Into the Night

“And now to kill a man.”

How simple the words were. How easy to say, or think. And yet how frightful, how fearsome, to put into effect, to carry out. And once carried out, how impossible ever again to undo, to restore as it was before.

To turn someone like that — she let her gaze slowly travel around the hotel dining room, encompassing it and taking in each man in it in turn, but only the men (for it was a man who was to die, not a woman. Though women died too, they were no different):

One was smiling at the girl in front of him, interestedly drinking in her quick flow of words, nodding approvingly, admiringly, eyes glued to her unswervingly in the first head-on impact of youthful love.

One was looking at his watch as her eyes passed over him and telling the other three people at the table (probably) that it was time to start for the theater.

One was sitting alone, but quite complacently, an empty stemglass with a tiny white onion in it before him, thinking of something that pleased him very much, judging by the almost fatuous expression on his face.

One, just coming back after being called outside to answer a phone, was anything but complacent. His face was flushed with sulkiness and wounded vanity, and after he’d reseated himself to wait some more, he drummed anger-expressing fingers on the table.

One was breaking a roll open, preparing it for buttering.

One had his hand inside his pocket to get out money, and with the other one was good-naturedly waving off his friend’s attempt to pay.

One was holding a vivaciously twinkling lighter across the table to the cigarette of his woman companion.

— to turn someone like that, or that, or that, into something that didn’t move anymore. And soon rotted away. That didn’t smile at some girl anymore, or look at a watch anymore. Or flick on a lighter anymore. Or take money out of his pocket.

Well, what was so terrible about it? God in His infinite wisdom — or infinite indifference — did that every day, stopped lives by the score and by the hundreds. Blind Nature did it too, in a multitude of ways, if any distinction could be made between the two.

Yes, but she wasn’t God, and she wasn’t Nature. That was what was terrible about it.

Death took only an instant, a second. It couldn’t by its nature take more than that. Even a lengthy dying was still life up until that final second. To destroy in less than a second, then, what it had taken twenty-five, thirty, forty years to grow and shape. To efface, to wipe out, what some mother had nurtured and cherished. What some younger woman had loved and joined her life to. To blank out the collected knowledge inside that mind, the specialties, the talents, the knacks, the lacks; never again to be reassembled in just that identical collectivity and ratio and proportion and degree. Unique, each single mind, out of all the millions of others. Irreplaceable. The memories, the experiences, the disappointments, the hates, the loves, the plans, the hopes.

All this — in just an instant, erased, extinguished, annihilated.

And yet it had to be. It was to be. It would be.

She wanted her own peace of mind back. She was entitled to it. She couldn’t live without it, life would be unendurable.

She took up an unused table knife and slowly drew an invisible line along the tablecloth.

This is his path, slowly coming toward mine. Nearer as the days go by, nearer each hour and each day.

She drew another line toward the first one, but stopped it short before they encountered one another.

This is my path, slowly going toward his. Inevitably, they will come together. After they meet, mine will keep going on again. His won’t. His will have stopped.

The shadow of a man’s head and shoulders dimmed the whiteness of the table a little, and the waiter asked her if there was anything more.

She shook her head inattentively without looking up at him, and watched the faint outline efface itself from the cloth again.

Like that, life left you, went away from you. Like a faint shadowing slipping off the blankness of some empty tablecloth. Just like that.

It is at one and the same time both the easiest and yet the hardest thing in the world for a girl to meet a certain designated man, who is a stranger to her and within whose orbit she does not naturally fall: that is, with whom she does not share mutual friends nor gravitate within the same business or professional background as he does. It is easy if her long-range motive is marriage or her short-range one simply a love affair. Or for that matter, even just a quick sex-kick. Because then all she does is place herself in his way, go somewhere where she knows he’ll be and where he can’t help see her, and let the rest follow automatically from there. Either let him pick her up, or else pick him up and let him think he did.

But if her motive is something else again, if there is not the slightest possibility of love on her part, and even less on his, so that even the phony promise of love-yet-to-come cannot be used as an inducement or come-on in helping to break the ice, and if they have no mutual friends, no complementary backgrounds, then the difficulty becomes almost insurmountable.

Madeline’s motive was murder, no more, no less. She was honest enough to admit to herself that that was all it could be called in the final analysis, no matter how she tried to gloss it over by calling it a deed of retribution, or atonement, or vindication, or whatever. It was death by violence, at her hands, and that was murder.

There had to be a relationship to precede this act. She couldn’t just shoot him down at sight. One very good reason being she didn’t know him by sight. All she’d seen was his smile, in one torn photograph. She had to know he was the right one, she had to make sure. Since love was barred, and there was no business or professional empathy, the only possible relationship had to be friendship. No matter how false, but still a friendship.

And that was where the problem came in. A woman cannot suddenly meet and commence a friendship with a strange man, just like that.

Even apart from that, the logistics of getting within reach of him, she had a minor problem of identification on her hands. She had very little to go by. Charlotte herself had never set eyes on him in her life. She, Madeline, had no physical description beyond the single, brief black-and-white glimpse of his lips. Starr’s letters to her mother had been filled with emotional descriptives, but never physical ones. He might be stocky, he might be slender, might be short, might be tall. She had to cut him out of a whole worldful of men.

Only two facts about him had filtered through Charlotte to her, both coming at second hand from Starr. And those two facts were the minimum that can be known about anyone: They were his two names, first and last. “Vick” and “Herrick.” Not another thing. Not even that much in full, for one of them was probably a nickname. There was a very good possibility that “Vick” stood for “Victor,” but not an out-and-out certainty.

She didn’t even know what his occupation was, his method of earning a living. Starr had never told Charlotte, oddly enough, and so Charlotte had been unable to tell Madeline. Dell herself had only used the word “work,” which could have meant anything. “Sometimes he used to go straight from work to pick her up.”

Madeline took stock. She had this much, then: “Vick Herrick.” And one thing in addition, gathered by indirection. Dell had admitted he was younger than she when she married him. Since Dell herself had been at the most still in her early thirties, he must be in his late twenties, even today.

Not much to go by. Very little. Vick Herrick, age twenty-eight, — nine, or thirty. No face, no height, no hair coloring. To be singled out, isolated, from a huge population complex.

For days on end, the very hopelessness of the task held her immobile, kept her from doing anything at all. So afraid of failure that she was afraid even to start in. Finally she had to say to herself, “Get up your nerve. Don’t let it throw you like this. Even if you fail, it’s better than just to sit doing nothing. It’s too late to turn back now anymore, so the only place you can go is ahead.” She took a deep breath, and without knowing just where to begin, began anyway.

The obvious thing of course was to consult the telephone directory. That wouldn’t facilitate her striking up a friendship with him, but it might at least indicate whom to strike it up with. When she had hit upon a way of going about it.

She was surprised at the number of Herricks she encountered. She had thought it a fairly uncommon name. But she counted eighteen of them. However, of these there were only three listed with given names starting with a V, so the problem wasn’t as bad as it seemed. One was a female, Vivian; other two just had initials after the “Herrick.” She eliminated Vivian at once, and that left her with just two to concentrate on. At least within the metropolitan city limits. There was nothing of course to exclude his being a suburbanite, one of that teeming horde that siphoned in each morning and out again each night. In which case the task would be so magnified it might take the better part of a year. She closed her eyes with a shudder to ward off the dismal prospect.

She had her two V. Herricks, then; one on Lane Street, one on St. Joseph. Now to make contact.

She decided a spurious phone call, to try to elicit information was not only impractical, it might even be risky and defeat its own purpose. People do not readily drop their guard, open up their lives, to the voice of a stranger on the telephone. And how could she claim to be anything else? To make an impostor out of herself, pass herself off as somebody he already knew or who already knew him, was out of the question. She didn’t know whom to impersonate, in the first place, and the imposture would probably fall flat on its face after the second sentence had been spoken.

A personal visit, a face-to-face confrontation or sizing up was the only feasible modus operandi.

This much granted, now she was stymied by having to find a plausible excuse. A personal visit, a call, had to have one. She couldn’t just go up to his doorbell and ring it.

Additional days went by while she pondered this. Each new idea that came to her seemed fine, the very thing, at first sight. Then as she examined it, flaws would appear, more and more of them. Until it was as full of holes as a fishnet.

More than once, pacing the floor, trailing question marks of cigarette smoke, she would say to herself, “If I were only a man.” How much easier that would have made it. She could have passed herself off as a gas-meter inspector, a plumber, an electrician, a telephone repairman, a building inspector. Even rented a bike and borrowed a carton and pretended to be a grocery-store deliveryman who’d rung the wrong bell by mistake. Any number of things like that, just to gain access and size him up, if nothing more. But who ever heard of a girl filling such duties?

And then, as so often happens in this unpredictable world, when she least expected it, and from the quarter it was least likely to have come from, the inspiration was dropped into her lap. Or rather placed in her hand. Ready-made, complete, and practically foolproof.

One night she went down to dinner in the hotel dining room, as she did most nights. But this one night she discovered she’d left her handbag upstairs in the apartment, which she did not do other nights. There was no great predicament involved — the meal was always charged to her bill, and so could the tip be if it had to — except for one thing. Her room key was in the handbag, so she found she’d locked herself out. Here again there was no difficulty, the hotel always kept duplicates at the desk for just such an eventuality.

She therefore stopped at the desk, a thing she rarely had occasion to do, for she never received any mail or messages, and to her surprise the desk man put an unsealed envelope with her name and room number written out on it into her hand.

It was a form appeal for contributions to a multiple-sclerosis fund, and looking up at the mail rack she could see that a similar envelope had been placed in every single letter slot. They all showed evenly white, as though a diagonally slanted blizzard had struck them.

On the back flap, partly printed out and the rest filled in in handwriting, was the notation: “Kindly return this with your contribution to your floor monitor, Mrs. Richard Fairfield, 710.”

Madeline had what she’d been looking for, and she recognized it at sight. She took it upstairs with her, let herself in with the emergency key, took twenty-five dollars out of the repossessed handbag, and put it inside the donation form. Then, conceding that it was extremely important for her purposes to get into Mrs. Fairfield’s good graces and win her confidence as fully as possible, she added a second twenty-five to the first, making her total contribution a generous and impressive fifty dollars.

She left the envelope unsealed, so there would be the least possible obstacle to Mrs. Fairfield’s almost immediate discovery of her munificence, preferably while she was still present. Then she patted her hair a little and went down the hall to 710. She tipped the knocker, and in a moment a strangely composite type of person was standing before her. She was both youthfully old and oldly youthful, a peculiar blend of overage flapper and vivacious dowager. She hadn’t jelled right; one hadn’t been able to submerge the other. Artfully waved silver-blue hair. Triple ropes of pearls the size of Chiclets, which couldn’t have been anything but genuine, they were too large. Some sort of trailing garb with lots of satin and lots of lace. She was even carrying a cigarette in a short jade holder, a thing Madeline hadn’t seen anyone do since her own childhood in the fourth Roosevelt Administration. She was completely unlifelike, she seemed to have stepped out of a cartoon in The New Yorker. Madeline almost wanted to look down around the floor under her in search of a signature.

“Mrs. Fairfield?” Madeline said smilingly. “I took the liberty of bringing this to you myself, because I—”

“Miss Chalmers,” Mrs. Fairfield said, reading the name on the envelope. “How d’do. Very kind of you.”

Madeline’s strategy had proved well advised. It now paid off handsomely. Mrs. Fairfield had managed to deftly project and compute the bills in the folder without seeming to do so at all, just by a trick of the fingernails, much in the way a practiced card player scans his cards by the merest tips of their corners while he holds them close in to him.

Madeline suddenly found herself high in favor, high beyond mere cordiality, high almost to the point of unbridled enthusiasm. Mrs. Fairfield gave her a dazzling electric smile with teeth that must have cost a fortune. “Won’t you come in for a few moments and chat?” she invited.

“If I’m not taking up your time,” Madeline said apologetically, but moving forward even as she was saying it.

“I’m expecting my husband to take me to a violin recital,” Mrs. Fairfield informed her as they seated themselves, “but he’s late. He always seems to be late at times like this.” Then she added archly, “Sometimes I wonder about that.”

Madeline wasn’t interested in the surroundings, she wasn’t there for that, so she took no notice of them. But she inescapably received a blurred off-center impression of ornateness all around her, and at least one detail came through clearly: a large oil painting on the wall of Mrs. Fairfield herself, some twenty-five or thirty years ago. Irreproachably beautiful, but irreparably dated by the peculiar flat hairstyling of the early thirties, always worn with a part far over to the side of the head, the way men wore them. Madeline recognized it from movies she’d seen.

Mrs. Fairfield had seen her gaze up at the wall. “My husband insisted I sit for that,” she remarked complacently. Then she went on to explain, rather piquantly, “Not this one. One of the earlier ones. I forget just which.”

She wants me to know she’s been married more than once, Madeline thought, so that it won’t fail to point up how attractive to men she once was. But anyone can be married more than once, she reflected. All it takes is a disagreeable disposition.

“I’ve seen you from a distance once or twice, coming and going,” Mrs. Fairfield confided. “I asked everyone, ‘Who is that lovely young girl?’ No one seemed to know. No one could tell me anything about you—”

“There isn’t anything to tell,” Madeline murmured.

“—Always alone. Never a young man with you. Why, when I was your age, I could hardly put my foot down without fear of stepping on one of them.”

She wants to give me the mental picture that they were always on their knees all around her, groveling.

“They don’t interest me too much,” Madeline said dryly. “They seem to be always there, a part of the background. I take them for granted.”

A look of genuine horror passed fleetingly across Mrs. Fairfield’s marshmallow-white face. She promptly dropped the topic, which was what Madeline had wanted in the first place, anyway.

“I don’t suppose most people deliver their contributions in person,” she said.

“I assume you wanted to be very certain I received it.”

“That’s only part of the reason,” Madeline said. “It struck me that I might be able to do something for the cause besides what cash I can afford to contribute.”

“How do you mean?”

“I thought I could solicit donations. I’m sure not every building in the city is fortunate enough to have a volunteer passing out envelopes and collecting contributions. I could go around to other buildings, tell people a little about multiple sclerosis, and see if they’d care to make a donation.”

“That’s grueling,” the woman said. “If you just leave envelopes you never hear from the people again. And if you press for a donation on the spot, you get turned down time after time. All in all, it can be a terrible waste of time.”

“It’s my time,” Madeline said evenly. “I don’t mind wasting it, not if it’s in a good cause.”

“I don’t know. I’m not authorized to deputize you as a building representative or anything of the sort—”

“Just give me some literature and contribution envelopes,” she suggested. “I don’t have to have any official standing. Any contributions I receive I’ll hand over directly to you and you can turn them in with whatever else you collect.”

The woman thought for a moment. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “I’ll list you as a volunteer,” she said. “It may be slightly irregular, but it will be all right.”

An hour later, a sheaf of donation envelopes in her purse, she stood on the sidewalk in front of the address listed for V. Herrick, on Lane Street.

It was a frugal, little apartment building, no frills or luxuries, somewhat run-down in appearance but still clinging to an overall aspect of respectability. It was of newer vintage than the old walk-ups of the early 1900s — she could see a self-service elevator no wider than a filing cabinet standing open at the end of the hall — but it was anything but modern. It probably dated, she surmised, from the immediate pre-Pearl Harbor period, when all such construction was jerry-built, due to the shortage of funds and the low level of rents. It had probably just gotten in under the wire before controls went on, all private building was frozen, and the hordes of war workers came pouring in from all over the country, to beg, bribe, and fight for every square inch of floor space that was to be had. And today — who wanted it?

The Herrick door was indicated as the first one on her left as she entered the ground-floor hall. There was a peculiar vibration such as a riveting machine might make somewhere about, but she couldn’t identify what the source of it was. She took out the donation forms, took in a deep but not very heroic breath, and knocked. Nothing happened. She knocked again. Nothing happened again. There was a roaring sound, then it died down again.

She noticed a small push button at the side of the door. It had escaped her until now because some unsung but remarkably conscientious (or remarkably sloppy) painter had painted it over the same sage-green color he’d used on all the rest of the woodwork around it.

She didn’t hear any sound when she thumbed it in, but evidently it still worked, because in a matter of not more than a minute or so the door opened, and the torrential tumult of hundreds of shouting voices came banging out at Madeline’s eardrums, almost bowling her over by the sheer impact and unexpectedness of it alone. Somewhere in the middle of it all a man was screaming away, as if he were being torn apart by wild horses: “—into the bleachers back of left field! Bob Allen, twenty-three! A left-hander from Texas!”

And closer at hand, another man yelped shrilly: “Be-jeezis, don’t ever tell me they’re no good!”

The woman looking out at Madeline was somewhat slipshod, but had amiability written all over her broad, good-natured face. She had evidently grown used to immeasurable decibels of noise and it no longer had any effect on her placidity. She was holding an orange-pop bottle in one hand and a bottle opener poised in the other. Madeline read the word “Yes?” from her pleasantly up-cornered lips.

“Would you be interested in contributing something to the multiple-sclerosis fund?” Madeline rattled off. “Any amount you care to give will be appreciated.”

“I can’t hear you,” the woman shouted.

“The multiple-sclerosis fund!” Madeline yelled back.

“I still can’t hear you!” the woman screeched.

Madeline let her arms sag limply. “I can’t yell any louder. I’ve used up all my voice.”

“Wait a minute,” the woman said. Or at least lip-formed. She turned her head around. “Vince!”

“Ball one,” came back hollowly in answer.

“Vince, I’m talking to you! There’s somebody at the door. Tone that thing down a minute, so I can find out what she wants.”

This time an injured but stentorian baritone managed to penetrate the sound barrier. “Top of the ninth, five-all, two men on base, and she asks me to tone it down!”

But Madeline didn’t wait for any more. She quietly but firmly closed the door again, from the outside, and went away.

It was a basement furnished room, and even as she stepped down from the sidewalk into the enclosed areaway it fronted on, a sense of foreboding overcame her. She even halted a moment and made a half turn as if to get back onto the sidewalk again. Then she overrode her hesitancy and crossed to the arched brownstone doorway set in under the high stoop, and rang. She could hear the faint ring deep inside the house somewhere. If personal risk was going to deter her, she told herself, then she shouldn’t have embarked on this odyssey in the first place. There was bound to be risk now and then along the way. Risk was to be expected. There had been risk attached to the Dell Nelson business and she’d come through that all right.

A dim bulb lit up behind the iron-barred basement door, and a man came into view.

She didn’t like the barred effect the door created between them. It suggested prison, confinement, restraint, something she wasn’t able to quite put her finger upon. Danger, that was it. It suggested some sort of latent danger, as if you were facing someone kept apart from you for his own good.

His face wasn’t what troubled her. There was nothing in it to suggest malevolence. It had deep lines in it, at the brow and around the eyes, not the lines of age but of punishing experience. But its overall aspect was a grim stoicism that took what it got, asked no quarter, and sought no retaliation.

He was anything but trim of appearance. He had on a rumpled shirt open at the neck, a pullover sweater that badly needed dry cleaning, and a pair of dingy slacks that needed pressing. He hadn’t shaved today, even if he had yesterday. His hair was light brown and tumbled. His eyes were a darker brown, and looked as though they’d seen a lot of things they wished they hadn’t.

Something inside her told her that if he wasn’t the one she was looking for, he came closer to being it than anyone else she’d come across yet.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Do you want to contribute to the multiple-sclerosis fund?”

“Why don’t they get up a fund for me sometimes?” he said, dourly. “I could use one too.”

“Well—” she faltered. “That’s not the point. The point is—”

He reached out and opened the grillwork door. “Do you want to come in and tell me about it?”

It was an invitation that even a seventeen-year-old novice would have backed away from in mistrust. It wasn’t even put forward artfully or adroitly. It made no promises of immunity, not even false ones meant to be broken. She even saw him glance past her shoulder, as if to see whether there was anyone else around out there.

And yet somehow the very baldness of his technique had the reverse effect of not driving her away, of arousing her interest. This was the very sort of man that might have inspired a wife to want him dead. Maybe something like this had happened to Starr. To others, that is to say, while he was married to Starr and she had to stand by looking on. He had every earmark of the professional rapist.

“You’re Mr. Herrick?”

“Mr. Herrick, right.”

“We keep lists of the people we call on back at our headquarters, Mr. Herrick. I have you down for my last call of the day,” she said pointedly. “So if I don’t report back afterward—”

“What makes you think you won’t report back afterward?”

“Nothing — so far.”

They eyed one another steadily for a moment, each one trying to dominate. Then his eyes lost, and slid edgewise. They came right back again, but hers had had their victory. With that, she stepped past him and turned into the basement hallway. Without looking around she knew he had put out his hand to reclose the iron gate. “Would you mind leaving that open,” she said, “while I’m in here?”

He gave a sniff of laughter. “You won’t have to leave in that much of a hurry.”

The room was about what she’d expected it to be. A sagging cot against the wall, which he slept on. A couple of wood-backed chairs, of unsure stability. A table with a smoldering cigarette gnawing its way into its rim to join the dozens of other indented burns that ringed it around. A gas ring hooked to a jet and parked on a shelf. A number of copper beer cans in two positions, upright and prone. Meaning full and empty. A calendar on the wall, but it was the wrong year and the last leaf had never been torn off: December 1960. Yesterday’s newspaper and the day before yesterday’s newspaper, neither of them yet thrown out. Last month’s magazine (For Men Only), ditto. On the wall opposite the calendar, a photograph of a soldier in a flowerpot helmet, with a girl leaning her head against his shoulder.

Not much else.

Lives, she realized, are lived in such rooms. Some lives.

There was one other thing, though, of undetermined connotation, which caught her eye. There was a standpipe over in one corner, running through from floor to ceiling. Alongside it was a small steam radiator with a flat piece of tin nailed over it. On this lay a monkey wrench. She noticed a curious thing about the standpipe, which she couldn’t identify at first. It seemed to have a metal ring or “collar” encircling it at one point, and from this hung a short chain, at the end of which there was another ring or band. But this one was open at one end, and was not encircling the standpipe but was hanging down flat alongside it.

Suddenly it dawned on her what the complicated design was. It was a pair of handcuffs, fastened by one cuff to the pipe. And the other one, the open one, what was that for? Something made her go a little cold inside.

“How much do you want me to give?” he said, putting his hand to the baggy pocket of a moldy sweater hanging from a nail. This one was a coat-sweater with sleeves, but they had big holes at the elbows that seemed to peel outward.

“Give whatever you feel you can afford,” she said. Then, because it was a good opportunity, she rang the question in. “Are you married?”

“Not this minute.”

It was beginning to shape up more and more, she told herself.

He handed her a five-dollar bill. “Here,” he said grudgingly, and repeated the ancient wisecrack: “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

“But are you sure you can spare this?” She couldn’t resist glancing around a second time at the squalid room.

He caught her doing it. “Don’t let it worry you,” he said. “Money’s one thing I’ve got plenty of. Enough to get by on, anyway. I draw a Veterans’ Disability Pension.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked at him. He seemed untouched.

“I was wounded in the war. Kara something-or-other, I think it was called. It was an island.”

“Tarawa,” she said impatiently. “You were there but you don’t know the name. We learned about it in high school.”

“We were dying, not studying geography,” he rebuked her mildly. “I can still see it, though,” he went on. “Just a little patch of hell stuck out there in the ocean. Never knew why the Japs wanted it, or why we wanted to take it away from them. I can get sick thinking of all the boys who died for islands that were never any use to anybody, and never will be.” His eyes challenged her. “A lot of boys died,” he said.

“I know.”

“And they were the lucky ones,” he said. “Do you know that too?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s worse things than dying, but I don’t expect you to believe that.”

She thought of Starr, dying, and of herself, with a leftover life to live. “I believe it,” she said, softly.

He didn’t seem to have heard her. “Tarawa,” he said. “Guys left their arms there. Or their legs. Or came away blind or deaf or with their brains scrambled. They were lucky too. Not as lucky as the dead ones, but luckier than some.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I wasn’t so lucky.”

She stared at him. “You’ve got your arms and legs,” she said. “And your hearing and your eyesight. What makes you the unluckiest man at Tarawa?”

“Do you know the difference between a bull and an ox?”

“Not exactly. An ox is bigger, isn’t it? And stronger, I guess.”

He laughed sourly. “You must be a city girl,” he said. “A farm girl would have the picture by now. How about a ram and a wether? A rooster and a capon?”

“I—”

“Or a stallion and a gelding. How about that?”

“You don’t mean—”

“Don’t I? We were on patrol. From out of nowhere, a Jap threw a grenade at us. My buddy dove for it to throw it back. It went off in his hand and killed him. The lucky bastard.”

“And—”

“And I got to keep my arms and my legs and my sight and my hearing. All I lost was what makes a man a man.”

“My God,” she breathed.

“When I came back, my wife walked out on me. I didn’t blame her. She would’ve stood by me in anything else, if I was on crutches, if I was blind. She was a good wife. But she was entitled to a husband.”

She looked over at the picture on the wall. The soldier in his helmet, the girl looking up worshipfully from his shoulder. It couldn’t have been Starr, then. Tarawa had been in 1943. But maybe Starr had come along afterward, unsuspecting. Who knows what this terrible tourniquet had turned into later on?

“At first it wasn’t so bad for a little while. I went out on dates like I had before I got married. Plenty of dates. Plenty of girls. Some wanted to marry. Some were ready to settle for less. But there always comes a time in an evening when the two of you are alone by yourselves. I used to tell all kinds of lies to cover myself up.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I even told one girl I was contagious.”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me she didn’t mind, not to let it stop me, because she was contagious herself.”

He went over to the vicinity of the washbasin and picked up a flat brown-glass bottle from somewhere near it, she didn’t quite see where. “I don’t suppose I can offer you a drink?” he said uncertainly.

“That might only lead to trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Trouble for me. And trouble for me spells trouble for you too,” she told him coolly. “You know that, don’t you?”

Even his answer was the perfect answer — for her line of inquiry. “I ought to by now,” he said with a heavy sigh.

He tipped the bottle up, pulled the cork with his teeth, held it fast there, let some liquor run into his mouth alongside of it, then reinserted the cork, still with his teeth only. She’d never seen that done before.

“It started in gradually, the bad part of it. I found myself starting to hit them, to get a little rough, to throw them around and swing at them. One or two even stood for it, but not too long. Most ran away. Then the stray slaps and knocks became regular beatings. I beat one girl up very badly one night. I had to throw cold water on her before she came around. I put some money in her hand, all I had on me, and kissed her and beat it away. She never preferred charges against me, but she used to duck out of sight if she saw me on the street after that.”

She gave him a look of antipathy. “You hated them because of what had happened to you. Is that why you roughed them up?”

“No, no. You’ve got it turned around. I only did it because I loved them. I couldn’t show them I loved them like other guys can. And you have to show it, you have to express it, it has to come out, it can’t be kept back. I could only show it by violence at the end of my hands. Those were my caresses. It was the only way I could find my peace and satisfaction. I had no other way of going through to the end.”

This is the one, she told herself inexorably. He’s the one — knew Starr.

“But I knew it wouldn’t stop there. I knew sooner or later I was going to kill one of them.”

“And have you?”

His answer was bloodcurdling in its simplicity. “Not yet.”

“Why don’t you have yourself placed under treatment before that? Before that happens?”

“There is no treatment for this. Maybe you didn’t understand me right. This isn’t something mental, that a headshrinker can work on. I went through all those tests in the beginning, and they found me normal. This is a physical dismemberment. As physical as a busted arm would be. Only, a busted arm can be put back in business again. This can’t.

“What year is this?” he asked at a tangent.

“Sixty-one.”

“That don’t mean my memory’s failing,” he defended himself. “It’s just that I lose track every now and then. I was nineteen when I was on Tarawa. That means I’m still only thirty-seven today. At thirty-seven you still get restless every week or so. You wouldn’t know it, but you do.”

She lowered her head, strangely touched for a moment.

“You want to go out for a stroll, be a part of the world again, the world you once knew. You see other fellows with their girls. You want a girl too. Nothing dirty about it, unhealthy about it. It’s as normal, as natural, as that. But that’s when the trouble comes in.”

He poked his thumb over his shoulder. “Do you see that pipe back there?”

“I noticed it when I first came in.”

“I’ve set up a system. You know, like a fire-protection system. The superintendent of this building is a Norwegian, his name is Jansen, husky as an ox. He has the apartment right over this one. He used to live down here in the basement, but when I came in he turned this one over to me and moved upstairs. You see, he likes me. His son and I were buddies in the war. Well, one night we were having a few beers around the corner, and I told him about it: how I was afraid I was going to end up in serious trouble if things kept on going the way they were; maybe even do away with someone altogether.

“So we rigged up this signal between us. When I start getting restless, and know that I’m about to go out and roam around, I hit that pipe a wallop with that monkey wrench over there, and he comes down here and keeps me from going. Sits down and plays cards with me, and we have a few drinks, and when I start to get sleepy he locks the door from the outside and goes back upstairs. Next day I’m all over it.”

“What’re the handcuffs for?” she asked batedly.

“Once in a while I won’t listen to reason.”

He started to light a cigarette, then interrupted the act, flame before lips, to tell her: “So if I start to crowd you too much, remember to pick up that monkey wrench there and hit the steam pipe with it with all your might.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said a little tautly, “because I’m leaving now.”

She got up from the rickety chair she’d seated herself on (without noticing) a long while before, turned her back on him, went over to the door, and turned the knob.

The knob turned willingly enough, but the door wouldn’t open.

“What’d you do, lock this?” she said sharply. “Don’t try anything like that! You’d better open it, if you know what’s—”

Her last glimpse of him had had him standing on the opposite side of the table from her, a considerable distance, hands rounded toward chin, matchlight streaking his face like yellow crayon. Suddenly, before she even had time to turn her head and finish the denunciation facing him, she felt his arm go around her waist. Then the other one crossed over her shoulder, interlacing with the first. His face pressed hard against hers from over the opposite shoulder. She could feel the tough, often-shaved skin, stiff as cardboard, and he planted a trail of kisses down her cheek until he found her mouth.

Fear didn’t come at first, only anger and outrage did. But when she found she couldn’t move, not even enough to squirm or struggle, that the embrace was like iron, like steel, almost traumatic in its intensity, then fear did come, in a cold, sick rush, like nausea of the mind. She kept cautioning herself: Don’t panic, don’t lose your head, that’s the worst thing you could do. And then: Go limp, let yourself go limp, and his instinctive reaction may be to relax the embrace.

She let her knees dip, and though the rest of her body was held too compressed to slide down after them, she let him carry her full weight, and it worked. His arms slackened in reflex, and she was able to duck down under them and up again on the outside.

He was too close to the door, had it boxed in, so she fled back again the other way, behind the large round center table where he’d originally been himself.

She spoke in a breathless voice, as though she were whispering in confidence. “Don’t! Cut it out!”

“You overstayed your margin of safety.”

“I’m going to have you arrested for this!”

Again he came after her. She tried to overturn the table toward him, but it had too wide a base to tilt easily. Then she remembered what he’d told her about the wrench, fled over into the corner, picked it up, and swung it in a long, shattering arc against the standpipe. The sound of it was brazen in its intensity, and it seemed to go echoing up through the house high over their heads, playing back upon itself section by section.

She only had time for the one blow, he came in at her too fast. She threw it at him and it hit him, but only on the protective arm he’d thrown up before his head. Again he penned her in his arms, but this time forward, not from in back, and she could feel the heat of his breath stirring her hair like some kind of an ill wind. She tried to kick him in the ankle with the sharp point of one of her shoes, and did, but the blow couldn’t have hurt much, he hardly flinched, it had been too foreshortened.

He lied, she thought frantically. He said the man would come.

“A little love is all I want,” he was coaxing. “Just a little love—”

She saw the cigarette that he’d lit just before the thing began, still balanced there on the rim of the table. She strained one arm toward it behind his back, but it fell a finger-length short, for she could only use the forearm because the upper arm was pinned under his. She pushed forward against him unexpectedly, instead of pulling away as she had been doing. He wasn’t expecting the impulse and had to take a couple of steps back to hold his equilibrium. Her flexing fingers snatched up the cigarette, and she jabbed it into the drum of his ear, coal-forward.

He didn’t cry out, but he recoiled like a bounced ball and let go of her. He bent his head over to one side as though his neck had been broken, and kept pounding at his ear with one hand, and stamped his heel on the floor twice.

Then before she knew what was coming, he swung the flat of his hand around at her and gave her a terrific slap that covered one whole half of her face from eyebrow to jawline. The pain of it wasn’t as bad as the force, or at least she had no time to experience it; she went back onto the cot, shoulders prone, rolled over once in a complete body turn, and landed on the floor at the foot of it, but with one arm out to break her fall.

She saw him pick up the monkey wrench from the floor where she’d thrown it before, and for a moment thought he was going to attack her with it, but before she could have moved or done anything to defend herself, other than just draw her legs defensively in underneath her, he turned and went the other way with it, and banged the standpipe, not just once but three or four times in urgent succession.

Then he flung it away from him, and settled onto a chair, head bowed down and held in both hands. Not from pain, from remorse.

The room was quiet by the time the half-running footsteps came along the passage outside and a key started to work in the door. Neither of them had moved. They were both emotionally exhausted. They weren’t even looking at each other anymore.

A heavily built man with a shock of yellow-white hair came in. He had a massive neck, arms, and shoulders, and a sizable paunch under his blue denim work shirt. He had on a pair of peculiarly shaped glasses — they were either square or octagonal — that gave him an oddly benign, homespun appearance.

“What happened down here?” he demanded. “Vern, what have you been up to down here?”

“It’s over,” the man on the chair said apathetically.

The older man came over and stood looking down at Madeline. “What did he do to you?” he said. “The whole side of your face is red.”

“He slapped me,” she said, and began to cry from pent-up tension. “No man ever slapped me before in my life. Even my own father never slapped me.”

“What took you so long?” the man on the chair said accusingly.

“I was up on the roof, doing a yob,” the superintendent said.

He helped Madeline to her feet and brushed off the back of her dress with a heavy but well-meaning hand. “Sh-h, sh-h,” he said consolingly, as if he were talking to a child. “It’s all right now. Do you want a drink of water? I get you a drink of water.”

She stopped crying abruptly. “I don’t want a drink of water!” she said angrily. “I want to get out of here.”

“Well, go,” he told her matter-of-factly. “The door’s open. Nobody stops you.”

She went over and stood by it, but without leaving.

Jansen had turned his attention to Herrick, took no further notice of her.

“Get up,” he said brusquely. “Get up and come over here.” But she detected a paternal note in the brusqueness.

“I’m all right now,” Herrick said docilely, looking up at him.

“Yust the same, you do like I say,” Jansen insisted. “You come and sit over here.” He took the chair Herrick had just been on, and moved it over against the standpipe. Then he brought a table up against it, not the large round one in the middle of the room but a small unpainted one that had been against the wall. He opened a shallow drawer in it and took out a greasy deck of cards. “We play a few hands,” he said, and he brought up another chair for himself and sat down across the table from Herrick. Then he took a small drawstring sack of pipe tobacco out of his breast pocket and placed that on the table also.

“We better put that on a few minutes,” he said. “Yust to be on the safe side.”

Herrick sheepishly extended his wrist, and Jansen snapped the open cuff around it. Then he began to deal the cards.

Madeline had watched the proceedings with incredulous eyes. “He’s vicious!” she burst out. “He oughtn’t to be allowed at large, a man like that. He’s a menace. A maniac.”

Jansen turned on her as fiercely as though she were the offender, not the man.

“He’s not a maniac,” he said severely.

“No? Well, what do you call it when he beats women—”

“He’s just unfortunate, that’s all. Well, go to the police, if that’s what you want to do. Go and have him taken in, if it make you feel better.”

She bit her lip. “For personal reasons of my own, which don’t happen to have anything to do with this, I prefer not to. But he won’t get off so easy if he ever tries it again, with somebody else, let me tell you.”

“You’re as much to blame as he is,” he told her. “You didn’t have to come into his room. You know better than that. You’re not a child.”

“Why are you so ready to defend him?”

This time he threw down his entire hand with vehemence. “He saved my son’s life. He covered him with his own body when my son lay there helpless, unable to move, his leg caught in a booby trap. He didn’t stop to ask questions then, did he? He didn’t stop to argue if it was right or if it was wrong, did he? Why should I now? Today, thanks to him, Harald is a successful businessman in San Francisco. He has a lovely wife, three beautiful children, a fine house, a car. All because of this ‘maniac,’ as you call him. I’m a poor man, I work hard, but I have scruples—”

He probably meant to say morals, she surmised.

“I only know one thing. When you owe, you repay. When good is done you, you do good back.”

Herrick had kept his eyes lowered throughout the whole discussion.

“How many drunken husbands come home and beat their wives? How many jealous lovers knock their sweethearts around?”

“That doesn’t make it right, though,” she said defensively, but in a minor key.

“No, that doesn’t make it right. He and I both know that. That’s why we made up this signal between us.”

“And what about the time, the one time too many, when his control slips, he doesn’t signal, he gets away from you? That time will surely come. You know it will. And some girl will pay with her life.”

He didn’t answer that. He just looked down.

“Will you hide him then?” she insisted. “Will you still protect him then?”

“We’ll know what to do, if that time ever comes. We’ve talked about it. We’ve agreed. We’ll handle it — between us two. Yust us two.”

She saw an odd look pass between them, which she couldn’t interpret. Something about it chilled her.

They took up their cards and started playing, but she still lingered there by the door, unable to tear herself away, though they seemed to have become oblivious of her.

“What was that you called him,” she said to Jansen, “when you first came into the room?” The passage of violence that had occurred between Herrick and herself made her self-conscious about addressing him directly.

“His name is Vernon,” the older man said.

“What was his wife’s name, the one that left him?”

“He only had one wife,” Jansen answered. “Marika. She was Polish.”

Madeline went “Hhhhhh” on a long, deflating note of disappointment.

“I don’t blame her,” Herrick said. “She did the right thing. She was only twenty then. It was better to walk out like that, make a clean break, than stay by me and cheat right and left right under my nose.”

He played a card.

“I’m sorry what happened,” he said to Madeline without looking at her. “I apologize.”

“That’s all right,” she murmured almost inaudibly. “I understand how it was.”

He suddenly lifted his head and looked directly over at her. “Good night,” he said timorously.

“Good night,” she answered. “Thanks for your contribution.”

It only occurred to her afterward what an anticlimactic remark that was, coming after what had taken place between them.

Some sort of inner integrity prevented Madeline from discarding the unused contribution folders she still had left. After all, they had been given to her in good faith, no matter what her own purpose had been. She therefore slipped a couple of dollars into each one, wrote the names of fictitious donors on the outsides, and prepared to return them without, if possible, encountering the committeewoman a second time. An encounter that held very little appeal for her.

Her timing was faulty. By one of the flukes which are impossible to guard against, just as she straightened up from sliding the envelopes underneath the door, Mrs. Fairfield appeared at the upper end of the corridor, coming from the elevators, and caught her in the act.

“How are you making out with your legwork?” she greeted Madeline jauntily.

“I just now finished up,” Madeline said.

“Come in a minute and we’ll tally up.”

“I’m afraid I have to run,” Madeline demurred.

“But I have to enter the amount and give you credit.”

“You take the credit yourself, I don’t mind.”

“But we’re not allowed to do that!” Mrs. Fairfield gasped, as horrified as though she’d been asked to participate in an embezzlement.

By this time she had the door open and one persuasive hand under Madeline’s elbow, so Madeline followed her in with a private sigh of frustration, prepared to submit with as good grace as possible to a retelling of her hostess’s past triumphs, in the man-killing and marital fields.

Mrs. Fairfield, seating herself at the desk to do a little lightweight bookkeeping, asked her if she wanted additional contribution forms. Madeline no-thanked her, explained she’d used up all the spare time she had, and a shudder flickered through her as she thought of last night’s incident on St. Joseph Street.

Mrs. Fairfield had more than her fair share of narcissism, as all women have who have once been beautiful. “I’ve just had some new pictures taken,” she said, indicating a sheaf of large oblong folders stacked on the desk. “I suppose you think it’s silly at my age.”

Madeline tractably said what she knew Mrs. Fairfield wanted to hear her say. “You’re not old enough to stop having your picture taken.”

“Friends of mine kept asking me—” Mrs. Fairfield got up and brought two of them over to show Madeline.

“I like this one best,” she said. “But I want your opinion. Which one do you think does me the most justice?”

“This,” said Madeline in a stifled voice. But her eyes weren’t on the subject’s face. They were on the signature in sepia ink that ran diagonally across the lower right-hand corner: “Vick’s Photo Studio.”

“Vick,” she said. “Is that the photographer’s first name or his last name?”

“His first name,” the woman said. “Although that’s an unusual way to spell it, isn’t it? With a K.”

“I had a friend once who spelled it that way,” Madeline said. “I don’t suppose you remember the photographer’s last name.”

“I’m afraid I don’t.” The woman frowned in thought. “But I’m sure I received a receipt, and I’m sure I kept it. Let me see if I can find it.”

And, a few minutes later, Madeline was holding the receipt in her hand. Vick’s Photo Studio, with the street address and phone number. And, at the bottom, the signature: Vick Herrick.

It had all the appointments of a business office, she thought curiously as she stepped in from the hall. There was a small reception room first, with a desk, a girl at the desk, paperwork for her to do on the desk. Even an intercom.

“I’m Miss Chalmers,” Madeline said. “I phoned in for an appointment.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl remembered. “You asked for the last appointment of the day, if possible. Well, I have you down for it. Won’t you have a seat? Mr. Herrick will be ready for you in just a few minutes.”

He had framed samples of his work displayed on the walls. They did him credit, she thought, looking them over. He was more than an expert craftsman at his work, he was an artist. Each was more arresting than the last.

He was almost a surrealist in portrait photography, she told herself. There was one haunting study of a young girl that, once you had looked at it, you couldn’t keep your eyes off from then on. He had achieved the impossible by violating all the laws of photography. The light was behind the subject, not in front of it. A dazzlingly bright light, almost explosive, almost like a chemical reaction. He must have had a large bare-faced bulb hanging concealed in back of her head. You could almost see the rays streaking out from it, like sun rays when the sun is embedded in a tangle of cloud. As a result, the face itself was in shadow, of course, only a contour, a silhouette. Then he had taken some reflective surface, possibly a narrow strip of mirror, and centered it on the face from in front, so that the eyes were lighted up in misty suffusion, a narrow line ran down the center of the nose, and the curve of the underlip was faintly traced. No more than that. It was like a sketch of a face done in chalk on a blackboard. It was like a negative, where all the white area shows black. And yet all the girl’s delicacy of feature managed to come through, and with it something of the loneliness and awe of youth. It was a cameo of grace, a camera chiaroscuro.

“Who is that?” Madeline asked, open-mouthed.

“Everyone who comes in here asks that,” the girl smiled. Then she added, “Can’t you guess? It took real love to create a piece of work like that, not just skill with a camera. It’s his wife.”

Are those the same eyes that closed against my heart? Madeline wondered. Is that the face I saw die out? The eyes, she thought now that she knew, seemed to have a knowledge of approaching death, seemed to be looking at it from a great distance, waiting, waiting...

“It could easily take a prize in any show,” the girl was saying, “but he won’t exhibit it. I’ve heard people offer to buy it, and he just gives them a look—”

“Is that what she was like?” asked Madeline. Meaning, in full life, before she was struck down.

“I never saw her,” the girl said.

“Wasn’t it made right here, at the studio?”

“He must have done it at home. Or somewhere else. He brought it in one day. They’re separated now, you know.”

“Oh,” said Madeline, realizing — she doesn’t know Starr is dead.

“Or so I understand.” Then she confided, with that typical feminine freemasonry that springs up whenever affairs of the heart are under discussion. “I came to work one morning and I found him asleep in the chair here. That one there, facing it. He’d never gone home all night. Thousands of cigarette butts. A small empty bottle. He had the shade of the lamp tilted so that it shone directly on it. All night long...”

She shook her head compassionately.

“I pretended I didn’t notice anything. Which was a hard thing to do. He never did it again, though. Did it at home, I suppose.”

Madeline looked down pensively.

The girl said, “He’ll be ready for you any minute now. Would you like to freshen up before you go in? There’s a little powder room behind that door there. You’ll find everything you need in there, I think.”

Madeline got up and went in.

There was a long dressing table, backed by a mirror of matching length. A number of bottles on it, hair glosses and the like.

She took off her watch and put it down on the table. Then she combed her hair over a little. Then she pulled two or three Kleenex tissues out of their slotted mirrored holder and put them down over the watch. She got up and went toward the door. She glanced back, and you could still partly see the watch. She went back and rearranged the tissues so that they hid it more fully, covered it completely over. Then she stepped out.

She had the last appointment of the day. No one else would be coming in here. Only the girl, to lock up and put out the lights. Madeline hoped she was honest. At any rate, she already had a watch of her own, Madeline had noticed it on her, so there was that much of a safeguard.

“You can go right in,” the girl said. The door to the studio proper was standing open now.

Madeline stepped in past it, and there was a man in there standing looking at her.

For the first time they saw one another. For the first time their eyes met and looked at one another. For the first time in the world. The killer and the one to be killed.

She only received an overall impression, a summary of him, at first. Two-dimensional, without depth. There was no time for anything else, her senses were too preoccupied with the physical immediacy of the meeting to be able to stand aside and study him in detail. Comely of face, unhandsome but agreeable. Well-proportioned bone structure, no slackness of jaw or anything like that, but otherwise undistinguished. Was this the jaw, the lips, from the photograph? Hair a very light brown, but still not quite blond, with a crisp crinkle to it. Eyebrows a little darker, eyes darker still. Intelligence in them, also some sensitivity. About five-ten, not heavily built but symmetrical, on the spare side. And when he spoke, in another moment, a light voice, but not a high one, no localized dialect overtones, just basic well-bred eastern-seaboard United States.

To sum up: someone you could quite easily have taken to — if you didn’t have to kill him.

“You’re very pretty, Miss Chalmers,” was his opening remark.

It was said with professional objectivity, not personal interest, that much she could tell.

“You probably know it already,” he added, “so there’s no sense in my telling you.”

“One knows,” she said quite simply. “If not, one’s a fool. Or a liar.”

He gave her a quick look, as though he liked that. Found it refreshing.

“Is that your wife out there?” she asked. “She’s very beautiful too.”

“The girl already told you who it was,” he said quietly.

She accepted the dig unruffledly. “I wanted to make sure.”

He answered her previous remark. “Yes, she is,” he agreed. “Starr is very beautiful.”

Now at last, she told herself exultantly, and clenched her fist in mental imagery and brought it down. Now at long, long final last. No more mistakes, no more false alarms. No more noisy baseball fans, no more pathetic war derelicts. The right one at last. The man that Starr had married, here before her.

“I think I’d like to have you sit here,” he said, shifting a shell-backed chair. “I’m just going to take the face and throat.”

He moved around her, shifting and adjusting various screens and reflectors, every move a sure one, knowing just what he wanted to do.

“Just relax. You can cross your legs if you want to. I want to make a few preliminary tests with the lights first.”

“It’s my hands that I don’t know what to do with,” she admitted.

“Do anything you want with them. They won’t be in the picture. Here. Here’s something that I sometimes use.” He thrust a common ordinary lead pencil into her hand. “Do anything with it. Fiddle with it. Just so long as it keeps your hands from becoming clenched and tight. That can have an effect on the shoulder line and even the neck, sometimes.”

He turned on something, and the reflectors threw a dazzling light all over her, bright as magnesium.

“Try not to blink. You’ll get used to it in a moment.”

He toned it down a little.

He knows his job, inside and out, she thought.

“I’m glad to see you don’t wear jewelry,” he said. “Jewelry distracts, takes the eye away from the face, which should be the focus of the picture.”

She thought of the watch. She hoped the girl didn’t go into the powder room too soon, before she managed to get out of the studio.

“Turn a little bit this way. Do you see that seam running up and down between the two walls over there? Keep your eyes on that. No, that’s too blank. Think of something a little puzzling. Can you? A little baffling, mystifying.”

“Puzzling?”

“I can get a very nice eyebrow line, a certain lift to the brows, that way, that I can’t get in any other way. I had a sitter in here one day who told me she was very poor at arithmetic. I had her do the higher multiplication tables, you know, times-thirteen, times-fourteen, and I got the most beautiful quirk into her eyebrows. It made her whole face. Most brows are too straight.”

She thought: It’s hard to kill a man whom you don’t hate. Just hate by proxy.

“That was a remarkable expression!” he exclaimed with satisfaction. “One of the most remarkable I’ve ever seen!”

“When are you going to take me?” she asked.

“I just did,” he said blandly. “That expression was too good to pass up. You’re going to have quite a photograph on your hands.”

He took her several times more, with various changes of angle, and then it was over.

“Thank you,” she said. She held out her hand, more to test out his grip than anything else.

His grip was sincere and warm and firm.

The grip of an honest, straightforward man.

The first phone call practically raced her back to the hotel. It was sounding as she keyed the door open. She made no move to go over and answer it; instead she carefully reclosed the door, took off her hat, settled herself comfortably in a corner of the sofa, all as oblivious as if she were stone-deaf and didn’t hear it. It finally rang itself out.

It rang again about a quarter hour later. They must have waited that long to give her additional time to get home. Again she didn’t go near it. She wanted him out of the studio before she answered. Again it dwindled down, like a spent alarm clock.

The third time it rang sooner, inside of about ten minutes. This time she went over to it and answered. It was now close to six. He couldn’t possibly still be at the studio this late, watch or no watch.

“Miss Chalmers?” It was his voice, not the girl’s.

“Yes?” she said as guilelessly as though she didn’t know who it was.

“This is Mr. Herrick, the photographer. Are you by any chance missing a watch?”

“Yes, I am,” she lied superbly. “I only just now noticed it was gone as I came in the door. I thought I might have lost it in the taxi—”

“We found one in the dressing room,” he said. “No offense, but could I ask you to describe it, please?”

“It’s platinum, round, with a circle of diamonds around the dial. It’s a Patek Philippe. It’s mounted on a twisted black cord instead of the usual strap or band.”

“That’s the one,” he said. “I have it. Miss Stevens found it right after you’d left.”

“Oh, bless her heart!” she exclaimed fervently. “What a relief. I don’t know how to thank you. My mother gave it to me as a birthday gift.” Which latter part was true, anyway; it had been her grandmother’s first.

“I have it with me right now,” he said. Then explained, “I’m downstairs in the hotel. Shall I turn it over to the desk?”

“No, no,” she cried, in such alarm that he must have taken it to be an excess of gratitude. “Please come up, if only for a moment. You must let me thank you personally.”

“Fine.” He hung up.

She had him on her own territory now. The gambit had worked beautifully, without a hitch, from beginning to end.

It was still light outside the windows, but she turned on a certain lamp, so that if he sat within its radius as she proposed to arrange that he do, the light would fall on his face and she could watch his expression more closely. He was not the only expert in lighting effects, she said to herself arrogantly. Only, his were created for appeal, hers for espionage.

He knocked, she opened the door, and he came in.

He handed her the watch, and she did a thorough acting job over it, uttering little cries, even holding it pressed for a moment to her heart. Then she put it back on her wrist.

“I don’t know how I came to do that.”

“We don’t have a safe at the studio, don’t keep anything of too much value down there, and I didn’t want to just leave it in a desk drawer overnight. I decided to take it home with me and call you in the morning, but I knew you might worry about it all night, so I took a chance and had the taxi stop off here first on the way home.”

“Sit down and visit.” She guided him with just a shadow of a gesture to exactly where she had wanted to have him sit. “Let me buy you a drink, to show my appreciation.”

“Please don’t trouble,” he demurred.

But she was already at the phone. “Don’t deny me that privilege, I’ll feel hurt. What would you like to have?”

“Scotch and plain water.”

“What Scotch?”

“Chivas Regal.”

“Room service,” she said. And then concluded with, “A double and a single.”

“I have another customer who lives in this building,” he remarked when she’d rejoined him.

“I know her,” she said.

They both laughed a little in common understanding, but good-naturedly, not unkindly, without having to say anything further.

“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?” she asked. “Your wife isn’t expecting you, is she?”

“We’re not together anymore,” he said expressionlessly.

“I’m sorry.”

“That makes two of us,” he said.

It wasn’t news to her, of course, but now that she’d worked it so that he’d seemed to tell her himself, they could go on from there without further hindrance.

Nothing memorable was said, but then it was too early in the game for that, anyway.

She learned little things about him, tiny facets, nothing more. He drank slowly, and he left an inch of liquor in the glass. That meant he didn’t qualify as a heavy drinker nor even as a moderate one, he qualified as a light sociability drinker. He was not a nervous nor a restless type of person. At one point what must have been an oversized truck backfired with a thunderous detonation immediately outside the window somewhere. She jarred an inch above her seat in recoil. He never moved at all, just gave her a humorously rueful smile. Also, soon after he sat down, she noticed that he crossed his legs, the left one over the right. At the very end, when they were both ready to get up and go, they were still that way, the left one over the right. He was placid, restful to have around.

She watched the play of his hands a great deal. They were sensitive, dexterous hands, good for the work he did. The nails were cut square across the top. A home job, obviously; he wasn’t one of these male popinjays that go in for manicures. But they were faultlessly clean. She could detect no cruelty or meanness in his hands. And yet could one be sure? They were only hands, no matter what was said, and not the mind that ruled them. She wondered if they’d ever clenched and struck a blow in anger and in hate at Starr.

He still wore Starr’s gold wedding ring, one of the pair they must have exchanged.

Somehow she knew then, though she could not have told why, that no, he’d never struck a blow in anger or in hate at Starr.

He seemed to feel comfortable with her, made no drastic attempt to get up and go. She purposely procrastinated, prolonged the interlude until all the light outside had faded away and it was almost too late for him to go anywhere else for his dinner.

Then craftily she went inside to the phone and asked for two menus to be sent up, without letting him near her.

“What’re you doing?” he said to her, when the waiter showed up at the door.

“I’m ordering dinner for us,” she said sleekly.

He half rose to his feet in protest, but she could see that he was flattered. “I can’t let you do that—!” And then, “Well, only if you’ll let me buy it—”

“I live here,” she said firmly. “The next one will be your buy.”

In the end they compromised, went downstairs and sat at the corner table she usually occupied, and she signed the tab and he paid the tip.

Once dinner was taken care of, it was easy to get him back upstairs again. He could not have left her right after the meal without being guilty of the classic “eat-and-run” offense.

And he had a very strong sense of social responsibility, she could tell that much about him already.

Once upstairs and with a symbolic rather than utilized cognac in front of each of them, they found themselves on more intimate terms than before. The dinner and the predinner drink had mellowed him, and she found it easy, with an adroit question or two for a lead, to get him started talking about himself. Not the private inner self that Starr had known, of course. She didn’t dare reach for that. It was too soon, it would only have evaded her. But the self of his outer life, his work, his experiences.

“How did you get started in photography?”

“It was born in me,” he told her candidly. “I couldn’t have been anything else.”

At ten or eleven his father had given him a camera as a birthday gift, one of the elementary Kodaks of those days. Nearly all boys are given cameras at one time or another, and to nearly all boys it becomes a hobby for a while, just like collecting stamps or coins or things of that sort. And then it passes and is forgotten.

But from the minute he first put his hands on it, something happened.

“I knew right then what I was going to be. I knew right then what I wanted to be, had to be. I was holding my whole life’s work in my hands.”

He quickly learned the mechanics of the thing, the developing of his own prints. Most boys do, anyway, and it cost too much to take them down to the corner drugstore, even at those days’ thrifty prices.

But there was much more than that to it. It was as though there had been pent up in him until now this force, this drive, this reservoir of creative ability, and this outlet came along and released it, acted as catalyst to it, so that it poured forth unslackening from then on, for the rest of his days.

From the beginning he wasn’t interested in snapping his friends’ grinning faces, or their pups, or their little sisters. Or the school team in their baseball togs.

Odd shots and angles. That was all that ever interested him. He was always looking for new and different angles. That intrusion of self between the lens and the object that transmutes a mere mechanical process into art.

There was a lamppost across the street and down a little way that he could see from his bedroom window. But from there it was nothing at all. In the summer it cast a soft hazy light, almost blurred by the humidity. In the fall it had dried leaves swirling about its base. But in the winter it was best of all, with snowflakes softly sifting down past it, lighting up for a minute like sparks, then going out again in the dark.

He wanted to get it from below, from directly underneath, nothing else would do.

So he waited patiently, and finally just what he wanted came along: a whopping big snowfall, about three feet deep. He sneaked out of the house about midnight, when there was no one much on the streets anymore. He lay flat on his back in the snow under it, focusing straight up. It was two o’clock in the morning before he finally got the shot he wanted, the one perfect shot, and the imprints his body had made in the snow were like the spokes of a wheel going all around the base of the lamppost.

His mother rubbed his back with alcohol for the better part of an hour, but he went down with a light case of pleurisy the next day anyway. The only thing that kept his father from whaling him was that he was so sick. But the one punishment that would have really been a punishment they didn’t inflict. They never withheld his camera from him. They must have sensed somehow what it would have meant to have it taken away from him.

Then another time he wanted to get a shot of lightning flashing in the sky. This too he wanted to take from directly underneath, as if it were coming down on him. Again he lay on his back, this time in a meadow in the park in the middle of a walloping summer shower, his camera tucked under his chin and a tarpaulin wrapped around the two of them. Most of the flashes bleached the entire sky, they were worthless to the lens, there was no darkness left to differentiate from. Several times it must have struck nearby, he could feel the ground reverberate under him, but he was too taken up to have any time for fear. He must have used up three rolls of film, trying to get what he was after. But, as in the other instance, he finally did get it. Lightning that could be printed and made to last forever.

“Like a live wire, like a filament — you know what I mean? — corkscrewing across the sky.” Then he added wistfully, “I still have it, somewhere.”

And that was the way it went, all those young years of his. A man wielding a blowtorch, in a puddle of sparks, a fountain blown awry by the breeze, an iron demolition ball at the moment of impact as it sundered a wall, a man riding a crane as seen through the black frame of the opening at the end of a pier. He’d hang around such potentialities by the hour, until he had his shot made. Even drunks sleeping it off in doorways didn’t escape his visual voracity. He kept a patient vigil beside one one late afternoon until a certain slanting ray of sunlight had caught and kindled the empty bottle he held cherished in his arms, and that in turn sent a reflected highlight up into the sleeping face above it. Like someone hovering over the afterglow of the fire that has consumed him. The story the picture told was implicit, but only he had known how to add the one little touch that gave it full expression.

Once he almost lost his life, lying full-length under a parked car making a series of montages of the feet of pedestrians coursing along the sidewalk, when the owner unexpectedly got in and started it.

At the end of his basic schooling, he went to vocational high school and took a course in photography, but there already wasn’t very much they could teach him. Just a little more up-to-dateness in the equipment used and in the processing methods, that was all. He could have taught his teachers how to take an unforgettable picture. But at least it gave him the necessary credentials.

He found the going very hard at first. He got a few jobs as assistant in other people’s photo studios, but the pay wasn’t enough to get along on, and the interesting part of the work, the creative part, wasn’t thrown his way. Sometimes he was little better than an errand boy, bringing back coffee, sweeping the floor, emptying out trays of solution.

He had to take odd jobs, whatever he could find, to tide himself over. Then one summer he managed to get hired on as a stagehand at a summer-stock theater in the country. He’d gone up there originally to work as a waiter at the resort hotel. One week the man who had charge of lighting the plays (they used to do one a week) was hurt in a car crash coming out from the city and stood them up. Herrick talked them into letting him pinch-hit for the absentee, and he turned out such an eye-fluttering job (the play was a natural for trick lighting exercises, anyway: Berkeley Square) that they kept him on from then on.

When the season ended, he went to New York, armed with a letter of introduction from the summer-playhouse manager, to tackle the theater there. After heartbreaking months he managed to get a job, and then after he’d worked like a dog over his lights and gelatin slides and dissolves and all the rest of it, the play promptly closed down after its second performance. Presently he landed another, and it went on like that.

One or two of the reviews even had a line of praise in them for the lighting effects, which is a very unusual thing. But you can’t eat lines of praise, and his name was never mentioned, anyway, so who cared?

“It still wasn’t my kind of work. It was a dead end. And the layoff between shows was awfully long sometimes.”

Then one night the leading lady of the current particular show he’d lighted caught him in the act of taking candid shots of her from the wings as she came off. She got him to show her the finished prints the next day, and she was so impressed when she looked them over, she offered to buy them from him. He gave them to her instead. One thing led to another, and in the course of conversation he told her what his dream was. She ended up by staking him to it, advancing him enough money to open his own studio and start out by himself.

“Everyone in the case, of course, thought there was something else behind it. She was a woman about forty and she was known to have a weakness for much younger men. But there was nothing like that in back of it at all. As a matter of fact she was very much in love with somebody else right at the very time. But she was a great humanitarian, and she believed enough in my talent and ability to want to help me. That was all there was to it. And I made a point of seeing to it that she got back every penny of that loan by the time I was through.”

She knew he had; that was his characteristic.

“She was my first sitter. And she let me display one of the portraits I made of her under glass alongside the street entrance to the studio. The publicity helped. She didn’t need it; I did.”

He left at about eleven. Not much had been accomplished, but at least a start had been made. The groundwork had been laid. They were “Vick” and “Madeline” to one another now. And he owed her a dinner. That was important, because he had an abnormally acute sense of reciprocal obligation, she had detected that about him already. What he owed, he repaid.

At any rate, the ball had started rolling.

He called a week later, toward the end of the week.

“Vick Herrick.”

“Hello, Vick.”

“I’ve been given two tickets to a show, and if you’re not doing anything tonight, I was wondering if you’d care to take it in with me.”

“I would,” she said immediately.

“Have dinner with me first and—”

“No,” she said, just as immediately. “Give me a rain check on the dinner part.” She wanted to keep the obligation going, so she would have that much of a lien on seeing him a third time.

“You won’t let me buy you dinner?” he said, crestfallen.

“Next time around I will, not tonight. But I will take in the show with you, and you can buy me a cup of coffee afterward. I like to sit up late and talk.”

“All right, I’ll pick you up at the hotel.”

“I can meet you at the theater, if you want.”

“No, it’s one of these off-trail playhouses, you might have a hard time finding it. I’ll stop by for you at eight.”

She waited for him just inside the lobby entrance, in order to save time and trouble. Since this wasn’t a romance, there was no reason for playing coy or hard to get and making him come inside, call up to her room, and all the rest of the courtship trimmings.

She recognized him through the cab window as it drove up, went outside, and joined him just as he opened the door and stepped out.

“How’s that for timing?” she asked cheerfully.

“To a tee,” he grinned. “You’re the kind of person I’d like to have along when I have to make a train in a hurry.”

The backtracking lights outside stippled their faces as the cab got underway again.

“Get your pictures all right?”

“Vick, they’re simply incredible. How do you do it?”

“It’s my métier, as the French say. By the way, you never did tell me — just what were you thinking when you got that marvelous hike into your brows?”

She laughed. “You know something? If I were to tell you, you’d be the one with a hike in your brows.”

“I don’t guarantee this thing we’re going to,” he said. “It was done in New York two years ago, at one of the little off-Broadway theaters. Even then, I don’t think professionals were in it. So tonight you might say we’re going to see a road company of an amateur production.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said leniently. “It’ll be an experience, at least.”

It was. It was called The Connection, and it had something to do with narcotic addiction. Other than that, what it was about was completely undecipherable. The stage was set in the center of the audience the way a boxing ring is. It was furnished with two or three wood-backed chairs and that was all. Two or three men stood in one corner of it talking. Occasionally one or the other of them would move about a little, then rejoin the others. And that was the extent of the dramatic action.

Madeline wasn’t too put out about it; she was there on behalf of dramatic action of her own, and not to watch that of others. What did jar her occasionally was to glimpse other faces in the audience looking her way through the actors’ legs whenever they made a move or took a stand. It destroyed all chances the play might have had of weaving an illusion.

At one point they both turned simultaneously and looked at one another.

“I can hear them perfectly,” she said under her breath. “Their delivery is good. But I can’t make out what they’re talking about.”

“I was just going to say the same thing to you,” he chuckled. “I think a lot of it is users’ slang, that’s why. Drug users, you know.”

They stayed on for a rather valiant length of time at that, but finally gave up the struggle and left when it showed no signs of stopping.

“I don’t know how we would have known when it was over, anyway,” she remarked on their way out. “They had no curtain.”

“One way of telling it wasn’t going on anymore might have been by the general perking up in the surrounding atmosphere. I really owe you an apology.”

“No, you don’t at all. It’s part of the scene around us today. A tiny part, but still a part. Maybe drug addicts do stand around like that and just wait; I’ve never known any of them. Still, I’m glad we took it in.”

“It was very avant-garde, I suppose. But why couldn’t it be that and at the same time lucid? They never are.”

“I don’t care for any of that stuff,” she told him decidedly. “I must have been born a hundred years too late.”

It was true. She was a formalist. She had been born old-fashioned. She wanted plot in her plays (à la Shakespeare); she wanted a melody in her music (à la Verdi, à la Strauss); she wanted a reproduction of the natural image in her paintings, her art (à la Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael). Those men were good enough for her.

She wasn’t interested in kindergarten-age children’s crayon daubings when done by grown-ups. Or reefer dreams improvised out of a slide trombone without any notes to back them up. Or sculpture done with chicken wire. Or people on a stage who talked but didn’t move.

For her it had to be laid on the line, circle-perfect, rounded out, no gaps left to be filled in.

And it must have been something of this feeling for completion, for symmetry, that lay at the bottom of her compulsion to finish out Starr’s life for her. The original guilt complex wasn’t solely responsible for it any longer; that would have worn thin by this time.

A modernist would have walked away with a laugh. I should finish up somebody else’s life for them? I got my own, and one at a time’s enough.

But the nineteenth century would have understood. The nineteenth century with its idealism.

They found a little espresso coffee place, dim as a flickering match flame but a good place to talk in. They sat way over in a corner in the gloom, barely able to see one another’s eyes. A girl with her back against the wall lazily picked at a mandolin, but she never seemed to finish more than the first bar of anything she started.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said, the way you drop a small pebble into a smooth sleek pool of water and wait to see the ripples slowly widen around it.

But no ripples came; it suddenly solidified, seemed to harden over. The way his eyes did too. And the ease of talk was gone for a moment.

It’s too soon, she realized. He won’t tell me yet. Maybe he never will.

“Tell you what about her?” he said guardedly.

“I only meant — her looks,” she corrected. “It’s hard to tell from that picture at the studio, she’s so much in shadow.”

“Oh,” he relented. And he thought for a minute. And he probably saw her face in the flame of the candle she could see him staring at. It reflected itself doubly in his eyes, once in each pupil, like two small tapers shining at an altar of recollection.

“She’s stunningly beautiful,” he murmured reverently.

Madeline had held her in her arms when she was dying, had looked into her face, had seen it. True, she was in pain, she was in shock, life was flowing out of her. But even with that allowed for, she had not been stunningly beautiful. Attractive, yes; pleasing to look upon; the structure and the proportions of her face did that for her. Above all, youth did that for her. But she had not been stunningly beautiful. Yet to him she was, she had been.

Therefore: He had really loved her.

No further doubt was needed, no question remained about that. He had loved her with the true eyes of love, which for each man see one thing, one thing only, and pass by all the rest and all the others.

She took that home with her and thought about it. Whatever it was he had done to her, it hadn’t been done from lack of love, but in the fullness of love.

Returning home one night after she had been out with him — their evenings spent together numbered upwards of six or eight by this time — she took off her things, put a wrap over her, and sat down at the desk to think things out, to analyze what she had of him so far.

She knew the externals of his life by now almost as well as one person can ever know those of another. Even had he been her husband. His boyhood hobby with the camera, his early knocking around before he found himself, his final success and fulfillment in his chosen work, he had told her all about that. But the injury to Starr lay somewhere in the inner, private life that he had not told her about.

Whatever it had been, it had been within the framework of his love for her, of that there could be no doubt. It had been an offense, an outrage, of love, and not of hatred or ill-will. This should have simplified it greatly. How innumerable are the harmful acts you can commit against someone you dislike; how few those against someone you love. But it didn’t.

She picked up a pencil, finally, and a piece of paper, and tried to draw up a list of possibilities, to help her thinking powers along. She had a great predilection for using a pencil to help crystallize her thinking. She would have made a good draftsman.

Alcohol: Completely ruled out. He had none of the telltale signs about him, which are so easy to read. He drank even more slowly than she did herself. He invariably left the bottom of his glass still holding liquor in it. He hadn’t attained the status of even moderate social drinking. He was an occasional social drinker, the first stage above complete abstention.

Narcotics: There she was on obscure ground. He had none of the traces, but she was no expert at divining them, either. She thought momentarily of the play he had taken her to see. Was there some sort of an inkling there? But then she dismissed it as unfair, it had been simply a coincidence. Or rather, since there was nothing for it to coincide with, a random occurrence. In any case, arguing that he had been an addict himself, what then would have been the attraction in going to see such a play? He would have known the life so well, why go to see a reproduction of it? He would have been more likely to shy away from it, if only to spare his own guilty conscience. Finally, she recalled, he had seemed as unfamiliar with the specialized slang used in the play as she was herself. And there was no reason to think this was an act.

A criminal record, or some past criminal offense: This didn’t seem to fit him at all. True, she wasn’t naive enough to expect criminals or lawbreakers to go around looking like criminals, or to carry a sandwich board on their chests reading: “I am a criminal.” And true again, she had heard it said that often as not some of the worst people in this category were, at home with their families, gentle, devoted, considerate, even more so than the average run of husbands and fathers. But when all this had been duly allowed for, the fact remained he didn’t fit into the picture at all and the picture didn’t fit him.

The simple, tightly knitted little story of his life he had told her need not have been true, of course. He could not have been expected to reveal some serious criminal act or criminal way of life to her on such short notice. But it was so plausible, so artless, so uncontrived from beginning to end that it didn’t seem likely he had left anything out. In other words, it was too monotonous to be anything but true. If it had been rigged, it would have at least been more colorful. And there wasn’t a chink, a gap in it, in which to insert, to wedge, some major off-law experience. Almost, you might say, there was no room in it. It was as though every day, pretty nearly every minute, had been accounted for in that brief, unmemorable, but somehow simpático saga of his thirty years that he had given her.

She knew this man pretty well by now. There wasn’t violence in him or she would already have glimpsed it, no matter how hard he tried to keep it from showing. That is to say, violence on the grand scale, beyond a mere swear word and punch of a fist. He’d never lived by violence, and he’d never done violence. And above all else, he lacked that sharp acuteness that is needful to criminality. He was a simple man. He was good at his work, but personally he was simple, uninvolved, uncomplicated. Just a run-of-the-mill Joe, with camera fingers, loaded with good nature and goodwill and deathlessly loyal in his love.

That was the way she saw him, and nothing could convince her she was wrong.

All the possibilities she had listed had one thing in common, she couldn’t help noting. They were negative offenses. That is, offenses against himself, not against Starr. Any woman, any wife, would have done one of two things in such a case. Either stuck by him and tried to help him, or if she saw that was hopeless, simply washed her hands and walked out on him. But not turn around and want him killed. Even get ready to kill him herself. There wasn’t anything in any of those hypothetical malefactions that warranted that.

She found the list had vanished.

She crumpled the little leaf of paper and threw it away. She tugged the chain pull on the hooded desk lamp, and the pool of light in front of her eyes went out.

I can’t stand this uncertainty anymore, she thought, raking her fingers through her hair and dragging it down in front of her face. I’ll have to be a blind instrument of justice then, in every sense of the word, and do it still without knowing. Anything, anything, to get it over with and get rid of it!

The very next time we’re together, I’ll do it. I’ll have to do it then, or I may never do it at all.

Finally, the day had come. She knew it from the time she first opened her eyes early in the morning. On the one hand, there was no actual reason for it to be that day, and not the one that had just preceded it or the one that would immediately follow it; it was wholly arbitrary. Yet on the other hand, there was every reason. She had nerved herself to a certain pitch which she might not be able to hold longer than for just a few hours, and once lost or even partially relaxed, might never be able to regain. She needed this certain pitch, she could not do the thing without it. For she was not a professional killer nor yet a passionate one. She could kill neither in cold blood nor in hot. Both extremes were foreign to her nature. She could only kill as she was about to kill now: for an ideal, as an obligation, to fulfill a vow. As one lighted a taper at an altar: in expiation.

And only this once, never again.

He was a man. Of that there could be no doubt. He had been married to Starr, Starr had been his wife. He was the one she wanted killed, he and no other. And Starr-Madeline would be the goddess of the machine, who earned it out for her.

Let whatever he had done to her, whatever had made her want him killed, be buried with him, then, go down into the grave with the two of them and never be known. Maybe it was better that way. Who knew what the thing was? Why let it live on, dirtying the world? Why take it with her into some cell and nurse the morbid knowledge of it for the next twenty years or even her whole lifetime? Somehow in all her calculations — no, that wasn’t the word, she didn’t calculate in this — in all her willingness to accept punishment, to undergo penalty, she had never visualized herself being given a death sentence. Not that this would have deterred her. But it was always a lengthy prison term that she foresaw being meted out to her.

This was the day, then. It had come.

She hadn’t even left her bed yet. The slats of the Venetian blinds, or rather the interstices between them, drew thin pencil strokes of yellow on the wall opposite the window, and on the floor, and on the counterpane on her bed, and even partly up one of her bare arms. She even had the impression that one of these stripes of light must be lying flat across the bridge of her nose, because of a dazzle effect she got in both eyes. She thought it was charming; like being in a golden cage.

She got up and went over to the blinds and tugged the cord that controlled them. They went up supplely, with only a slight rustling sound, and the day became a full foursquare panel, not just streaked glimmers on a wall. It was surging with sunlight, and in it the city looked like something brand-new, that had just come into being. Every brick spotless, every paving block freshly laid. She leaned out, and a taxi with an orange roof polished as a mirror went scuttling by under her eyes, like some kind of an amiable, off-color beetle scampering for cover.

How strange, she thought, we’re both in this city together at this very moment, though at a distance. We’re both breathing, we’re both looking at things, even though we’re apart. Yet, by tonight, or by the early hours of the morning, he’ll be dead. Then he won’t be in this city anymore, just I will be, alone. Where will his breaths be then, where will they have gone? Where will the sights reflected on the irises of his eyes be then, where will they have gone?

I don’t know, for I didn’t order death, fashion it. I only know that he’ll be gone into it.

She turned away from the window, and as she passed the discomposed bed she’d just now been sleeping in, glanced at it reflectively. Last night, she thought, we both slept, he and I, and our sleeps were alike. Today we both woke up from our sleeps. Tonight we’ll both sleep again, he and I, but our sleeps this time will be different. Tomorrow again I’ll wake up, as I did today. Tomorrow he won’t; for him there’ll be no tomorrow.

Sleep, that little bit of death embedded in life. No, she corrected herself. Sleep is not death. Not at all like it. People are wrong when they say or think that. “Dead to the world,” meaning a sound sleep. Completely wrong. For the body goes on functioning. It breathes, the blood flows, the heart beats. Sometimes the body even moves, turns itself over. The dreams of the daytime world color sleep; night after night they are there, even though they may not be recalled the next day.

No, the French Revolutionaries who inscribed “Death is eternal sleep” on tombstones were mistaken. There is no point of similarity between the two, not any at all. Even the position of the eyes is different, for in sleep they are closed, but in death, paradoxically, they remain open. It is human hands that have to close them.

No, sleep is not death. Sleep is submerged life.

She shook her head in self-annoyance. Why do I torture myself so? Just do it, and have done with it! Not think about it, think about it, think about it, all the time.

But I have to think about it. The other things I did for her were minor, subsidiary. This is the main thing. This is the important one. This is the one she wanted most.

She took a brief shower, without using soap. She took an average of two a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, and only used soap about every second one; it was actually superfluous more often than that, she was inclined to believe. Possibly even unbeneficial to the skin.

She dressed and made a cup of instant coffee. She told herself unwillingly, I suppose I ought to eat something. She was always telling herself this, in the mornings, and always trying to evade doing so. She finally compelled herself, against her own inclination, to slip a slice of wheat bread into the toaster, and plug it in.

Then she ate standing up, biting at the toast in one hand, taking swallows of the coffee in the other. She put the cup down finally, left part of the rind of the bread, and acted as if she were glad it was over. She was.

The city was awake now. She lit a cigarette and went back to the window and stood there looking out again. The day was so normal, so everyday looking. You couldn’t tell it held death in it.

A mouse-colored French poodle on leash to a young girl stopped to investigate a tree, decided against it, went on to the next. A deliveryman came along pedaling a bicycle with a built-in box for carrying groceries.

A trim-looking truck went by, the legend “U.S. Mail” on it, the lower half blue, the upper half white, a thin band, no more than a stripe, of red separating them. They should have put the red on top, she thought idly; the expression was “red, white, and blue,” not “white, red, and blue.” Still, she supposed, maybe they decided a red roof wouldn’t look good on a truck.

Somewhere in the immediate vicinity, but out of sight, an apartment-house doorman kept blowing on his whistle, trying to conjure up a cab for his waiting tenant. There was something unutterably lonely and plaintive about the sound.

A defective “Don’t Walk” sign stayed red when it should have turned green and caused a minor amount of traffic confusion down at the next crossing. Then it finally meshed and turned green, but by now all the others had turned red again.

Two nuns floated majestically along, heading a long double-file procession of small schoolchildren.

A jet coursed by overhead, turning the sky into a tom-tom, heading for some faraway romantic place. Anchorage, Tokyo, Manila.

A couple of pigeons, outmoded, flew up from a cornice defiantly then turned around and came down on it again, their challenge ignored.

A Sanitation Department street-washing vehicle came trundling clumsily along, held its water along a stretch of curb where there were no pedestrians, then let fly target-accurate as it came abreast of a man and woman walking together. They both jumped aside and started to brush at themselves, ruefully but uncomplainingly.

A stocky workman was standing by an open manhole, with a bright orange circular guardrail ringed about it, and a red flag on a stick projecting from this, talking to someone else unseen down inside it. It made a little eddy in the otherwise smooth flow of the traffic.

In the building across the way from Madeline’s hotel, but at the same floor level she was, a window washer attached his safety belt to the two brackets flanking the window, and then seated himself backward on the ledge, closed the sash down tightly across his thighs, and began to go over the pane with a wet sponge.

What a way to earn a living, Madeline thought deprecatingly. And he may even have a wife and child at home. Why shouldn’t he have, just as well as everyone else?

But for every job there is in the world, no matter how unrewarding, there’s always someone there to fill it. Or else the world couldn’t go on.

Standing there, she decided she’d call him at noon, just before he took his lunch break.

Just as the decision crystallized in her mind, there was a knock at the door. She sighed, crossed the room, and opened the door.

It was the maid. They exchanged good-mornings, and then the maid said, “Isn’t it a lovely day!”

“It certainly is,” Madeline agreed. And then the thought of his death came back again. Not that it had ever been very far away. He’s having nice weather to die in, she reflected.

“Aren’t you going out and get some of that beautiful sunshine?” the maid wanted to know.

“I’m going out later on,” Madeline told her. “I’m going out this afternoon.” She wondered what the maid would think or say if she were to tell her, I’m going out to kill a man. Probably grin ephemerally as at a joke you don’t understand and go right on with her work.

“You don’t have to bother with that,” Madeline said as the maid picked up the coffee cup to rinse it out.

“It’s no trouble, let me do it,” the maid said accommodatingly. “I like to leave your place spic and span.” Madeline was a good tipper.

And that was the last exchange of the day between them.

The morning had gone. The morning of Herrick’s last day on earth.

She looked at her wristwatch. Three and a half to twelve. She went into the bedroom once more and sat down on the bed again, now neatly made up.

The death call.

She waited two and a half minutes. Then she picked up the phone and gave the apartment hotel operator his business number. She was as calm as though she were asking for a time check or valet service.

She gave his name to a girl. Then she heard his voice. Every word it said meant it had used up one word more and had that many fewer left to use before it grew silent forever. Still, isn’t that true of all of us? she thought.

“This is Madeline,” she said, and smiled a little at him in greeting though he couldn’t see her.

“Funny, I was thinking of you only a little while ago,” he said.

“I was thinking of you too,” she admitted.

“Do you believe in mental telepathy?”

“It’s impossible not to,” she said soberly, “when something comes up like what we’re saying right now.”

“Come down and have lunch with me,” he invited. “The whole town is playing hooky from school. A day as fine as this isn’t for working in, it’s for idling in.”

“No,” she said quickly, “I can’t. I have some things I want to do this afternoon.”

“Have lunch with me first, and then you can do them later,” he suggested.

“No,” she said, “but I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”

“What?” he said eagerly.

“I’ll have dinner with you tonight, if you’re free.”

Eagerness had become enthusiasm. “Fine,” he said heartily. “That’ll be just fine. Where’ll we make it and where’ll I meet you?”

“Have you got facilities over in your place?” she said at a sudden tangent.

“Facilities?”

“Facilities for making a meal.”

“Oh, yes, sure. Why, would you rather eat up in my place?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that better than a restaurant. I’m just in the mood for that. The only obstacle is—”

“What?” he said.

“I can’t cook worth a nickel.”

He laughed in relief. “I can,” he said. “Want me to, rather than have it sent in?”

“By all means,” she said gaily. “That’s what I’m fishing for, a home-cooked meal for once in my life.”

“You’ve got it,” he said. “Now, what would you like? Name your menu. I’ll phone in the order, and it’ll be all delivered and ready to go to work on by the time you arrive.”

“Well,” she said, looking thoughtfully along the wall. “I’m not a fancy eater, and I’m not a large one. I like plain fare.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ve got paper and pencil here. Let’s start at the beginning. What do you want for a before-dinner drink?”

“Sherry,” she said decidedly. “Always and only. I don’t go for mixed drinks. In that, I’m with the Europeans.”

“Brand?”

“Domecq. La Ina, if you have it. It’s one of the driest in the world.”

“I do have it,” he said. “Like it myself. Next?”

“No soup, no nothin’. Just a one-course meal. I know most men are fond of red meat, and I am myself, in moderation. How about a steak?”

“You’re a girl after my own heart.”

“But not one of these oversized sirloins,” she said quickly. “Why don’t you get us each a little individual club steak? They’re small and tender.”

“I know a great sauce,” he enthused.

“Put mushrooms into it.”

“They go with it. Mushrooms and sauterne.”

“No trimmings, no salad.”

“Dessert?”

“No dessert. I hate sweet desserts. They’re for children.”

“I do too.”

“Or, I’ll tell you what. Roquefort on thin saltine crackers, and then black coffee laced with cognac. And that’s it.”

“You’ve got good sense in food,” he complimented her. “And good taste in it.”

“Thank you,” she said quite matter-of-factly. Then she asked him, “What time shall I drop by?”

“Oh, anytime after five-thirty. I’m not going to start in until after you’re there. Half the fun is having someone around you when you’re doing it.”

“All right,” she said with grave politeness. “I’ll be there. You can count on it.”

“’Bye for now,” he said.

“’Bye for now,” she repeated.

She didn’t smile vindictively when she’d hung up, or look grim, or anything melodramatic like that. She had a pensive, wistful look in her eyes, almost as if she felt sorry for the guy. She gave a soft sigh, underneath her breath. Then she shrugged one shoulder very slightly, as if realizing the whole thing was beyond her control.

She left the apartment at about one-thirty, and had a midday snack at the fountain in the hotel drugstore. This was only a degree less frugal than her preceding repast had been: a tomato sandwich and a malted milk.

Then she got on a bus and, avoiding the larger department stores, where the clothes had a tendency to lack individuality, sought out a small specialty shop on a side street that she had been to once or twice before.

“Something in black,” she mentioned.

About the fourth one struck her interest. She went into the dressing room, put it on, and came outside again.

“You two go very well together,” the brisk manager-saleswoman told her.

“I can see that,” Madeline agreed. “That’s why I picked it out. The only thing is this—” She put her hand over a small metallic ornament. “Can’t you take it off? I don’t like gewgaws on my clothes.”

“Oh, but that makes it look too much like mourning,” the other protested. “You’re not going to a funeral.”

Aren’t I? thought Madeline, eying her inscrutably. Aren’t I?

“It’ll have to come off,” she said flatly, “if you want me to take the dress.”

The woman brought a small pair of scissors and severed it.

Madeline paid for the dress and had it boxed.

It was now a little after three, and she still had better than two hours to kill.

She went back to the hotel, had a bellman take the dress up to her room for her, and she herself went into the hotel beauty salon. This was more for the sake of using up the excess time that she had on her hands than because she was interested in having her hair done. As a matter of fact, for a girl in her own particular age bracket, she patronized such places remarkably seldom; not more than once or twice a year.

“Can you take care of me?” she asked the girl at the desk. “I don’t have an appointment.”

“I have a customer who’s late again for her appointment, as usual,” the girl remarked resentfully. A resentment that was not, however, intended for Madeline, it was apparent. “You can have her time. If she does show up, she can just wait until after you’re through. It may teach her to be more punctual after this.” Then she added, no doubt as a special concession, “Would you like Mr. Leonard to take care of you?”

“No,” Madeline said. “I’d rather have a girl do my hair.”

“I’ll call Miss Claudia,” the receptionist said.

Following an enamel-smooth redhead into a booth, Madeline wondered, as she had once or twice before, why in this particular profession the names of the personnel were always prefixed by a “miss,” whereas in all others employees of equal rank simply called one another by their given names. One of the traditions of the trade, she supposed.

“What would you like to have done?” the girl asked Madeline, running a professionally appraising eye over her hairdo.

“I’m not too well up on the new styles,” Madeline let her know. “I’ve worn my own this way since I was sixteen, but I know it must be outdated by now, because I no longer see it on anyone else, the way I used to at the start.”

The girl handed her a brochure of glossy photographs. “Perhaps you may find something in there you like.” She pointed one out. “We get a lot of requests for this.” It looked like a beehive. It was massive, rising to a point high above the head.

“It must be a lot of trouble to keep it looking right,” Madeline remarked dubiously

“It is,” the girl admitted. “But it’s very dramatic.”

Madeline laughed outright. “I don’t think I’d care to go around with dramatic-looking hair, whatever that is.”

They finally arrived at a compromise. Madeline kept her original flat downswept style, but it was modernized by being shortened to the ear tips and combed several different ways at once on top.

“Not bad,” she conceded when the job had been completed.

“Not bad?” the girl almost yelped. “Why, you look marvelous. You’ll be a killer tonight,” she promised.

Then she faltered and stopped. “Why, what a strange smile,” she said lamely. “I never saw a smile quite like that before.”

She was still staring after Madeline with more than just professional interest as she walked out, knowing she’d come across something, but not knowing exactly what it was.

Madeline went up to her room and began at last the final preparations for the meeting. The death meeting. She put on the new black dress, and wondered as she did so if she would ever again be able to bring herself to wear it after tonight. Probably not. She decided she would give it to the nice maid, when she came in in the morning. She pulled her valise out of the closet, unlocked it, and got out the revolver that Charlotte Bartlett had given her so long ago. Almost in another lifetime, it seemed. She checked it, not that she was an expert on firearms, in fact hardly knew the first thing about them, but simply to make sure that it was fully loaded. It couldn’t fail to be, of course; it had been fully loaded when she first put it into the valise, and who had gone near it since? It was. It was a cylinder-type weapon, and as she “broke” it at the heft she could see that all six of the little bores were solidly plugged by the little brass bases of the bullets.

As for the ability to sight and hit with it — in which, again, she was completely amateur — how could she fail, at almost point-blank range? Two people together in a room, one of them motionless. Only the width of a dinner table or the length of a settee between them.

She closed it up and put it lengthwise, upside down, into the bottom of her handbag. That way her hand could reach down and bring it out in a single unbroken movement, without reversing. Also it balanced better, resting on its back with its handle up.

As she completed fastening the handbag — it was an underarm, envelope type, without a strap — a sudden surge of chilling fear coursed through her, tingling as ice water. The telephone was going. Not that she had anything to fear from it in itself; it was simply the sequence in which it had occurred, following immediately upon what she had just been doing with the gun. It felt as though the tripper were hitting her on the heart each time, instead of striking the bell.

It must be he. She didn’t know anyone else. And if it were he, then he was calling to postpone or cancel the date. That would be the only possible reason. She stood there like a statue, refused to move. If she didn’t answer, then he couldn’t reach her to tell her not to come. She would go, anyway, just as she had intended to all along.

She gave it a minute even after it stopped, to make sure the line had been vacated. Then she went over to it and asked the operator, “That call you had for me just now, was that a man’s voice? I was prevented from answering.”

“That call wasn’t for you,” the operator said. “I’m sorry, I plugged in the wrong room number.”

Madeline let out a long, deep breath as she hung up.

She still had a little loose time on her hands. She drew a glass of water in the serving-pantry, brought it out, and sat down with it in a chair, slowly sipping at it.

Finally she got up, went back into the other room, and got her handbag with the gun in it. As she surveyed herself in the mirror, ready to leave, a sudden sense of unreality came over her. This isn’t so. This isn’t true. Am I going out of here within the next couple of minutes on my way to kill a man?

She bent forward more closely, only inches away from the glass. Are those the eyes of a killer? Those soft, almost childlike things, pale blue disks swimming in crystalline moisture, pale brown lashes all around them like a feathery fringe. Those, the eyes of death?

She turned and ran out like someone possessed, as though the sight of her own face had frightened her. She didn’t even turn to close the door after her, but gave it a backhand sweep as she went by it that closed it of its own momentum a few seconds after.

Even riding down in the elevator, the operator turned and darted her a quick little glance, as if he sensed some sort of stress emanating from her.

She got into a taxi and gave the address of Herrick’s apartment.

In less than fifteen minutes they were at a halt in front of the place.

The driver waited a moment entering the pick-up point and destination in his logbook. Then he turned around and said to her, “Isn’t this where you wanted to go?”

She nodded affirmatively, without answering. What she wanted to say to him was, “Please turn around and take me back where we started from,” but she forced herself not to.

He waited another minute, his elbow slung on top of the front seat. Then he asked, still patient, still tractable, “Didn’t you bring any money with you? That what it is?”

Still without speaking, she opened her handbag, gave him some money, and opened the door. She shuddered as she got out.

But, upstairs before his door, she put her finger firmly enough on the button. She was now past the point of no return. There would be no more hesitancies, no more backing away.

He came to the door and they greeted one another with casual congeniality, even down to shaking hands.

“Hello, Madeline.”

“Hello, Vick.”

She said the usual things a woman visitor does when she looks over a man’s apartment for the first time. “Very nice. I didn’t realize you had as nice a place as this.”

“It came to me just the way it is, nothing added, nothing taken away. A friend of mine had it, and when he got married he and his girl moved out to the country, so he turned this place over to me. I’m paying the old rent, too. It’s a steal.”

“Have you been here long?”

“Two and a half years.”

Then she’d been here with him. This was where she’d lived.

She asked it, anyway. There was no reason not to.

“Did your wife live here with you?”

“Yes, Starr and I spent our marriage here.” She saw the old pain cross his face again. The pain, the wanting, that wouldn’t die.

He brought out the sherry and sprang the cork and poured it. The wine wasn’t chilled but the empty glasses were. He’d learned that trick, which she knew of herself.

He offered her a cigarette. She had her own but she took one of his, to be agreeable. It turned out they smoked the same brand. They laughed a little about it.

“Would you like some music?” he offered. “Or would you rather not?”

“I would, I think it would be nice.”

“What would you like?”

She considered. “‘One Fine Day,’ from Madame Butterfly; ‘Musetta’s Waltz,’ from La Bohème; ‘The Stars Are Shining,’ from Tosca; maybe ‘Villa,’ from The Merry Widow; the tango ‘Jealousy’; ‘April in Portugal.’ Like that. I like music to follow a melody, I don’t like ricky-tick music.”

“I have them all. I’ll keep it down,” he said. “So that we can talk comfortably.”

He racked records, flicked the lever, and the needle arm swung out, then in, then down, like something with an intelligence of its own. Then he came back and sat down opposite her on the sofa. The sofa that was to be his bier.

They sat half turned toward one another, easily, negligently, and they chatted.

“I like you very much, Madeline,” he said at one point.

She knew exactly how he meant it. It wasn’t a declaration of love. You don’t lean back on an elbow, with your legs crossed, and say I like you very much, and mean it for love. He had his love already. He liked her as a person. She was compatible.

She didn’t know just what to say to that, so she quite simply said the obvious thing: “Thank you. It’s always nice to be told that.”

After the second glass of sherry, he got up and began his preparations.

The food was excellent. He might not have been an all-around cook (as he had told her he wasn’t), but the few dishes he knew how to do, he knew how to do well.

But her concern wasn’t with the food.

The setting was charming. Only it had the wrong people in it. The setting would have been perfect for two lovers. Or even appealing for just two friends. The comfortable, livable, unostentatious yet well-done apartment, the bright-spirited table, the unobtrusive music, the intimacy of a highly attractive woman and a personable man. But they weren’t lovers, they weren’t friends, they were the slayer and the one who was to be slain.

She glanced around once, in the middle of something he was saying, at the handbag lying there on the sofa across the room where she had left it, with the gun in it, then turned back to him again.

No, it was all wrong to do it this way. To come here and take his food and hospitality, and then to shoot him between the eyes. It was abominable, it was cowardly, it was the worst kind of treachery. And yet what other way was there for her to do it? There was no other way. To lie in wait and shoot him from some doorway as he stepped from a taxi to his entrance? To go up and ring his bell and shoot him as he came to the door, unaware and unprepared? That was for sneak assassinations, such as the underworld carried out, or jealous women, or former business associates with an obsessive grudge. She wasn’t an assassin, and this wasn’t that kind of killing; This was a killing in fulfillment of a sacred pledge. There was no other way to do it but this, in the open, to his face, letting him know if possible what it was for before he died.

“I thought you looked a little white, just then,” he said.

She smiled without denying it.

“But now you don’t again.”

He filtered the Hennessy into the coffees, then held them both in his hands.

“Shall we take our coffee over there?” he said, tipping his head toward the sofa. “Starr and I always did, whenever we ate home. Which wasn’t often.”

She got up and went over to it, and they both reseated themselves again where they’d been before, one at each end of it. At a distance of about five feet. There really was no reason for them to be any closer.

But I still don’t know, she thought. I must try to get that out of him. I still don’t know why she left him.

“Doesn’t it hurt you?” she asked him quite bluntly.

“Doesn’t what?”

“Doesn’t it remind you?”

“Oh, the coffee. No, little things like that don’t matter. There’s nothing the same about it. The cups aren’t the same. The girl sharing them with me isn’t the same. The only thing that’s the same is the man.” Then the pain came and went. “The only thing that hurts is the one big thing — that she left me.”

I have him going now. I have him going.

The rack of records finally came to an end. There was a definitive little click, almost like a snub. He turned his head around toward it, then gave her an inquiring look.

“No more,” she said curtly, and sliced her hand at it edgewise almost fiercely. Damn that ill-timed machine, she thought.

“Was it very sudden, her leaving you?” She had been straining forward a little toward him. She became aware of it herself, and forced herself to lean back more.

“Terribly sudden. Awfully sudden.” He killed all the rest of his coffee in one swallow, more for the brandy than for the coffee, she surmised.

“Sometimes that’s kinder, sometimes it’s not.”

“It’s never kind, in love.”

And I’m not being kind, am I, doing this to you? But I’ve got to know. Oh, I’ve got to know — why I’m killing you.

“Take another drink,” she said, with perfidious sympathy — which was only partly perfidious. “When you take a drink, it makes it easier to talk. When you talk, it makes it easier to bear.”

He looked at her in acknowledgment. “I’ve never told it to anybody. You see, there wasn’t anybody to tell.”

“There is now,” she said lullingly.

He poured Hennessy into a snifter, about a quarter of the way up the sides. Then he rolled it back and forth between his hands.

She took a chance. It might not come if she just sat and waited. “Was there a quarrel — just before?”

“There wasn’t time for a quarrel.”

“Oh,” she said.

“It started out as some kind of an attack. I didn’t know it was going to end up by her leaving me. I didn’t know until weeks later.”

“But you said—”

It was coming now. It had started. It had started and nothing could stop it. Like when you turn on a faucet and the handle breaks off. Or start a rock slide down a slope of shale.

He pointed to a place nearer the opposite wall than to them. “She fell down on the carpet right there. See where I’m pointing? She fell down very suddenly. Fell like a stone.” And as if to reassure her, he said, “It’s not the same carpet. Don’t be alarmed. I had it changed.”

“Illness?”

“I didn’t know at first, I couldn’t tell. She was conscious, her eyes stayed open. But she couldn’t talk, or wouldn’t. She kept thrashing around on the floor, as if she were having a convulsion. Saliva kept flowing out of her mouth, in spurts. It shone silvery, in little foamy patches. That’s why I had the carpet changed, later on. And she started to bite at it. She pulled little tufts out of it with her teeth.”

Sweat was pouring down his own face now.

Starr? This was the same Starr who died in my own arms so quietly, so unassumingly, later on? “Not temporary insan—?”

“No,” he said quickly, before she had time to finish. “I couldn’t do anything with her. She became worse each time I tried to go near her. When I’d try to pick her up in my arms, she’d thrash violently. Unmanageably. A spasm would go through her, almost like a patient undergoing electric-shock therapy.”

He swallowed some of his drink. He looked as though it were pulling all the lining off his throat as it went down.

“I had to phone for an ambulance finally. The intern examined her right there on the floor where she was lying. He said it was shock. Acute shock. Emotional shock. He said he’d seen it in soldiers, during the Korean War. He gave her a needle to quiet her, and, of course, they took her to the hospital.”

Now he took another drink, a worse one, a more hurtful one.

She took a chance and opened her handbag narrowly, just about the width of the edge of her hand, and dipped inside and pulled out a handkerchief. It had a little cologne on it, but that couldn’t be helped. She threw it over toward him, and he picked it up and mopped his soaking forehead with it, and then pressed it between the palms of his hands.

“As she went out that door on the stretcher, that was the last time I ever saw her. I never saw her again to this day. She never came back here from that night on.”

“But — how is it you didn’t go with her? Doesn’t a husband usually go with his wife, when she’s taken ill like that?”

“She wouldn’t let me. She carried on so terribly. You see the needle didn’t take effect quickly enough, and she must have heard me say I’d ride over with her in the ambulance. She started to moan and plead to them not to let me come near her, she didn’t want me to come near her. Finally the intern took me aside and said it might be better if I didn’t, the idea seemed to have an exciting effect on her. To wait awhile and give her time to quiet down. He said he didn’t think it was anything to worry about, it was just a nerve crisis of some kind.

“So I walked the floor, walked the floor, all night long.”

He stopped suddenly. He gave her a peculiar look and said, “Why am I telling you all this?”

“I don’t know,” Madeline said quietly. “There are times when everybody has to tell somebody things — and I’m the one this time.” Then she added, “Finish it. You’ve already told me so much, it doesn’t matter if you go ahead. I’d like to hear the rest.”

“The rest is very little,” he said. “I gave them time to get her there, and then I called the hospital. They’d checked her in — I’d arranged for a private room — and they told me she was asleep.

“I stayed on my feet all night. I went around the very first thing the next day, and they told me she was resting quietly, but I must have patience, I couldn’t see her yet, she still wasn’t in any condition to be disturbed.

“I went back in the evening. There was a new nurse on duty, but she told me the same thing.

“Well, for the first three, maybe four, days I could understand it and I could accept it.” He clenched his fist, and then splayed the fingers open again in all directions. “But for three weeks — three weeks — three weeks” — he said it three times — “I visited that hospital twice a day. Forty-two visits. And somewhere along in those weeks I finally caught on. It might have been hospital regulations in the beginning but it was her own doing that was keeping me out by this time. She must have refused to see me and ordered them not to admit me. I couldn’t even reach her by phone. The nurse always answered each time, and wouldn’t let me talk to her. I tried writing. The letters came back unopened inside typed hospital envelopes.”

“And then?”

“And then. The forty-second time I went around there was the evening of the twenty-first day. I got a different message that time. The nurse told me she’d checked out that morning, without leaving any forwarding address. They didn’t know where she’d gone.”

He fell silent for a minute, and she thought it was over.

But it wasn’t. Suddenly he went on, “The nurse was very worldly-wise, you know how nurses are. She looked at me very closely and she said, ‘I don’t know what happened between the two of you, Mr. Herrick. She didn’t tell me, and I don’t want to know, it’s not my business. But don’t you think it’s better for her sake if you keep away from her from now on, don’t try to go after her, don’t try to find her. That young girl we had in here all those weeks wasn’t fooling, wasn’t acting a part. She’s a real sick girl.’ And she took a very small envelope out of her desk drawer, one of those little things they use for holding pills and capsules, and handed it to me. It was sealed and nothing was written on it. I didn’t open it until I’d taken it home with me.”

“What was in it?” she asked when the halt had become noticeable.

“Do you really want me to tell you what was in it? You don’t leave me anything, do you?”

She gestured imperturbably with one turned-up hand.

“My wedding ring was in it. Hers. The one I’d bought her. And another thing, a terrible thing. I don’t think any husband ever got a thing like that, from the wife who was walking away from him.”

And again he couldn’t seem to bring it out, but this time she didn’t ask.

“A scrap of toilet tissue. That had been soiled. It was folded all around the ring. The ring was embedded in it.”

She backed her hand to her mouth, in reflex dismay.

After that he didn’t talk anymore. What more was there to say, after what he’d told her at the very last?

Now was the time for her to talk, and after she’d talked, for him to die.

“I met Starr once,” she said tonelessly, casually.

She could tell he didn’t think he’d heard her right. “You what? What was that you said?”

“I met Starr once.”

“After she left me?”

“After she left, yes.”

Hope was lighting up his face, even this soon. It was like a flame. He was handsome with hope, dazzle-eyed with it.

“No, no,” she said quickly, and motioned to him forbiddingly. “Don’t hope. Don’t. It’ll hurt twice as much after, if you do.”

His face died again, went out again.

God, how he loves her, she thought. But what did he do to her—?

His mouth was hanging open, mutely begging, silently pleading.

“Yes, I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you about it, all about it. Just as you told me your story, from your end, I’m going to tell you my story, from my end. Isn’t it funny how the two of us come together, and piece the two pieces together, and then we have the whole story.”

“Hurry,” he panted, almost like a man dying of thirst.

“It was last May, a year ago. I was going to kill myself.”

“Why?”

“Do you want to know something? It’s hard to remember why. Because life had no meaning, I guess. Because — just because. I had a gun, the only thing my father left me when he drank himself to death. I put the gun to my head and actually pulled the trigger and the gun didn’t go off.”

“A miracle,” he breathed.

“That’s what I thought. I felt reborn. I leaped up, ready to dance and sing with joy. I threw the gun down. And—”

“Yes?”

“It went off. The shot passed through the window. Are you sure you want to hear this? Are you sure?”

“Don’t torture me.”

“That’s when I met Starr. She was the one the bullet hit. She died in my arms.”

She stopped. There wasn’t any more to tell him.

She wondered if he’d cry, or moan, or what he’d do. She’d think a little less of him if he did — she didn’t like whimpering men — yet what right had she to set a pattern for his grief?

He didn’t move at all for several minutes. Just sat there numbed, dazed.

Then he picked up the brandy snifter. She thought he was going to drain its contents in a gulp.

Instead he stood up, shock-sudden, all six feet of him, and hurled it. The liquor made an amber rainbow of falling drops all across the room and the glass exploded into a hundred pieces against the wall.

“Thanks, Life!” He roared at the top of his voice. “Thanks a load! Thanks a lump!”

And then he balled a fist, and bared his teeth like an animal snarling at a master who had just kicked him, and looked straight up overhead at the ceiling. But she knew he wasn’t seeing the ceiling.

“As for you—!”

She went over to him quickly and sealed his mouth with her hand.

“Don’t,” she cautioned him, almost superstitiously. “Not that. Haven’t you been punished enough? Are you begging for more? Don’t turn on your God because of something you’ve done yourself.”

“He’s not my—”

She quickly put her hand back again. Then he slumped, and all the defiance went out of him. He turned and went back to the sofa, and sagged into it bonelessly, soddenly.

“Something I’ve done myself,” he kept repeating listlessly, the words she’d just used. “Something I’ve done myself.”

“It must have been,” she said finally, in a low, almost inaudible voice. “Why would the girl leave you like that, why send you back your ring defiled? I’ll tell you something else, Vick. She wanted you killed, Starr wanted you killed. If she’d lived, she could have known no peace until you were killed. What was it? What was it you did to her?”

She watched him, studied him. She could see a change coming over his face. A look that hadn’t been there before. Not the pain of loving and losing Starr. Not the grief-rage of hearing of her death. No, something else.

She tried to translate it, and she thought she did.

While the thing he loved was alive yet, in the same world with him yet, even though they were apart, nothing could slake his thirst for her, fever, addiction, use whichever word you want. Nothing else counted, nothing else mattered, nothing else existed. There was no right, there was no wrong, there was no good, there was no bad.

Now she no longer lived, was gone from the world.

The flame that had fed on her body, even though it was only in his mind and nowhere else, now had nothing more to feed on. And when flames have nothing more to feed on, they go down, down, down. A flame can’t stay alive on a memory.

She could see it expiring in him as he was sitting there. Horror was coming on. It was written on his face, and his eyes were big and round and flickering with horror. Now the blazing flame that must have kept things, unspeakable things, at a distance, beyond the pale, like a burning, slowly turning sword, was gone. Now the skeletons and the worms, the maggots and the vermin, all the things that were fearsome and unclean and foul, crept slowly in toward him, ringing him around, closing in, feeding on him, covering him.

And he, in their center, was in a hell such as this world never knew of, nor even the hell that was the hell beyond this world.

She could see it on his face. It was almost too awful to watch. She looked down into her lap, batedly, fearfully.

She could hear her own words still echoing, ringing faintly in the room around her, though it seemed long ago that they’d been spoken. “What was it? What was it you did to her?”

And suddenly he answered, and everything was over.

“Because I was her own brother!”

In the hollow stillness that followed came the sound of faraway voices from the past, drumming in her ears like knells of doom; came the memory of things that had been said, and things that she had read.

She heard Charlotte Bartlett’s voice again, in the distance: “We had a little baby boy first, before Starr. Then we lost him. He just disappeared from the face of the earth. One minute he was playing in front of the door. The next minute there wasn’t a sign of him.”

Starr herself, in a letter to her mother: “...That little-boy look, that husband look. I threw my arms around him and hung from his neck with my feet lifted clear of the ground, and kissed him about eighteen times.”

Dell, baring her heart in reminiscence: “I could tell when he’d been with her. The telltale little signs that give a man away. Tired, all vitality spent. A hollowness in the cheeks and at the temples that was gone again inside twenty-four hours. To come back once more inside forty-eight.”

Even the nurse at the hospital, as given at second hand by himself: “She’s a real sick girl. I don’t know what you’ve done to her, but keep away from her!”

She jolted to her feet, and her face wasn’t just white, it was yellow with illness.

“Where’s the bathroom? Hurry up—!” she said in a strangled voice.

“In there — the door with the mirror—”

The mirror flashed back the lights of the room as she flung the door open, then an instant later flashed again like a panel of running water as she came out almost immediately afterward.

“False alarm,” she said sardonically, to no one in particular. “I must have a stronger stomach than I—”

She looked around for the Hennessy, found it, and poured herself some without asking him to help her. She poured it into a small shot glass, downed it at a throw. She needed it.

She sat down on the sofa without looking toward him. There was silence between them for a long time after that. He seemed to have forgotten she was even there. She couldn’t forget that he was.

“How long after you were married did you find it out?” she asked suddenly.

He shook his head doggedly. “I knew it before.”

If anything new could have been rung in on the gamut of emotions she’d already experienced in this one evening, this did it now. She felt a mixture of disgust and dismay, and an overall incredulity. “You knew it, and you went ahead and married her!” she choked.

“I was in love with her. I even left my wife for her.” Then he corrected, as an afterthought, “My first wife.”

“Don’t put it that way,” she said, grimacing in horror.

For the first time since the thing had come out into the open, he turned and looked directly at her. Her own eyes turned and fled off into a far corner, straining to get away from his look, refusing to endure him. “I never loved somebody like I loved her. Couldn’t you see it, the way I looked when you said her name? Couldn’t you tell it, the way I spoke when I said it?

“I knew when I married her. She didn’t. I married her with my eyes wide open. What was the difference, by then?”

“What was the difference?” she gasped.

“We’d already been sleeping with each other while I was still living with Dell. The marriage didn’t bring on anything new. I didn’t want a paramour. I loved her like a man loves the woman he wants to marry — and does marry.

“It’s not so terrible. It’s just the idea that frightens you and sounds so terrible.”

“It’s accursed,” she cut in sharply. “It’s unclean. It’s forbidden,” but he paid no attention.

“We were complete strangers,” he said, raising his voice in his own defense. “Even if we’d spent a year together as children — even a half year, a month. But we’d never set eyes on each other in our lives before, until the day we met and started to fall in love. No one was as complete strangers as we two were. The only thing that was the same was the blood. And what does the blood know, how can it tell? Cousins often marry cousins. In ancient Egypt the law in the ruling family was for brother to marry sister. It was traditional. It’s only because it’s taboo now that it shocks so.”

“That was paganism. This is Christianity. And by that I mean as well Judaism, Islam, call it what you will; it’s condemned by all of them alike. It’s taboo for a reason,” she said coldly, “and it’s not meant to be disobeyed.”

“You see this beautiful face,” he said dreamily. “You love this beautiful face. You love this beautiful person. Then you find out that for a little while, at the start of life, you nursed at the breast of the same woman who nursed her afterward. But if you already love as deeply as you do it’s too late to make a difference anymore. It doesn’t seem to matter, it fans your love even more. Now you love not only her, you love the added closeness that brings you that much nearer to her each time. Your sense of owning, of possessing, is strengthened that much more.”

“You’re not trying to convince me,” she said dully. “You’re trying to convince yourself. It’s written on your face, the guilt, the fear—”

“Yes, because now she’s gone. She’s not here anymore to keep the guilt, the fear, at a distance, make me forget.”

“You can’t bury your conscience, you can’t kill it completely. You’ve destroyed yourself. Now you won’t be able to bear living, and you’ll be terrified of dying. Or you should be.”

He hung his head in admission.

“How did you first find out?”

He spoke with his head still downturned, without looking up at her. “Quite simply, nothing complicated about it. My mother died about seven, eight years ago. The night before she passed, I was sitting there beside her bed, and she told me there was something she wanted to get off her mind before she went, she’d feel better about it if she did. It sounds like one of those old melodramas, I know, but it really happened this way.

“She was jilted, as a young girl, after the guy got her pregnant. The child, when it came, was stillborn. This preyed on her mind and, I guess, turned her queer for a while.

“She talked about walking through a certain street one day, and seeing this small child playing there in front of a house. She named the street and even gave the number of the house. She said she couldn’t help herself. Before she realized she was doing it, she was leading the child by the hand down the street.

“Around the corner she got into a taxi with it, and had the taxi drive her to a false address, completely away from where she really lived. Then from there she rode a bus back to her own place.

“They lived in one of these old-fashioned private houses, just she and her mother, and so they were at least safe from the prying eyes of neighbors in adjoining flats. I don’t know how they got away with it, but they did. I suppose they kept me indoors and away from the windows for the remainder of their stay there. It was easier to get away with things like that in the thirties than it would be in the sixties. The mother was in a wheelchair and couldn’t have done much to oppose the thing even if she’d wanted to. But she was all for it, because it made her daughter happy and in a very short while she herself had grown very attached to me.

“As soon as it was safe to do so, in about a year’s time, after most of the furor had subsided, they took the precaution of selling the house and moving out to a place in the country.

“Then when my father appeared on the scene — I should say the man she married — and proposed to her, she told him all about the old-time seduction, but not the other thing, and let him think that I was the child in question. He married her, anyway, and he was not only a good husband but a good father to me all his life.

“It’s as simple as that.

“Then after I met Starr, about a month after we first started making love to each other, she was lying next to me talking to me one night. You know how people tell everything about themselves at times like that. She mentioned her father’s drinking, and said she thought it was caused by her mother’s resentment because he’d tricked her into having her, Starr, when she didn’t want to have any more children. And she went on to tell about this little brother of hers who’d disappeared before she was born and never’d been seen again. Quite casually, she mentioned the street and the house number where they’d been living when it happened. I didn’t even ask her to. It was the same street, the same house, my mother had referred to.

“I knew I was that same child.”

“Didn’t you show anything? Couldn’t she tell you were surprised?”

“We were in the dark. She couldn’t see my face.”

“And you never told her.” It wasn’t a question.

“Never to the end.”

“Then how did she find out?”

“It must have been my first wife, Dell. I never found out for sure, but it couldn’t have been anyone else but Dell.

“Starr and I had been making love, that one night. Later I was drowsing, half asleep. It seemed like far off — you know how things sound when you’re half asleep like that — far off I seemed to hear the phone ring. It was right there next to the bed, but I was too groggy to answer it, so I guess she must have. If only I’d picked it up instead, maybe we’d still be together today, the two of us. I didn’t hear her saying much. Just one thing came through clearly. She must have raised her voice or something at that point. Just one thing is all I heard. ‘You must be crazy!’ The next thing, I could feel her shaking me and shaking me, as though she were half distracted. I couldn’t snap out of it, I couldn’t open my eyes. I heard her say, ‘Were you adopted? Were you an adopted child? Were you?’ She kept on shaking me, until I mumbled yes. All I wanted was for her to stop shaking me, let me go back to sleep. I said my address, with my eyes closed. And that was all, not another word from either of us.

“Suddenly the lights flashed on. That opened my eyes finally, I was awake at last. And she was running from the room, running from the room. I can’t tell you how she was running from the room. As if — as if pursued by the very hounds of hell. I jumped up and went after her. I caught up to her here, in this room we’re in now. I asked her what the matter was, and I put out my hand and touched her. At the mere touch of my hand, she fell down on the floor like I told you, in this shock state.”

This was no petty harm, she thought, no little meanness, no small unhappiness. This was an enormity. It was no wonder that Starr wanted him dead. He deserved to die.

She took up the handbag, held it upright in her lap, a hand at each corner of its frame. She wondered if he had any idea what was in it. How could he? But he would, very soon now.

“Aren’t you asking yourself why I came here tonight?”

“That was a thousand years ago,” he said listlessly, “before I knew she was dead. I remember now, you came here to have dinner.” He looked at the table they’d used. “We did have dinner. A thousand years ago.”

“But is that all I’d come here for, a dinner? I can get a dinner anywhere. Why should I come here to you? We’re not in love. We’re not even close friends.”

“Then why did you?”

“I told you she died in my arms. Now do you understand?”

He looked at her strangely, as though in a sudden flash of premonition he did. But he didn’t admit that he did. And he didn’t show any fear.

“I retraced her steps,” she told him. “Those steps she took away from you. Would you like to know where they carried her, toward what?”

“I’d like to know anything about her there is,” he said as insatiably as ever. “Anything about her is what I want to know, to hear, to be told. It brings her back again for a little while, in all her flame, all her glow, all her glory.”

“Her glory was shame and darkness, the glory that you gave her,” she spat out at him. “The hospital might have cured the shock symptoms, but she was a sick girl the day she walked out of there, sick in mind and sick in soul. She walked in shadows. She hid away, tried to hide away, from those shadows, in a cheap furnished room. I’ve been in it. I can see her there now, as she must have been. The shades pulled all the way down, all day long; hiding from life, trying to keep it out. Trembling on the bed at times, even though she wasn’t cold. Waking up at night from a fever-sleep and screaming out her horror and despair.

“She saw there was only one way to dispel those shadows, only one way to cleanse them out of her heart. Only one way to achieve purification. She had been brought up in a religion which forbade administration of the last rites or burial in consecrated ground to suicides. That way out was barred to her, then, or she surely would have taken it. But she was too frightened by what she’d been through to be able to face death without consolation, lie for all eternity an outcast, unhallowed and unprayed for. So she chose another crime, another sin, instead, perhaps as being the lesser of the two, who knows? The more redeemable. And that was the blotting out, the extirpation, of the source of the impurity that had engulfed her. That was the only way she could find peace.

“She left the room, gave up the room for the time being, and went back to her mother’s. To try to pull herself together a little, and also to make her preparations.”

She saw his brows twitch involuntarily.

“She bought a gun,” she said. “I have it. Its license is in her name.”

She saw his face go momentarily to the handbag, and then back to her face again.

He knows, she said to herself. He knows.

There was no fear. And neither was there any will to self-preservation, any crafty, calculating look of planning how best to evade or outwit it. She didn’t receive that impression. It was more like somebody waiting with as much patience as they could for something good, some benefit, to come to them.

“It’s, in many ways, far easier for a girl to obtain a permit for a gun than it is for a man. At least if she is known to the license department, has been a lifelong resident of the community, and is known to have a good reputation. She can plead molestation, real or fancied, fear of being followed or accosted on her way home late at night; fear of breaking and entry, if she occupies an apartment alone or, as in Starr’s case, with just an elderly woman; crackpot or obscene phone calls; any number of things like that.

“I don’t know if Starr did that. I do know she got her license and got the gun. She bought it quite openly at a sporting-goods store.

“When she was on the point of coming back here again, her mother, who’d guessed enough to feel uneasy about the whole thing, sneaked it out of her locked bag and hid it. She turned it over to me, when I retraced Starr’s path, step by step.”

This time he kept from looking at the handbag, but she could tell by his eyes he wanted to.

“Starr actually only discovered she was without the gun when she was once more back in the same furnished room she’d occupied the first time. I suppose she would have simply gone about the business of trying to get another one here in the city, which wouldn’t have been quite as easy a matter. But before she could do anything at all, she walked past the ground-floor windows of my house quite at random — and she didn’t need a gun anymore. I was the means of killing her.”

She saw him put a hand around his throat and hold it tightly, as though it hurt him there to breathe.

“I pledged myself to carry out whatever she wanted most out of life. The wreckage of life that was all there was left to her.

“Above all else, she wanted your death.”

At this, he slowly inclined his head in a sort of fatalistic acquiescence, as if to say: If she wanted it thus, thus let it be.

“And I’m pledged to carry that out for her. For I took her life away, and I must do the things, in her place, that I kept her from doing.”

She opened the handbag at long last and took out the gun. He winced a little, very briefly, as you do when you know pain is coming. Necessary, benevolent pain. Then he turned more fully toward her, as if to give her a better surface at which to shoot, and he took a deep breath. It almost sounded like relief.

He didn’t speak another word from then on, for all the rest of the time she was there in the room.

Although the way it lay, on its side, it was pointing straight at him, she didn’t raise it in her hand.

He started to lean a little toward her. Not in an attempt to close the gap between them, in order to snatch at it or try to deflect it. For he kept his arms where they’d been — they were now slightly to the rear of him — and he leaned forward with his upper body only. He was like a man slowly preparing for a dive, a dive down into death. He even tilted his face upward a little, as if trying to help her, trying to cooperate. And his eyes were pleading, begging, she couldn’t mistake what they were saying to her. Asking for this gift that she alone could give him. The gift of death. The gift of clean, fast death, and then no more horror, no more fear, no more anything but nothing.

The tip of his tongue even crept out for an instant over at the far corner of his mouth, and touched the edge of his lips, as if in barely restrained anticipation.

Then he dropped the lids over his eyes and he just waited, breathing a little fast but breathing hopefully. Not cringing. Waiting bated for the accolade of deliverance. “You are free.” God’s greatest gift to man: death.

“But I’m not going to do it,” she said, with no more inflection than they’d used at the dinner table earlier. “I can’t. I see that now. This isn’t my affair. Why should I interfere? Who gave me that right and who gave me that obligation? I have my own happiness, my own peace, to think of. I’ve caused one death, taken one life, already. Why should I add a second to it? Will that make it easier for my conscience to bear the first? No. Why should I liquidate my debt to Starr, only to find myself with a new one on my hands, to you? And after you, who next? On and on and on, like the links of an endless chain. And if she could look at you now as I’m looking at you, perhaps she wouldn’t want you dead after all. For the greater punishment for you by far is not to be dead. I think for you, life is death. And death would be — just escape. So Starr gets her fulfillment after all.

“My hand won’t be the one to meddle with your destiny.”

His eyes had flown open, stunned, reproachful, long ago.

She’d gotten to her feet, and as she did so, the gun slid off her lap and into the inside corner of the sofa. She made no move to reclaim it. If she saw it at all, it had lost all meaning for her; her faculties were too absorbed in the metaphysical problem that engaged them both, inanimate objects around her had no bearing or existence.

He didn’t seem to notice it either. It was into her face that he kept looking, with his haunted, pleading eyes, so strained they were like white scars slashed across his face. Nothing else existed. To the end they were fixed on her, begging without a word.

She opened the door, and from it looked back at him. “Goodbye,” she said quietly. “May God have mercy on your soul. Your poor, poor soul.”

She closed the door, and shut the sight of him out.

She ran and ran and ran, through endless corridors of the night — as Starr had once run the unattainable distance between his bed and his front door — ran for miles and ran for hours, through countless turnings and this-ways and that-ways, and ups and downs, and meshing of cabs and braking of cabs, and the supporting arms of doormen and of elevator men around her, until at last the running stopped and she lay still, holding a palmful of little white pellets in one hand, a small half-empty bottle in the other.

When she opened her eyes in the morning after a tranquilizer-induced sleep, somehow she knew right away. He wasn’t in the world with her anymore. He was dead.

She was so sure, so certain, that she almost didn’t bother to ascertain. When she’d dressed, she went over to the window as she had yesterday and stood looking out. How long ago yesterday seemed.

She looked up at the sky and the clouds skimming by across it like little puff balls of white cotton, some of them unraveling with their own speed. Was it a better world without him? Was it a worse world? It was neither, she knew. It was an oblivious world, it didn’t even know he was gone. One living soul less, that was all.

She happened to glance at the watch on her wrist, and it was twenty-eight before the hour. Just in time for the half-hourly news break. She’d probably missed the lead item, but that was sure to have been political, most likely the Congo. She turned the knob of the little transistor, which had the advantage of not taking time to warm up. The radio came on abruptly in the middle of an item, a drug-related shooting on the West Side. She listened to the full newscast without hearing anything of personal significance.

Then they were playing music again. She left the radio on but paid no attention to what she was hearing. She had the impulse to turn off the radio and switch off the lamp, and she remembered when she’d done that once before, ultimately taking her father’s gun and pressing it to her temple.

If only it had gone off when she squeezed the trigger. She remembered Vernon Herrick, his eyes wild as he told her about his injury on Tarawa. He was right — sometimes the ones who died were the lucky ones.

She started. Was she hallucinating? Or was it her song, playing on the radio?

The tune was unfamiliar, nothing she had heard before. But the lyric was hers, the one lyrical fragment Dell had commented favorably on. The rest of the lyric was as unfamiliar to her as the melody. She heard the song all the way through, entranced by it, and at the end her bit of lyric returned as the song’s climax.

It was easy to guess what must have happened. Dell, more impressed by the words than she’d cared to admit, had passed them on to a professional songwriter. And he’d incorporated them in a song, stealing them without a qualm, and now a singer had recorded the song and it was getting air play. It might even become a hit.

The irony of it, she thought. That a song with that particular lyric should become popular at just this stage of her life.

Because here she was, just as she’d been at the beginning. All alone, on a desert island of her own.

Where the population’s only one.

She was scanning the radio dial, trying to find another news report — or, failing that, perhaps the song again, on another station — when there was a knock on the door.

The police, she thought.

She turned the radio down to a whisper, approached the door. “Who is it?” she called.

The response was muffled. She couldn’t make it out.

“Who is it?”

“Why don’t you open the door and find out?”

It was his voice! Her heart leaped. She opened the door and thrilled at the sight of him.

“A funny thing happened,” he said. “I went through what you must have gone through a year ago, except the gun didn’t misfire and it didn’t go off and shoot somebody else, either. What happened just took place in my mind, but it added up to the same thing. I chose life.”

Her heart hammered in her breast. She looked into his eyes, felt his strength.

“What do you choose, Madeline?”

She was in his arms. He pressed her close, stroked her hair.

Hadn’t she turned off the radio? Of course she had. But the music was playing in her heart, in her mind. Once before she had chosen life — life alone, life of purposeful vengeance. Now once again she chose life — life with him, life spent in love.

The music swelled, drowning all thought.