Strangers on a Train

Twenty

“Have a drink with me,” Bruno said. He had appeared out of nowhere, in the middle of the sidewalk.

“I don’t care to see you. I’m not asking questions. I don’t care to see you.”

“I don’t care if you ask questions,” Bruno said with a weak smile. His eyes were wary. “Come across the street. Ten minutes.”

Guy glanced around him. Here he is, Guy thought. Call the police. Jump him, throw him down to the sidewalk. But Guy only stood rigidly. He saw that Bruno’s hands were rammed in his pockets, as if he might have a gun.

“Ten minutes,” Bruno said, luring him with the tentative smile.

Guy hadn’t heard a word from Bruno in weeks. He tried to summon back the anger of that last evening in the snow, of his decision to turn Bruno over to the police. This was the critical moment. Guy came with him. They walked into a bar on Sixth Avenue and took a back booth.

Bruno’s smile grew wider. “What’re you scared about, Guy?”

“Not a thing.”

“Are you happy?”

Guy sat stiffly on the edge of his seat. He was sitting opposite a murderer, he thought. Those hands had crushed Miriam’s throat.

“Listen, Guy, why didn’t you tell me about Anne?”

“What about Anne?”

“I’d have liked to know about her, that’s all. On the train, I mean.”

“This is our last meeting, Bruno.”

“Why? I just want to be friends, Guy.”

“I’m going to turn you over to the police.”

“Why didn’t you do that in Metcalf?” Bruno asked with the lowest pink gleam in his eyes, as only he could have asked it, impersonally, sadly, yet with triumph. Oddly, Guy felt his inner voice had asked him the question in the same way.

“Because I wasn’t sure enough.”

“What do I have to do, make a written statement?”

“I can still turn you over for investigation.”

“No, you can’t. They’ve got more on you than on me.” Bruno shrugged.

“What’re you talking about?”

“What do you think they’d get on me? Nothing.”

“I could tell them!” He was suddenly furious.

“If I wanted to say you paid me for it,” Bruno frowned selfrighteously, “the pieces would fit like hell!”

“I don’t care about pieces.”

“Maybe you don’t, but the law does.”

“What pieces?”

“That letter you wrote Miriam,” Bruno said slowly, “the cover-up of that job canceling. The whole convenient trip to Mexico.”

“You’re insane!”

“Face it, Guy! You’re not making any sense!“Bruno’s voice rose hysterically over the jukebox that had started up near them. He pushed his hand flat across the table toward Guy, then closed it in a fist. “I like you, Guy, I swear. We shouldn’t be talking like this!”

Guy did not move. The edge of the bench cut against the back of his legs. “I don’t want to be liked by you.”

“Guy, if you say anything to the police, you’ll only land us both in prison. Don’t you see?”

Guy had thought of it, even before now. If Bruno clung to his lies, there could be a long trial, a case that might never be decided unless Bruno broke down, and Bruno wouldn’t break down. Guy could see it in the monomaniacal intensity with which Bruno stared at him now. Ignore him, Guy thought. Keep away. Let the police catch him. He’s insane enough to kill you if you make a move.

“You didn’t turn me in in Metcalf because you like me, Guy. You like me in a way.”

“I don’t like you in the least.”

“But you’re not going to turn me in, are you?”

“No,” Guy said between his teeth. Bruno’s calm amazed him. Bruno was not afraid of him at all. “Don’t order me another drink. I’m leaving.”

“Wait a minute.” Bruno got money from his wallet and gave it to the waiter.

Guy sat on, held by a sense of inconclusiveness.

“Good-looking suit.” Bruno smiled, nodding toward Guy’s chest.

His new gray flannel chalk-stripe suit. Bought with the Palmyra money, Guy thought, like his new shoes and the new alligator brief case beside him on the seat.

“Where do you have to go?”

“Downtown.” He was to meet a prospective client’s representative at the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 7. Guy stared at Bruno’s hard, wistful eyes, feeling sure Bruno thought he was on his way to meet Anne now. “What’s your game, Bruno?”

“You know,” Bruno said quietly. “What we talked about on the train. The exchange of victims. You’re going to kill my father.”

Guy made a sound of contempt. He had known it before Bruno said it, had suspected it since Miriam’s death. He stared into Bruno’s fixed, still wistful eyes, fascinated by their cool insanity. Once as a child he had stared at a mongoloid idiot on a streetcar, he remembered, like this, with a shameless curiosity that nothing could shake. Curiosity and fear.

“I told you I could arrange every detail.” Bruno smiled at the corner of his mouth, amusedly, apolegetically.“It’d be very simple.”

He hates me, Guy thought suddenly. He’d love to kill me, too.

“You know what I’ll do if you don’t.” Bruno made a gesture of snapping his fingers, but his hand on the table was carelessly limp. “I’ll just put the police onto you.”

Ignore him, Guy thought, ignore him! “You don’t frighten me in the least. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to prove you insane.”

“I’m no more insane than you are!”

It was Bruno who ended the interview a moment later. He had a 7 o’clock appointment with his mother, he said.

The next encounter, so much shorter, Guy felt he lost, too, though at the time he thought he had won. Bruno tried to intercept him one Friday afternoon as he was leaving his office on the way to Long Island to see Anne. Guy simply brushed past him and climbed into a taxi. Yet a feeling of having physically run away shamed him, began to undermine a certain dignity that had up to them been intact. He wished he had said something to Bruno. He wished he had faced him for an instant.

Twenty-One

In the next days, there was hardly an evening when Bruno was not standing on the sidewalk across the street from his office building. Or if not there, standing across the street from where he lived, as if Bruno knew the evenings he would come straight home. There was never a word now, never a sign, only the tall figure with the hands in the pockets of the long, rather military overcoat that fit him closely, like a stovepipe. There was only the eyes following him, Guy knew, though he did not look back until he was out of sight. For two weeks. Then the first letter came.

It was two sheets of paper: the first a map of Bruno’s house and the grounds and roads around it and the course Guy would take, neatly drawn with dotted and ruled ink lines, and the second a typed, closely written letter lucidly setting forth the plan for the murder of Bruno’s father. Guy tore it up, then immediately regretted it. He should have kept it as evidence against Bruno. He kept the pieces.

But there was no need to have kept them. He received such a letter every two or three days. They were all mailed from Great Neck, as if Bruno stayed out there now—he had not seen Bruno since the letters began—writing perhaps on his father’s typewriter the letters that must have taken him two or three hours to prepare. The letters were sometimes drunken. It showed in the typing mistakes and in the emotional bursts of the last paragraphs. If he were sober, the last paragraph was affectionate and reassuring as to the ease of the murder. If he were drunk, the paragraph was either a gush of brotherly love or a threat to haunt Guy all his life, ruin his career and his “love affair,” and a reminder that Bruno had the upper hand. All the necessary information might have been gotten from any one of the letters, as if Bruno anticipated he might tear most of them up unopened. But despite his determination to tear up the next, Guy would open it when it came, curious as to the variations in the last paragraph. Of Bruno’s three plans, the one with a gun, using the back entrance of the house, came most often, though each letter invited him to take his choice.

The letters affected him in a perverse way. After the shock of the first, the next few bothered him hardly at all. Then as the tenth, twelfth, fifteenth appeared in his mailbox, he felt they hammered at his consciousness on his nerves in a manner that he could not analyze. Alone in his room he would spend quarter hours trying to isolate his injury and repair it. His anxiety was unreasonable, he told himself, unless he thought Bruno would turn on him and try to murder him. And he didn’t really. Bruno had never threatened that. But reasoning could not alleviate the anxiety, or make it less exhausting.

The twenty-first letter mentioned Anne. “You wouldn’t like Anne to know your part in Miriam’s murder, would you? What girl would marry a murderer? Certainly not Anne. The time is getting short. The first two weeks in March is my deadline. Until then it would be easy.”

Then the gun came. It was handed him by his landlady, a big package in brown paper. Guy gave a short laugh when the black gun toppled out. It was a big Luger, shiny and new-looking except for a chip off the crosshatched handle.

Some impulse made Guy take his own little revolver from the back of his top drawer, made him heft his own beautiful pearlhandled gun over his bed where the Luger lay. He smiled at his action, then brought the Texas gun up closer to his eyes and studied it. He had seen it in a glutted pawnshop window on lower Main Street in Metcalf when he was about fifteen, and had bought it with money from his paper route, not because it was a gun but because it was beautiful. Its compactness, the economy of its short barrel had delighted him. The more he had learned of mechanical design, the more pleased he had been with his gun. He had kept it in various top drawers for fifteen years. He opened the chamber and removed the bullets, three of them, and turned the cylinder around with six pulls of the trigger, admiring the deep pitched clicks of its perfect machinery. Then he slipped the bullets back, put the gun into its lavender-colored flannel bag, and replaced it in his drawer.

How should he get rid of the Luger? Drop it over an embankment into the river? Into some ashcan? Throw it out with his trash? Everything he though of seemed either suspect or melodramatic. He decided to slip it under his socks and underwear in a bottom drawer until something better occurred to him. He thought suddenly of Samuel Bruno, for the first time as a person. The presence of the Luger brought the man and his potential death into juxtaposition in his mind. Here in his room was the complete picture of the man and his life, according to Bruno, the plan for his murder—a letter had been waiting in his box that morning, too, and lay on his bed now unopened—and the gun with which he was supposed to kill him. Guy got one of Bruno’s recent letters from among a few in the bottom drawer.

Samuel Bruno (Bruno seldom referred to him as “my father”) is the finest example of the worst that America produces. He comes of low-class peasants in Hungary, little better than animals. He picked a wife of good family, with his usual greed, once he could afford her. All this time my mother quietly bore his unfaithfulness, having some concept of the sacredness of marriage contract. Now in his old age he tries to act pius before it is too late, but it is too late. I wish I could kill him myself but I have explained to you due to Gerard, his private detective, it is impossible. If you ever had anything to do with him, he would be your personal enemy, too. He is the kind of man who thinks all your ideas about architecture as beauty and about adiquate houses for everyone are idiotic & doesn’t care what kind of factory he has as long as the roof doesn’t leak and ruin his machinery. It may interest you to know his employees are on strike now. See N. Y. Times last Thurs. p .31 bottom left. They are striking for a living wage. Samuel bruno does not hesitate to rob his own son…

Who would believe such a story if he told it? Who would accept such fantasy? The letter, the map, the gun—They seemed like props of a play, objects arranged to give a verisimilitude to a story that wasn’t real and never could be real. Guy burnt the letter. He burnt all the letters he had, then hurried to get ready for Long Island.

He and Anne were going to spend the day driving, walking in the woods, and tomorrow drive up to Alton. The house would be finished by the end of March, which would give them a leisurely two months before the wedding to furnish it. Guy smiled as he gazed out the train window. Anne had never said she wanted a June wedding; it was simply drifting that way. She had never said she wanted a formal wedding, only, “Let’s not have anything too slapdash.” Then when he had told her he wouldn’t mind a formal wedding if she wouldn’t, she had let out a long”Oh-h!” and grabbed him and kissed him. No, he didn’t want another three-minute wedding with a stranger for a witness. He began sketching on the back of an envelope the twenty-story office building he had learned last week he had a good chance of being commissioned for, that he had been saving as a surprise for Anne. He felt the future had suddenly become the present. He had everything he wanted. Running down the platform steps, he saw Anne’s leopard coat in the little crowd by the station door. Always he would remember the times she waited for him here, he thought, the shy dance of impatience she did when she caught sight of him, the way she smiled and half turned round, as if she wouldn’t have waited half a minute longer.

“Anne!” He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek.

“You didn’t wear a hat.”

He smiled because it was exactly what he had expected her to say. “Well, neither did you.”

“I’m in the car. And it’s snowing.” She took his hand and they ran across the crisp ash lane toward the cars. “I’ve got a surprise!”

“So have I. What’s yours?”

“Sold five designs yesterday on my own.”

Guy shook his head. “I can’t beat that. I’ve just got one office building. Maybe.”

She smiled and her eyebrows went up. “Maybe? Yes!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” he said, and kissed her again.

That evening, standing on the little wooden bridge over the stream back of Anne’s house, Guy started to say, “Do you know what Bruno sent me today? A gun.” Then, not that he had come close to saying it, but the remoteness of Bruno and his connection with him from his and Anne’s life shocked him with a terrible realization. He wanted no secrets from Anne, and here was one bigger than all he had told her. Bruno, the name that haunted him, would mean nothing to Anne.

“What is it, Guy?”

She knew there was something, he thought. She always knew. “Nothing.”

He followed her as she turned and walked toward the house. The night had blackened the earth, made the snowy ground hardly distinguishable from woods and sky. And Guy felt it again—the sense of hostility in the clump of woods east of the house. Before him, the kitchen door spilled a warm yellow light some way onto the lawn. Guy turned again, letting his eyes rest on the blackness where the woods began. The feeling he had when he gazed there was discomforting and relieving at once, like biting on an ailing tooth.

“I’ll walk around again,” he said.

Anne went in, and he turned back. He wanted to see if the sensation were stronger or weaker when Anne was not with him. He tried to feel rather than see. It was still there, faint and evasive, where the darkness deepened at the baseline of the woods. Nothing of course. What chance combination of shadow and sound and his own thoughts had created it?

He slipped his hands into his overcoat pockets and moved stubbornly closer.

The dull snap of a twig plummeted his consciousness to earth, focused it at a certain point. He sprinted toward it. A crackling of bushes now, and a moving black figure in the blackness. Guy released all his muscles in a long dive, caught it, and recognized the hoarse intake of breath as Bruno’s. Bruno plunged in his arms like a great powerful fish underwater, twisted and hit him an agonizing blow on the cheekbone. Clasping each other, they both fell, fighting to free arms, fighting as if they both fought death. Bruno’s fingers scratched frenziedly at his throat, though Guy kept his arms straight. Bruno’s breath hissed in and out between his drawn-back lips. Guy hit the mouth again with his right fist that felt broken, that would no longer close.

“Guy!” Bruno burst out indignantly.

Guy caught him by the front of his collar. Suddenly they both stopped fighting.

“You knew it was me!” Bruno said in a fury. “Dirty bastard!”

“What’re you doing here?” Guy pulled him to his feet.

The bleeding mouth spread wider, as if he were going to cry. “Lemme go!”

Guy shoved him. He fell like a sack to the ground and tottered up again.

“Okay, kill me if you want to! You can say it’s selfdefense!” Bruno whined.

Guy glanced toward the house. They had struggled a long way into the woods. “I don’t want to kill you. I’ll kill you next time I find you here.”

Bruno laughed, the single victorious clap.

Guy advanced menacingly. He did not want to touch Bruno again. Yet a moment before, he had fought with “Kill, kill!” in his mind. Guy knew there was nothing he could do to stop Bruno’s smile, not even kill him. “Clear out.”

“You ready to do that job in two weeks?”

“Ready to turn you over to the police.”

“Ready to turn yourself over?” Bruno jeered shrilly. “Ready to tell Anne all about it, huh? Ready to spend the next twenty years in jail? Sure, I’m ready!” He brought his palms together gently. His eyes seemed to glow with a red light. His swaying figure was like that of an evil spirit’s that might have stepped from the twisted black tree behind him.

“Get someone else for your dirty work,” Guy muttered.

“Look who’s talking! I want you and I’ve got you! Okay!“A laugh. “I’ll start. I’ll tell your girl friend all about it. I’ll write her tonight.” He lurched away, tripped heavily, and staggered on, a loose and shapeless thing. He turned and shouted, “Unless I hear from you in a day or so.”

Guy told Anne he had fought with a prowler in the woods. He suffered only a reddened eye from the battle, but he saw no way to stay on at the house, not go to Alton tomorrow, except by feigning injury. He had been hit in the stomach, he said. He didn’t feel well. Mr. and Mrs. Faulkner were alarmed, and insisted to the policeman who came to look over the grounds that they have a police guard for the next few nights. But a guard was not enough. If Bruno came back, Guy wanted to be there himself. Anne suggested that he stay on Monday, so he would have someone to look after him in case he were sick. Guy did stay on.

Nothing had ever shamed him so much, he thought, as the two days in the Faulkner house. He was ashamed that he felt the need to stay, ashamed that on Monday morning he went into Anne’s room and looked on the writing table where the maid put her mail to see if Bruno had written. He hadn’t. Anne left each morning for her shop in New York before the mail was delivered. On Monday morning, Guy looked through the four or five letters on her writing table, then hurried out like a thief, afraid the maid might see him. But he often came into her room when she was not there, he reminded himself. Sometimes when the house was filled with people, he would escape to Anne’s room for a few moments. And she loved to find him there. At the threshold, he leaned his head back against the door jamb, picking out the disorder in the room—the unmade bed, the big art books that didn’t fit in the bookshelves, her last designs thumbtacked to a strip of green cork down one wall, on the corner of the table a glass of bluish water that she had neglected to empty, the brown and yellow silk scarf over the chair back, that she had evidently changed her mind about. The gardenia scent of the cologne she had touched to her neck at the last moment still lingered in the air. He longed to merge his life with hers.

Guy stayed until Tuesday morning when there was no letter from Bruno either, and then went in to Manhattan. Work had piled up. A thousand things nettled him. The contract with the Shaw Realty Company for the new office building still had not been settled. He felt his life disorganized, without direction, more chaotic than when he had heard of Miriam’s murder. There was no letter from Bruno that week except one that awaited him, that had arrived Monday. It was a short note saying thank God his mother was better today and he could leave the house. His mother had been dangerously ill for three weeks with pneumonia, he said, and he had stayed with her.

Thursday evening when Guy got back from a meeting of an architectural club, his landlady Mrs. McCausland said he had had three calls. The telephone rang as they stood in the hall. It was Bruno, sullen and drunk. He asked if Guy was ready to talk sense.

“I didn’t think so,” Bruno said. “I’ve written Anne.” And he hung up.

Guy went upstairs and took a drink himself. He didn’t believe Bruno had written or intended to write. He tried for an hour to read, called Anne to ask how she was, then restlessly went out and found a late movie.

On Saturday afternoon, he was supposed to meet Anne in Hempstead, Long Island, to see a dog show there. If Bruno had written the letter, Anne would have gotten it by Saturday morning, Guy thought. But obviously she hadn’t. He could tell from her wave to him from the car where she sat waiting for him. He asked her if she had enjoyed the party last night at Teddy’s. Her cousin Teddy had had a birthday.

“Wonderful party. Only no one wanted to go home. It got so late I stayed over. I haven’t even changed my clothes yet.” And she shot the car through the narrow gate and into the road.

Guy closed his teeth. The letter might be waiting for her at home then. All at once, he felt sure the letter would be waiting for her, and the impossibility of stopping it now made him weak and speechless.

He tried desperately to think of something to say as they walked along the rows of dogs.

“Have you heard anything from the Shaw people?” Anne asked him.

“No.” He stared at a nervous dachshund and tried to listen as Anne said something about a dachshund that someone in her family had.

She didn’t know yet, Guy thought, but if she didn’t know by today, it would be only a matter of time, a matter of a few days more, perhaps, until she did know. Know what, he kept asking himself, and going over the same answer, whether for reassurance or self-torture, he did not know: that on the train last summer he had met the man who murdered his wife, that he had consented to the murder of his wife. That was what Bruno would tell her, with certain details to make it convincing. And in a courtroom, for that matter, if Bruno distorted only slightly their conversation on the train, couldn’t it amount to an agreement between murderers? The hours in Bruno’s compartment, that tiny hell, came back suddenly very clearly. It was hatred that had inspired him to say as much as he had, the same petty hatred that had made him rage against Miriam in Chapultepec Park last June. Anne had been angry then, not so much at what he had said as at his hatred. Hatred, too, was a sin. Christ had preached against hatred as against adultery and murder. Hatred was the very seed of evil. In a Christian court of justice, wouldn’t he be at least partially guilty of Miriam’s death? Wouldn’t Anne say so?

“Anne,” he interrupted her. He had to prepare her, he thought. And he had to know. “If someone were to accuse me of having had a part in Miriam’s death, what would you—? Would you—?”

She stopped and looked at him. The whole world seemed to stop moving, and he and Anne stood at its still center.

“Had a part? What do you mean, Guy?”

Someone jostled him. They were in the middle of the walk. “Just that. Accused me, nothing more.”

She seemed to search for words.

“Just accused me,” Guy kept on. “I just want to know. Accused me for no reason. It wouldn’t matter, would it?” Would she still marry him, he wanted to ask, but it was such a pitiful, begging question, he could not ask it.

“Guy, why do you say that?”

“I just want to know, that’s all!”

She pressed him back so they would be out of the traffic of the path. “Guy, has someone accused you?”

“No!” he protested. He felt awkward and vexed. “But if someone did, if someone tried to make out a strong case against me—”

She looked at him with that flash of disappointment, of surprise and mistrust that he had seen before when he said or did something out of anger, or out of a resentment, that Anne did not approve, did not understand. “Do you expect someone to?” she asked.

“I just want to know!” He was in a hurry and it seemed so simple!

“At times like this,” she said quietly, “you make me feel we’re complete strangers.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. He felt she had cut an invisible bond between them.

“I don’t think you’re sorry, or you wouldn’t keep on doing this!” She looked straight at him, keeping her voice low though her eyes had filled with tears. “It’s like that day in Mexico when you indulged yourself in that tirade against Miriam. I don’t care—,1 don’t like it, I’m not that kind of person! You make me feel I don’t know you at all!”

Don’t love you, Guy thought. It seemed she gave him up then, ‘ gave up trying to know him or to love him. Desperate, slipping, Guy stood there unable to make a move or say a word.

“Yes, since you ask me,” Anne said, “I think it would make a difference if someone accused you. I’d want to ask why you expected it. Why do you?”

“I don’t!”

She turned away from him, walked to the blind end of the lane, and stood with her head bent.

Guy came after her. “Anne you do know me. You know me better than anyone in the world knows me. I don’t want any secrets from you. It came to my mind and I asked you!” He felt he made a confession, and with the relief that followed it, he felt suddenly sure—as sure as he had been before that Bruno had written the letter—that Bruno hadn’t and wouldn’t.

She brushed a tear from the corner of her eye quickly, indifferently. “Just one thing, Guy. Will you stop expecting the worst—about everything?”

“Yes,” he said. “God, yes.”

“Let’s go back to the car.”

He spent the day with Anne, and they had dinner that evening at her house. There was no letter from Bruno. Guy put the possibility from his mind, as if he had passed a crisis.

On Monday evening at about 8, Mrs. McCausland called him to the telephone. It was Anne.

“Darling—I guess I’m a little upset.”

“What’s the matter?” He knew what was the matter.

“I got a letter. In this morning’s mail. About what you were talking about Saturday.”

“What is it, Anne?”

“About Miriam—typewritten. And it’s not signed.”

“What does it say? Read it to me.”

Anne read shakily, but in her distinct speech, ‘“Dear Miss Faulkner, It may interest you to know that Guy Haines had more to do with his wife’s murder than the law thinks at present. But the truth will out. I think you should know in case you have any plans for marrying such a dual personality. Apart from that, this writer knows that Guy Haines will not remain a free man much longer.’ Signed, ‘A friend.’”

Guy closed his eyes. “God!”

“Guy, do you know who it could be?—Guy? Hello?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Who?”

He knew from her voice she was merely frightened, that she believed in him, was afraid only for him. “I don’t know, Anne.”

“Is that true, Guy?” she asked anxiously. “You should know. Something should be done.”

“I don’t know,” Guy repeated, frowning. His mind seemed tied in an inextricable knot.

“You must know. Think, Guy. Someone you might call an enemy?”

“What’s the postmark?”

“Grand Central. It’s perfectly plain paper. You can’t tell a thing from that.”

“Save it for me.”

“Of course, Guy. And I won’t tell anyone. The family, I mean.” A pause. “There must be someone, Guy. You suspected someone Saturday—didn’t you?”

“I didn’t.” His throat closed up. “Sometimes these things happen, you know, after a trial.” And he was aware of a desire to cover Bruno as carefully as if Bruno had been himself, and he guilty. “When can I see you, Anne? Can I come out tonight?”

“Well, I’m—sort of expected to go with Mother and Dad to a benefit thing. I can mail you the letter. Special delivery, you’ll get it tomorrow morning.”

So it came the next morning, along with another of Bruno’s plans, and an affectionate but exhorting last paragraph in which he mentioned the letter to Anne and promised more.

Twenty-two

Guy sat up on the edge of his bed, covered his face in his hands, then deliberately brought his hands down. It was the night that took up the body of his thoughts and distorted it, he felt, the night and the darkness and the sleeplessness. Yet the night had its truth also. In the night, one approached truth merely at a certain slant, but all truth was the same. If he told Anne the story, wouldn’t she consider he had been partially guilty? Marry him? How could she? What sort of beast was he that he could sit in a room where a bottom drawer held plans for a murder and the gun to do it with?

In the frail predawn light, he studied his face in the mirror. The mouth slanted downward to the left, unlike his. The full underlip was thinner with tension. He tried to hold his eyes to an absolute steadiness. They stared back above pallid semicircles, like a part of him that had hardened with accusation, as if they gazed at their torturer.

Should he dress and go out for a walk or try to sleep? His step on the carpet was light, unconsciously avoiding the spot by the armchair where the floor squeaked. You would skip these squeaking steps just for safety, Bruno’s letters said. My father’s door is just to the right as you know. I have gone over everything and there is no room for a hitch anywhere. See on map where the butler’s (Herbert’s) room is. This is the closest you’ll come to anyone. The hall floor squeaks there where I marked X…. He flung himself on the bed. You should not try to get rid of the Luger no matter what happens between the house and the RR station. He knew it all by heart, knew the sound of the kitchen door and the color of the hall carpet.

If Bruno should get someone else to kill his father, he would have ample evidence in these letters to convict Bruno. He could avenge himself for what Bruno had done to him. Yet Bruno would merely counter with his lies that would convict him of planning Miriam’s murder. No, it would be only a matter of time until Bruno got someone. If he could weather Bruno’s threats only a while longer, it would all be over and he could sleep. If he did it, he thought, he wouldn’t use the big Luger, he would use the little revolver— Guy pulled himself up from the bed, aching, angry, and frightened by the words that had just passed through his mind. “The Shaw Building,” he said to himself, as if announcing a new scene, as if he could derail himself from the night’s tracks and set himself on the day’s. The Shaw Building. The ground is all grass covered to the steps in back, except for gravel you won’t have to touch…. Skip four, skip three, step wide at the top. You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm.

“Mr. Raines!”

Guy started, and cut himself. He laid his razor down and went to the door.

“Hello, Guy. Are you ready yet?” asked the voice on the telephone, lewd in the early morning, ugly with the complexities of night. “Want some more?”

“You don’t bother me.”

Bruno laughed.

Guy hung up, trembling.

The shock lingered through the day, tremulous and traumatic. He wanted desperately to see Anne that evening, wanted desperately that instant of glimpsing her from some spot where he had promised to wait. But he wanted also to deprive himself of her. He took a long walk up Riverside Drive to tire himself, but slept badly nevertheless, and had a series of unpleasant dreams. It would be different, Guy thought, once the Shaw contract was signed, once he could go ahead on his work.

Douglas Frear of the Shaw Realty Company called the next morning as he had promised. “Mr. Haines,” said his slow, hoarse voice, “we’ve received a most peculiar letter concerning you.”

“What? What kind of a letter?”

“Concerning your wife. I didn’t know—Shall I read it to you?”

“Please.”

‘“To Whom It May Concern: No doubt it will interest you to learn that Guy Daniel Haines, whose wife was murdered last June, had more of a role in the deed than the courts know. This is from one who knows, and who knows also that there will be a retrial soon which will show his real part in the crime.’—I trust it’s a crank letter, Mr. Haines. I just thought you should know about it.”

“Of course.” In the corner, Myers worked over his drawing board as calmly as on any other morning of the week.

“I think I heard about—uh—the tragedy last year. There’s no question of a retrial, is there?”

“Certainly not. That is, I’ve heard nothing about it.” Guy cursed his confusion. Mr. Frear wanted only to know if he would be free to work.

“Sorry we haven’t quite made up our minds on that contract, Mr. Haines.”

The Shaw Realty Company waited until the following morning to tell him they weren’t entirely satisfied with his drawings. In fact, they were interested in the work of another architect.

How had Bruno found out about the building, Guy wondered. But there were any number of ways. It might have been mentioned in the papers—Bruno kept himself well informed on architectural news—or Bruno might have called when he knew he was out of the office, casually gotten the information from Myers. Guy looked at Myers again, and wondered if he had ever spoken on the telephone with Bruno. The possibility had a flavor of the unearthly.

Now that the building was gone, he began to see it in terms of what it would not mean. He would not have the extra money he had counted on by summer. Nor the prestige, the prestige with the Faulkner family. It did not once occur to him—as much at the root of his anguish as any of the other reasons—that he had suffered frustration in seeing a creation come to nothing.

It would be only a matter of time until Bruno informed the next client, and the next. This was his threat to ruin his career. And his life with Anne? Guy thought of her with a flash of pain. It seemed to him that he was forgetting for long intervals that he loved her. Something was happening between them, he could not say what. He felt Bruno was destroying his courage to love. Every slightest thing deepened his anxiety, from the fact he had lost his best pair of shoes by forgetting what repair shop he had taken them to, to the house at Alton, which already seemed more than they should have taken on, which he doubted they could fill.

In the office, Myers worked on his routine, drafting agency jobs, and Guy’s telephone never rang. Once Guy thought, even Bruno doesn’t call because he wants it to build up and build up, so his voice will be welcome when it conies. And disgusted with himself, Guy went down in the middle of the day and drank martinis in a Madison Avenue bar. He was to have had lunch with Anne, but she had called and broken the appointment, he could not remember why. She had not sounded precisely cool, but he thought she had not given any real reason for not lunching with him. She certainly hadn’t said she was going shopping for something for the house, or he would have remembered it. Or would he have? Or was she retaliating for his breaking his promise to come out to dinner with her family last Sunday? He had been too tired and too depressed to see anyone last Sunday. A quiet, unacknowledged quarrel seemed to be going on between himself and Anne. Lately, he felt too miserable to inflict himself on her, and she pretended to be too busy to see him when he asked to see her. She was busy planning for the house, and busy quarreling with him. It did not make sense. Nothing in the world made sense except to escape from Bruno. There was no way of doing that that made sense. What would happen in a court would not make sense.

He lighted a cigarette, then noticed he already had one. Hunched over the shiny black table, he smoked them both. His arms and hands with the cigarettes seemed mirrored. What was he doing here at 1:15 in the afternoon, growing swimmy on his third martini, making himself incapable of work, assuming he had any? Guy Haines who loved Anne, who had built the Palmyra? He hadn’t even the courage to throw his martini glass into the corner. Quicksand. Suppose he sank completely. Suppose he did kill for Bruno. It would be so simple, as Bruno said, when the house was empty except for his father and the butler, and Guy knew the house more exactly than his home in Metcalf. He could leave clues against Bruno, too, leave the Luger in the room. This thought became a single point of concreteness. His fists closed reflexively against Bruno, then the impotence of his clenched hands before him on the table shamed him. He must not let his mind go there again. That was exactly what Bruno wanted his mind to do.

He wet his handkerchief in the glass of water and daubed his face. A shaving cut began to sting. He looked at it in the mirror beside him. It had started to bleed, a tiny red mark just to one side of the faint cleft in his chin. He wanted to throw his fist at the chin in the mirror. He jerked himself up and went to pay his bill.

But having been there once, it was easy for his mind to go there again. In the nights when he could not sleep, he enacted the murder, and it soothed him like a drug. It was not murder but an act he performed to rid himself of Bruno, the slice of a knife that cut away a malignant growth. In the night, Bruno’s father was not a person but an object, as he himself was not a person but a force. To enact it, leaving the Luger in the room, to follow Bruno’s progress to conviction and death, was a catharsis.

Bruno sent him an alligator billfold with gold corners and his initials G. D. H. inside. “I thought this looked like you, Guy,” said the note inside. “Please don’t make things tough. I am very fond of you. As ever, Bruno.” Guy’s arm moved to fling it into a trashbasket on the street, then he slipped it into his pocket. He hated to throw away a beautiful thing. He would think of something else to do with it.

That same morning, Guy declined an invitation to speak on a radio panel. He was in no condition to work and he knew it. Why did he even keep coming to the office? He would have been delighted to stay drunk all day, and especially all night. He watched his hand turning and turning the folded compass on his desk top. Someone had once told him that he had hands like a Capuchin monk. Tim O’Flaherty in Chicago. Once when they had sat eating spaghetti in Tim’s basement apartment, talking of Le Corbusier and the verbal eloquence that seemed innate in architects, a natural concomitant of the profession, and how fortunate it was, because generally you had to talk your way. But it had all been possible then, even with Miriam draining him, merely a clean invigorating fight ahead, and somehow right with all its difficulties. He turned the compass over and over, sliding his fingers down it and turning it, until he thought the noise might be bothering Myers and stopped.

“Pull out of it, Guy,” Myers said amiably.

“It isn’t anything one snaps out of. One either cracks up or doesn’t,” Guy retorted with a dead calm in his voice, and then, unable to stop himself, “I don’t want advice, Myers. Thanks.”

“Listen, Guy—” Myers stood up, smiling, lanky, tranquil. But he did not come beyond the corner of his desk.

Guy got his coat from the tree by the door. “I’m sorry. Let’s forget it.”

“I know what’s the matter. Pre-wedding nerves. I had them, too. What do you say we go down and have a drink?”

Myers’ familiarity piqued a certain sense of dignity that Guy was never aware of until it was affronted. He could not bear to look at Myers’ untroubled, empty face, his smug banality. “Thanks,” he said, “I really don’t feel like it.” He closed the door softly behind him.

Twenty-three

Guy glanced again at the row of brownstones across the street, sure he had seen Bruno. His eyes smarted and swam, fighting the dusk. He had seen him, there by the black iron gate, where he was not. Guy turned and ran up his steps. He had tickets to a Verdi opera tonight. Anne was going to meet him at the theatre at 8:30. He didn’t feel like seeing Anne tonight, didn’t want Anne’s kind of cheering, didn’t want to exhaust himself pretending he felt better than he did. She was worried about his not sleeping. Not that she said much, but that little annoyed him. Above all, he didn’t want to hear Verdi. Whatever had possessed him to buy tickets to Verdi? He had wanted to do something to please Anne, but at best she wouldn’t like it very much, and wasn’t there something insane about buying tickets for something neither of them liked?

Mrs. McCausland gave him a number he was supposed to call. He thought it looked like the number of one of Anne’s aunts. He hoped Anne might be busy tonight.

“Guy, I don’t see how I can make it,” Anne said. “These two people Aunt Julie wanted me to meet aren’t coming until after dinner.”

“All right.”

“And I can’t duck out on it.”

“It’s perfectly all right.”

“I am sorry though. Do you know I haven’t seen you since Saturday?”

Guy bit the end of his tongue. An actual repulsion against her clinging, her concern, even her clear, gentle voice that had before been like an embrace itself—all this seemed a revelation he no longer loved her.

“Why don’t you take Mrs. McCausland tonight? I think it’d be nice if you did.”

“Anne, I don’t care at all.”

“There haven’t been any more letters, Guy?”

“No.” The third time she had asked him!

“I do love you. You won’t forget, will you?”

“No, Anne.”

He fled upstairs to his room, hung up his coat and washed, combed his hair, and immediately there was nothing to do, and he wanted Anne. He wanted her terribly. Why had he been so mad as to think he didn’t want to see her? He searched his pockets for Mrs. McCausland’s note with the telephone number, then ran downstairs and looked for it on the hall floor. It had vanished—as if someone had deliberately snatched it away to thwart him. He peered through the etched glass of the front door. Bruno, he thought, Bruno had taken it.

The Faulkners would know her aunt’s number. He would see her, spend the evening with her, even if it meant spending the evening with her Aunt Julie. The telephone in Long Island rang and rang and nobody answered. He tried again to think of her aunt’s last name, and couldn’t.

His room seemed filled with palpable, suspenseful silence. He glanced at the low bookshelves he had built around the walls, at the ivy Mrs. McCausland had given him in the wall brackets, at the empty red plush chair by the reading lamp, at his sketch in black and white over his bed entitled “Imaginary Zoo,” at the monk’s cloth curtains that concealed his kitchenette. Almost boredly he went and moved the curtains aside and looked behind them. He had a definite feeling someone was waiting for him in the room, though he was not in the least frightened. He picked up the newspaper and started to read.

A few moments later, he was in a bar drinking a second martini. He had to sleep, he reasoned, even if it meant drinking alone, which he despised. He walked down to Times Square, got a haircut, and on the way home bought a quart of milk and a couple of tabloids. After he wrote a letter to his mother, he thought, he would drink some milk, read the papers, and go to bed. Or there might even be Anne’s telephone number on the floor when he came in. But there wasn’t.

At about 2 in the morning, he got up from bed and wandered about the room, hungry and unwilling to eat. Yet one night last week, he remembered, he had opened a can of sardines and devoured them on the blade of a knife. The night was a time for bestial affinities, for drawing closer to oneself. He plucked a notebook from the bookshelf and turned through it hastily. It was his first New York notebook, when he was about twenty-two. He had sketched indiscriminately—the Chrysler Building, the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, barges on the East River, workmen leaning on electric drills that bit horizontally into rock. There was a series on the Radio City buildings, with notes on space, on the opposite page the same building with the amendations he would make, or perhaps an entirely new building of his own conception. He closed the book quickly because it was good, and he doubted if he could do as well now. The Palmyra seemed the last spurt of that generous, happy energy of his youth. The sob he had been suppressing contracted his chest with a sickening, familiar pain—familiar from the years after Miriam. He lay down on his bed in order to stop the next.

Guy awakened to Bruno’s presence in the dark, though he heard nothing. After the first small start at the suddenness, he felt no surprise at all. As he had imagined, in nights before this, he was quite happy that Bruno had come. Really Bruno? Yes. Guy saw the end of his cigarette now, over by the bureau.

“Bruno?”

“Hi,” Bruno said softly. “I got in on a pass key. You’re ready now, aren’t you?” Bruno sounded calm and tired.

Guy raised himself to one elbow. Of course Bruno was there. The orangey end of his cigarette was there. “Yes,” Guy said, and felt the yes absorbed by the darkness, not like the other nights when the yes had been silent, not even going out from him. It undid the knot in his head so suddenly that it hurt him. It was what he had been waiting to say, what the silence in the room had been waiting to hear. And the beasts beyond the walls.

Bruno sat down on the side of the bed and gripped both his arms above the elbows. “Guy, I’ll never see you again.”

“No.” Bruno smelled abominably of cigarettes and sweet brilliantine, of the sourness of drink, but Guy did not draw back from him. His head was still at its delicious business of untying.

“I tried to be nice to him these last couple days,” Bruno said. “Not nice, just decent. He said something tonight to my mother, just before we went out—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Guy said. Time and again he had stopped Bruno because he didn’t want to know what his father had said, what he looked like, anything about him.

They were both silent for several seconds, Guy because he would not explain, and Bruno because he had been silenced.

Bruno snuffled with a disgusting rattle. “We’re going to Maine tomorrow, starting by noon positively. My mother and me and the chauffeur. Tomorrow night is a good night but any night except Thursday night is just the same. Any time after 11…”

He kept talking, repeating what Guy knew already, and Guy did not stop him, because he knew he was going to enter the house and it would all come true.

“I broke the lock on the back door two days ago, slamming it when I was tight. They won’t get it fixed, they’re too busy. But if they do—” He pressed a key into Guy’s hand. “And I brought you these.”

“What is it?”

“Gloves. Ladies’ gloves, but they’ll stretch.” Bruno laughed.

Guy felt the thin cotton gloves.

“You got the gun, huh? Where is it?”

“In the bottom drawer.”

Guy heard him stumble against the bureau and heard the drawer pull out. The lampshade crackled, the light came on, and Bruno stood there huge and tall in a new polo coat so pale it was nearly white, in black trousers with a thin white strip in them. A white silk muffler hung long around his neck. Guy examined him from his small brown shoes to his stringy oiled hair, as if from his physical appearance he could discover what had caused his change of feeling, or even what the feeling was. It was familiarity and something more, something brotherly. Bruno clicked the gun shut and turned to him. His face was heavier than the last time Guy had seen it, flushed and more alive than he remembered ever having seen it. His gray eyes looked bigger with his tears and rather golden. He looked at Guy as if he tried to find words, or as if he pled with Guy to find them. Then he moistened the thin parted lips, shook his head, and reached an arm out toward the lamp. The light went out.

When he was gone, it hardly seemed he was gone. There were just the two of them in the room still, and sleep.

A GRAY GLARING LIGHT FILLED THE ROOM when Guy awakened. The clock said 3:25. He imagined more than remembered that he had gotten up to go to the telephone that morning, that Myers had called to ask why he had not come in, and that he had said he didn’t feel well. The devil with Myers. He lay there blinking his dullness away, letting it seep into the thinking part of his brain that tonight he was going to do it, and after tonight it would all be over. Then he got up and slowly went about his routine of shaving, showering, and dressing, aware that nothing he did mattered at all until the hour between 11 and midnight, the hour there was neither hurry nor delay about, that was coming just as it should. He felt he moved on certain definite tracks now, and that he could not have stopped himself or gotten off them if he had wanted to. In the middle of his late breakfast in a coffee shop down the street, an eerie sensation came over him that the last time he had seen Anne he had told her everything that he was going to do, and that she had listened placidly, knowing she must for his sake, because he absolutely had to do what he was going to do. It seemed so natural and inevitable, he felt everyone in the world must know it, the man sitting beside him unconcernedly eating, Mrs. McCausland, sweeping her hall as he went out, who had given him an especially maternal smile and asked if he was feeling well. March 12 FRIDAY, said the day-by-day calendar on the coffeeshop wall. Guy stared at it a moment, then finished his meal.

He wanted to keep moving. He decided by the time he walked up Madison Avenue, then Fifth to the end of Central Park, down Central park West to Pennsylvania Station, it would be time to catch the train to Great Neck. He began to think of his course of action for tonight, but it bored him like something in school he had already studied too much, and he stopped. The brass barometers in a Madison Avenue window had a special appeal now, as if he were soon to have a holiday and possess them and play with them. Anne’s sailboat, he thought, didn’t have a barometer as handsome as any of these, or he would have noticed it. He must get one before they sailed south on their honeymoon. He thought of his love, like a rich possession. He had reached the north end of Central Park, when it occurred to him he didn’t have the gun with him. Or the gloves. And it was a quarter to 8. A fine, stupid beginning! He hailed a cab and hurried the driver back to his house.

There was plenty of time after all, so much that he wandered about his room absently for a while. Should he bother to wear crepe-soled shoes? Should he wear a hat? He got the Luger out of the bottom drawer and laid it on the bureau. There was a single plan of Bruno’s under the gun and he opened it, but immediately every word was so familiar, he threw it into the wastebasket. Momentum smoothed his movements again. He got the purple cotton gloves from the table by his bed. A small yellow card fluttered from them. It was a ticket to Great Neck.

He stared at the black Luger which more than before struck him as outrageously large. Idiotic of someone to have made a gun so big! He got his own little revolver from the top drawer. Its pearl handle gleamed with a discreet beauty. Its short slender barrel looked inquisitive, willing, strong with a reserved and gallant strength. Still, he mustn’t forget he’d been going to leave the Luger in the bedroom, because it was Bruno’s gun. But it didn’t seem worth it now, to carry the heavy gun just for that. He really felt no enmity toward Bruno now, and that was the odd thing.

For a moment, he was utterly confused. Of course take the Luger, the Luger was in the plan! He put the Luger in his overcoat pocket. His hand moved for the gloves on the bureau top. The gloves were purple and the flannel bag of his revolver was lavender. Suddenly it seemed fitting he should take the small revolver, because of the similar colors, so he put the Luger back in the bottom drawer and dropped the little revolver into his pocket. He did not check to see if anything else should be done, because he could simply feel, having gone over Bruno’s plans so often, that he had done everything. At last he got a glass of water and poured it into the ivy in the wall brackets. A cup of coffee might make him more alert, he thought. He would get one at the Great Neck station.

There was a moment on the train, when a man bumped his shoulder, when his nerves seemed to go quivering up and up to a pitch at which he thought something must happen, and a flurry of words rushed to his mind, almost to his tongue: It’s not really a gun in my pocket. I’ve never thought of it as a gun. I didn’t buy it because it was a gun. And immediately he felt easier, because he knew he was going to kill with it. He was like Bruno. Hadn’t he sensed it time and time again, and like a coward never admitted it? Hadn’t he known Bruno was like himself? Or why had he liked Bruno? He loved Bruno. Bruno had prepared every inch of the way for him, and everything would go well because everything always went well for Bruno. The world was geared for people like Bruno.

It was drizzling in a fine, directionless mist as he stepped off the train. Guy walked straight to the row of buses Bruno had described. The air through the open window was colder than New York’s, and fresh with open country. The bus moved out of the lighted community center and into a darker road with houses along both sides. He remembered he hadn’t stopped for coffee in the station. The omission threw him into a state of irritation just short of making him get off the bus and go back for it. A cup of coffee might make all the difference in the world. Yes, his life! But at the Grant Street stop, he stood up automatically, and the feeling of moving on established tracks returned to comfort him.

He step had a moist elastic sound on the dirt road. Ahead of him, a young girl ran up some steps, along a front walk, and the closing of the door behind her sounded peaceful and neighborly. There was the vacant lot with the solitary tree, and off to the left, darkness and the woods. The street lamp Bruno had put in all his maps wore an oily blue and gold halo. A car approached slowly, its headlights rolling like wild eyes with the road’s bumps, and passed him.

He came upon it suddenly, and it was as if a curtain had lifted on a stage scene he knew already: the long seven-foot high wall of white plaster in the foreground, darkened here and there by a cherry tree that overhung it, and beyond, the triangle of white housetop. The Doghouse. He crossed the street. From up the road came the grit of slow steps. He waited against the darker north side of the wall until the figure came into view. It was a policeman, strolling with hands and stick behind him. Guy felt no alarm whatever, less if possible than if the man hadn’t been a policeman, he thought. When the policeman had passed, Guy walked fifteen paces beside the wall, sprang up and gripped its cornice across the top, and scrambled astride it. Almost directly below him, he saw the pale form of the milk crate Bruno had said he had flung near the wall. He bent to peer through the cherry tree branches at the house. He could see two of the five big windows on the first floor, and part of the rectangle of the swimming pond projecting toward him. There was no light. He jumped down.

Now he could see the start of the six white-sided steps at the back, and the misty frill of blossomless dogwoood trees that surrounded the whole house. As he had suspected from Bruno’s drawings, the house was too small for its ten double gables, obviously built because the client wanted gables and that was that. He moved along the inner side of the wall until crackling twigs frightened him. Cut cattycornered across the lawn, Bruno had said, and the twigs were why.

When he moved toward the house, a limb took his hat off. He rammed the hat in the front of his overcoat, and put his hand back in the pocket where the key was. When had he put the gloves on? He took a breath and moved across the lawn in a gait between running and walking, light and quick as a cat. I have done this many times before, he thought, this is only one of the times. He hesitated at the edge of the grass, glanced at the familiar garage toward which the gravel road curved, then went up the six back steps. The back door opened, heavy and smooth, and he caught the knob on the other side. But the second door with the Yale lock resisted, and a flush of something like embarrassment passed over him before he pushed harder and it yielded. He heard a clock on the kitchen table to his left. He knew it was a table, though he could see only blackness with less black forms of things, the big white stove, the servants’ table and chairs left, the cabinets. He moved diagonally toward the back stairs, counting off his steps. I would have you use the main stairway but the whole stairway creaks. He walked slowly and stiffly, stretching his eyes, skirting the vegetable bins he did not really see. A sudden thought that he must resemble an insane somnambulist brought a start of panic.

Twelve steps up first, skip seven. Then two little flights after the turn… . Skip four, skip three, step wide at the top. You can remember it, it’s got a syncopated rhythm. He skipped the fourth step in the first little flight. There was a round window just at the turn before the last flight. Guy remembered from some essay, As a house is built so the pattern of activity of those will be who live in it…. Shall the child pause at the window for the view before he climbs fifteen steps to his playroom? Ten feet ahead on his left was the butler’s door. This is the closest you’ll come to anyone, said Bruno in a crescendo as he passed the door’s dark column.

The floor gave the tiniest wail of complaint, and Guy resiliently withdrew his foot, waited, and stepped around the spot. Delicately his hand closed on the knob of the hall door. As he opened it, the clock’s tick on the landing of the main stairway came louder, and he realized he had been hearing it for several seconds. He heard a sigh.

A sigh on the main stairs!

A chime rang out. The knob rattled, and he squeezed it hard enough to break it, he thought. Three. Four. Close the door before the butler hears it! Was this why Bruno had said between 11 and midnight? Damn him! And now he didn’t have the Luger! Guy closed the door with a bump-bump. While he sweated, feeling heat rise from his overcoat collar into his face, the clock kept on and on. And a last one.

Then he listened and there was nothing but the deaf and blind tick-lock again, and he opened the door and went into the main hall. My father’s door is just to the right. The tracks were back under him again. And surely he had been here before, in the empty hall that he could feel as he stared at Bruno’s father’s door, with the gray carpet, the paneled creamy walls, the marble table at the head of the stairs. The hall had a smell and even the smell was familiar. A sharp tickling sensation came at his temples. Suddenly he was sure the old man stood just the other side of the door, holding his breath just as he did, awaiting him. Guy held his own breath so long the old man must have died if he too had not breathed. Nonsense! Open the door!

He took the knob in his left hand, and his right moved automatically to the gun in his pocket. He felt like a machine, beyond danger and invulnerable. He had been here many, many times before, had killed him many times before, and this was only one of the times. He stared at the inch-wide crack in the door, sensing an infinite space opening out beyond, waiting until a feeling of vertigo passed. Suppose he couldn’t see him when he got inside? Suppose the old man saw him first? The night light on the front porch lights the room a little bit, but the bed was over in the opposite corner. He opened the door wider, listened, and stepped too hastily in. But the room was still, the bed a big vague thing in the dark corner, with a lighter strip at the head. He closed the door, the wind might blow the door, then faced the corner.

The gun was in his hand already, aimed at the bed that looked empty however he peered at it.

He glanced at the window over his right shoulder. It was open only about a foot, and Bruno had said it would be open all the way. Because of the drizzle. He frowned at the bed, and then with a terrible thrill made out the form of the head lying rather near the wall side, tipped sideways as if it regarded him with a kind of gay disdain. The face was darker than the hair which blended with the pillow. The gun was looking straight at it as he was.

One should shoot the chest. Obediently the gun looked at the chest. Guy slid his feet nearer the bed and glanced again at the window behind him. There was no sound of breathing. One would really not think he were alive. That was what he had told himself he must think, that the figure was merely a target. And that, because he did not know the target, it was like killing in war. Now?

“Ha-ha-ha-a!” from the window.

Guy trembled and the gun trembled.

The laugh had come from a distance, a girl’s laugh, distant but clear and straight as a shot. Guy wet his lips. The aliveness of the laugh had swept away everything of the scene for a moment, left nothing in its place, and now slowly the vacuum was filling with his standing here about to kill. It had happened in the time of a heartbeat. Life. The young girl walking in the street. With a young man, perhaps. And the man asleep in the bed, living. No, don’t think! You do it for Anne, remember? For Anne and for yourself. It is like killing in war, like killing— He pulled the trigger. It made a mere click. He pulled again and it clicked. It was a trick! It was all false and didn’t even exist! Not even his standing here! He pulled the trigger again.

The room tore up with a roar. His fingers tightened in terror. The roar came again, as if the crust of the world burst.

“Kagh!” said the figure on the bed. The gray face moved upward, showing the line of head and shoulders.

Guy was on the porch roof, falling. The sensation awakened him like the fall at the end of a nightmare. By a miracle an awning bar slid into one of his hands, and he fell downward again, onto hands and knees. He jumped off the porch edge, ran along the side of the house, then cut across the lawn, straight for the place where the milk crate was. He awakened to the clinging earth, to the hopelessness of his pumping arms that tried to hurry his race against the lawn. This is how it feels, how it is, he thought—life, like the laugh upstairs. The truth was that it is like a nightmare when one is paralyzed, against impossible odds.

“Hey!” a voice called.

The butler was after him, just as he had anticipated. He felt the butler was right behind him. The nightmare!

“Hey! Hey, there!”

Guy turned under the cherry trees and stood with his fist drawn back. The butler was not just behind him. He was a long way off, but he had seen him. The crazily running figure in white pajamas wavered like leaping smoke, then curved toward him. Guy stood, paralyzed, waiting.

“Hey!”

Guy’s fist shot out for the oncoming chin, and the white wraith collapsed.

Guy jumped for the wall.

Darkness ran up higher and higher about him. He dodged a little tree, leapt what looked like a ditch, and ran on. Then suddenly he was lying face down and pain was spreading from the middle of him in all directions, rooting him to the ground. His body trembled violently, and he thought he must gather up the trembling and use it to run, that this wasn’t where Bruno had said to go at all, but he could not move. You just take the little dirt road (no lights there) eastward off Newhope south of the house and keep going across two bigger streets to Columbia Street and walk south (right)… To the bus line that went to another railroad station. All very well for Bruno to write his damned instructions on paper. Damn him! He knew where he was now, in the field west of the house that never in any of the plans was to be used! He looked behind him. Which way was north now? What had happened to the street light? Maybe he wouldn’t be able to find the little road in the dark. He didn’t know whether the house lay behind him or to his left. A mysterious pain throbbed the length of his right forearm, so sharp he thought it should have glowed in the dark.

He felt as if he had been shattered apart with the explosion of the gun, that he could never gather the energy to move again, and that he really didn’t care. He remembered his being hit in the football game in high school, when he had lain face down like this, speechless with pain. He remembered the supper, the very supper and the hot-water bottle his mother had brought to him in bed, and the touch of her hands adjusting the covers under his chin. His trembling hand was sawing itself raw on a half-buried rock. He bit his lip and kept thinking vacuously, as one thinks when only half awake on an exhausted morning, that he must get up in the next moment regardless of the agony because he wasn’t safe. He was still so close to the house. And suddenly his arms and legs scrambled under him as if statics had built up a charge abruptly released, and he was running again across the field.

A strange sound made him stop—a low musical moan that seemed to come from all sides.

Police sirens, of course. And like an idiot he had thought first of an airplane! He ran on, knowing he was only running blindly and directly away from the sirens that were over his left shoulder now, and that he should veer left to find the little road. He must have run far beyond the long plaster wall. He started to cut left to cross the main road that surely lay in that direction, when he realized the sirens were coming up the road. He would either have to wait—He couldn’t wait. He ran on, parallel to the cars. Then something caught his foot, and cursing, he fell again. He lay in a kind of ditch with his arms outspread, the right bent up on higher ground. Frustration maddened him to a petulant sob. His left hand felt odd. It was in water up to the wrist. It’ll wet my wristwatch, he thought. But the more he intended to pull it out, the more impossible it seemed to move it. He felt two forces, one that would move the arm and another that would not, balancing themselves so perfectly his arm was not even tense. Incredibly, he felt he might have slept now. The police will surround me, he thought out of nowhere, and was up again, running.

Close on his right, a siren shrieked in triumph as if it had found him.

A rectangle of light sprang up in front of him, and he turned and fled it. A window. He had nearly run into a house. The whole world was awake! And he had to cross the road!

The police car passed thirty feet before him on the road, with a blink of headlights through bushes. Another siren moaned to his left, where the house must be, and droned away to silence. Stooping, Guy crossed the road not far behind the car and entered deeper darkness. No matter where the little road was now, he could run farther from the house in this direction. There’s sort of unlighted woods all around to the south, easy to hide in in case you have to get off the little road…. Do not try to get rid of the Luger no matter what happens between my house and the RR station. His hand moved to his pocket and felt the cold of the little revolver through the holes in his gloves. He didn’t remember putting the gun back in his pocket. It might have been lying on the blue carpet for all he knew! And suppose he had dropped it? A fine time to think of it!

Something had caught him and was holding him. He fought it automatically with his fists, and found it was bushes, twigs, briars, and kept fighting and hurling his body through it, because the sirens were still behind him and this was the only direction to go. He concentrated on the enemy ahead of him, and on both sides and even behind him, that caught at him with thousands of sharp tiny hands whose crackling began to drown out even the sirens. He spent his strength joyfully against them, relishing their clean, straight battle against him.

He awakened at the edge of a woods, face down on a downward sloping hill. Had he awakened, or had he fallen only a moment ago? But there was grayness in the sky in front of him, the beginning of dawn, and when he stood up, his flickering vision told him he had been unconscious. His fingers moved directly to the mass of hair and wetness that stood out from the side of his head. Maybe my head is broken, he thought in terror, and stood for a moment dully, expecting himself to drop dead.

Below, the sparse lights of a little town glowed like stars at dusk. Mechanically, Guy got out a handkerchief and wrapped it tight around the base of his thumb where a cut had oozed blacklooking blood. He moved toward a tree and leaned against it. His eyes searched the town and the road below. There was not a moving thing. Was this he? Standing against the tree with the memory of the gun’s explosion, the sirens, the fight against the woods? He wanted water. On the dirt road that edged the town, he saw a filling station. He made his way down toward it.

There was an old-fashioned pump beside the filling station. He held his head under it. His face stung like a mask of cuts. Slowly his mind grew clearer. He couldn’t be more than two miles from Great Neck. He removed his right glove that hung by one finger and the wrist, and put it in his pocket. Where was the other? Had he left it in the woods where he tied his thumb? A rush of panic comforted him with its familiarity. He’d have to go back for it. He searched his overcoat pockets, opened his overcoat and searched his trousers pockets. His hat fell at his feet. He had forgotten about the hat, and suppose he had dropped that somewhere? Then he found the glove inside his left sleeve, no more than the seam of the top that still circled his wrist, and a tatter, and pocketed it with an abstract relief like happiness. He turned up a trousers cuff that had been torn ~ down. He decided to walk in the direction he knew was southward, catch any bus farther southward, and ride until he came to a railroad station.

As soon as he realized his objective, pain set in. How could he walk the length of this road with these knees? Yet he kept walking, holding his head high to urge himself along. It was a time of dubious balance between night and day, still dark, though a low iridescence lay everywhere. The dark might still overcome the light, it seemed, because the dark was bigger. If the night could only hold this much until he got home and locked his door!

Then daylight made a sudden thrust at the night, and cracked the whole horizon on his left. A silver line ran around the top of a hill, and the hill became mauve and green and tan, as if it were opening its eyes. A little yellow house stood under a tree on the hill. On his right, a dark field had become high grass of green and tan, gently moving like a sea. As he looked, a bird flew out of the grass with a cry and wrote a fast, jagged, exuberant message with its sharp-pointed wings across the sky. Guy stopped and watched it until it disappeared.