Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 114, May 1953

Dormant account by Cornell Woolrich[4]

I often think, what a strange thing Chance is. I often wonder what would have happened if I had picked the name above it, the name below it. Or any of the others. Nothing, probably. But out of all of them, I singled out that one. How? Why?

Chance.

It was in an ad in the paper. The paper was in a waste-bin in the park. And I was in the park on the bum. To make it worse, I was young enough yet to refuse to take it lying down. The old are resigned. I wasn’t. I was sore with a burning sense of injustice, bitter about it, and ripe for Chance. And Chance got its devious work in.

I came along a certain pathway in the park. It could have been any other, I had nowhere to go and all of them were alike to me; but it wasn’t, it was that particular one. I came to a bench and I sat down; it could have been any other, but it was that one. Nearby there was a paper-bin. I’d already passed half a dozen others without looking into them, but now I got up, went over to this one, and looked into it to see if I could find a discarded newspaper to read while I was sitting there. Most of them were messed up. There was one in it standing on end, fresh as though it had been thrown away by someone after just one reading. I took that one out, went back to the bench with it, slowly started meandering through it.

I came to the ad. It would have been impossible to miss, it took up half the page. It must have tost a good deal to insert, but the state banking law (I found out later) required it. It said:

And then the five columns of names, each with the last known address given next to it.

I let my eye stray over them desultorily. Money waiting for each one. And most of them didn’t know about it. Had forgotten, or were dead, or had vanished forever into the maw of the past. Money waiting, money saying, “Here I am, come and get me.” I started to turn the page, to go on with my idle browsing. My last thought, before the list passed from sight, was a rueful, “Gee, I wish I was one of them.”

And then suddenly, so unexpectedly it almost seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, “Well, why don’t you be?”

My hand turned the page back again.

I was asking myself two things. One: Is it worth trying, would there be enough in it to repay the risk? I did a little figuring. The minimum they were required to advertise for by law was $10 or over, after fifteen years. But even on $10,2 per cent for fifteen years brought it up to thirteen. And until just recently they’d given as high as 4 per cent, some of these banks. So the very least I could expect was $15 or better. Not very much, maybe? Well, what did I have now? A bench in the park and a secondhand newspaper out of a waste-bin. And what was the most I could expect? Ah, there was where the laws of chance got in their play. The ceiling on interest in such banks was $7,500, but that didn’t mean the original deposit couldn’t have been even higher than that. I didn’t bother figuring out what the maximum could be. It wasn’t likely to be the maximum, any more than it was likely to be the minimum. The probabilities were all that it would hit somewhere in-between. That answered the first question. It was worth trying.

The second was: Can I get away with it?

The first thing they’d ask me was what the original amount was. How was I going to answer?

That didn’t stop me. I wasn’t going to. I just didn’t know, that was all. After fifteen years, wasn’t it natural if I’d forgotten? If I didn’t remember having the account itself until I saw my own name in the paper, how could they expect me to recall how much was in it?

That took care of that.

Next, I’d have to verify my identity in some way, prove it. They weren’t just going to hand out the money to me on demand. Just how did they check? I couldn’t inquire ahead, that would be tipping my hand. I had to prepare myself, unaided, the best I could.

Every depositor has to sign his own name on a reference-card. First of all, handwriting. That didn’t worry me so much; handwriting can change in fifteen years. If the discrepancy turned out to be too glaring, I could always plead some disability during the intervening years, rheumatism or joint-trouble that had cost me the use of my hands for a while and forced me to learn to write all over again. I might get away with it. Something else did worry me, though.

Every depositor is asked his age when he opens an account, whether it’s transcribed in his own handwriting or that of the bank-official. How was I to guess the right age that went with any of these names? That was one thing I couldn’t plead forgetfulness of. Even after fifteen years, I was expected to know my own age.

Another requirement: the given name of one parent, preferably the mother. That was another thing you didn’t forget all your life.

An impossibility. Here were two factors in which the laws of chance were manacled, had no opportunity whatever to operate in my favor.

For a minute or two I was on the point of giving the whole thing up. I wouldn’t let myself. The paper kneaded into ridges at the margins with the stubborn determination of my grip on it. I said to myself: “Don’t quit. Don’t be yellow. Some way may come up of getting around those two hitches. Try it anyway. If you don’t try it, you’ll go on sitting on a park bench, reading newspapers out of a bin. If you do try it, you’ve got a 50–50 chance. Which prospect appeals to you most?”

That didn’t need any answer.

So I was going to do it. I had nothing to lose, everything to gain, and here I went.

But now the most important thing of all. Which name? Who was I going to be? In one way, it didn’t make much difference which one I picked. In another, it made all the difference in the world. One of these names might bring me $1,000; the very next one under it might bring only twenty. One might spell immunity, its rightful owner might be dead; the very next one might mean sure-fire exposure. But there was no way of controlling this, it was ruled by sheer unadulterated chance. That being the case, the way to choose was by sheer unadulterated chance as well.

I turned the page over, covering the ad. I took a pin I had in my lapel, and I circled it blindly a couple of times, and then I punched it through, from the back. Then I turned the page back again, with the pin skewering it, and looked to see where its point was projecting.

It had pierced the “e” of Nugent, Stella.

I grimaced, got ready to try it again. That was one thing I couldn’t be, a woman. Then I happened to look closer as I withdrew the pin.

Good enough. She was probably dead, and he must have been a kid at the time. That made it a lot more plausible. I would have had a hard time shaving fifteen years off my own right age without putting myself back into short pants.

I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. That was me, from now on. Sink or swim, win or lose, that was me.

Less than an hour later I was reconnoitering Read Street, on the odd-numbers side. I came to 291 halfway down the block, and right after that there was a triple-width vacant lot. The building had been torn down, and so had the ones on either side of it.

But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I loitered there, scanning the other buildings roundabout. They were all pretty old. If there had ever been a building in that vacant gap, these survivors were easily its contemporaries. But you can’t ask a building questions.

I watched the people that occasionally came or went from the doorways. Kids were no good to me. Neither were the younger grown-ups. I needed someone good and old. Finally I saw what I wanted. She was about 70 and she’d come to one of the ground-floor windows in the building directly opposite the empty space, to water some geraniums.

I sauntered over, trying not to seem too anxious. I didn’t know how to begin, but the old are like children, you don’t have to be quite so wary with them. I tipped my hat. “I’m a real estate man looking over likely sites for development, ma’am.” Her eyesight couldn’t have been too keen, or I’d never have gotten away with that in my shabby condition. “Could you tell me about how long ago the buildings over there were torn down?”

“They weren’t torn down,” she piped. “They had a big fire there once, and then they just cleared away what was left of them afterwards.”

“Oh, I see,” I said politely. “You couldn’t tell me about just how long ago that was?”

“Ages ago. That was before even we moved around here, and we’ve been living here the longest of anybody on the whole block.”

That ended that. I’d been hoping against hope that I could get some sort of an indirect line on —

A younger woman appeared in the background, said, “Grandma, don’t do so much talking!” darted me a suspicious look — suspicious just on general principles — and drew grandma back inside with her.

I turned and drifted away. I didn’t want to ask questions of anyone else; too many questions weren’t good. If she hadn’t known, nobody else would. I was little better off than I had been before. There once had been a 295 Read Street. But I still didn’t know if there’d ever been anyone named Nugent living in it. Or if there had been, how old he’d been.

I roamed around, without straying very far from the immediate neighborhood. I didn’t actually know what I was looking for — or that I was looking for anything — until Id suddenly sighted it: a red-brick building with a yawning wide-open ramp for an entrance. There was a Dalmatian stretched out on the sidewalk in front of it. I stopped to caress him. Then from that I worked into a harmless, friendly chat with the fireman sitting by in his suspenders reading a newspaper. He was graying and looked as though he was nearing the retirement age.

Something like this: “Keeping pretty busy these days?”

“Oh, we’re still getting them now and then.”

“Had any real big ones?”

“Not lately.”

“That must have been a pretty big one that took down those three buildings over on Read Street. Know where I mean?”

“That was before my time,” he said. “Yeah, that was a wow, from what I’ve heard. Five-bagger.”

“No kidding?” I said, continuing to play with the Dalmatian’s car. “About what year was that?”

“Oh — fifteen, seventeen years ago. I used to hear some of the older fellows speak of it. Spring of ’24, I guess. Well, it was either ’24 or ’23, somewhere thereabouts.”

Just a harmless little chat, about nothing much at all. It stopped after that. “Nice dog you’ve got there.” I ambled on.

I had a little something more now. I went, from there, to the reference room of the main library and I put in a requisition for the bound volume 1922-23 of the Herald-Times. It split like that, in the middle of the calendar year. I started at January 1, 1923, and worked my way from there on. Just skimming headlines and in-side-page column-leads. If it had been a five-alarm fire it must have made headlines at the time, but I wasn’t taking any chances on how accurate his memory was; he’d gotten it second-hand after all, and with firemen a blaze never shrinks but enlarges.

It was slow work, but in an hour and a half I’d reached the end of the volume. I went back and changed it for 1923–1924.

It came up after about another half-hour or so of page-scanning. I couldn’t very well have missed it. It was all the way over in November, so that fireman’s accuracy as to time of year hadn’t been so hot after all. At least he’d approximated the year. I finally found it on November 5:

I didn’t care much about the details. I was looking for proper names, hoping against hope. The five dead were listed first. Rabinowitz, Cohalan, Mendez — no, nothing there. Wait a minute, two unidentified bodies. Maybe it was one of them. I followed the thing through to the back. There it was, there it was! It seemed to fly up off the page and hit me in the eye like cinders. Nugent. I devoured the paragraph it was imbedded in.

A sudden gap in the smoke, caused by a shift of wind, revealed to the horrified spectators a woman and her two children balanced precariously on a narrow ledge running under the top-floor windows, their escape cut off by the flames mushrooming out both below and above them, at the fifth-floor windows and from the roof. The woman, later identified as Mrs. Stella Nugent, 42, a newcomer who had moved in only the day before, pushed both children off ahead of her into the net the firemen had hastily stretched out below to receive them, and then followed them down herself. All three landed safely, but it was found on examination that both children, Lee, 9, and Dorothy, 11, as well as the mother, had suffered badly gashed throats, probably from thrusting their heads blindly through the broken glass of shattered window-panes to scream down for help. The mother lapsed into unconsciousness and little hope is held for her recovery. Neither child could give a coherent account of what had happened immediately preceding their appearance on the window-ledge, nor could it be learned at once whether there were any other members of the family —

I went on to the next day’s paper, the sixth. There was a carry-over in it. “Mrs. Stella Nugent, one of the victims of yesterdays fire on Read Street, died early today in the hospital without regaining consciousness, bringing the total number of casualties to—”

I went ahead a little further. Then on the ninth, three days later:

I followed it through just to see, but that was the last, there wasn’t any more after that. I quit finally, when I saw I’d lapped over into December. He’d either died by then or recovered, and either way it wasn’t of topical consequence enough any more to rate mention. Just a tenement kid.

So I still didn’t know one way or the other. But outside of that, I had about everything else, more than I’d ever dared hope to have! Given names, ages, and all! I had my age now. If he was nine in November 1923, I was 27 now. And by a peculiar coincidence, I was actually 26 years old myself.

But, of course, I wasn’t George Palmer any more.

I was about ready. I had about all the background I’d ever have, so there was nothing more to wait for. Even the handwriting obstacle had melted away, since the account had been opened in trust for me and therefore I hadn’t signed it anyway. I considered that an auspicious omen. Present identification wasn’t very difficult. The prosperous, the firmly rooted, have a hard time changing identities. To a bird of passage like me, rootless, friendless, what was one identity more or less? No close friends, no business associates, to hamper my change of skin. I was just “Slim” to the few of my own kind who knew me by sight, and “Slim” could be anybody, right name Palmer or right name Nugent.

I took two days for present identification, that was all it needed. I realized of course that meanwhile, from one minute to the next, a real Nugent, the real Nugent, might show up, but I went right ahead.

That was one bracket of the 50–50 chance that I’d willingly accepted.

The two days were up, and now for it. I left myself looking pretty much as I was. To look too trim might invite suspicion quicker than to look down-at-heel, as I had been all along. I wasn’t pretending to be anything other than what I was; I was only pretending my name was different.

I headed for the bank and I went straight inside. I didn’t hesitate, nor loiter around the entrance reconnoitering, nor pass back and forth outside it trying to get my courage up. My courage was up already. If I didn’t plunge right in I was afraid it would start oozing away again.

I still had the original newspaper with me. I stalked up to one of the guards and I tapped the ad with my fingernail. “What do you do about this? My name’s listed here.” He sent me over to one of the officers, sitting at a desk in an enclosure to one side of the main banking-floor.

I repeated what I’d said to the guard. He pressed a buzzer, had the records of the account brought to him, to familiarize himself with them before doing anything further. Not a word out of him so far. I tried to read his face. He shot me a searching look, but I couldn’t figure out what it was meant to convey. The documents were old and yellowed, you could tell they’d been on file a long time. He was holding them tipped toward him. I would have given anything to be able to see what was on them.

Finally he put them down, cleared his throat. This was the first test, coming up now. I knew there would be others, if I passed this one O. K. This was just the preliminary. I braced myself for it. “So you’re Lee Nugent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any identification on you?”

I fumbled around in my clothing haltingly, as though I hadn’t been expecting to be called on for documentary proof, was caught off-guard. I produced a carefully prepared scrap or two, just about as much as a fellow in my circumstances would have been likely to have on him. I wasn’t counting on it to be enough, I’d known it wouldn’t be. He shook his head. “Haven’t you got anything more than that? We can’t just turn over a sum of money to you, you know, on the strength of your word alone.”

“I know that, sir,” I said docilely.

He said: “Can you get anyone to vouch for you? Someone that’s known you for several years?”

I’d expected that. For that matter, I could hardly have gotten anyone to vouch for me as George Palmer. That gave me the right line to take. I said, promptly and unqualifiedly, “No, I can’t. Not one single person, as far as I know. You’ve got me there.”

He spread his hands. “Why not? What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been footloose, I’ve been drifting around. I’ve got acquaintances here and there, yes. They don’t know me by name. I’m ‘Slim’ to most of them.” I watched him. It was unsatisfactory in one respect, but I think it made a favorable impression, rather than otherwise. It sounded so plausible. It should have, it was true.

“Well, you’ve worked at times, haven’t you?” He could tell by looking at me that I wasn’t working right now, didn’t have to ask that.

“Sure, whenever I could, which wasn’t often.”

I mentioned two or three jobs I’d actually had, which I knew wouldn’t be any good to him. Hand-labor jobs in which my name hadn’t even been down on any pay-roll, just “Slim” to the foreman and paid off in line according to bulk; fruit-picking jobs in orchards on the West Coast and stuff like that.

He took up the file-cards again. “Answer a few questions, please. Your age?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Date of birth?”

“I can’t give you that,” I said unhesitatingly. “You see, I lost both parents and my older sister when I was nine. If my mother ever told me what my exact birth-date was — and I guess she must have — I’ve forgotten it long since.”

“Place of birth?”

“Right here.” That was an out-and-out guess. If it had backfired, I was going to give him the small stall as on the previous question. I must have hit it right, I noticed he didn’t pick me up on it.

“Mother’s given name?”

“Stella.”

“Can you give me her age at the time of her death?”

“She died in 1923 and she was 42 at the time.”

“You didn’t know of the existence of this account until now?”

“It’s the first I ever heard of it. She may have told me at the time, I can’t remember. If she did, I was just a kid, I didn’t even know what she meant.”

“No passbook, I suppose?”

“My mother lost her life in a fire. The passbook must have been destroyed along with all the rest of her belongings at the same time.”

He put the checked answers away. He brought out some other kind of a paper, said, “Sign this.”

I looked it over carefully. It was an application, a claim on the account. I wasn’t afraid of the handwriting angle any more. I wrote “Lee Nugent” unstudiedly, unselfconsciously, in my own script. I let it stream out. I saw him watching intently as I did, to see if I’d hesitate or think twice.

He blotted for me. “All right,” he said. “That’s all for now. We’ll notify you at—”

I gave him the name and address of a cheap lodging-house.

They were going to check. As far as they were able to, and that wasn’t going to be terribly far.

I said, “Thanks,” turned away. I hadn’t expected to walk out with it then and there. I didn’t. I hadn’t even learned what the amount was yet. I didn’t ask him; there was time enough for that. For the present, the main thing was to see if I was going to get it or not.

It came within three days after that. Came to the “desk” of this 30-cents-a-night flop-house where I’d been stopping for three days past as “Lee Nugent,” in order to have some place to receive it. That was even quicker than I’d expected. It worried me a little. It didn’t say one way or the other, when I’d tremblingly torn it open. Just a typed paragraph, neat and official looking.

I went up at once. It was harder to force myself to go inside than the first time. This was the crucial time, now. I could feel moisture at the palms of my hands, and I dried them against my sides before I pushed the revolving doors around. A temptation to drop the whole thing, back out while there was still time, even flitted briefly through my mind. “Keep walking, don’t go in. You’re still out of trouble. Stay outside, keep walking.”

“To where?” I answered myself viciously. “A bench in the park again?” I flipped the door and went in.

I went straight over to him. He said, “Hello, Nugent,” non-committally.

I said to myself: “This looks like it, this looks like it. He’s accepted me under that name.”

He got out all the data again, with new data that had been added to it since the last time. It made quite a sheaf by now. He patted it all together, and then he said: “What do you want to do, leave it in?”

I was getting it! I swallowed twice before I could trust myself to make an answering sound. I managed to bring out in a studious monotone, “Then it’s O. K.?”

“We’re satisfied it’s rightfully yours. You want to withdraw it, that right?”

I sure did. The real Nugent might appear from one moment to the next. Even right while I was sitting there winding up the last of the transaction.

He said, “Sign this.” This time it was a blank withdrawal slip. I passed it back and he filled in the rest of it for me himself. The date, the account number, most important of all — the amount involved. He wrote it in script, not ciphers, and it was upside-down from where I was; I still couldn’t tell how much it was. He scrawled his official O. K. on it, sent it over to the teller by messenger. He said, “It’ll take a minute or two,” leaned back in his chair.

He kept looking at me. That added to my uneasiness. For a minute I was tempted to bolt and run, even at this late stage of the proceedings. It seemed to be taking a long time. Were they just using it for an excuse to hold me here while they sent out for the police?

Suddenly the runner was standing beside the desk again. He put down the file-card, with a sheaf of money clipped up against it. The card had been diagonally perforated “Canceled” to show that the account was closed out. The bank-official unclipped the money, separated it from the card, shifted it over to me. “There you are,” he said and watched my face.

I was looking down at a hundred-dollar bill. My heart started to pick up speed. Over $100 — gee, it had been worth going to all that — I thumbed it. The second one from the top was a $100 bill too. Over $200; this was even better than I’d dared think; the third was still another — I couldn’t go ahead separating them. My heart was rattling around in my chest like a loose bolt. I took a short-cut, reached out for the file-card, scanned it instead.

My eyes riveted themselves to that last group of numerals at the bottom, blurred, then cleared again by sheer will-power. Twelve hundred and — over $1000! Suddenly another zero had jumped up at the end, almost as though an invisible adding-machine was at work under my very eyes.

12010

I just looked at him helplessly. He nodded. He finished counting it out for me, since I was obviously too shaken to be able to do it for myself right then. Dazedly I saw 120 hundreds whirr through his deft fingers. And then a lone ten at the end.

“It’s the biggest unclaimed sum we’ve turned over in years,” he told me. “In fact, as far as I know, it’s the biggest that’s ever been held anywhere, since the law first went into effect. Sign this, please.”

It was some kind of a quit-claim or acknowledgment. There had to be one in this case, because of the size of the sum involved and because I hadn’t presented any passbook. Catastrophe flicked me with its dread wings — I just managed to swerve out from under them by a hair’s breadth now, at the very end, with the money already counted out and turned over to me.

I was so stunned, so punchdrunk, that as I took up the pen I started to write George Palmer, my own name, my former name, I should say, from automatic force of long habit. I’d already formed the capital G when I caught myself doing it. Luckily, his eyes were off me at that instant, he was putting the money in an envelope for me. I quickly pushed down on the pen and a blot obliterated the damning initial completely. I started further over and scrawled “Lee Nugent” with a shaky hand.

He blotted it for me, put it away. I picked up the envelope stood up, and found my legs were a little unmanageable. I had to “lock” them at the knees to get them to work. He shook hands with me. “Sure you don’t want to rent a safety-box with us, make sure of nothing happening to it? That’s a lot of cash to be carrying around on you.”

“No thanks, I’ll take it with me,” I mumbled. The one thing I was sure of was I wanted to get far away from there with it, and stay away. “Good day.” I turned around and walked out, a little stiff-legged.

I could feel heads turning to look after me curiously as I made my way toward the revolving door. Something about the pallor of my face, I guess, or my jerky gait. Heads of people I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me. Or did they? Was there one among them that knew me, knew what had brought me there? I couldn’t tell. I was Lee Nugent now. I didn’t know whom I knew any more.

Sometimes I think they have a sixth sense, that other people don’t have, that draws them unerringly to the right place at just the right time. As I came down the sloping steps to sidewalk-level, there were several others behind me leaving at the same time I did. Just as there were those making their way in. The bank was a busy one. But it seemed to me that one of them had kept on looking at me intently all the way out here, outside the bank. I was conscious of the “feel” of his eyes on the back of my neck, just as you are of any prolonged stare.

I stiffened the cords of my neck to keep my head from turning as it wanted to. I didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes, lock glances with anyone. I just wanted to get into the street crowds and lose myself. I hurried along, close to the building line. Then, just before rounding the corner, I couldn’t hold out, I cast a circumspect look over one shoulder.

No one had followed me with their feet, but eyes were definitely following me, from back there at the bank entrance. Not just one face was turned my way, but two now. One of those who had left when I did had gone over to a small car standing at the curb. Both he and the man at the wheel were looking unmistakably toward me. I even caught one of them make a gesture pointing me out to the other. He didn’t actually point, he sort of nudged down toward me with his thumb as if giving an order.

I didn’t wait for any more. I hurried around the corner and out of sight. I quickened my gait, still trying to keep from an outright run, if possible. Before I could cover a third of the distance toward the next corner, which I again intended rounding, there was a hissing sound and the car had suddenly overshot me, braked against the curb a few yards ahead. One of them had stayed on the outside, clinging standing up to the door.

I stopped short, swerved, and started back the other way. I might have made it, but I ran full-tilt into one of these vagrant peddlers you see here and there on the downtown streets, carrying a shoulder-slung tray of razor blades or shoelaces out before him. The whole trayful went all over the sidewalk. Before I could get out and around him, the two in the car had leaped down and come up to me, one behind the other. I crouched back against the wall, at bay.

The one in the lead was jabbering as he closed in... “Your name’s Lee Nugent and you just came into a whale of a big unclaimed deposit back there at the bank, right? How about a few words, what it feels like and what you intend doing—” And before I knew it the second one had fanned out from behind him, sighted a camera, and clicked it at me repeatedly.

Instead of being relieved I was more frightened even than when I’d thought it was a hold-up or some sort of retributive vengeance. That was the one thing I didn’t want: pictures and publicity on it. That was the one thing that could make it end up bad for me.

I reversed, rushed headlong out at them instead of away. The legman warned, “Look out for your camera, Bill, he’s after it!” They both evaded me, jumped agilely aside. “Never mind, I’ll write it on the cuff back at the office, let’s clear out.” They doubled back, regained the car, and it had streaked oft again before I could stop them. I stood there staring after them with a mixture of premonitory fear and baffled fury coursing through me.

Then I turned and met the eyes of the poor devil of a street-vendor. Probably if he had stood there and snarled imprecations at me I would have told him to go to the devil, and hurried on my way. But he didn’t, for some strange reason. He just stood there and looked at me in a sort of mildly reproachful way without saying a word, as though accepting this as just one more of the hard knocks he kept getting all day long. Something about that look on his face touched me. After all, he was me, twenty minutes ago. Except that I’d had the use of both of my legs and he was game-legged.

I moved over against the wall, took out the envelope, fumbled in it without letting anyone see me, turned back to him and handed him the odd ten that came with the 12010. “Here,” I said, “to make it square.”

He just stared at me speechless. It gave me sort of a glow. It was as though I’d found myself a mascot, a living good-luck piece, to help ward off the evil that I could feel crowding close behind me. Long before he could stammer his thanks I was out of hearing and on my way again.

It had hit all the papers by six that evening. It was a natural, you couldn’t blame them for playing it up. I didn’t mind the write-ups so much; it was the pictures. All of them ran that one he’d taken, probably it had been distributed by some news-service. There was my face, caught for good. For thousands to look at. For the whole city around me to see. And somewhere among those thousands, somewhere in that whole city around me, might be — must be — the real Lee Nugent.

I was in a night-club with a redhead on one side of me, a blonde on the other, when I first became aware of him. I was in a different nightclub every night now, with a different blonde and a different redhead beside me every night.

At the third look he started to sink in. He was standing there by the entrance looking steadfastly over at me. At first sight there was nothing unusual in that. The place was small and overcrowded and there were plenty of people standing around, jawing and holding drinks. But he wasn’t with anyone and he wasn’t holding any drink. And he wasn’t looking anywhere but over at my table, the direction of his head never changed. Not even at the girls with me, either; he kept his eyes on me and me alone. Not a muscle moved; he stood there impassive as a cigar-store Indian.

At the fourth look, the fourth I gave him, I mean, he tried to cover up. He was looking at the ceiling. Only there was nothing up there to see. And the first three looks had told the story. I said, trying to laugh it off: “Let’s go some place else, that guy’s getting on my nerves.”

They didn’t have a brain between the two of them. “Maybe he knows you, why don’t you ask him over?” one of them giggled.

I said: “Quit staring at him. Start putting your faces on. I’ll be right with you, I’m going out back.”

I went back toward the men’s room. Fortunately it was in the other direction, away from the front. There was an attendant there in a white jacket. I let him give me the works, brush-off, shoe-dusting, hair-tonic, talcum, anything to stay in there.

Then when he was all through, I eased the door a fingers width open and squinted out. By standing there in a certain position I could look straight out across the club proper, over to the entrance where he was. He hadn’t stirred. His whole attitude expressed that terrible lethal patience that never tires, never gives up. I could see where he was looking now, too. It wasn’t at the table any more. It was straight over at this very door, waiting for me to show up again.

“Is there any other way out of here?” I asked the attendant.

“No suh, this a one-way place.”

I peered out again, and he had started to move. Time was up. I was taking too long to come back. He was coming in after me. There was no mistaking that. You could tell by the way he cut through the dancers, elbowed aside waiters and whoever happened to get into his way, eyes fixed straight ahead — at the door behind which I was standing. He meant business.

Conscience makes cowards of us all. There was no reason why I shouldn’t stand there, find out what he wanted with me. But I couldn’t — because I already knew, or at least had a pretty good idea. I wasn’t entitled to this money I was throwing around right and left, it belonged to someone else. These spiffy clothes I was standing in, they weren’t mine either. Every stitch I had on, from head to foot, from my underwear on out — belonged to somebody else.

I pointed to a narrow door right beside the main one. “What’s that?”

“Closet where I keep my supplies, boss.”

I peeled off another ten. It was always tens these days. “What would you do for one of these?”

“Practickly anything,” was his frank answer.

I only had seconds. I hoisted up first one foot, then the other, wrenched off my patent dress-oxfords, handed them to him. “Put these on the floor in that cabinet over there. Side by side, where they can be seen from outside, as though there was somebody in them. Here’s a jit to open it up with. There’s a man on his way in — this $10 is for you to do something — anything — so I can get from the closet out that door without him seeing me.”

I backed into it, drew the door after me. It was lined with shelves, but there was enough space between them and the door for me to sandwich myself upright in; one week’s high living hadn’t been enough to put any paunch on me yet. I left the closet-door open by a hair’s breadth, to be able to breathe and also so I could watch for a chance to slip out.

The other door winged inward, blocking the one I was behind. Then it receded again, and he was standing there. Motionless for a moment, like he had been outside against the wall. There were two things I didn’t like about him. One was the look on his face, even though it was held profile ward to me. It was bloodless and yet glowing, as if with the imminent infliction of death — on someone, by him — right in here, right now, no matter who was around, no matter where he happened to be. And the second thing I didn’t like was the stance his right arm had fallen into. It was right-angled to the rear of him, elbow sharp in air, forearm slanted clown under the tail of his coat, as if ready to bring out something. It was held still, frozen, like the rest of him.

To the attendant facing him from the line of gleaming washstands opposite, it might have seemed only as if he was fumbling for a handkerchief. But I was behind him, and I could see the wedge-shaped bottom of the hip-holster peering from under his coat.

The attendant was engaged in dumping talcum from a big square canister into a round glass bowl, to be set out on the shelf for the convenience of customers whose beards grew in too fast while they were patronizing the club. But he managed to get too much in, it piled up higher than the rim in a mound.

The man in the doorway look a slow step forward. He started, “Hey, you—” and backed up his thumb. I suppose he was going to tell him to clear out.

The attendant said, “Yessuh, gen’-man, whut’ll it be?” but in his anxiety to please, he stepped out without watching where he put his foot, and it landed on the floor-pedal of a hot-air drier. The blast caught the cone of dumped talcum in the bowl he was holding head-on. There was suddenly a swirling blizzard over there, veiling the two of them as though they were in a fog. It was worth more than $10, it was worth $100.

The man facing him sneezed violently, so violently he floundered with it, staggered with it. A whole series of sneezes exploded from him, bending him over, blinding him, rendering him as helpless for those few minutes as a third-degree drunk.

Two quick, quiet steps in my bare socks took me from the closet to the outer door. I pared it open, sidled around the edge of it, and was outside.

I passed through the club a moment later in my bare socks, without stopping. I flung down a pair of lens at the table with the redhead and the blonde, said, “Sorry, girls, see you around,” and was gone before their heads had even had time to turn around toward me. I knew the type, they wouldn’t grieve long.

I hobbled painfully out across the hard cold sidewalk and jumped into a cab. I gave him the address of my hotel, and spent the first few blocks of the ride dusting off the soles of my feet between both hands. I’d have to change quarters right away, as soon as I got back. He’d be able to pick up the trail too easily, from back there at the club, now that he was once on it. Too many of those little numbers who frequented the place knew where I was stopping, had called me up now and then.

Just before we made the turn around the corner into the block the hotel fronted on, a light held us up. I swore softly; every minute counted. But I should have blessed it instead of cursing it out. In the minutes that we were standing there motionless, there was a street light shining into the cab from almost directly overhead, and a figure suddenly launched itself out at us from the enshrouding gloom of the building-line, where it must have been lurking unseen. The driver had already thrown his brakes and begun to swing around by that time.

The human projectile caught onto the door-handle, was carried around the corner with us, managed to get it open and flounder in against me. I shied away instinctively along the seat before I saw who it was. It was my living talisman, the shoelace peddler. He’d made the immediate vicinity of the hotel his beat, ever since that first day. There wasn’t one night, since then, that I’d failed, on coming home, to stop a minute by him and slip him another one of those tens.

I reached for my wallet to do it again right now. “Hullo, Limpy. You seem mighty spry tonight. Sorry I couldn’t stop, I’m in kind of a rush—” He motioned the offered money away. “That ain’t why I stopped you, Mr. Nugent!” he said breathlessly. Meanwhile he was tugging at me by the shoulders, trying to draw me off the scat. “Get down! Get down low, where you can’t be seen! And tell him not to stop, don’t leave him stop in front of the hotel. Quick, tell him to keep on going straight through and turn the next corner. I’ll tell you why after we get around there. Hurry up, Mr. Nugent, we’re nearly there!”

I had to take his word for it. I didn’t hesitate long. “Keep going, driver, don’t slow up.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“There’s a guy waiting in the shadows across the way from the hotel-entrance for you to come back. I don’t know what his game is, but he don’t act like he’s up to any good. I’ve been casing every car that came along for the past hour down there at the other corner, trying to head you off and tell you. Luckily it’s a one-way street and they all got to slow up for the turn even when the light’s with them.”

“How do you know it’s me he’s waiting for?”

“There were two of them came up together first. I seen them stand and chat for a minute with old Pete, your hotel doorman. One of them went inside, maybe to see if you were in, then he came out again in a minute, and they shoved off. But not very far, just down around the lower corner there. I went up to Pete after they’d gone, I know him pretty well from hanging around here so much, and he told me they’d just been asking him kind of aimless questions about you. I went on down the line, pushing my pack, and when I got around the corner they were still there. They didn’t pay any attention to me, and I’ve got a favorite doorway right there I hang out in wet weather. I couldn’t help overhearing a little of what they were saying, they were right on the other side of the partition from me. One of them said: I’ll go back and keep the hotel covered. You start out and make a round of the clubs. See if you can put the finger on him. Don’t close in on him, just tail him, stay with him. Between the two of us we ought to be able to get him’

“Then they split up. One crossed over, got in a car, and drove off. The other one went back around the corner, but he stayed on the dark side, hid himself in the shadows. You couldn’t tell he was there any more, after that, unless you knew like me.”

“What’d the one that drove off in the car look like?”

He described him to the best of his ability. I knew by that he wasn’t lying. It was the same man I’d seen at the club — the man I had narrowly evaded.

So there were two of them, instead of just one. The authentic Lee Nugent, if it was he, had someone working with him. Which was which didn’t matter. Their intentions, obviously, went far beyond mere accusation, arrest, and juridical procedure. They wouldn’t have gone about it the way they were, if that had been the case. They noticeably had avoided having the police participate.

And the expression I’d seen on the face of one of them, in that washroom, had been that of a killer as he closes in for the kill.

I reached out and gripped Limpy absently by one of his skinny shoulders while I was thinking it over. “Thanks, you’re a real pal.”

“That ain’t nothing. One good turn deserves another. You’ve been swell to me ever since that first day you bumped into me on the street.” He waited a while, watching me intently. “What’re you going to do, Mr. Nugent?”

That was it, what was I? I pawed my chin a couple of times. “I don’t know who they are or what they’re out for,” I lied for his benefit, “but I’m not going back there and get all tangled up with them.”

“Why don’t you go to the police, Mr. Nugent?”

“No, that’s no good.” I didn’t tell him why. I had as much, possibly even more, to lose by police interference than they did. “I’m going to blow town for a while,” I decided suddenly. Yes, that was it. I had the money now, one place was as good as another to enjoy it in. That was the best way of throwing them off the trail once and for all. Simply to change from one hotel to another would only win me temporary immunity.

I looked down at my sock-feet, wiggled my toes ruefully. “Look, there’s something I have to have, though, and I can’t go back to there myself and get it. You’ve been up to my place several times, you know the layout.” I didn’t know why, but I had a strong hunch I could trust him. “I’m going to take a chance on you, Limpy. Here’s my key. Go up there and get me a pair of shoes out of the clothes-closet. That’s one thing. And the second thing — now listen carefully. You know that little knee-high frigidaire in the serving-pantry? Open it up. Put your hand in where the ice-cube tray goes. Instead you’ll find a flat tin box, locked. Pull it out, wrap it up in a towel or something, and bring it out with you.”

I didn’t tell him what was in it. There was roughly $11,000 in cash in it. I’d spent about $1,000 in the past week. I hadn’t trustee it to any bank or even the hotel safe. I was glad now. It made it easier to get hold of at short notice, and without having to appear personally.

“The elevator boys all know you, and I’ll phone in to the desk from outside and tell them I’m sending you over to get something from my rooms, so you won’t be stopped on the way out. You bring it over to the station and meet me there. I’ll be in the last row of benches in the waiting-room, against the wall, so my bare feet won’t be noticed. I’ll have a newspaper spread out full-width in front of my face. Look for me behind a spread-out newspaper.”

“I can get in and out through the service entrance. That way, if they do happen to spot me, they won’t think nothing of it. I know the hotel fireman, I’ve often gone down there to get warmed up in the cold weather.”

“Make it as fast as you can, Limpy. There’s a Midnight Flier I’d like to make.”

As I watched him get out of the cab and disappear around the corner, I wondered if I’d ever see him again. Even though I hadn’t told him, he was no fool, he must have a good hunch what was in such a box as I’d asked him to bring. Locked or otherwise, a chisel and hammer would open it in five minutes. It was a pretty strong temptation to put to a half-disabled down-and-outer like him.

Maybe, I thought shamefacedly, he’s not like you, maybe he don’t take what don’t belong to him.

I put in my identifying call to the hotel and then I cabbed over to the station. I had enough money on my person to buy my Flier ticket ahead of time, without waiting for him. My socks were black, fortunately, and I forced myself to walk as naturally as possible, in order to avoid attracting attention to my feet. No one seemed to notice that my extremities ended in silk instead of shoe leather. I picked up a newspaper, sidled into the last row of benches in the waiting-room, and opened it out full-spread before my face.

I had sixteen minutes to go before train-time.

The first five minutes, he was coming and it was going to be all right. The second five, he’d let me down, he’d taken the cash-box and goodbye. I’d have to powder out of here as broke as I’d been a week ago, and when I got where I was going, the whole thing would start over — park-benches and papers out of bins. Then the next four minutes or so after that with the gates already open and that minute-hand on the wall creeping closer and closer to twelve, were a mixture of the two, hope and despair, with a third fear added for good measure. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, maybe those guys waiting outside had caught on, had jumped on him and hauled him off with them as he came out.

Somebody coughed in front of my newspaper, and I tucked my head a little lower. The cough came again, like a double-take-em of the throat if there is such a thing. This was on the fourteenth minute.

I lowered the paper and Limpy was sitting there, in the scat right in front of me. He was turned sidewise toward me, holding up a paper of his own to screen him from the front. His arm hung down over the back of the scat toward me. An oddly shaped news-paper-wrapped bundle, obviously a pair of shoes, already lay on the floor beside me. The flat oblong of the strong-box, also newspaper-wrapped, came down beside them a moment later, from somewhere underneath his outer clothing.

“Boy,” I exhaled softly. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. I got on the shoes, and sheathed the long flat box in the waist-band of my trousers, upright against my side. It stayed there pretty securely, and without making a very noticeable bulge.

There was a minute-and-a-half yet before the train left. I couldn’t resist asking him, as I stood up: “Limpy, did you have any idea what was in this box?”

“Sure,” he said unhesitatingly. “Several thousands dollars in cash.”

I stared at him, startled. “How did you know?”

“I couldn’t help seeing it, the lid came open while I was wrapping it. You maybe thought you locked it the last time you took it out, but in your excitement or hurry you must have forgot to. It was open.”

I just stared at him unbelievingly. “You’re what I call an honest man, Limpy. There aren’t many like you.”

“But you’re my friend, Mr. Nugent,” he protested. “A guy don’t do that to his friends.”

“Sure no one followed you?” I said as we made our way toward the track.

“The two of them were still waiting there when I came away. The other guy had come back again. I guess they think you’ll still show up there eventually from that club where you gave him the slip,” he explained softly.

He came out to the train with me to see me off. There was less than a minute left now. A day-coach had been all I’d been able to get, at the last minute like that. I got aboard, found a seat by the window, and spoke to him on the platform outside, where he’d remained standing, through a two-inch opening left at the bottom of the pane, bending over so I could see him. The shade had been drawn down to match.

“Look,” I said. “There’s a lot of swell clothes, some of them I never had time to wear yet, and gadgets I’m leaving behind at the hotel. I want you to have them. The rooms have been paid for until tomorrow night. You still have the key. You go up there and take them with you.”

“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Nugent,” he said disclaimingly. “F’rinstance, if I wore clothes that looked too good, it would kill my way of earning a livelihood. But I’ll take your belongings over to my place and look after them for you there, until you come back to town. I’ll give you my address, so you’ll know where to find me. Or in case you want them forwarded, drop me a line. Just Limpy Jones. I got a room on the third floor, over at 410 Pokanoke Street. You can remember that name, can’t you?”

“Look, Limpy, I want to do something for you—” I protested to him vehemently.

“Four ten Pokanoke Street,” he insisted.

Somebody had dropped heavily into the seat beside me. I lowered my voice so I wouldn’t be overheard. “I’ll never forget what you did for me tonight. I’m O. K. now, the train’ll be pulling out in a few more seconds. Take care of yourself, Limpy.”

“Lots of luck, Mr. Nugent,” he said. He turned and drifted away through the groups on the platform. There went a swell guy, I said to myself.

I sank back in my scat, tilted my hat well down on the bridge of my nose to shade my eyes, and prepared to doze.

I pushed my hat up off my eyes again and turned to the man beside me. “Pardon me, would you mind taking your elbow out of my ribs, I’m trying to take a little nap here.”

“That ain’t my elbow,” was the casual answer.

I looked and it was a gun. He had his right arm tucked under his left, and the gun came out just about where his left elbow would have been.

The wheels had given their first jerky little turn under us. “Time we were getting off, isn’t it?” He was as matter-of-fact about it as though we were a couple of fellow-commuters riding out to the same station together of an evening. That was the deadly thing about him; no tension, no pallor, no strain, like that fellow to the washroom.

“You can’t hijack me off the middle of a crowded train, gun or no gun.”

“The gun ain’t the important part,” he agreed languidly. “The tin is.” His hand came out of his vest, showed it to me, put it back again, “The gun is just to hold you still so you’ll take time to look at it.” The wheels were starling to pick up tempo. He raised his voice authoritatively, so that it would reach the vestibule. “Hold that door, conductor, two rain-checks!” And to me: “Get going.”

I walked down the aisle ahead of him, made the transfer to the platform beginning to sidle past, and he hopped off at my heels, without breaking the twist he had on my arm.

He stopped there a moment and frisked me, in full sight of everyone, while the train hurtled by. “What’s this?” he said, when he came to the tin box.

“Money.”

He transferred it to his own outside coat-pocket. “All right,” he said, “now if you don’t want the bracelets in front of everyone, just walk quietly out through the station with me.”

I began walking. A dick. And all along I’d thought it was a matter of personal vengeance on the part of the real Lee Nugent. “What’s it for?” I asked him as we made our way back across the main rotunda.

He gave me a halfway smile. “What’re you trying to do, kid me? You don’t know, do you? You haven’t the slightest idea. Are you Lee Nugent or aren’t you?”

Sure, it had to do with that. They must have changed their minds, turned it over to the police, when they found I’d slipped through their own fingers. What could I do but brazen it out? “I’m Lee Nugent,” I answered crisply. “And that money is rightfully mine.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said drily. “Nobody’s talking about the money. You’re wanted for murder. Long time no catch. But all that publicity you got a couple days ago sure dropped you in our laps pretty. Pictures n everything. Brother, you must think we don’t keep records and haven’t got good memories.”

I’d taken sudden root on the mosaic flooring. Even the gun couldn’t get me to stir for a second. So that explained why the account hadn’t been claimed! The original Nugent had known better than to show up, 12,000 or no 12,000. And I like a fool had walked straight into the trap!

“No, wait — listen to me a minute — I’ll make a clean breast of it, I’m not Lee Nugent. I crashed that account. My right name is—”

He smiled humorlessly. “So now you’re not. A minute ago you were. You sure change fast. Keep moving.”

I stumbled on out to the street beside him. They must have fingerprints and things like that on record; I could clear myself, I could prove I wasn’t the same individual. But suppose they didn’t, suppose it was just one of those circumstantial cases —

We’d stopped beside a car standing waiting a short distance down from the main entrance to the station. There was one other man in it, in civilian clothes, at the wheel. He swung the door open as we neared it. The dick collared me into the back ahead of him and then got in after me. Neither he nor the driver said anything to one another, and the car started off without any instructions being given.

“Look,” I began again in another minute or two, “I tell you I’m not Lee Nugent. There must be a difference in our descriptions, there must be something that’ll—”

“Don’t tell it to me,” he said with stony unconcern, “tell it where we’re going when we get there — if it’ll do you any good. Personally, I don’t give a hoot who you are. To me you’re just a guy I was sent out to bring in.”

I didn’t speak again for a while — what was the use? — until a wrong street had ticked by, and then a second and a third. I looked out sharply, and then sharply back to them. “This isn’t the way to headquarters.”

Something darker than the overtones of the official arrest began to descend on me; an oppressive sense of doom, a complete extinction of hope. The police, though they may err at times, at least are not vindictive just for the sake of being so. Private vengeance is.

I hardly noticed the direction they took me; what difference could background make at a time like this? It was all a blur of shadows heavy-laden with imminent death. I knew in my heart this was a one-way journey.

When the car stopped finally, I was vaguely aware of the dim outline of some large house directly before us. I was hustled inside before I could further identify it. The driver of the car as well as the man who had seized me on the train both came inside with me. The door opened as we reached it, as though we had been sighted beforehand. I tried to turn my head and see who had been behind it, but the hand of one of my captors caught me tightly at the back of the neck, just below the skull, and held me rigid there while they continued to thrust me forward between them.

I was shoved into a room in which there was a cobblestone fireplace and wood panelling on the walls. Whatever this place was, it was fitted up as though it was used for dwelling purposes, was someone’s residence. There were two men in it, waiting for us. One standing, the other negligently balanced across the corner of a heavy table, one leg dangling short and repeatedly flipping an open jackknife in air and catching it almost miraculously each time by the flat of the open blade between two fingers before it could bite into the polished table-surface. The one standing was the man I had given the slip to at the night-club.

He came forward and he said: “Here. You forgot something.” And he let me have one of my own patent dress-shoes full in the face. It stunned me for a minute. I went back against the table, and the ones who had come in with me held me up between them. I heard one of them say: “Don’t do that till Ed sees him.”

One of them left the room, and there was a short wait. Then he reappeared followed by a short, heavy-set man. The latter was fully dressed, but he was in the act of shrugging on his jacket as he came through the doorway. He buttoned it, then he raised both hands and smoothed back his stringy black hair, as though he’d been taking a nap fully-dressed when they summoned him. He appeared to be in his early forties, and he was probably younger than he looked. The others drew back from me as he came on, I noticed, as though to give him plenty of room.

He walked all around me two or three times, looking me up and down, almost like a fitter in a clothing-store inspecting someone trying on a new suit. “Uh-huh,” he grunted affirmatively a couple of times, “uh-huh.” Then he stopped finally, directly before me. “So this is what you’re like.”

I said, a lot more defiantly than I felt: “You’re not the police. What’s this for, what’s it about?”

“We’re our own police.”

“What’re you doing with me here, exactly what do you want with me?”

He withdrew to the other side of the table, ensconced himself in a swivel chair, cocked one leg up over the other, stripped a cigar. One of his henchmen supplied the match.

Finally, when I thought he was never going to speak again, “I’m Eddie Donnelly,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”

“No, because I’m not—”

“It should,” he overrode me. “Well it would to your father, if he hadn’t been smart enough to die before I could get my hands on him.”

“I haven’t any fa—”

Again he bore me down. “Maybe I should refresh your memory. Joe Nugent, your father, and mine were partners. A crooked partner and a partner that was honest. The crooked one swindled the honest one, and hundreds of oilier people that trusted the honest one besides. Then he disappeared, and let the innocent one take the rap for him. It’s an old story, old as the hills. But I never yet grew tired of repeating it. Because it happened to me and mine!”

His face darkened. “My father went to jail, for something he didn’t do. Yours hid his family out of sight for a while, and went off by himself, out of reach, to another country, where he lived off the fat of the land on stolen money, waiting for things to blow over. But it didn’t end there. My father died in jail. He never came out alive again. It killed him just as surely as a gun or a knife. He was murdered. They took me up to see him near the end. Yes, I was just a kid, but they took me up to see him, that was his last request. And his dying words to me were: ‘Get even for us, Eddie. Get even on that man that’s done this to us, on him and his, if it takes all your life.’ I swore I would, and I keep my oath to a dying man.”

He flung down his cigar, as though the memory of all this made it taste bad. “I saw my mother scrub floors on her hands and knees, until she died too, years before her time, a worn-out drudge. I saw my sister — well something even worse happened to her, because there was no one to give us a home any more. I grew up on the streets myself, and then in reform school. All because my birthright was taken away from me.

“But I had one thing through it all to keep me going. My oath to get even. And it still hasn’t been fulfilled. I caught up with him years later. I tracked him down until I’d caught up with him. And I was just too late. Just a few weeks too late. He’d died safe in bed, in the beautiful mansion that blood-money had bought him. He’d died a respected, honored, adopted citizen in that second home of his in a foreign land. I couldn’t take that away from him. My oath went unfulfilled. But I knew he had a son somewhere. A son he was too cowardly to come back and acknowledge.” His list came down with a sound like thunder. “And now I’ve got his son. That’s something even better!”

“Only you haven’t,” I said. “I was born George Palmer. I never heard of any Lee Nugent until a few short days ago. I picked the name at random out of a newspaper because I saw there was some money waiting to be claimed, and I went down there and impersonated him. You’ve got the wrong guy. You’ve got a fake, a phony. What good is it to your vengeance to get even on somebody entirely different? I haven’t got the blood of your father’s enemy in my veins—”

To my surprise he’d shut up completely. I hadn’t thought it would be this easy to convince him. Suddenly, for some reason or other, he seemed uncertain. They were all looking at him curiously, I saw. He made a steeple of his fingertips and poised them before his mouth. “It’s always possible, of course,” he said quietly, “that me and my fellows here have made such a mistake. Isn’t it, boys?”

He turned and looked hard at them, one by one. I saw the corners of his eyebrows quirk upward. Then he turned back to me again. “I don’t want to be too hasty. I’ve waited a long lime. I can afford to wait just a little longer, for the sake of being sure. Suppose I send down to your old neighborhood, bring someone up here and see if they recognize you. There’s no one has such long memories nor such keen eyesight for familiar faces as old-time neighbors—” He was soft as silk now; he was good. “Naturally, I don’t mean where you were first raised, you were too small then,” he interposed smoothly. “I mean from where you moved to after that, from where he hid you out later—” He snapped his fingers helplessly a couple of times, like you do when you’re trying to remember a name.

“Read Street?” I blurted out incautiously. “But they weren’t there long enough—”

“What d’you mean they weren’t there long enough?” he said glibly.

“There was a fire, the very first night after they’d moved in. The building at 295 burned down and—” I clamped my jaws shut too late, felt like biting off my tongue.

He didn’t do anything for a minute. There was silence. Then he turned and looked at the others like he had before. With the same quirk to his eyebrows. As if to say, “See?”

But there wasn’t a smile on any of them, him included. He turned back to me.

“You’ve told us who you are out of your own mouth,” he said with soft ferocity. “If you weren’t Lee Nugent how would you know the street and the very house-number you lived at as a kid? How could you know there was such a fire, in which your mother and sister lost their lives, but in which you were saved — for me, here, today?”

He got up and came over to me. He gave me the back of his hand across my mouth, back and forth, three, four, five times. It sounds light, the back of a hand; it wasn’t. He had a heavy ring on it. It opened my lip the second time, it widened the split on the back-swing. It chipped the enamel from my front teeth the time after. By the time he quit there were thin strings of red running down crisscross all over my chin.

“Take him outside,” he said, “and put on your best hats, we’re all going to a funeral.”

They put me in the back again, one on each side of me. He sat in front, next to the driver. He rode turned halfway around in the seat, facing me over the back of it, so that he could gloat all the way.

People have been taken for rides before. I kept telling myself that; it was all I had. They died at the end of it, and then it was over. It only took a few minutes. All right, they were going to show me my own grave at the cemetery, readied years beforehand, he’d told me just now as we got in. Then they’d make me climb down into it, most likely, and then they’d shoot me. People had died in worse ways than that. Sewn up in gunny-sacks, so that they strangled themselves. Dropped into the river with their feet stuck into buckets of cement.

And meanwhile, he kept riding sidewards on the seat, looking back at me, arm slung over the seat-top. He couldn’t wait until we got there, that might have spared me ten or fifteen minutes premonitory agony of mind. No, he had to tell me now, ahead of time, so I’d have that much added horror to look forward to.

“You think you’re going to be stretched out in it dead, don’t you?” he smiled. “My father was buried alive. That’s what that jail amounted to. We’ll do as much for you. We’ve got a length of copper tubing, with a little nozzle. D’you get what I mean? You’ll last for hours, maybe days. He lasted years!” A mouth wasn’t meant to smile like that; to call such a thing a smile was sacrilege. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” he said softly.

I raised my face toward the ceiling of the car and drew in a slow, cold, shuddering breath. I shivered as it went down me. He was getting what he wanted; anticipation was sheer unadulterated agony. One of the oldest instincts of man is fear of being put into the ground alive.

He all but licked his lips. If he didn’t that was the expression in his eyes as he watched me. Then something the driver did took his attention off me for a moment. He turned his head around forward. “No, you should have taken the other one, Chris. This won’t get you anywhere.” He was indulgent about it, though. I was his only hate in the world. He could forgive anyone else anything, tonight. “Back up to the intersection we just crossed and turn right into Hallowell Avenue, that’s the shortest way.”

“Sorry, chief,” the driver mumbled, crestfallen. “I thought this one was just as good.” He went into reverse. “Wasn’t watching.”

“Naw, this is Pokanoke Street, this won’t take us anywhere. It just runs on for a while and then quits cold. You’d only have to shuttle back over again when you got to the end of it—”

The name sank in, the funny name, like a pebble thrown into a dark pool, and went plunging downward through layers of memory. Pokanoke Street, Pokanoke Street. That name, there was something I had to remember — No there wasn’t, it didn’t matter, what was the difference? I was going to be dead in a little while, what good would a street-name do me?

There was a moment or two of awkward maneuvering, while he guided the car backward, erasing the slight error of direction he’d made. I suppose he thought it was simpler than making a complete loop around and facing the other way, only to have to reverse a second time a few moments later for the new start. There wasn’t anything behind us in a straight line, his mirror showed him that, but as our rear backed out into the open past the corner line, a lightweight truck came at us from the transverse direction without any warning.

The two things happened at once. The plunging pebble struck bottom in the pool of my memory, and the truck sideswiped the back of the car, shunted it out of the way, and sent it lashing around in a long shuddering skid against the pull of its own brakes, that momentarily threatened to overturn it.

Limpy. A helping hand, waiting down there along that street. Refuge if I could only get to it. Sanctuary. It’s true he was only a lame peddler, but he had a door that would let me in, and close them out. The only friendly door in the whole length and breadth of the town —

There were four of them around me in the car. And only one — the driver — without a gun either already in his hands or within such short reach of his hands that it amounted to the same thing.

But the odds had suddenly evened out in my favor. For, while the car rocked from side to side and threatened to topple from one instant to the next, they were all afraid of dying, death was all they had time to think of. I’d been afraid of dying all along, long before they were, so I was ready for it, and now life was all I could think of.

I freed the gun from the hand of the man next to me on my right. His grip had become so nerveless that I didn’t even have to wrench it from him. I just plucked it from his loose fingers. That meant I had it by the bore and that was the way I wanted it, it saved me the trouble of reversing it. I hitched it against the ceiling and chopped down backhard into the middle of his forehead with it, square between the two eyebrow-bulges. Then I freed the door on that side and made a circular hop out past his relaxing knees. The car hadn’t even finished its burning skid yet. They were all still suspended between two worlds.

Ed Donnelly turned just in time to see me go, then reversed to try to get me on that side. “Hold onto him!” I gave him the gun-butt the flat way, across his teeth. He got his hands on it blindly, as though he were a glutton cramming something into his own mouth. I let it go. His whole head was well-shocked, he couldn’t use it.

By the time the first shot came, I was already sprinting up Pokanoke Street. It was a soft, spongy sound I didn’t recognize for a shot. It was like a soggy paper bag crunching open. Silencer. I swerved in closer to the building-line and kept hurtling along.

410. 410, he’d said. 410 alone was life, and every other doorway spelled death. Their badges, their phony tin badges would open them, pull me out.

The crunching sound came again, but it was further behind me now.

The doorways kept ticking off, like uprights of a black picket-fence, I was going so fast. Most were dark. I flashed past one with a dim light behind its grubby fanlight. 395. I was on the wrong side, but it was right over there, just a few doors ahead.

I had to get over. I didn’t slacken, but I launched myself out on a diagonal, away from the sheltering building-line, and that was when they got me. They got me halfway over; I guess I showed better against the empty middle of the street. It made me miss a step, but then I went right on as though nothing had happened.

It was like the prickling of a needle first. That was all, nothing more. Then a sharper pain bored its way in more slowly, as though an awl was being rotated in its wake. Then came heat, as though the awl were generating friction. Then fire, then agony, then approaching collapse.

400. 402. They were coming now. Something had held them up, they hadn’t been able to start right out after me. Most likely the truck that had participated in the collision had halted a short distance off around the corner and its occupants got out to parley for a minute. They’d been held there against their wills a minute or two, until they could get rid of them, even though one had ventured the muffled potshots in the meantime that had gained their object. Now the running splatter of their feet suddenly surged out after me in the silence up there; it echoed forebodingly.

I had to get in off the street. I couldn’t make another doorway. I couldn’t get there. This was only 406, still three houses away, but this was as far as I could go. I fell twice, once outside the threshold and once inside. The feet were coming nearer. I picked myself up and zig-zagged back to where some stairs began.

I pulled the steps down toward me with my hands, got up them that way, scrambling on all fours like somebody going up a treadmill. I got to the first landing, reared upright, fell again, clawed up another flight of steps.

They got there. They made a blunder outside the door that gained me another flight, a third. They went on past, one doorway too many. I could hear them arguing. “No, it’s this one back here, I tell you! I seen him!”

They’d doubled back now, and come in after me, down below. I could tell by the hollow tone their bated voices took as soon as they were in out of the open. “This is it. Sec the blood-spots across the doorway?” Two of them must have preceded the others. There was a short, surreptitious whistle, by way of signal. “In here.”

And then an order from Donnelly, in a husky undertone: “You two stay out there, me and Chris’ll go in after him. Bring the car down this way and keep it running. Keep your eyes on all these doors along here, he may try to cross over the roofs and come out one of the others—”

I could hear every word, through the silence, up there where I was. And they could hear me, wrenching at the last barrier of all, the roof-door that ended the stairs, warped and half-unmanageable, but held only a rusted hook and eye on the inside. “Listen, he’s up above there, hear him?”

I was out now, in the dark, stars over me, gravel squashing away from under my feet. I kept going blindly, in the same direction as down below in the street. A low brick division-rampart, only ankle-high, came up. That meant 408 was beginning. I had to keep count, or I’d go too far. I couldn’t raise my feet that high any more, to step over it. I had to kneel on it and let myself fall over to the other side. I got up again, it got wet all over again where the bullet had gone in, but I managed to pull myself up again.

I stumbled on. Those stars were acting funny, they kept blurring and swirling, like pinwheels. Another brick partition came up. I crawled over that full-length, like an eel. This was 410 now. This was safety, down under my feet somewhere. Only his door, his was the only one was any good against that tin badge.

I found the roof-door, in the little hutch it fitted into. And then — something was the matter. It would come out just so far, about a hand’s breadth, and then it wouldn’t come out any further. That same hook and eye arrangement on the inside, like the other. I pulled and strained at it, but I didn’t have enough strength left —

And behind me, two rooftops away, I heard the gravel scuff as they came out after me. There was a wink of light from one of them as though he’d lit a match, but it wasn’t that. There was another of those crunches.

I’ll never know just what it was. I don’t think it could have been the bullet, such a thing happens only in fairy tales. But I hadn’t been able to open it until now, the hook was in the way, holding it back. And all of a sudden, after that flash, the hook wasn’t there any more, the door swung out free for me.

I got down the first flight, inside, on my own feet, although sometimes they were too far behind and sometimes they were too far out in front of me. But the next one I couldn’t make standing up any more, I fell all the way down. Not head-first, but in a sort of diagonal slide on my back. And then I just lay flat.

This was the third floor. It was one of these doors. But I was still as far away as I had been outside, or back in the car. All that travail for nothing. A thought passed through my mind: why do you want to live this bad? They have the money now, you have nothing. Just a bench in the park, just a paper out of a bin.

Give me that, I breathed, but let me live.

There was a door just inches beyond my numb, outstretched arm lying along the floor. I couldn’t move those few inches. I couldn’t reach it.

I heard another one open, somewhere behind me, as though the sound of my sliding fall just now had attracted someone’s attention. Feet moved toward me and stood there before my glazing eyes.

Someone’s arms dug under me, and I was hoisted up, propped against the wall. My blurred vision cleared for a moment, and Limpy’s face came through. It blotted, then came into right focus.

“They’re coming down after me,” I breathed hoarsely. “From up there. And there are others waiting down below outside the door. I haven’t any place to go but here—”

He just stood looking at me.

I reached out and caught him weakly by the shoulder. “Limpy, it’s me, don’t you know me, can’t you see my face? What’re you standing waiting for like that? Take me inside with you, close the door. Don’t you want to save me?”

They were opening the roof-door. He still didn’t move. But he spoke at last.

“Would you?” he said. “Would you if you were me? You see, I happen to be — the real Lee Nugent.”

My first day out of the hospital, I came along a pathway in the park. It could have been any pathway, they were all alike to me and I had nowhere to go, but it happened to be that particular one. I slumped down on a bench.

I sat there thinking over what had happened that night. How he’d hauled my half-conscious form inside with him at the last minute, after they were already clattering down the stairs; barred the door and shoved things up against it to hold them off for awhile. “Sure, I’m Lee Nugent,” I’d heard him say softly, “but you’re still my friend.”

I suppose they would have gotten us there, in the end, though — the two of us together, the real and the fake, instead of just me alone. There was no telephone, no weapon, not even an outside window through which to call for help.

But those truck-drivers who had been in the collision earlier with the death-car hadn’t beer, as gullible as they had appeared to be. They went straight to the police from there, reported a car from which a man had been seen to break away, followed by suspicious flashes that might have been silenced shots, and gave its license number. The cops closed in turn around them, and jumped them just as the door was splintering under their vicious assault, caught them pretty, the whole lot of them. The two who had stayed behind were picked up later. Donnelly and one other guy had been shot dead in the fracas.

And that was about all. Except, and this came weeks later, I was free to leave the hospital whenever I was in condition to go. Lee Nugent, the real Lee Nugent, didn’t want me held, was willing to drop all charges against me. He felt I’d been punished enough already for my week of stolen high life, and if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t have been able to come into unhampered enjoyment of the money himself.

So here I was back where I’d started, slumped on a bench in the park, staring meditatively down at the ground before me. I heard a car brake in the driveway out front, and footsteps approached.

I stared at the expensive custom-made shoes and then on up to his face. He was smiling. “They told me you’d checked out when I tried to find you at the hospital just now. I’ve been looking for you. Don’t take offense now, but there’s something that I want to do, I won’t be happy until it’s off my mind. I’m a firm believer in completing the circle of events, ending things where they began.” And he took out his wallet and handed me a ten-dollar bill, one of those same tens I used to give him all the time. “Remember?” he grinned.

He turned and went back to the car. I just sat there holding it in my hand, looking after him. Gee, life was screwy.

He waited a minute by the wheel. Then he beckoned me. “Come on,” he called over genially, “get in. You don’t want to sit there on a bench in the park. We should stick together, you and me, we’ve got a lot in common.”

George Palmer went over and climbed in beside Lee Nugent, and the two of us drove off together.