Deadline at Dawn

Chapter 3

He took his hand off the knob, came back to her again. He didn’t say anything. He turned back his coat, fumbled with the lining down toward the hem. He unpinned a slit that looked as though it had been made intentionally with a knife or razor blade. He worked something free through it, with agilely probing fingers. Suddenly a deck of rubber-banded currency was resting on the table between them. The topmost bill was a fifty. He shifted to the other side of the coat, opened up a matching suture there. A second tablet of banknotes joined the first. This time the topmost denomination was a hundred.

It took him some time. He’d had them evenly inserted all around the hem of his coat, so that their bulk wouldn’t betray itself in any one particular place. He’d had others in his various pockets. He’d even had one fastened at the side of his leg, under the garter. When he was done there were six of the banded sheaves arrayed there on the tabletop, and the debris of a seventh that had already been sundered and partly dissipated.

Her face was expressionless. “How much is it?” she asked tonelessly.

“I’m not sure now any more. It must still be over twenty-four hundred. It started out to be an even twenty-five.”

Her face still showed nothing. “Where’d you get it?”

“Some place I had no right to.”

After that, neither of them said anything more for a few minutes. It was as though the money weren’t in sight there between the two of them.

Then finally, without any further urging, he began to talk about it. Maybe because she was from his own home town, and he had to tell someone. She was the girl next door, the one he would have told his troubles to, if they were both still back there. He wouldn’t have had anything like this to tell her, back there, but he had it here, so he told it here.

“I had a job as an electrician’s helper until just a short while ago. Sort of an apprentice or assistant, whatever you’d want to call it. It wasn’t much, but it was something. We did a little of everything, repairing radios, converting them from one current to another, electric flatirons, vacuum cleaners, putting in new wall-outlets or extra lengths of wiring in people’s homes, fixing doorbells — you know, all that sort of thing.

“It wasn’t what I’d come here for, but it was a darned sight better than the first few weeks had been, when I’d slept out on park benches. So I wasn’t complaining.

“Then about a month ago, I lost it. I wasn’t fired, it just folded up under me. The old guy got a heart-attack and was told to take it easy, so he quit business. He had no one to take over for him, I was no kin of his, so he just closed up shop. I was left high and dry again, like I’d been before. I tramped around by the hour, and I couldn’t get myself anything else. Nothing that was halfway permanent, anyway. Either in that line or any other. Stints at washing dishes in greasy-vest joints, or busman in one-arm hash-houses — Things are tight in this town, and nothing else was open. 1939’s a tough year, you know that yourself. When I saw that I was heading for the ash-heap again, I should have gone back home while I still had the price of the fare on me. Or written the family for money; they’d have sent it. But it was like with you, I guess. I hated to admit I was licked. I’d come here on my own, and I wanted to make good on my own. Smart guy, me.”

He was pacing slowly back and forth now, while he spoke to her; hands shoved deep into his pockets in dejection, head bent, looking down at his own feet as he moved them.

She just sat there, listening intently, sideward on the chair, hugging her own waist.

“Now I’ve got to go back and mention an incident that happened last winter, several months before I lost my job. This is the part that’s going to sound shady, that you won’t want to believe, but it happened, just the way I’m telling you. We got one of these custom-made jobs, that came our way once in awhile. The shop was on Third, but it was right on the edges of the Gold Coast; you know, the swanky zone, the east side Seventies. My boss had been in business there a long time, and he had a good reputation for thorough, methodical work, and you’d be surprised how often these people would call him in for something in their homes. We got to see the insides of lots of the swellest homes in the city.

“Well anyway, this particular call was from a swanky private home over on East Seventieth. The guy had bought an ultra-violet ray sunlamp, to keep himself fit through the winter instead of going to Florida, and it needed a special outlet rigged up for it on the bathroom wall so it could be plugged in.

“The name was Graves. Mean anything to you?”

She shook her head.

“It didn’t to me either. It still don’t, as far as that goes. My boss claimed they were in the society columns a lot, very old and well-known family. Not that he read the society columns himself, but he seemed to know all about them. The job itself was easy enough. It took us three days, but that was because we only worked at it for an hour or so at a time each day, in order not to inconvenience them too much.

“We had to chop a hole about the size of a fist part way through the bathroom wall, then hook up a wire with one that was already inside the wall, leading into the room beyond, and bring it through, to take the lamp-connection. Well, it was an old house, and the walls were good and thick, I never saw them so deep. One time, when I was chipping away there by myself — my boss wasn’t with me at the moment, he’d gone back to the shop to get something — I struck wood offside to me. I didn’t know what it was, but I shifted further over to avoid it. After that, it didn’t give me any more trouble.

“Then the next day — I think it was — somebody stepped into the next room from where I was working, it was a sort of library or second-floor study at the back; he was only there for a minute or two, and then he went out again.

“I heard a slight disturbance in the wall right next to me. The doorway between was open, and I leaned my head back and glanced out. There was a mirror opposite, and I could see him in that; he was standing on the other side of the same wall I was working at, just a little further over. He’d opened sort of a wooden panel — the whole wall in there was panelled about halfway up — and he was turning a little dial on a safe-lid built-in behind it. It wasn’t a very big one, oh about two by four, one of these baby-sized safes, like they have in rooms sometimes. He swung out the lid, and slid out a shallow drawer, and I saw him take out some money; then he shoved it back again.

“I didn’t even wait to watch any more. I went back to my work. I wasn’t interested. All I’d wanted to know was what the vibration was I could feel right next to me in the wall. Afterwards I remembered about hitting wood the day before, so I figured it must have been the back or the side of the wooden lining the safe was set into that I’d grazed. And I let it go at that, I didn’t think any more about it from then on. I don’t ask you to believe that; I don’t blame you if you don’t.”

All she said was, “I didn’t believe you when you said you were from the same town I was, at first, either. If that was true, why shouldn’t this be?”

“Then what I’m going to tell you next is even harder to believe. I don’t know myself how it happened; I only know it did, and I had nothing to do with it. They had a little table, downstairs by the door as you came in. Several times, without meaning anything, I’d left my kit standing open on need, after we’d once got the job lined up; I guess it was more absentmindedness than anything else, though. Then when we were all through and went back to the shop for the last time, I emptied it out and I found something in it that must have got mixed up with my tools and wiring and things by mistake. Either somebody had dropped it in by mistake, or I’d swept it up off the table with my own hand without noticing, when I was putting things back in the kit. There was a dopey-looking sort of a maid answered the door for us once or twice, she might have done it when she was dusting around the table, thinking it was part of my equipment. All I know is I didn’t do it purposely, I swear to you I only saw it for the first time when I got back to the shop. I don’t know yet how it got in there.”

“What was it?” she asked.

“It was the latchkey to the front door of the house, that I’d brought away with me by mistake in my tool-kit. Or at least one of the latchkeys to the front door.”

She just looked at him, long and hard.

He said again, “I don’t know how it got in there. I only know I didn’t do it, didn’t know about it till I saw it.” Then he let his hands fall limp at his sides. “That I don’t expect anyone to believe.”

“An hour ago I wouldn’t have,” she admitted. “Now I’m not so sure any more. Go ahead, finish it.”

“The rest don’t need much telling, you can guess it from here. I should have told my boss about it, turned it over to him. I would have, but he wasn’t there any more; he’d already gone home and left me to close up shop. Then the next best thing was, I should have gone right straight back there myself and returned it to them. But it was late and I was hungry and tired; I wanted to eat and take it easy, I’d been working all day. So I left it where it was overnight, and I meant to drop around the next day and turn it over to them without fail. I didn’t do that either. I was kept on the jump from eight in the morning until the last thing at night, and I didn’t have a chance. By the day after that, it had already slipped my mind. First thing you know, I’d forgotten about it completely.

“Then the job folded, like I told you, and I was left stranded. My money all went, and— Well, to make a long story short, yesterday I got out my kit and looked it over, to see maybe if I could borrow something on it at a hock shop. I’d already hocked about everything I owned that I could get anything on. I dumped it out, taking inventory, and there was the key. I saw it and I remembered where it had come from.

“I put it in my pocket, and I groomed myself up a little, and I went back there with it. All that was in my mind was that maybe they could put me in the way of doing a little work, even if it was only tightening a lamp socket.

“I got there, and I rang the bell, and no one came to the door. I kept ringing away, and no one answered. This was in the early part of the afternoon. I started to leave, but I didn’t make a clean break of it. I sort of loitered around outside the place, wondering what to do next. Then a delivery boy came out of one of the other buildings close by, and noticed me looking up at the place still waiting for an answer, and without my asking him he came out with there was no one in the house, they’d all gone to their country place for the summer the week before. I asked him how was it they hadn’t boarded up the door and lower windows, the way they usually do in such a case. He said he understood one member of the family had stayed behind a few days to finish up some business; probably the house would be closed up proper when he got through and was ready to follow the rest. I asked him if he had any idea when would be the best time for me to find this one person in. He didn’t know any more than I did about it, but he suggested what my own common sense should have told me without asking: to try in the evening.

“So I went back to my room and I waited for the evening, and it was while I was waiting that the idea first started in to grow. You know; I don’t have to tell you what it was.”

“I know,” she acquiesced.

“It grew without my noticing it, and those kind of growths are bad ones. They’re like weeds, they’re hard to rip up once they get a start on you. And everything helped to — to water it, you might say. I was down to my last dime, I couldn’t get any supper. When you’re down to a dime, you can’t spend it, not even on coffee and a cruller; you might need it more the next day than you do right then — you’re afraid to let go of it. I’d been dodging being put out of my room for over two weeks past, and that’s about as long as you can stretch that; that was going to come any minute. Well, the thing sprouted like a stinkweed, while I sat there on the edge of my bed all afternoon long, throwing the key up and down in front of me with my hand.

“Around seven, just a little past dark, I went out and headed for there a second time.” He smiled at her bleakly. “Now the excuses stop, and you can listen to the rest of it without making allowances. I came to the corner below, and stopped a minute, and this is what I saw from there. There was a light on, coming from the lower windows, so I’d come back in time — if that was what I’d come back for, to catch this one person in. And there was a taxi in front of the door, standing waiting for someone. Right while I was looking, the light went out, and a minute later a man and a woman came out of the door, on their way to the taxi. I had plenty of time to catch them before they got in. They took their time, they weren’t in any hurry. I could have run up to them from where I was, or hollered to them to attract their attention, and they would have stood and waited a minute.

“My feet just took root there and wouldn’t let me move. I stood there quiet, watching them go, waiting for them to go. I didn’t know which of the two belonged in the house, and which had stopped by for the other. But I could tell they were going out for the evening, they were going to be gone for hours. She had on a long dress and he had on a tux, I could see it from where I was. And when people dress like that they’re not coming back right away, inside the next hour or so.

“They got in the cab and they went away, and I went away too. I walked around the block, with my hand in my pocket feeling the key, fighting the idea. I came back to it again from the other side, and I turned and walked around the block again, in the other direction. I fought hard, all right, but I guess I didn’t fight hard enough. My stomach was empty, and you don’t fight so good that way. I hadn’t brought my kit with me, but I did have a couple of lightweight tools in my pocket, just about what I’d need. This time you don’t have to strain your imagination; they didn’t get separated from the rest and get into my pocket by accident, I’d picked them out and put them there myself.

“Once I even tried to drop the key into a rubbish can that I passed, to kill the temptation. But it wouldn’t work; inside of two minutes I’d weakened, and gone back, and picked it out again. Then I hurried up after that, came back around the corner, and marched straight up to the door without any more dillydallying. Well, I’d lost the bout. And at first it felt awfully good to lose too, don’t let them kid you about that.”

He sounded a note of laughter, without joy. “The rest you don’t need a blueprint for. You can take it from there yourself. I rang the bell one last time, for the look of it. I knew there was no one in there now any more. Then I stepped inside the vestibule and got busy on the inner door with the key. It opened right up at touch; they’d never even changed the lock, the dopes. Maybe they’d never even missed the key, I don’t know.

“I didn’t need the lights to find my way around. I went right up the stairs, like my boss and I had so many times before, and into that study or whatever it was at the back of the second floor. I lit up the bathroom, because it was safe there, it had no outside window that could give the light away. I took out the couple of little things I’d brought with me, and I went at the safe from behind. I reopened the hole we’d made in the bathroom wall, only this time I aimed it straight at the back of the safe, instead of over to the side. And I made it bigger than the first time too, big enough to pry away one of the wooden panels the safe was imbedded in.

“It was the jerkiest kind of safe I ever saw. Only the lid and the frame were steel; the rest of it was just a wooden lining. And when you ripped out the back panel, it was all open; you could reach in and pull the drawers out backward into the bathroom. I guess it was tough enough to crack from the front, but you weren’t supposed to get at it from behind like that.

“It was cluttered up with papers and stuff, but I didn’t bother with anything but the cash. I cleaned that out, and left all the jewelry and heirlooms and securities they had in it just the way they were. Then I slipped the cash-drawers back in again, and tidied up. I cleaned all the chipped plaster and mortar up off the floor, and I swung the shower-curtain around on its rod a little, so that it covered up the great big gaping hole I’d made. If he — I guess it’s he that lives there — goes in there when he comes back late tonight, he probably won’t notice anything wrong. He won’t find out about it until tomorrow, when he swings the curtain around him to take his morning bath.

“Well, that was all there was to it. To that part of it, anyway. I put out the light, and I came down to the door again, and I watched from behind it for a minute or two until I was sure there was no one around to spot me. Then I came out, closed it behind me, and walked quickly away from there.

“And right away, I started to pay for it; boy, how I paid for it. Before I spent a nickel of it or got a block away, I was already paying for it through the nose. Until now, I’d owned the streets. That was about all I’d had, but I’d had them, at least. I was hungry and broke and jobless, but I looked everyone square in the face, I went anywhere I damn pleased on them, the streets were mine. Now all of a sudden, the streets were taken away from me, to stay on them too long became dangerous. Faces coming toward me, if they seemed to look at me too closely, became something to watch out for. And people walking behind me — my shoulder would twitch, as if I expected a hand to drop on it.

“But the worst part of it all was, now that I had it, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it any more. Half an hour before I’d known a hundred things I’d wanted so bad I would have given my right arm for them. And now I couldn’t remember one of them any more.

“I’d thought that I’d been hungry, and matter of fact I hadn’t been eating right for a week or more past, but now I found that I wasn’t even that any more. I went into the swellest restaurant I could find, a real swell one, and I ordered everything straight down the list, like I’d always dreamed of doing some day. While I was still ordering, it sounded great, but when the stuff started to show up — something went wrong. I couldn’t seem to swallow right. Every time they brought something and put it down in front of me and I tried to dig in, somehow I’d find myself thinking ‘This is your own future you’re eating, years and years of it,’ and it would gang up and stick in my throat.

“After awhile I couldn’t stand it any more; I peeled off a five-dollar bill and I left it on the table, and I got up and I got out, without waiting for the rest of it. And when I came out, I couldn’t help remembering that when I only had a dime of my own to spend, a dime that really belonged to me, I didn’t have any trouble swallowing the coffee and the cruller that that bought me. In fact, my throat stayed wide open long after it was gone and there wasn’t any more on the way down, just waiting to see.

“I don’t know, I guess you’re either honest or you’re crooked by nature, and you can’t change yourself over that suddenly from the one thing to the other without a lot of growing pains. I guess you have to do it slowly, it takes years, maybe.

“Then afterwards, I was walking along the streets again, in that new way I had now, leery of faces in front of me, shying from steps in back of me, and I heard music coming from a row of open windows across the street. There was a guy I hadn’t liked the looks of the last couple of blocks, he seemed to be coming along behind me too steadily, so when he wasn’t looking, I cut over and jumped in there. It seemed a good place to stay in for a while, to keep out of sight and off the streets. I bought a whole carload of tickets, to make sure I’d have enough to last me for a while, and then I looked around, and the very first girl I saw—” he ridged his forehead at her deprecatingly — “was you.”

“Was me,” she repeated thoughtfully, running her hand slowly along the edge of the table and back, slowly along the edge of the table and back.

They fell silent. He’d been speaking so steadily, just now, that the silence seemed longer to both of them than it actually was, by contrast. It was probably only a moment or two.

“What are you going to do now?” she said finally, looking up at him.

“What’s there I can do? Just wait, I guess; just wait for them to finally catch up. They always do. He’ll find out about it by nine or ten, when he goes in there to take his bath. And probably that errand boy’ll remember seeing some fellow ringing the doorbell there the afternoon before. Then my old boss’ll tell them who I am and where I lived last. It won’t take long. They’ll know me, they’ll get me. Tomorrow. The day after. By the end of the week. What difference does it make? They always do, they never fail to. You never stop to think of that before. You think of it after. It’s after for me, now, and I’m thinking of it.”

He shrugged hopelessly. “It’s no use trying to run out of town, hide somewhere else; that never works either. Not for little guys like me, that are new at it. If they’re going to get you, they’ll get you wherever it is, whether it’s here or some place else. They’ve got a long reach, and it’s no use trying to get away from it. So I guess I’ll just stick around and wait.” He sat there staring down at the floor with a puzzled, defeated smile on his face. As if he was wondering how the whole thing had come about in the first place, couldn’t quite make it out.

Something about that look got to her. There was some sort of a helplessness about it, you might say a resigned helplessness, that did something to her. The boy next door, she thought poignantly. That’s who he is, that’s all he is. He’s no crook, no dance-hall shark. He’s just that boy on the next porch you waved to when you went in or out your own gate. Or that sometimes leaned his bicycle against the fence and chatted with you over it for a while, a big wide grin on his face. He came here to do big things, to lick the town, but now instead the town had licked him. He’d kissed his mother or his sister goodbye, at the trainside or at the bus one day, and she’d be willing to bet anything he’d felt a little like crying, for just the first few minutes after leaving them, though of course he hadn’t shown it. She knew, because so had she. And then the golden glow came on, effacing that; the promise of great things to be, the aura in which youth sallies to the wars. Probably before the first hour was done, all his plans were made, his castles reared; fame, fortune, happiness, all the things that were to be had taken shape. She could have read just what the thoughts in his mind were, that first day of departure, because hers had been that too. Back home they, the one or two of them who were particularly his, thought he was swell, they thought he was wonderful. And the funny part of it was, they were right and the rest of the world, that didn’t, was wrong. Back home they probably read from his letters across the back fence to the neighbors, bragged about how well he was doing. Her folks did too.

And look at him now, look at him here, in this room with her. She didn’t know, any more than he, why it had gone wrong, why it had turned out like this. She only knew he shouldn’t end up like this, furtive, hiding, hunted up and down the streets, never knowing when a hand was about to drop to his shoulder and hold him fast. The boy next door, the grinning, puppy-friendly boy next door.

She raised her head at last from the hand that had shaded it. She hitched her chair forward, as if some invisible dividing-line it crossed in doing so marked the boundary between passive auditor and active participant, slight as the adjustment was. She stared at him closely for a moment, not so much in discernment of him as in contemplation of what she herself was about to say. “Listen,” she said finally. “I’ve got a proposition for you. What do you say we both go back where we belong, back home there where we come from? Get our second wind, give ourselves another chance? Both get on that six o’clock bus that I was never able to make alone.”

He didn’t answer. She was leaning across the table now, to press her point more strongly home. “Don’t you see it has to be now or never? Don’t you see what this place is doing to us? Don’t you see what we’ll be like a year from now, even six months from now? It’ll be too late then, there won’t be anything to save any more. Just two other people, with our same names, that aren’t us any more—”

His eyes flicked aside to the packets of money on the table, then back to her again. “It’s already too late for me now. Just a few hours too late, just a half night too late, but that’s as good as a lifetime.” He said again what he’d said before. “I wish I’d met you last night, instead of tonight. Why couldn’t I have met you before, instead of after? It’s no good, now. They’d only be waiting to grab me when I got off the bus at the other end. They’d know by then who I was, where I was from; they’d look for me there when they couldn’t find me here. I’d only drag you into it, if I went with you. The people back there, the very ones I would want least of all to find out about it, they’d see it happen right under their eyes—” He shook his head. “You go. You’ve still got your chance, even if I haven’t got mine. Go by yourself, go right tonight. You’re right about it, it’s bad here. Go right now, before you weaken again. I’ll go with you down to the bus if you want me to, I’ll see you off, to make sure you get away—”

“I can’t; haven’t I been telling you that? I can’t make it by myself. The city’s too strong for me. I’d only get off at the first Jersey stop and come back again. I can’t make it without you, just like you probably can’t any more without someone like me. It’ll take our combined strength. You’re my last straw, and I’m yours; we’ve met, and we know that now. Don’t let’s throw this chance away. It’s like dying when you’re still alive—” Her face was puckered in desperate appeal, her eyes holding his by their intensity.

“They’ll only be there waiting for me, I know what I’m saying. They’ll collar me before my foot’s even off the steps—”

“Not if nothing’s missing, if nothing’s been taken. What would there be to arrest you for then?”

“But something has. It’s right here in front of us.”

“I know, but there’s still time to undo it, that’s what my proposition is. Not to go with that, not to take that with you. What would there be to run away from then? We’d be bringing the badness of the city back home with us.”

“You mean you think I could—?” A scared look was peering from his face, as if he was longing to hope but scared to let himself.

“You said he’s there alone in the house. You said he went out all dressed up and won’t be back until late. You said you didn’t think he’d find out until he gets up in the morning—” She was speaking without pause for breath. “Have you still got the key, the key to get in with?”

His hands went to his pockets, darting from one to the other quickly now, as quickly as she had spoken. The tempo of hope was accelerating. “I don’t remember throwing— Unless I left it in the door—” He rose from his chair to gain better clearance for his movements. Suddenly a terse breath gushed from him, signalling the finding of the key before it had itself appeared to view. “I’ve got it.” Then he brought it out. “Here. Here it is, here.”

They marvelled over the fact of its presence for a brief moment.

“It’s funny I should hang onto it like this, isn’t it? It’s like a... a— Some sort of a—”

“Yeah, it is.” She knew what he meant, though not the word they both needed.

He repocketed it. She jumped to her feet in him. “Now if you can get back there before he comes home— Just in and out, long enough to put it back where you got it, that’s all you need to do. Nobody’s going to come after you just for chopping a hole in the wall, as long as nothing’s been taken out—”

She was hastily gathering up the scattered packets, evening them together into one cube to give to him. The same thought struck them both at once, and they stopped to look at one another in dismay. “How much have you blown already? How much have you taken out?”

He pasted the flat of his hand to his forehead for a moment. “I don’t know. Wait a minute, see if I can— Five dollars for that meal I didn’t eat. And I must have bought about fifteen dollars’ worth of those tickets up at your place— Twenty, altogether. Twenty bucks. It can’t be more than that.”

“Wait a minute, I’ve got it here,” she said crisply. “I’ll put it back in for you.”

She jumped up, ran over to the cot, dismantled it by pulling up the bedding at the side. Then she tilted the mattress along its edge, thrust her hand into some unsuspected slit lurking along its underside, extracted a small quantity of paper money bedded there in tortured shape, like some sort of a flower pressed flat within an album.

“Oh, no,” he started to protest. “I don’t want — I can’t let you do that. It’s my worry, why should you make good the difference?”

She put on her best dance-hall armor, cut her hand at him frontally. “Now listen, I’m doing this, and I don’t want to hear any arguments. All of it has got to go back; if there’s even a dollar still out, it’s technically a theft and you’re open to arrest. Besides, what’s the difference? Call it a loan, if it’ll make you any happier. You can pay me back after we get home and you’ve started working again. I’ve still got enough left here to take care of both our bus tickets. You can square that up too, later on, if you want to.” She thrust it into his hand. “Here, you hang onto it for us. It’s our bankroll now, yours and mine.”

He gave her a look that was like a pause in the flurry of their preparations for departure. “Gee, I don’t know what to say—”

“Don’t say anything.” She flung herself back into the chair she’d originally sought out when she first entered the room. “The main thing is to make sure we both get out of this town tonight. Wait for me a minute, till I get my shoes on — throw a few things into my bag — there isn’t much to take—” Then as she saw him make a tentative move toward the door and look at her inquiringly, “No, stay right in here with me, don’t even wait outside — I’m afraid I’ll lose you, and you’re my one chance of getting home tonight—”

“You won’t lose me,” he promised almost inaudibly.

She jumped up again, settled her feet into their gear with a slight downward stamp of each one. “It’s funny, but I’m not tired any more—”

He watched her throw things headlong into a battered suitcase she had hauled out from under the cot. “Suppose he’s back by the time I get over there?”

“He won’t be. We’ve got to keep saying that, praying it. It’s the only way. You weren’t caught when you went there to take it, why should you be caught when you go there to put it back? He’s stepping out some place with that girl you saw leave with him — there’s an even chance he won’t get back till half-past three or four; till he sees her home to wherever she lives herself and—”

She went over to the window, raised it and leaned out. Not in the center of it, but slantwise, over in the far corner, looking off at an angle. “Look, we’ve still got time. You can still make it, you’ve still got a fighting chance.”

“What’s that out there you’re looking at?”

She drew her head in again. “That’s the only decent thing in this whole town. Every night it let me off when I thought I couldn’t hold out another minute. It never tricked me, never gypped me, and I know it won’t tonight. It’s the only friend I’ve got, the only one I’ve ever had since I first came here. It won’t let us down. It’s the clock on the Paramount Building, all the way over; you can see it from here, if you look the right way, where there’s a chunk cut out between two of the buildings— Come on, Quinn, it says we still can; and it never steered me wrong yet.”

She latched down the lid of the valise. He reached for it, and she passed it to him. He held the door wide for her a moment, after she’d already passed through to the hall. “Got everything? Sure there’s nothing else?”

“Close the door,” she said wearily. “I don’t want to look at it again. Leave the key in it, I won’t be needing it any more.”

They went down the rickety stairs one behind the other, he with her weather-beaten valise in his hand. It didn’t weigh much; it had hardly anything in it — just busted hopes. They trod softly, not so much in fear of inmates around them as with the instinctive hush that goes with night-departure.

At one place he saw her put out her hand to a star-shaped gash shattering the tinted plaster of the wall, hold it pressed there for a moment.

“What’d you do that for?”

“That used to be my lucky spot,” she whispered. “I’d touch it on my way out, every time I left here. A year or so ago, when I was still going around to casting-offices and such. You get that way, you know, when luck’s against you. It’s been a long time since I touched it last. It never paid off. But maybe it will tonight. I hope it does. We need it tonight.”

He’d gone down several steps beyond it, in her wake, while she spoke. He stopped for a moment, hesitated. Then he turned, went up again the step or two it took to reach it, put his hand to it as she had. Then he followed her down once more.

They stopped for a moment behind the street-door, side by side, before going on. Then she put out her hand to the knob. He put out his at almost the same instant. His hand came to rest atop hers. They stayed that way for a second. They looked at one another and smiled, artlessly, without coquetry, like children do. He said, “Gee, I’m sort of glad I met you tonight, Bricky.” She said, “I’m sort of glad I met you too, Quinn.”

Then he took his hand off and let hers open the door. It had been her house, until just now, after all.

Outside the street stretched still and empty—