were all on one side of the street only, they were kept back there, by a rope and by some policemen on foot, in a long black line, shoulder-to-shoulder and faces peering overshoulder, all looking over at the opposite side of the street. And on the opposite side of the street there was nothing by comparison. Two or three policemen standing around, looking very small and lonely in all that emptiness. And something covered on the ground, like when you throw something away.

The drone of the crowd hushed temporarily as the new arrival drove up and stopped, and in the momentary silence the crack of the car-door rang out like a shot, as Leone was taken out and they closed it behind her.

They took her over to the quieter side of the street on a long diagonal walk, for the car that had brought her couldn’t get in any closer, and long before she had reached there the crowd had started up its rolling, surf-like surge of sound again.

“There she is! That’s her. She’s the one the flat belongs to.”

And a woman began again, for the twentieth time, to anyone around her who would listen: “They were creeping up the stairs, hoping to surprise him. Suddenly he came out of the flat and started firing at them, right there on the stairs. They backed down a little, and he ran up onto the roof. You could see him up there, from the street. I saw him up there myself. They were firing up at him from the street, and he was firing down into the street at them. Then everything stopped, and you could tell someone had hit him.

“First he did a slow lean-over, like he was never going to fall, and then a somersault and then all the way down to the sidewalk — Blapp!”

Leone’s escort tipped one edge of the covering back. “You know this man?” And then, “You know the penalty for harboring a fugitive?”

She freed her arm from him and sank slowly to her knees, with a peculiar, little-girl forlornness suggested by the attitude.

“How does a nice kid like you,” he said, “come to get mixed up with such a type? You see what it’s brought you to. It’s too late now. You’re in for it now. You can’t go back and undo the damage now.” And kneeling there, sitting back on her own heels there, on that gritty Paris sidewalk, holding the dead head on her lap that had once kissed her, breathed against her breast, framing it gently with a hand against each side of it and rocking back and forth with it in aloneness and desertion and cold, she looked up at him and cried out in a bitter, defiant, and yet somehow almost exultant voice that rang up and down the packed street and hushed the jabbering crowd:

“And if I could go back, if I were given the chance, I’d do it exactly all over again! Because he was a real man. What would you understand about that? A real man. Just to know him, just to be loved by him, makes it all worthwhile. Go ahead, arrest me! Throw away the key forever! I still come out ahead...

“Still come out ahead.”