Phantom Lady

12 The Fourteenth, Thirteenth, Twelfth Days Before the Execution

The Girl

She’d already been perched on the stool several minutes when he first became aware of her. And that was all the more unusual, in that there were only a scattering of others at the bar as yet; her arrival should have been that much more conspicuous. It only showed how unobtrusively she must have approached and settled into place.

It was at the very beginning of his turn of duty, so her arrival must have occurred only moments after his own taking up of position behind the bar, almost as though she had timed it that way: to arrive when he did. She had not yet been there when he first stepped out of the locker room in freshly starched jacket and glanced about his domain-to-be, that much he was sure of. At any rate, turning away from waiting on a man down at the other end, he became aware of her sitting there quiescently, and immediately approached.

“Yes, miss?”

Her eyes held his in a peculiarly sustained look, he thought. And then immediately thought, in postscript, that he must be mistaken, he must be only imagining it. All customers looked at him when they gave an order, for he was the means of bringing it to them.

In this gaze of hers there was a difference, though; the impression returned a second time, after having been discarded once. It was a personalized look. A look in its own right, with the giving of the order the adjunct, and not just an adjunct to the giving of the order. It was a look at him, the man to whom she was addressing the order, meant for him in his own right. It was a look that said, “Take note of me. Mark me well.”

She asked for a little whisky with water. As he turned away to get it, her eyes remained on him to the last. He had a trivial and fleeting feeling of being at a loss, of being unable to account for her bizarre scrutiny, that evaporated again almost as soon as it had risen. That did not bother him much, it was just there and gone again at first.

Thus, the beginnings of it.

He brought her drink, and turned away immediately to wait on someone else.

An interval elapsed. An interval during which he did not think of her again, had forgotten her. An interval during which there should have been some slight alteration in her position, if only a shift of her hand, a raising or edging of her glass, a look elsewhere about the room. There wasn’t. She sat there not moving. As still as a pasteboard cut-out of a girl seated on a bar stool. Her drink was not touched, remained where he had left it, as he had left it. Only one thing moved: her eyes. They went wherever he went. They followed him about.

A pause came in his activities, and he encountered them again, for the first time since his original discovery of their peculiar fixity. He found now that they had been on him all the while, without his guessing it. It disconcerted him. He could find no meaning for it. He stole a look into the glass, to see if there was anything awry with his countenance or jacket. There wasn’t, he was as other times, no one else was looking at him in that prolonged steadfast way but she. He could find no explanation for it.

It was intentional, of that there could be no doubt, for it moved about as he moved about. It was no glazed, dreamy, inward mulling stare that just happened to be turned his way; there was intelligence behind it, directed at him.

Awareness of it having once entered his mind, it could not be dislodged again; it remained with him to stay and trouble him. He began watching her covertly from time to time himself now, each time thinking himself unobserved. Always he found her already looking at him when he did, always he left her continuing to look at him after he had already desisted. His sense of being at a loss deepened, became discomfort, little by little.

He had never seen a human being sit so still. Nothing about her moved. The drink remained as neglected as though he had not brought it at all. She sat there like a young, feminine Buddha, eyes gravely, uninterruptedly on him.

Discomfort was beginning to deepen into annoyance. He approached her at last, stopped before her.

“Don’t you care for your drink, miss?”

This was meant to be a hint, a spur to get her to move on. It failed; she blunted it.

Her answer was toneless, told nothing. “Leave it there.”

The circumstances were in her favor, for she was a girl, and girls are under no compulsion to be repetitious spenders at a bar, as a man customarily is if he expects to continue to be welcome. Moreover, she was not flirting, she was not seeking to have her check lifted, she was not behaving reprehensibly in any way; he was powerless against her.

He drew away from her again, worsted, looking back at her all the way down the curve of the bar, and her eyes followed him as persistently as ever.

Discomfort was settling into something chronic now. He tried to shrug it off with a squirming of the shoulders, an adjustment of his collar about the nape of his neck. He knew she was still looking, and he wouldn’t look over himself any more to confirm it. Which only made it worse.

The demands of other customers, the thicker they came, instead of harassing him, were a relief now. The necessary manipulations they brought on gave him something to do, took his mind off that harrowing stare. But the lulls would keep coming back, when there was no one to attend to, nothing that needed polishing, no glass that needed filling, and it was then that her concentration on him would make itself felt the most. It was then that he didn’t know what to do with his hands, or with his bar cloth.

He upset a small chaser of beer as he was knifing it atop the sieve. He punched a wrong key in the cash register.

At last, driven almost beyond endurance, he tackled her again, trying to come to grips with what she was doing to him.

“Is there anything I can do for you, miss?” he said with husky, choked resentment.

She spoke always without putting any clue into her voice. “Have I said there is?”

He leaned heavily on the bar. “Well, is there something you want from me?”

“Have I said I do?”

“Well, pardon me, but do I remind you of someone you know?”

“No one.”

He was beginning to flounder. “I thought maybe there was, the way you keep looking at me—” he said unsteadily. It was meant to be a rebuke.

This time she didn’t answer at all. Yet neither did her eyes leave him. He finally was the one had to leave them again, withdraw as discomfited as ever.

She didn’t smile, she didn’t speak, she showed neither contrition nor yet outright hostility. She just sat and looked after him, with the inscrutable gravity of an owl.

It was a terrible weapon she had found and she was using. It does not ordinarily occur to people how utterly unbearable it can be to be looked at steadily over a protracted period of time, say an hour or two or three, simply because it is a thing that never happens to them, their fortitude is not put to the test.

It was happening to him now, and it was slowly unnerving him, fraying him. He was defenseless against it, both because he was confined within the semicircle of the bar, couldn’t walk away from it, and also because of its very nature. Each time he tried to buffet it back, he found that it was just a look, there was nothing there to seize hold of. The control of it rested with her. A beam, a ray, there was no way of warding it off, shunting it aside.

Symptoms that he had never noted in himself before, and would not have recognized by their clinical name of agoraphobia, began to assail him with increasing urgency; a longing to take cover, to seek refuge back within the locker room, even a desire to squat down below the level of the bar top where she could no longer see him readily. He mopped his brow furtively once or twice and fought them off. His eyes began to seek the clock overhead with increasing frequency, the clock that they had once told him a man’s life depended on.

He longed to see her go. He began to pray for it. And yet it was obvious by now, had been for a long time past, that she had no intention of going of her own accord, would only go with the closing of the place. For none of the usual reasons that cause people to seek a bar were operating in her case, and therefore there was no reprieve to be expected from any of them. She was not there to wait for anyone, or she would have been met long ago. She was not there to drink, for that same untouched glass still sat just where he had set it hours ago. She was there for one purpose and one alone: to look at him.

Failing to be rid of her in any other way, he began to long for closing time to come, to find his escape through that. As the customers began to thin out, as the number of counter-attractions about him lessened, her power to bring herself to his notice rose accordingly. Presently there were large gaps around the semicircle fronting him, and that only emphasized the remorseless fixity of that Medusa-like countenance all the more.

He dropped a glass, and that was a thing he hadn’t done in months. She was shooting him to pieces. He glowered at her and cursed her in soundless lip movement as he stooped to gather up the fragments.

And then finally, when he thought it was never coming any more, the minute hand notched twelve, and it was four o’clock and closing time had arrived. Two men engaged in earnest conversation, the last of all the other customers, rose unbidden and sauntered toward the entrance, without interrupting their flow of amicable, low-voiced talk. Not she. Not a muscle moved. The stagnant drink still sat before her, and she sat on with it. Looking, watching, eyeing, without even a blink.

“Good night, gentlemen,” he called out loudly after the other two, so that she would understand.

She didn’t move.

He opened the control box and thew a switch. The outer perimeter of lights went out, leaving just an inner glow coming from behind the bar where he was, a hidden sunset creeping up the mirrors and the tiers of bottles ranged against the wall. He became a black silhouette against it, and she a disembodied, faintly luminous face peering in from the surrounding dimness.

He went up to her, took the hours old drink away, and threw it out, with a violent downward fling of the hand that sent drops leaping up.

“We’re closing up now.” he said in a grating voice.

She moved at last. Suddenly she was on her feet beside the stool, holding it for a moment to give the change of position time to work its way through her circulatory system.

His fingers worked deftly down the buttons of his jacket. He said cholerically, “What was it? What was the game? What was on your mind?”

She moved quietly off through the darkened tavern toward the street entrance without answering, as though she hadn’t heard him. He had never dreamed that such a simple causative as the mere sight of a girl quitting a bar, could bring such utter, contrite, prostrate relief welling up in him. His jacket open all down the front, he supported himself there on one hand planted firmly down upon the bar, and leaned limply, exhaustedly out in the direction in which she had gone.

There was a night light standing at the outer entrance, and she came back into view again when she had reached there. She stopped just short of the doorway, and turned, and looked back at him across the intervening distance, long and solemnly and with purposeful implication. As if to show that the whole thing had been no illusion; more than that, to show that this was not its end, that this was just an interruption.

He turned from keying the door locked, and she was standing there quietly on the sidewalk, only a few yards off. She was turned expectantly facing toward the doorway, as if waiting for him to emerge.

He was forced to go toward her, because it was in that direction his path lay on leaving here of a night. They passed within a foot of one another, for the sidewalk was fairly narrow and she was posted out in the middle of it, not skulking back against the wall. Though her face turned slowly in time with his passing, he saw that she would have let him go by without speaking, and goaded by this silent obstinacy, he spoke himself, although only a second before he had intended ignoring her.

“What is it ye want of me?” he rumbled truculently.

“Have I said I want anything of you?”

He made to go on, then swung around on his heel to face her accusingly. “You sat in there just now, never once took your eyes off me! Never once the livelong night, d’ye hear me?” He pounded one hand within the other for outraged emphasis. “And now I find you outside here waiting around—”

“Is it forbidden to stand here in the street?”

He shook a thick finger at her ponderously. “I’m warning you, young woman! I’m telling you for your own good—!”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t open her mouth, and silence is always so victorious in argument. He turned and shambled off, breathing heavily with his own bafflement.

He didn’t look back. Within twenty paces, even without looking back, he had become aware that she was advancing in turn behind him. It was not difficult to do so, for she was apparently making no effort to conceal the fact. The ticking off of her small brittle shoes was clear cut if subdued on the quiet night pavement.

An up and down intersection glided by beneath him like a slightly depressed asphalt stream bed. Then presently another. Then still another. And through it all, as the town slowly veered over from west to east, came that unhurried tick-chick, tick-chick, behind him in the middle distance.

He turned his head, the first time simply to warn her off. She came on with maddening casualness, as though it were three in the afternoon. Her walk was slow, almost stately, as the feminine gait so often is when the figure is held erect and the pace is leisurely.

He went on again briefly, then turned once more. This time his entire body, and flung himself back toward her in a sudden flurry of ungovernable exasperation.

She stopped advancing, but she held her ground, made no slightest retrograde move.

He closed in and bellowed full into her face, “Turn back now, will ye? That’s enough of this now, d’ye hear? Turn back, or I’ll—”

“I am going this way, too.” was all she said.

Again the circumstances were in her favor. Had their roles been reversed— But what man has sufficiently stout armor against ridicule to risk calling a policeman to complain that a solitary young girl is following him along the streets? She was not reviling him, she was not soliciting him, she was simply walking in the same direction he was; he was as helpless against her as he had been in the bar earlier.

He maintained his stance before her for a moment or two, but his defiance was of that face-saving kind that only marks time while it is waiting to extricate itself with the least possible embarrassment from a false situation. He spun around finally with a snort through his nose, meant to convey belligerence, but that somehow sounded a bit like windy helplessness. He drew away from her, resumed his homeward journeying.

Ten paces, fifteen, twenty. Behind him, as at a given signal, it recommenced again, steady as slow rain in a puddle. Tick-chick, tick-chick, tick-chick. She was coming after him once more.

He rounded the appointed corner, started up the roofed over sidewalk stairway he used every night to reach his train. He halted up above, at the rear of the plank floored station gallery that led through to the tracks, scanning the chutelike incline he had just emerged from for signs of her.

The oncoming tap of her footfalls took on a metallic ring as her feet clicked against the steel rims guarding the steps. In a moment her head came into view above the midway break in the stair line.

A turnstile rumbled around after him, and he turned there on the other side of it, at bay, took up a defensive position.

She cleared the steps and came on, as matter-of-factly, as equably, as though he wasn’t to be seen there at all in the gap fronting her. She already held the coin pinched between her fingers. She came on until there was just the width of the turnstile arm between them.

He backed his arm at her, swinging it up all the way past its opposite shoulder, ready to fling it loose. It would have sent her spinning about the enclosure. His lip lifted in a canine snarl. “Get outa here, now. Gawan down below where ye came from!” He reached down and quickly plugged the coin slot with the ball of his thumb just ahead of her own move toward it.

She desisted, shifted over to the adjoining one. Instantly he was there before her again. She shifted back to the original one. He reversed himself once more, again blocked it. The superstructure began to vibrate with the approach of one of the infrequent night trains.

This time he finally flung his arm out in the back sweep he had been threatening at each confrontation. The blow would have been enough to fell her if it had caught her. She turned her head aside with the fastidious little quirk of someone detecting an unpleasant odor. It fanned her face.

Instantly there was a peremptory rapping on glass somewhere close at hand. The station agent thrust head and shoulder out of the sideward door of his dingy little booth. “Cut that out, you. Whaddye trying to do, keep people from using this station? I’ll run you in!”

He turned to defend himself, the taboo partially lifted since this intercession wasn’t of his own seeking. “This girl’s nuts or something, she ought to be sent to Bellevue. She’s been follying me along the street, I can’t get rid of her.”

She said in that same dispassionate voice, “Are you the only one that can ride the Third Avenue El?”

He appealed to the agent once more, who continued to hang slant-wise out of the doorway as a sort of self-appointed arbiter. “Ask her where she’s going. She don’t know herself!”

Her answer was addressed to the agent, but with an emphasis that could not have been meant for him, that must have had some purpose of its own. “I’m going down to Twenty-Seventh Street, Twenty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. I have a right to use this station, haven’t I?”

The face of the man blocking her way had suddenly grown white, as though the locality she had mentioned conveyed a shock of hidden meaning to him. It should have. It was his own.

She knew ahead of time where he was going. It was useless therefore to attempt to shake her off, outdistance her in any way.

The agent rendered his decision, with a majestic sweep of his hand. “Come on through, miss.”

Her coin suddenly swelled up in the reflector and she had come through the next one over, without waiting for him to clear the way for her. A thing which he seemed incapable of doing at the moment, no longer through obstinacy so much as through a temporary paralysis of movement with which his discovery of her knowledge of his eventual destination seemed to have afflicted him.

The train had arrived, meanwhile, but it was on the opposite side, not theirs. It ebbed away again, and the station breastworks dimmed once more behind it.

She sauntered to the outer lip of the platform and stood there waiting, and presently he had come out in turn, but digressing so that he emerged two pillar lengths to the rearward of her. Since both were looking the same way, in quest of a train, he had her in view but she did not have him.

Presently, without noticing what she was doing, she be-began to amble further rearward along the platform, relieving the monotony of the wait by aimless movement as most people are inclined to do at such a time. This had soon taken her beyond the agent’s limited range of vision, and out to where the station roof ended and the platform itself narrowed to a single-file strip of runway. Here she came to a halt again, and would have eventually turned and retraced her steps back toward where she had come from. But while standing there, peering trainward and with her back still to him, an unaccountable tension, a sense of impending danger of some sort, began slowly to come over her.

It must have been something about the way his tread sounded to her on the planks. He too was straying now in turn, and toward her. He was moving sluggishly, just as she had. It wasn’t that; it was that his tread, while distinct enough in the unnatural stillness that reigned over the station, had some sort of a furtive undertone to it. It was in the rhythm, rather than in any actual attempt to muffle it. It was somehow a leashed tread, a tread of calculated approach trying to disguise itself as a meaningless ramble. She could not know how she knew; she only knew, before she had even turned, that something had entered his mind in the few moments since her back had been turned. Something that had not been there before.

She turned, and rather sharply.

He was still little better than his original two stanchion lengths away from her. It was not that that confirmed her impression. She caught him in the act of glancing down into the track bed beside him, where the third rail lay, as he drifted along parallel to it. It was that.

She understood immediately. A jostle of the elbow, a deft, tripping sideswipe of the foot, as they made to pass one another. She took in at a glance the desperate position she had unwittingly strayed into. She was penned against the far end of the station. Without realizing it she had cut herself off from the agent’s protective radius of vision altogether. His booth was set back inside to command the turnstiles, could not command the sweep of the platform.

The two of them were alone on the platform. She looked across the way, and the opposite side was altogether barren, had just been cleared by the northbound train. There was no downtown train in sight yet, either, offering that dubious deterrent.

To retreat still further would be suicidal; the platform ended completely only a few yards behind her back, she would only wedge herself into a cul-de-sac, be more at his mercy than ever. To get back to the midsection where the agent offered safety, she would have to go toward him, pass him, which was the very act he was seeking to achieve.

If she screamed now, without waiting for the overt act, in hopes of bringing the agent out on to the platform in time, she ran a very real risk of bringing on all the faster the very thing she was trying to prevent. He was in a keyed-up state, she could tell by the look on his face, on which a scream, more likely than not, would produce the opposite effect from that intended. This temporary aberration was due to sheer fright on his part more than rage, and a scream might frighten him still further.

She had frightened him badly, she had done her work only too well.

She edged warily inward, back as far as possible from the tracks, until she had come up close against the row of advertisements lining the guard rail. She pressed her hips flat against them, began to sidle along them, turned watchfully outward toward him. Her dress rustled as it swept their surfaces one by one, so close did she cling.

As she drew within his orbit he began to veer in toward her on a diagonal, obviously to cut off her further advance. There was a slowness about both their movements that was horrible; they were like lazy fish swimming in a tank, on that deserted platform three stories above the street, with its tawny widely spaced lights strung along overhead.

He still came on, and so did she, and they were bound to meet in another two or three paces.

The turnstile drummed unexpectedly, around out of sight from them, and a colored girl of dubious pursuits came out on the platform just a few short yards away from the two of them, bent almost lopsided as she moved to scratch herself far down the side of her leg.

They slowly melted into relaxation, each in the pose in which she had surprised them. The girl, with her back to the billboards, stayed that way, slumped a little lower, buckled at the knees now. He leaned deflatedly against a chewing gum slot machine at hand beside him. She could almost see the recent fell purpose oozing out of him at every pore. Finally he turned away from his nearness to her with a floundering movement. Nothing had been said, the whole thing had been in pantomime from beginning to end.

That would never come again. She had the upper hand once more.

The train came flickering in like sheet lightning, and they both boarded the same car, at opposite ends. They sat the full car length away from one another, still recuperating from their recent crisis; he huddled forward over his lap, she with her spine held convex, staring upward at the ceiling lights. In between there was no one but the colored girl, who continued to scratch at intervals and scan the station numbers, as though waiting to pick one at random to alight at.

They both left the car at the Twenty-Eighth Street station, again at opposite ends. He was aware of her coming down the stairs in his wake. She could tell that he was, although he didn’t look back. The inclination of his head told her that. He seemed passively acquiescent now to letting her have her way, follow him the short rest of the way, if that was her intent.

They both went down Twenty-Seventh Street toward Second, he on one side of the street, she on the other. He maintained a lead of about four doorways, and she let him keep it. She knew which entrance he would go into, and he knew that she knew. The stalk had now become a purely mechanical thing, with its only remaining unknown quantity the why. But that was the dominant factor.

He went in, was inked from sight, within one of the black door slits down near the corner. He must have heard that remorseless, maniacally calm tick-chick, tick-chick behind him on the other side of the street to the very last, but he refrained from looking back, gave no sign. They had parted company at last, for the first time since early evening.

She came on until she had used up the distance there had been between them, stood even with the house. Then she took up her position there, and stood in full sight on the sidewalk opposite, watching a certain two of the dozen-odd darkened windows.

Presently they had lighted, as in greeting at someone’s awaited entry. Then within a moment they blacked out once more, as if the act had been quickly countermanded. They remained dark after that, though at times the grayish film of the curtains would seem to stir and shift, with the elusiveness of a reflection on the glass. She knew she was being watched through them, by one or more persons.

She maintained her vigil steadfastly.

An elevated train wriggled by like a glowworm up at the far end of the street. A taxi passed, and the driver glanced at her curiously, but he already had a fare. A late wayfarer came by along the opposite side of the street, and looked over at her, trying to discern encouragement. She averted her face angularly, only righted it again after he was well on his way.

A policeman suddenly stood at her elbow, appearing from nowhere. He must have stood watching, undetected, for some little time before.

“Just a minute, miss. I’ve had a complaint from a woman in one of the flats over there that you followed her husband home from work, and have been standing staring at their windows for the past half hour.”

“I have.”

“Well, y’d better move on.”

“I want you to take hold of my arm, please, and walk me with you until we get around the corner, as though you were running me in.” He did, rather half-heartedly. They stopped again when they were out of sight of the windows. “Here.” She produced a piece of paper, showed it to him. He peered at it in the uncertain light of a near-by lamppost.

“Who’s this?” he asked.

“Homicide Squad. You can call him and check on it, if you want to. I’m doing this with his full knowledge and permission.”

“Oh, sort of undercover work, hunh?” he said with increased respect.

“And please ignore all future complaints from those particular people about me. You’re apt to get a great many of them during the next few days and nights.”

She made a phone call of her own, after he had left her.

“How is it working out?” the voice on the other end asked.

“He’s already showing signs of strain. He broke a glass behind the bar. He nearly gave in to an impulse to throw me off the elevated platform just now.”

“That looks like it. Be careful, don’t go too close to him when there’s no one else around. Remember, the main thing is don’t give him an inkling of what the whole thing’s about, of what’s behind it. Don’t put the question to him, that’s the whole trick. The moment he finds out what you’re after, it goes into reverse, loses its effect. It’s the not knowing that keeps him on edge, will finally wear him down to where we want him.”

“What times does he start out for work, as a rule?”

“He leaves the flat around five, each afternoon,” her informant said, as though with documentary evidence at his fingers to refer to.

“He’ll find me on hand tomorrow, when he does.”

The third night the manager suddenly approached the bar to one side of her, unasked, and called him over.

“What’s the matter, why don’t you wanna wait on this young lady? I been watching. Twenty minutes she’s been sitting here like this. Couldn’t you see her?”

His face was gray, and the seams were shiny. It got that way whenever he had to come this close to her now.

“I can’t—” he said brokenly, keeping his voice muted so that others wouldn’t hear it. “Mr. Anselmo, it’s not human — she’s torturing me — you don’t understand—” He coughed on the verge of tears, and his cheeks swelled out, then flattened again.

The girl, less than a foot away, sat looking on at the two of them, with the tranquil, guileless eyes of a child.

“Three nights she’s been in here like this now. She keeps looking at me—”

“Sure she keeps looking at you, she’s waiting to get waited on,” the manager rebuked him. “What do you want her to do?” He peered closer at him, detected the strangeness in his face. “What’s the matter, you sick? If you’re sick and want to go home, I’ll phone Pete to come down.”

“No, no!” he pleaded hurriedly, almost with a frightened sob in his voice. “I don’t want to go home — then she’ll only follow me along the streets, stand outside my windows all night again! I’d rather stay here where there are people around me!”

“You quit talking crazy, and take her order,” the manager said brusquely. He turned away, with a single verifying glance at her to confirm how well-behaved, how docile, how harmless she was.

The hand that set down the drink before her shook uncontrollably, and some of it spilled.

They neither of them said anything to one another, though their breaths all but mingled.

“Hello,” the station agent said friendlily through the wicket, as she came to rest just outside it. “Say, it’s funny, you and that guy that just passed through ahead of you always seem to get here at about the same time, and yet you’re never together. Did y’ notice?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” she answered. “We both come out of the same place, each night.”

She maintained contact with this shrine of his by resting the point of her elbow on the slab outside the wicket, as though there were some sort of protective virtue to be derived from the touch of it, while she chatted desultorily with him, whiling her train wait away, “Nice night, isn’t it?... How’s your little boy getting along?... I don’t think the Dodgers stand a chance.” Occasionally she would turn her head and cast a glance at the platform outside, where a lone figure paced, or stood, or was lost to view at times, but she never ventured out on it herself.

Only when the train was in, and at a full stop, and the platform gates stood open, did she break away and make a little dashing scamper that carried her aboard. On an insulated straight line, along which nothing could possibly happen to her, for the third rail was sheathed now by the undercarriages of the cars themselves.

An elevated train wriggled by like a glowworm at the far end of the street. A taxi sloughed by and the driver glanced at her curiously, but he didn’t want any more fares because he was taking his cab to bed for the night. Two late wayfarers passed, and one of them called over jocularly, “What’s matter, Toots, did you get a rain check?” Quiet descended again after they had lost themselves in the distance.

Suddenly without any warning the doorway, the doorway that belonged to the two windows, disgorged a woman, hair awry and rushing as though she were a projectile discharged by the long black bore of the hall. She had donned a coat over her nightdress, and her bare feet were thrust into improperly secured shoes that made a clattering noise at each purposefully quick step she took. She was brandishing the long pole of a denuded floor brush, and she made unerringly for the lone figure standing across the way, with unmistakable intent to flail at her.

The girl turned and sped, down to the near-by corner and around it and along the next street, but with a neat economy of movement that robbed her going of all fear, made it just a precautionary withdrawal from someone in whom she had no interest.

The woman’s railing screams, fleeter than their owner, winged after the girl, overtook her midway down the block. “For three days now you been hounding my monn! Come back here and I’ll give it to you! Let me get my hands on you and I’ll fix you, I will!”

She stood there in view for a moment or two, just past the corner, gesturing threats of dire antagonism with pole and arm. The girl slowed, stopped, dissolved into the gloom.

Presently the woman went back around the corner, sought her own house again.

Presently the girl was back again, too, standing where she had been before, and as she had been before, staring upward at two windows of the house across the way, like a cat watching a mouse hole.

An elevated train wriggled by... A taxi passed... A late wayfarer came along, passed, receded...

Those blank window-panes staring sightlessly down at her had a look of helpless frustration now, somehow.

“Soon,” the voice on the telephone said. “One more day, to make sure he’s completely pulverized. Maybe by tomorrow night—”

It was his day off, and he had been attempting to shake her off for well over an hour now.

He was going to halt again. She saw it coming before it had even occurred, she already knew the signs so well by now. He halted in full sunshine this time, stood back against a building wall, with shoppers streaming to and fro before him. He had already halted two or three times before this, but each time it had ended inconclusively. As it always did. He had gone on again; she had too.

This time she detected a difference. This time the halt almost seemed to be involuntary. As though some mainspring of endurance had finally snapped, then and there, at just that point, as he was passing it, and he had suddenly found himself all unwound. As he backed to the wall the small flat parcel he had held bedded under his arm slowly overbalanced, slapped to the ground, and he allowed it to lie there unrecovered.

She halted a short distance from him, making no pretense, as usual, that her halt had anything to do but with him. She stood looking at him in her usual grave way.

The sun was streaming whitely into his face, and he was blinking his eyes against it. More and more rapidly, however.

Tears appeared unexpectedly, and suddenly he was weeping abjectly, in full view of all the passersby, his face an ugly, brick-red, puckered mask.

Two people stopped, incredulous. The two became four, the four, eight. He and the girl were both contained in the hollow core of the crowd that in no time at all had ringed them around, kept thickening, outer layer by outer layer.

He was past all ordinary sense of self-consciousness, humiliation; he appealed to the onlookers, almost as if asking help, protection against her.

“Ask her what she wants of me!” he bawled soddenly. “Ask her what she’s after! She’s been doing this to me for days now— Day and night, night and day! I can’t stand it any more, I tell ya, I can’t stand it any more—!”

“What is he, drunk?” a woman asked another, in a derisive undertone.

She stood there unshrinking, making no attempt to escape from the attention he was forcing her to share with him. She was so dignified, so grave, so fetching to the eye, and he was so grotesquely comical, it could have had only one result; the sympathies of the crowd could have gone only one way. Crowds are more often sadistic than not, anyway.

Grins appeared here and there. The grins became snickers. The snickers, guffaws and outright jeers. In another moment the whole crowd was laughing pitilessly at him. Only one face in all that group remained impassive, sober, clinically neutral.

Hers.

He had only worsened his situation instead of bettering it, by making this spectacle. He had thirty tormentors now, instead of one. “I can’t stand it any more! I tell ya I’ll do something to her—!” Suddenly he advanced on her, as if to strike her, beat her back.

Instantly men leaped forward, caught his arms, flung him this way and that with surly grunts. For a moment there was a confused floundering of bodies around her. His head suddenly forced its way through, lower than normal, straining to get at her.

It might easily have developed into a multiple onslaught — on him.

She appealed to them, self-possessedly but loudly enough to be heard, and the calm clarity of her voice stopped them all short. “Don’t. Let him alone. Let him go about his business.”

But there was no warmth nor compassion about it, just a terrible steely impartiality. As if to say: Leave him to me. He’s mine.

Arms fell away from him, poised fists relaxed, coats were shrugged back into place, and the angry inner nucleus within the greater one disintegrated. Leaving him alone again within the hollow circle. Alone with her.

He made several false moves, in his torment and frustration, seeking an outlet through the massed figures around him. Then he found one, and forced his way through it, and went plunging out. He went running away from the scene full tilt, padding ponderously down the street; running away from the slender girl who stood there looking after him, her coat belted around her waist to the thickness of little more than a man’s hand span. The ultimate in degradation.

She didn’t linger long behind him. She wasn’t interested in the plaudits of the crowd, or savoring any juvenile public triumph. She thrust those in her way aside with deft little passes of her arm, until she had gained clearance for herself. Then she set out after the heavily laboring figure ahead, at a blend of light running and graceful energetic walking that carried her rapidly forward in his wake.

Strange pursuit. Incredible pursuit. Slim young girl hurrying after a stocky barman, in and out, out and in, through the swarming midday streets of New York.

He became aware almost at once that she had taken up the chase once more. He looked back, the first time in dismal apprehension. She waited for him to look again. When he did, she flung up her arm straight overhead, in imperious summons to him to stop.

Now would be the time, now would be the moment Burgess would approve of, she felt sure. Now he was like wax as he ran through this bright midday sun. That crowd back there had taken away his last prop. He had tested it, found it no protection, and accordingly he no longer had a sense of immunity even in broad daylight on these bustling city streets.

The curve of his resistance might start upward again from here on, if she didn’t act now while she had the chance. The law of diminishing returns might set in from here on. Familiarity might very well breed contempt, for all she knew.

Now was the time; it was simply a matter of pinning him against the nearest wall, putting in a quick call to Burgess, and having him take charge in time to be in at the death. “Are you ready to admit now that you did see a certain woman at the bar that night in company with the man Henderson? Why did you deny having seen her? Who paid or coerced you to deny it?”

He had stopped for a moment, down there ahead at the next corner, looking all about him for a way of escape like a trapped, scurrying animal. Panic was on him at white heat. She could tell by the abortive, zigzag false starts he kept making, looking for sanctuary. To him she was no longer a girl, something he could have buffeted senseless with one arm if he chose. To him she was Nemesis.

She threw up her arm again, as the distance rapidly closed between them. It only stung him like the flick of a whip to an added spurt of frenzied disorientation. He was walled in there on the corner by a thin but continuous line of people waiting to cross over, standing elbow to elbow along the curb. There was an adverse light on above.

He gave one last look at her, rapidly nearing him now, and then plunged through them like a circus performer tearing through a paper hoop.

She stopped short, as short as though both her flailing feet had caught simultaneously in a hidden crevice along the sidewalk. A brake keened out along the asphalt, scorching itself to death.

She flung up both hands, ground them into her eyesockets, but not before she had seen his hat go up in the air, in a surprisingly high loop, clear over everyone else’s head.

A woman screamed for prelude, and then a vast bay of horrified dismay went up from the crowd in general.