The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER XIV

EARLY TWILIGHT HUNG OVER the city like a thin, grey haze and made the lake a sheet of striated lead, stretching to a leaden horizon, when I landed at the Toronto Airport. I took a taxi to the Union Station. Down the long, drab streets the neons trembled in the gathering air, glowing blue and red and green with a quiet, inhuman lustre.

At the station a ticket-clerk told me I had nearly five hours to wait. The next train that would make the Kirkland Lake connection at Churchill left Toronto at 11:30 that night. I wouldn’t get to Kirkland Lake until two o’clock the next day.

I found a phone-booth and called the airport, but there was no seat available on any plane going anywhere. I went back to the ticket-clerk and bought a coach ticket, which was the only kind I could buy. That meant I had to sit up all night.

I went through the tunnel from the station to the Royal York, ate a quick dinner in the grill, and hired a room to sleep in until my train left. I was hatless and suitcaseless and wild-eyed, and the desk-clerk looked at me suspiciously. I mollified him by paying in advance.

“I’d like to be called at 11:10,” I said. “I have to catch the North Bay train.”

“Yessir, you shall be called,” he said, and signaled to a bellboy.

I followed the bellboy across the huge lobby to the elevators, but before I got to them something took hold of my attention and stopped me in my tracks. It was a newspaper folded inside out and left by someone on the seat of a leather armchair. At the top of the page that was showing there was a picture of Wendell Willkie.

I picked up the paper and saw that it was yesterday’s Globe and Mail, opened at page eight. I scanned the columns. It was the third column from which Peter Schneider had torn the clipping. Where the empty space had been in Peter’s copy there was nothing but a patent medicine advertisement offering solace to those undergoing change of life.

The bellboy was waiting by the elevators with a blank, intolerant expression on his sharp jockey’s face. I was just about to throw the paper down and follow him, when I thought of something that made me realize what a hell of an amateur detective I was. It was the simple staggering fact that newspapers are printed on two sides.

I turned the page and the heading I was looking for blazed black in my eyes. The bellboy kept on waiting while I read:

I stood and looked at the date on which she had been found. September 20. It twisted in my mind like a key, but no door opened. This must be the woman that the Kirkland Lake police had put under guard. My first thought was that Gordon was right and it couldn’t be Ruth after all. After the night and day I had gone through, insane coincidence seemed more probable than any kind of luck.

I noticed that the bellboy was still waiting and told him to leave my room-key at the desk.

He saw the look on my face and said, “Is anything wrong, sir?”

“Plenty. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He started away and I said, “Yes, there is. Where’s the tavern?”

“Right this way, sir,” and he led me to the copper-gleaming tavern on the basement floor.

I sat down at a corner table and ordered a quart of Molson’s Ale. Despair was dragging me down by the heels but the hot fingers of hope had me by the nape of the neck. The ale ballasted me but the wild pulling in two directions went on. A graph of my feelings for the next few hours would have looked like the Manhattan skyline.

One question I could not get around. If the woman wasn’t Ruth, why had Peter Schneider torn out the clipping about her? If the woman who had been in the Kirkland Lake Hospital for three days was Ruth Esch, it was not Ruth I had seen trading blows and kisses with Peter Schneider. Somebody else had helped him to murder Alec Judd and Herman Schneider.

After a while the ale slowed down the alternating swing of my feelings and I went up to my room to try to sleep. The two-hour sleep I got was as restful as a surfboard ride. Finally, the beetle-green motorboat that was dragging me over the dream-waves of hope and despair stopped with a grinding of gears and I answered the telephone.

The switchboard girl said it was 11:10 and I had twenty minutes to catch my train.

I put on the rest of my clothes over the underwear I had slept in, went down to the desk and checked out, and walked quickly through the brightly lighted tunnel to the station. I had time for a cup of coffee at the lunchbar before the train left for North Bay.

It took eight hours to get to North Bay, which was just a little better than halfway to Kirkland Lake. The dusty red plush seats of the old coach were crowded with civilians who looked as sleepy as I felt and soldiers who laughed and sang all night. Nobody got any sleep but I achieved a partial coma that made the trip unreal enough to bear. Farms and forests and dimly shining lakes slipped past the window for hours and merged with the images of my half-conscious dreams. When the mind is held awake on the point of sleep, an imagined face will take a hundred shapes, changing like a movie fadeout and fadein from beauty to ugliness, from gracious intelligence to idiot evil and back again to virtue and beauty. A goddess, a leering devil, a Victory of Samothrace, a sexless imbecile, a sweet young girl, a gross hag. The obscene amorphous masks changed constantly behind my eyes and cold sweat ran down the back of my neck. I sat and watched Ruth’s face change all night.

When daylight came it was better. I could see trees that seemed thicker as we went north, the rock ribs of the country bursting from the earth, still lakes like wide, innocent eyes mocking the bright blue sky. At dawn my brain felt drained and chilly but it gradually drew heat and energy from the sun. Breakfast was better still.

When I got back from the dining-car, a soldier had taken the seat beside me and we talked all morning. He was going home on sick leave after service in the Middle East and Africa, to his parents’ farm in the Clay Belt. I asked him what ailed him and regretted it. He tapped his left leg with his brown walnut knuckles and the leg rang with a metallic sound.

I felt like a child frightened by bad dreams.

At Churchill, a wooden hamlet like an angular fungus on the railway line, I changed to another train. Half an hour later I got off at Kirkland Lake and took a taxi to the hospital.

We went down streets of wooden buildings that looked new and jerry-built. Between and beyond the packing-case buildings I could see the peaked hills of exhausted grey-black earth thrown up by the gold-mines. In atmosphere, Kirkland Lake was like a western boomtown, but there were restaurants and drugstores with shining plastic fronts and electric signs, and faces on the streets from every race in Europe.

The hospital was a brick building standing in its own grounds. When the taxi took me up the drive and let me out at the main entrance, I noticed a man in plain clothes in the vestibule. He gave me a quick, hard look as I mounted the steps, and then turned away.

I passed him without shying, though I was still leery of plain-clothesmen, and walked up to the information desk. The nurse on duty was a middle-aged woman with a brittle grey permanent. Her face was white and starched like her uniform, and her voice when she spoke was very hygienic:

“What can we do for you, sir?”

“My name is Branch, Robert Branch. I–”

“Oh, are you Professor Branch?”

“Right. Has somebody–?”

Her sharp voice amputated my sentence like a sterile knife: “Do you know a man called Gordon?”

“Chester Gordon? Has he been here?”

“No, he has not been here. He called you this morning by long distance.”

“Where is he?”

“The call was from Chicago.”

“What did he want? Did he tell you?”

“No, he told me nothing. When I told him that we had never heard of you, he asked to speak to the policeman on duty here.” She sniffed, as if all policemen were typhoid-carriers.

“Nurse, will you do something for me?”

“What is it? We have rules, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “This is obviously a well-run hospital. Would you be allowed to put in a long-distance call for me, to Chicago?”

“This is not a telephone exchange.”

“No, but the call has to do with one of your patients. And it’s very important.”

“What patient?”

“The unidentified woman with concussion.”

“She has been identified,” the nurse said with the satisfied click of a mousetrap shutting on a mouse.

“She has?”

“Her brother was here this morning. She is a Miss Vlathek.”

I stopped breathing. When I started again I said, “Did you see him? What’s his first name?”

“We did not exchange first names.” But I knew what hers was. Gorgon.

“What does he look like?”

“Black curly hair. Spectacles. Rather pale in the face. A most courteous young man.” Unlike me.

“Where is he now?”

“Nor did we exchange addresses,” she said frigidly. “You can’t really expect me to answer all these questions. Are you a detective?”

“No, not exactly. But I’m assisting the F.B.I.” I hoped I was.

“Then the police will answer your questions.” She began ruffling papers.

I handed her a ten-dollar bill. “Look, put in that call for me, will you? This should cover it.”

“This is American money,” she said.

“I know, but it’s still good. Will you put in the call? It’s a matter of life and death.” I didn’t know then that it was, but I hoped she would recognize the phrase.

“Really?” Interest warmed her eyes almost to freezing-point. “Whom do you wish to speak to in Chicago?”

“The man who called me, person-to-person at the Chicago office of the F.B.I.”

“You are a detective,” she said, and even began to flutter a little. I was careful not to deny it.

“Is that the policeman that Gordon talked to this morning?” I pointed towards the vestibule.

“Yes.”

“Before or after Vlathek was here?”

“After, I think. Yes, it was after Mr. Vlathek left. He was here quite early. He said he drove up from Toronto overnight, as soon as he saw the newspaper account of his sister’s accident.”

“How is she?”

“Very weak, but much better. She’s suffering more from shock than concussion. She’s not allowed visitors, of course.”

“How did Vlathek identify her if he didn’t see her?”

“Oh, he saw her. A nurse took him in for a moment when she was sleeping. There was no doubt in his mind that she was his sister.”

“There wouldn’t be,” I said. “May I see her?”

“You’ll have to ask the police. I’m sorry.” Her thin mouth arranged itself in a facsimile of a smile.

“All right. Thanks very much for your trouble. And you will put in that call right away?”

“Yes, sir. Chester Gordon, F.B.I., Chicago.”

I did my best to devastate her with a grateful smile and went out to the vestibule. The officer in plain clothes, a brown hulk of a man whose straight back must have worn a uniform most of his forty years, was rolling a cigarette between fingers like Polish sausages.

“My name’s Branch,” I said.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Branch?”

“Perhaps you can give me some information. If you’d be good enough.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m assisting the F.B.I.,” I said, wondering if that was enough to convict me of impersonating an officer.

“Credentials?”

“I have none. I’m a private citizen. But an agent of the F.B.I. has asked me to obtain some information.”

“Sure, but how do I know that?” He raised one thick eyebrow and lowered the other so that he was scowling and looking superior at the same time.

“I’m calling Chester Gordon in Chicago now. The man you talked to this morning. You can ask him about me.”

“That’s all right. He said something about you. I just had to be sure you were the right guy.”

His low eyebrow went up and joined the high one and he drew in and blew out smoke. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you if I can.”

“How long has – Miss Vlathek been in the hospital?”

“Three days. But her name’s not Vlathek.”

“What is it?”

“You tell me.”

“Ruth Esch,” I said.

“That’s what Gordon thinks.”

“What did Gordon tell you?”

“Plenty.” He inhaled deeply and expelled smoke through wide nostrils and wider mouth.

“Did he tell you to arrest Vlathek?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m here for. He said he was coming back. He tried to take the woman out of the hospital this morning but they wouldn’t let him. She was still under guard and the doctor wouldn’t let her be moved, anyway.”

“Will you let me see her?”

“She can’t have visitors. Doctor’s orders.”

“I just want to see her. Vlathek saw her this morning. If it’s Ruth Esch I can identify her.”

The big man opened the inner door of the vestibule and spoke to the nurse behind the information desk. “Will you get somebody to show Mr. Branch here where Miss Vlathek’s room is?” She pressed a buzzer beneath the desk.

“Miss Vlathek?” I said in a lowered voice. “Doesn’t she know there isn’t anybody called Vlathek?”

“What people don’t know won’t hurt them,” he said. “We want to get Vlathek.”

“Vlathek-Schneider. Gordon told you about Schneider?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, Bud, we’re combing the whole region for that guy. All I ask is to get in sight of him.” He clenched a fist like the end of a knotted club and fondled it with his other hand.

I saw a nurse coming down the hall and left him in the vestibule.

“Did you put in that call?” I said to the nurse at the desk.

“Yes. The operator said it would take a few minutes.” She turned to the nurse who had come up behind me silently on rubber soles. “Is Miss Vlathek sleeping?”

“Yes,” the nurse said from behind a white starched bosom like a barricade.

“Take this gentleman to see her, please. He is on no account to speak or disturb her in any way.” She looked at me as if she suspected that I had a noisemaker in my pocket.

“This way, sir.” I followed the nurse along the hall to a rear wing of the hospital. Her starched posterior was immobile as if she moved on wheels. I had to hold myself steady to keep from running ahead of her down the corridor.

We turned into another corridor and she led me to a closed door and stood with a finger on her lips. My heart seemed to reverberate in the quiet wing like a muffled gong. She half-opened the door and I looked over her shoulder into a cool, dim room smelling of the hospital neutrality between life and death. The shade was almost completely drawn but I could see a mass of roses burning darkly on a table by the window and on the pillow a pale sleeping face beneath a helmet of bandages.

The nurse whispered, “She’s sleeping. Don’t make any noise. Can you see her from here?”

“Not very well. May I go in if I’m quiet?”

“Just for a minute.”

I tiptoed into the room and across to the head of the bed. It was Ruth, but not the Ruth I had seen with Peter Schneider. Though the face on the pillow was faintly hollowed by time and pain, it was as fair and smooth as a child’s face. Even in sleep and illness, her lips and chin held the curve of gaiety and courage.

Her lowered lashes shadowed her cheek delicately, and I bent to kiss her closed eyes. Then I remembered that I must not wake her and stood still with my head bowed over her. She must have felt my breath on her face. She raised her eyelids and her clear eyes looked at me.

Something hovered in her eyes, circled wildly and hovered again, like a lost gull over moving grey-green water. The lost thing plunged and her eyes focused and took hold of the meaning of my face.

Her lips fluttered and her voice seemed to come from a distance: “Bob Branch!” Something glittered in her eyes and two tears fell across her temples into the pillow. I touched her face with my hand.

She said in German, “My name is Ruth, nicht wahr? I am Ruth Esch.”

“Yes.”

“I remember now – You got my letter?”

“Yes, I came here to find you.”

“My brother,” she said. “Peter Schneider came to me in Toronto and told me my brother was no longer Nazi. He said Carl was sick in the prison camp and calling for me. I came here with Peter and waited to see Carl for three days. Then he took me to a dark field and Carl was there and they struck me – I did not know after so many years my brother could hate me so terribly–”

“Forget your brother. I love you. I came to take you home with me.”

The nurse came across the room and hissed, “You must leave now. You must not disturb her.”

Ruth said, “Don’t go.” Her hands moved under the sheets, beating against them feebly like caught birds.

I said, “I won’t go away, darling. I’m going to stick around. But you’ve got to rest some more.”

She smiled and two more tears fell. I kissed the bright track on her temple and felt the steady, heartbreaking tremor of the pulse that beat there. I went out of the room with sweet salt on my lips.

The nurse shut the door behind me and turned accusingly. “You said you wouldn’t disturb her.”

I felt like laughing in her face and weeping on her shoulder. “What would you do if you loved somebody and lost him for six years and found him again?”

She looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled and patted my arm. “I know. My husband’s been in England since 1940. I’d turn handsprings, I guess.”

She frowned and opened the door quietly and looked in. When she had closed it again I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing. I thought I might have left my bundle in there this morning, but I guess I didn’t. You didn’t see it, did you?”

“What kind of a bundle?”

“A big paper bundle of laundry. You know, caps and uniforms. Maybe I left it in the Residence.”

“No, I didn’t see it.”

Another nurse came tripping silently down the corridor. “Professor Branch?” she said. “Your party is on the line.”

I went back to the front desk and the grey-haired nurse got up from her seat and handed me the phone.

“Hello, Branch speaking,” I said into it.

“Mr. Gordon is on the line,” the operator announced above the electric murmur of the wires.

I said, “Gordon? This is Branch.”

His voice clear and crisp over a thousand miles of wire. “Hello, Branch. Have you seen the woman?”

“I’ve seen her. It’s Ruth Esch, and she’s been here for three days.”

“You’re quite sure? You were wrong once.”

“My glasses were broken and I don’t see so well without them. But there’s no mistake this time. She recognized me even before I spoke.”

“Would you swear to her identity?”

“I’m going to marry her. Does that convince you?”

“I have to be sure,” Gordon said. “But I figured she must be there.”

“What do you mean, you figured? You thought it was a bum steer.”

“I was wrong. I mean that’s what I figured this morning after we captured Carl von Esch.”

“So you got him.”

“We had to shoot him a little, but he’ll live to stand trial. Did you ever see him, Branch?”

“Once.”

“He resembles his sister, doesn’t he?”

“No. Yes. I don’t remember very well. I didn’t see much resemblance at the time, but he’s not a big man, is he?” A door in my mind opened on whirling vistas of possibility and another door clanged shut for good on a dark, ugly place. “Listen, Gordon, he knocked out his sister and left her for dead in an old mine-shaft here. Was he disguised as a woman?”

“When we caught him,” Gordon said, “he tried to ditch a bundle he was carrying. I’ve got the bundle here. It contains a set of women’s clothes, a woman’s red wig, and a pair of rubber breasts. He had Ruth Esch’s passport and visa on his person, and her Department of Justice permit to enter the United States. Incidentally, he entered this country from Windsor the night of September 21 – the day before this whole thing started. Peter Schneider must have driven him down from Kirkland Lake this morning. He had on a man’s suit, but he was wearing women’s underwear under it. I got the suit identified over long-distance by the man that had his car stolen, you know, the little man in the blanket. All in all, I think we’ve got enough to convict von Esch of murder.”

“Is he homosexual?”

“He has some of the mannerisms. Good female impersonators usually are pansies; they like pretending to be women. Why?”

“I saw Peter Schneider kiss him. That’s what buffaloed me from the first, more than my bad eyes, I think. I’ve seen men in women’s clothes in Paris, in the hole-in-the-wall dancehalls around the Place de la Bastille. But I forgot there were such things.”

“You’ll never forget again. They haven’t got Schneider yet, have they?”

“No. At least I don’t know. There’s still a policeman here.”

“Sergeant Cummings? Let me speak to him, will you?” I was laying down the receiver when Gordon said, “Just a minute. How badly hurt is she?”

“Pretty badly. Concussion and shock. She seems to be recovering – her memory has come back – but she’ll be in bed for quite a while.”

“If I can get permission, I’m going to come and talk to her when she’s able. Are you staying?”

“I’m going to stay here until I can take her back with me. There’s nothing on the books against her?”

“Not on our books. It’s pretty clear that her brother and Schneider sapped her and stole her clothes and papers and identity so that Carl could get away to this country. It not only got him across the border but it provided him with respectable shoes to step into, with very little danger of our investigating him. You were the nigger in the woodpile, Branch. You know now why they tried to kill you.”

“I know now all right. The irony is that when I did see Carl I was taken in. Herman Schneider wasn’t taken in, though. I doubt if they tried to fool him. He saw the whole thing and couldn’t stand it, even if he was working for the Nazis. They probably told him he had to co-operate or else. He co-operated to save himself, but he was cracking. They must have seen that he was both useless and dangerous to them, and had no qualms about killing him. They could get around whatever political morality he had, but his sexual morality was too strong to curb, stronger even than his vanity. Besides, he was a friend of Ruth’s and so far as he knew they had killed her.”

“They may try to yet.”

“What?”

“Look, Branch, she’s got to be guarded. I’ll talk to the police but you see that they’re not niggardly with protection. Her life is in danger.”

“From Schneider?”

“Why else would he go back to Kirkland Lake? Fenton checked that item in the Globe and Mail. He must have been in a hurry, to leave the paper in his car. The item he tore out–”

“I know. I saw it in Toronto.”

Gordon spoke with a harsh sincerity that made the telephone vibrate: “She’s got to be guarded twenty-four hours a day as long as Schneider is at large. They must have thought they killed her and that she wouldn’t be found. Now that he knows she’s alive, he’ll try to finish the job. So far as he knows she’s the only one that can put the finger on him.”

“Do you want to talk to the mountie?”

“Right. I appreciate your calling back right away. I’ll have the charges reversed.”

I called the man in the vestibule to the phone and listened to him asking and answering questions. Then he asked a nurse to get the resident physician, and she fetched a stout man in a white coat.

I heard him tell Gordon that Ruth should be able to talk to him in a week, perhaps sooner if necessary. He hung up.

The plain-clothesman called headquarters and asked for another man to help guard the hospital. When he finished phoning I said:

“Are you going to put a man in her room?”

“What do you think, Dr. Sandiman?” he said to the stout doctor. “The F.B.I. thinks there’s going to be another attempt on her life.”

“They do?” Dr. Sandiman’s chins shook. “We must do everything possible to protect her, Sergeant. Of course. But he’ll have to be very quiet, as inconspicuous as possible. A sudden shock to the patient could have very serious repercussions.”

“Could it?” I said.

“Very serious, indeed.”

“And Schneider was in her room?”

“Yeah,” Cummings said. “I only wish I’d known it sooner.”

“Did he leave those roses by the window?”

“Yeah. But I examined them. They’re O.K.”

“The point is that they’re there, visible from outside. He could have put them there to mark her room.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

I turned to Sandiman. “I have a suggestion, doctor. Miss Esch should be protected against the danger of shock as well as other dangers. Could you move her to another room without disturbing her?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I think that would be very sensible.”

“Then why not do it now?”

He gave orders to the nurse. As she started down the hall I said to her, “Leave the roses where they are.”

Sergeant Cummings went back to the vestibule. I said to Sandiman:

“Will you let me have the room that Miss Esch is vacating?”

“What on earth for? Are you ill?”

“Not especially, though you might have a look at my eyes. It’s just that if a certain visitor comes to that room I wouldn’t want him to be disappointed.”

“You’d do better to leave it to the police.” There was officious disapproval in his bulging blue eyes.

“The visitor I expect murdered my best friend. Yesterday he tried to hang me.” I showed him the marks on my neck.

He clucked like a sympathetic hen, but he said, “All the more reason for leaving it to the police.”

“Look, doctor,” I said, “I am leaving it to the police. He’ll never reach that room. But if he does I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

“Have you a gun?”

“No.”

“You’ll need a gun. Come along.”

He took me down the hall to his office. On the white wall above his desk there was a photograph of a young man in army uniform who looked like Sandiman’s son. But it was a uniform of the First World War. I looked at his face and saw the unchanging bones under the fat. He was the young man in the photograph.

He opened a drawer and laid a Colt .45 on the desk. “Keep this under your pillow. It’s loaded.”

“Thanks. Now how about bandaging my head. My concussion is paining me something terrible.”

He glanced at me sharply and gradually smiled. “Good idea. What reason shall I give for admitting you? It’s imperative to have a reason.”

“My eyes. Make it my diabolical eyes.”

“By the way, what happened? Haemorrhage?”

“Yes, the hangman’s noose–”

“I see. We’ll put some drops in them while we’re about it.”

I took off my glasses and he put drops in my eyes and covered my hair with bandages. He handed me the Colt and led me down the hall to the room that Ruth had left. “We put her at the other end of the wing,” he said.

“Good.”

“Well, I’ve got work to do. Good luck.” He waved a pudgy hand and closed the door.

I got into bed with my clothes on and pulled the sheet up to my eyes. I held the revolver in my right hand under the cover and watched the window. The scent of the roses reminded me of funerals and weddings, but I felt more like a bridegroom than a corpse.

I lay all afternoon and watched the bright spot the sun made creep down the blind. My mind was keyed up tight. My nerves were taut and brittle, ready to snap. To relieve the tension that made me shiver slightly under the sheet, I thought of great things beyond my reach, the stars and planets, a million luminous balls kept in the air by a juggler nobody had ever seen. To make the sun move down my blind a foot in an hour, the earth’s periphery whirled a thousand miles through space.

I thought of the inevitable past, Alec Judd crushed out with ten million others by the immense millstones of war, the millstones that were already powdering the bones of the men who had set them in motion. I thought of Herman Schneider, morally broken on a neat, cruel wheel devised by the son who had once been seed in his loins. I remembered the hunched despair of his well-fed shoulders when he walked away from the strange lovers in the fencing room, the lost and gone look in his eyes above the Lüger when he was going to shoot me, and the jagged hole that let the desperate conflict out of his head. I felt for him the kind of remote pity I felt for Agamemnon, a weak, well-meaning man betrayed and murdered in a forgotten language on a stage that time had crumbled into dust.

In the nightmare sequence of events that had seemed to grow out of each other, meaninglessly and malignantly, like cancer cells, I saw the push of giant uncontrollable forces on weak men, the waste of breakable wills and stout fragile bodies fractured in the clash of continents. But underneath the tired, cold impersonality of my vision I mourned for Alec Judd. I yearned steadily to plant the Schneider seed six feet deep.

When the sun’s rays came straight through the opening at the bottom of the blind and lay horizontally across the room, a nurse brought me dinner. It was a good dinner, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes and gravy and a quarter of a lemon pie. I ate it with my left hand, watching the window. My right hand held the gun under the sheet.

The sun faded out of the room and darkness seeped in slowly. I was glad that night was falling. I was more likely to have a visitor at night and I was lonely for someone to shoot.

The nurse came in and took away my tray. It was so dark I could barely see her face. The door opened and I could see a man’s head and shoulders black against the light from the hall.

“Don’t shoot,” Sandiman said. “How’s it going?”

“Fine. The dinner was excellent.”

“I’ll tell the dietitian. Well, see you later.”

“No sign of Schneider?”

“No.” He closed the door.

Now I could see only the dim outlines of the room, the walls which seemed more distant than before, the pale ridge my legs made under the sheet, the dark roses beside the window. I lay and watched the black mass of the roses, red in the sun and black at night like blood, rich and delicate to the touch like a loved woman, drowsy and dark like sleep and death. The rich, dark cloud of roses expanded and engulfed the room and the whole night.

I opened my eyes with a start and saw her standing in the room, a blurred figure glimmering faintly in the darkness by the window. No, it was a nurse. I could see her white uniform and cap. I must have been asleep. Thank God, he hadn’t come when I was asleep.

I realized that he could have. The nurse was there by the window and I hadn’t heard her enter. She seemed to be raising the shade.

“Leave it down,” I said.

I could feel her start, but she said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “All right,” and drew the shade.

Her low voice echoed in my mind. I closed my hand on the revolver under the sheet but there was no feeling in my fingers. I had been half-lying on my arm and it was asleep.

As I reached for the gun with my left hand, the white blur slipped towards me and I saw the gleam of a face and the white shadow of an arm stretched out. In the split-second it took me to throw off the sheet I thought of several things: the evil whiteness of Melville’s whale, the whiteness of sunless plants, the white bandaged head that had been on my pillow, the white look of death, and the bundle of caps and uniforms which the nurse had left in the room where Vlathek had been.

I caught the hand as it descended and tore the sandbag out of it. It wrenched free and took my throat. I drew my right knee to my chin and kicked out against the silent thing above me. It staggered back across the room, jumped up before I could free my other leg from the sheet, and crashed through the blind out the window.

The gun was lost on the floor but I felt life in my right hand again. I dived out the open window through the wreckage of the blind and landed on all fours on the ground. There were shouts from somewhere and I saw the white shape streaking across the lawn towards the trees at the edge. I went after it.

Before he reached the trees, Nurse Schneider fell over his skirts and I jumped him with my knees in the small of his back. He twisted over and I caught a glimpse of his pale contorted face before his heel came into my stomach and sprawled me backwards on the grass.

I got up fighting for air and saw him crouched with his right hand under his starched skirt tugging at something. The hand came out with a black gun he had given birth to.

I heard men’s voices and the sound of running feet somewhere behind me. He started to back away into the shadow of the trees and I walked towards him against my will faster than he retreated. The gun flashed and coughed.

I felt a freezing blow in the right thigh where the bullet struck but I got him by the wrist with my left hand and forced down the gun. His other hand tore my face but I kept hold of the twisting wrist. I circled his arm with my right arm and grasped my left wrist with my right hand and lifted.

The tendons in his shoulder tore softly like damp cardboard, and the gun dropped to the ground and lay impotent. He screamed on a high monotone and bit my arm. I let go of him with my right hand and hit him on the temple with all the will left in my body. He fell forward into the grass with his face turned sideways.

The ground shook under heavy feet and Sergeant Cummings came up beside me with a late gun in his hand. He turned a flashlight on the quiet face and said:

“It’s him.”

I said, “Yes,” between gulps of air.

Above the dark-headed trees the stars began to waver and flare like torches at a celebration a long way off and I sat down in the grass because my right leg was made of rubber. My mind flew out like smoke in empty space and I rode a vertical wind through moving stars like fields of arcing fireflies. The earth was a small, forgotten thing, a withered apple for which black ants and red ants fought together. The diastole of exhaustion ended and the systole of unconsciousness closed on my head, narrowing the universe to a warm, dry tunnel where I ran lightly and easily in the friendly darkness. The terrible things had died in the dark behind. At the end of the tunnel Ruth was waiting with hair bright as sunlight and no sword in her hand.