Fear and Trembling Part 11

And from the old man's fierceness I had said that, had it not been for that foul night on the roads and the weight he had carried so far and the fearful winds of October, he had fought with the blacksmith, the carpenter, and the postman's son, all three, till he beat them away from his sack. And weary and wet as he was he fought them hard.

I should no doubt have interfered; and yet the three men meant no harm to the wayfarer, but resented the reticence that he displayed to them though they had given him beer; it was to them as though a master key had failed to open a cupboard. And, as for me, curiosity held me down to my chair and forbade me to interfere on behalf of the sack; for the old man's furtive ways, and the night out of which he came, and the hour of his coming, and the look of his sack, all made me long as much to know what he had as even the blacksmith, the carpenter, and the postman's son.

And then they found the emeralds. They were all bigger than hazelnuts, hundreds and hundreds of them. And the old man screamed.

"Come, come, we're not thieves," said the blacksmith.

"We're not thieves," said the carpenter.

"We're not thieves," said the postman's son.

And with awful fear on his face the wayfarer closed his sack, whimpering over his emeralds and furtively glancing round as though the loss of his secret were an utterly deadly thing. And then they asked him to give them just one each, just one huge emerald each, because they had given him a gla.s.s of beer. Then to see the wayfarer shrink against his sack and guard it with clutching fingers one would have said that he was a selfish man, were it not for the terror that was freezing his face. I have seen men look at Death with far less fear.

And they took their emerald all three, one enormous emerald each, while the old man hopelessly struggled till he saw his three emeralds go, and fell to the floor and wept, a pitiable, sodden heap.

And about that time I began to hear far off down the windy road, by which that sack had come, faintly at first and slowly louder and louder, the click-clack-clop of a lame horse coming nearer. Click-clack-clop and a loose shoe rattling, the sound of a horse too weary to be out upon such a night, too lame to be out at all.

Click-clack-clop. And all of a sudden the old wayfarer heard it; heard it above the sound of his own sobbing, and at once went white to the lips. Such sudden fear as blanched him in a moment struck right to the hearts of all there. They muttered to him that it was only their play, they hastily whispered excuses, they asked him what was wrong, but seemed scarcely to hope for an answer. Nor did he speak, but sat with a frozen stare, all at once dry-eyes, a monument to terror.

Nearer and nearer came the click-clack-clop.

And when I saw the expression of that man's face and how its horror deepened as the ominous sound drew nearer, then I knew that something was wrong. And looking for the last time upon all four, I saw the wayfarer horror-struck by his sack and the other three crowding round it to put their huge emeralds back, then, even on such a night, I slipped away from the inn.

Outside the bitter wind roared in my ears, and close in the darkness the horse went click-clack-clop.

And as soon as my eyes could see at all in the night I saw a man in a huge hat looped up in front, wearing a sword in a scabbard shabby and huge, and looking blacker than the darkness, riding on a lean horse slowly up to the inn. Whether his were the emeralds, or who he was, or why he rode a lame horse on such a night, I did not stop to discover, but went at once from the inn as he strode in his great black riding-coat up to the door.

And that was the last that was ever seen of the wayfarer, the blacksmith, the carpenter, or the postman's son.

WILLIAM IRISH.

THE NIGHT REVEALS.

Harry Jordan awoke with a start in complete darkness. The only thing he could make out, at first, was a ghostly greenish halo looming at him from across the room, bisected by a right angle: the radium dial of the clock on the dresser. He squinted his blurred eyes to get in focus, and the halo broke up into 12 numbers, with the hands at 3 and 6. Half past three in the morning - he'd only been asleep four hours and had four more to go.

Instead of turning over and trying again, he suddenly sat up, wide awake now. He'd had a strange feeling that he was alone in the room from the minute he first opened his eyes. He knew he wasn't, knew he must be wrong, still he couldn't get rid of it, any more than he could explain it Probably one of those dim instincts still lurking just below the surface in most human beings, he thought with a s.h.i.+ver, harking back to the days when they were just hairy tree dwellers. Well, he'd knock it for a loop and then go back to pounding his ear, only way to get rid of it.

He pivoted on his elbow, reached out gingerly to touch the Missis's shoulder, convince himself she was right where she was every night. Blank pillow was all that met his touch, and the instinct that had warned him seemed to be laughing down the ages - it had been right after all. He threshed around the other way, flipped on the light on that side of him, turned back again to look. The pillow bore an imprint where her head had rested, that was all; the bedclothes were turned triangularly down on that side. Oh well, maybe she'd got up to get a gla.s.s of water - He sat there awhile giving his head a ma.s.sage. Then when she didn't come back he got up and went out to see if there was anything the matter. Maybe the kid was sick, maybe she'd gone to his room. He opened the closed door as quietly as he could. The room was dark.

"Marie," he whispered urgently. "You in here?"

He snapped on the light, just to make sure. She wasn't. The kid was just a white mound, sleeping the way only a nine-year-old can: flashlight powder wouldn't have awakened him. He eased the door shut once more. There wasn't any other place she could be, she wouldn't be in the living-room at this hour of the morning. He gave that the lights too, then cut them again. So far he'd been just puzzled, now he was starting to get worked up.

He went back to the bedroom, put on his shoes and pants. The window in there was only open from the top, so there hadn't been any accident or anything like that, nothing along those lines. Her clothes were missing from the chair; she'd dressed while he was asleep. He went out to the door of the apartment and stood looking up and down the prim fireproof corridor. He knew she wouldn't be out there; if she'd come this far, then she would have gone the rest of the way - to wherever it was she was going. The empty milk bottle was still standing there with a curled-up note in it, as he'd seen it when he locked up at 11. There wasn't really anything to get scared about, it was just that it was so d.a.m.ned inexplicable! He'd given up all thought of trying to go back to sleep until this was solved. All the time he kept rubbing one hand down the back of his neck, where he needed a haircut.

He knew for a fact that she wasn't a sleepwalker, she'd never suffered from that as far as he could recall. She hadn't received an emergency call from some relatives in the dead of night, because neither of them had any. And she hadn't got sore at him suddenly and gone off and left him, because they got along hand-in-glove. Take tonight for instance, just before turning in, when he'd filled his pipe for one last smoke, the way she'd insisted on lighting it for him instead of letting him do it himself, the affectionate way she'd held the match until the bowl glowed red, and that stunt she was so fond of doing, turning the match around in her fingers and holding the little stick by the head until the other end of it had burned down. When they got along so swell, how could she have anything against him? And the interest she showed in hearing him tell about his work each night, the way she drank in the dry details of his daily grind, asking him what premises if any he'd inspected that day and what report he was turning in to the office on them and all about it - that wasn't just pretended, it couldn't have been; she showed too much understanding, too much real eagerness. Instead of lessening, her interest in his job seemed to increase if anything as time went on. They'd never even had an angry word between them, not in five years now, not since that awful night riding in the cab when the door had opened suddenly and she fell out on her head and he thought for a minute he'd lost her.

He stepped across the corridor finally and punched the elevator b.u.t.ton. If she'd been taken ill suddenly and needed medicine - but he'd been right in the room with her, and they had a telephone in the place. The elevator came up and the night operator shoved the slide out of the way. This was going to sound dumb as h.e.l.l, but she wasn't in the flat with him, that much he was sure of. "Did, did - Mrs. Jordan didn't go down with you a little while ago, did she?" he asked.

"Yes sir, she did," the man said. "But that was quite a while ago. I took her down about happast two."

She'd been gone over an hour already! His face lengthened with anxiety, but it gave him a good excuse to say, "I think I'll go down with you, wait for her by the front door." On the way down he swallowed a few times, and finally came out with it more than he had wanted to. "She say where she was going?" He hung on the fellow's words, leaning toward him in the car.

"Said she couldn't sleep, just wanted to get a breath of fresh air."

Rea.s.suring, matter-of-fact as the reason sounded, he couldn't get all the comfort out of it he needed. "She should be back by now," he murmured, looking down at the floor. She might have been knocked down by a taxi, waylaid by a purse s.n.a.t.c.her, a woman alone at that hour of the night! His face was a shade paler at the thought as he stepped from the elevator out to the front door and stood there scanning the desolate street, first up one way, then down the other. To notify the police still seemed a little drastic, like borrowing trouble, but if she wasn't back pretty soon - he turned around. "Which way'd she go?" he asked the porter.

"Down toward Third," the man said. Which was certainly the less safe of the two directions, the other one being Park. They were on Lexington. What could she want down there, under the shadow of the El, where drunks lying sprawled in doorways were not an uncommon sight? He began to walk slowly back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the lighted doorway. "I can't imagine -" he said a couple of times, for the benefit of the porter who had come out and joined him. He was a pipe smoker, but this was no time for a pipe. He took a package of cigarettes out of the pocket of his jacket, which he'd put on over his unders.h.i.+rt. He gave the man one as well as himself, and then he felt for the folder of matches he always carried in his side pocket. They were not there; he'd handed them to Marie when she'd asked him to let her light his pipe for him earlier in the evening, and she must have forgotten to give them back to him. He tapped himself all over; she'd kept them all right, absent-mindedly, or they would be on him now.

The porter went in, got some, and came out again. "I wouldn't worry if I was you, Mr. Jordan," he remarked sympathetically; Jordan's fears were beginning to be easily discernible on his face. "I don't think she went very far away, she'll prob'ly be back any minute now."

And just as the calming words were being spoken, Jordan made her out, coming alone up the street toward them, from the corner of Third Avenue. She was walking very quickly, but without showing any signs of being frightened. As she joined him in the radius of the lighted doorway there was nothing either furtive or guilty about her; it might have been four in the afternoon Instead of four in the morning.

"Tsk, tsk," she clucked comfortingly, "I just know you've been worried sick about me, haven't you?"

They rode upstairs together without either of them saying anything further in the presence of the houseman. Her seedy, shapeless black coat, five years old now, looked as dilapidated as ever; she'd gone out without a hat and her graying hair was even untidier than usual as a result; otherwise she looked just the way she always did. She was carrying a small package done up in vivid green drugstore paper.

When he'd closed the door on the two of them once more, Jordan turned to her. "What on earth made you do that? You gave me a good stiff fright, I can tell you that!" There was no melodrama in the way he said it and no melodrama in the way she answered, just a man and wife talking something over quietly.

"I felt I just had to get some fresh air into my lungs," she said simply. "I'd been lying there two solid hours without being able to close my eyes. You must have woke up right after I left," she said casually.

He stopped unlacing his shoes and looked up at her in surprise. "Why, he said you'd been gone nearly an hour!"

"Well I like that!" she said in mild indignation. "What ails him anyway? I wasn't out of the house fifteen minutes all told - just once around the block and then I stopped in at that all-night druggist on Third, Geety's, and bought a box of aspirin." She unwrapped it virtuously and showed it to him. "Are you going to take my word for it, Harry Jordan, or that no-account employee downstairs?" she demanded, but without heat. "My stars, I ought to know how long I was gone, I'm not that feeble-minded!" All this, in an easygoing drawl between the two of them, without any emphasis or recrimination.

"Forget it, Marie," he said good-naturedly, bending over his shoes once more. "He must have dozed off for a minute and lost track of the time." He yawned cavernously. The thin eerie wail of a fire truck came floating in on the still night air, but from such a great distance that it sounded miles away; it must have been at least two or three blocks to the east, Second or Third Avenue. "All set?" droned Jordan sleepily, and without waiting for any answer he snapped the lights out. Almost before the current had left the filaments he was sleeping the sleep of the just, now that his good wife was back at his side.

He was a little dopey next day at the office from the unaccustomed break in his sleep the night before, but there wasn't much to do, just type out the report he'd made on that blaze the week before up in Was.h.i.+ngton Heights. The building had still been under construction, within an ace of completion, when it was mysteriously gutted and just the walls left standing. Neither his own investigation nor the report of the Fire Marshal's office had been able to unearth any evidence that the fire was incendiary; that is to say, deliberate instead of accidental. True, there had been some vague reports of labor trouble, but he had tracked them down and found them to be absolutely groundless; there had been no difficulties of any kind between the contractors and the labor union. Another thing, the blaze had taken place on a Sunday evening, a full day and a half after the workmen had knocked off.

It had been fairly easy to trace its point of origin. One apartment, on the ground floor, had been completed and opened for inspection to prospective tenants. Marie herself, for that matter, had been up there to look at it; she'd been heartbroken when he told her the next day what had happened. As he reconstructed it, some careless visitor had tossed a cigarette into a closet while being shown through the layout. The renting agent had locked up and gone home at six, taking the key with him, and the fire had smoldered away in there for the next two hours. The night watchman had no key to the place, so that absolved him of responsibility. He'd discovered it through the windows around eight.

All this was in the notes Jordan had prepared for his report. His reports were never questioned. If they said "Pay," the company paid; if they said "No Indemnity," the company told its legal talent to stand by for action. Harry Jordan was its best investigator. He slipped a sheet of stationery letterheaded Hercules Mutual Fire Insurance Corporation under the roller of the typewriter and began laboriously picking out letters on the keyboard with two fingers. He always hated this part of the job; it was with hopeful antic.i.p.ation therefore that he looked up as the president's secretary halted beside him. "E. P. would like to see you in his office as soon as you're through."

"This can wait," he said gratefully, and went in through a frosted-gla.s.s door.

"Morning," Parmenter said. "Read about that awful thing on the upper East Side?"

"I got away late this morning, didn't get a look at my paper," Jordan admitted. Parmenter showed him his, folded back to the third page. "That's us, you know," he added, while Jordan moved his lips soundlessly down the column. The latter looked up, startled. "One of those old-law tenements; I didn't know we covered -"

"We did this time," Parmenter told him gloomily. "The bank had taken it over for an investment, tinkered with it a little, slapped on a little paint, replaced the vertical escapes with horizontals, so technically it was no longer strictly old-law. It didn't pan out as well as they'd expected, so they turned it over to a guy named Lapolla, and he had even more extensive remodeling scheduled for the latter part of this month, soon as they could dispossess the remaining tenants. Well, on the strength of that we sold him coverage. He just called me a little while ago, tearing out his hair by the handfuls. Place is a complete wreck and if it hadn't been for the new escapes, incidentally, everyone on the upper floors would have been cremated alive. As it is there's three or four of them in the hospital right now with second-degree burns." He motioned with the folded paper. "According to this it started behind the stairs on the ground floor. They have it listed as 'suspicious origin'."

"You think it smells sort of funny yourself, that it?" asked Jordan.

"Not from the angle of Lapolla, as beneficiary, trying to pull a fast one on us - take out insurance and then commit arson on his own property; we've been handling him off and on since '31. He's straight. But there's always this thought: the type people living in a dump like that would be ignorant enough to resent being cleared out for the remodeling, and one of 'em might have tried to get even with the landlord. Anyway, Jordan, you know what to do, give the premises a look-see, get depositions from the janitor and whoever was in the building at the time - or as soon as they're in a condition to make any. Track down this 'suspicious origin' tag the paper has given it for all it's worth, and if you find any evidence -" But Jordan was already closing the frosted-gla.s.s door behind him, the paper wedged in his pocket.

Burned buildings were nothing new to him, but this one was a complete mess, and the teeming tenements all around it only gave its exploded blackened window s.p.a.ces an added touch of grisliness. Not a pane of gla.s.s, not a splinter of frame, had been left in the whole facade; it was just a sh.e.l.l, and already they had the ropes up to bring down the front wall before nightfall.

"Investigator for the underwriters," he said, and they let him through the barrier as soon as he'd produced his credentials.

"Three-alarmer," said his departmental escort, flas.h.i.+ng his torch down the nightmare hallway from just within the entrance. "I still don't know how we got 'em all out, even with the nets. I tell you, if it had happened a month sooner before the new escapes had been tacked on, it woulda made history. Mushroomed up the well, like most of 'em do. He turned his flash upward and the beam lost itself out of sight. There was no ceiling to stop it, just a weird network of charred beams through which the open sky peered from six stories above, where the roof had fallen through and disintegrated on its way down like something strained through a succession of sieves.

"Anything phony-looking about it?" asked Jordan. He edged forward along the fresh planking that had been laid between the doorway and the skeletonized staircase.

"Why would there have to be?" was the answer. "The way they leave their baby carriages parked behind the stairs - you can count the frames of four of 'em back there right now, and cripes knows what other junk was piled on 'em that's just ashes now! That's begging for it to happen!"

"That where it started, you think?"

"Must've. The bas.e.m.e.nt under us wasn't touched, and fire eats up, not down - Hey, stay back here, those stairs would fold up if a cat tried to walk on 'em!"

"Lemme that a minute," said Jordan, reaching for the torch. "I'm not going up, I just want to take a look behind 'em. Nothing ever happened to me yet in one of these places."

He sidled forward to the end of the plank, then got off it onto the original flooring, which was ankle-deep in debris that had fallen from above but hadn't given way on this floor. Testing it each step of the way before he put his weight down on it, he advanced slowly to what had been the back of the hall. The torch revealed a number of tortured metal frames, upthrust under the stairs, that had once been the hoops enclosing baby carriages. The heat here must have been terrific at the height of the blaze; the door that had once led downward to the bas.e.m.e.nt was completely burned away. An iron k.n.o.b and two twisted hinges were all that remained to show there had been one. The steps going down were brick, however; they remained.

"C'mon back," the a.s.sistant marshal said irritably, "before you bring the whole works down on us!"

Jordan got down on his heels and began to paw about, using the rib of an umbrella for a poker. Fine ash, that had once been the pillows and blankets lining the carriages, billowed up, tickling his nostrils. He sneezed and blew a little round clear s.p.a.ce on the charred floor boards.

It was when he had straightened up and turned to go, and had already s.h.i.+fted the torch away, that he first saw it. It sent up a dull gleam for an instant as the light flickered over it. He turned back to it with the flash, lost track of it at first, then finally found it again. It had fallen into one of the springs of the erstwhile perambulators and adhered there, soldered on by the heat like a gob of yellow-brown chewing gum. He touched it, pried it loose with a snap, it came off hard as a rock. It was, as a matter of fact, very much like a pebble, but it was metal, he could see that. He was going to throw it away, but when he scratched the surface of it with his thumbnail, it showed up brighter underneath, almost like gold. He found his way back to the fire marshal and showed it to him.

"What do you make of this?"

The marshal didn't make very much of it. "One of the bolts or gadgets on one of them gocarts, melted down, that's all," he said.

But it obviously wasn't one of the "bolts or gadgets" or it wouldn't have fused with the heat like that, the rest of the springs and frames hadn't; and what metal was softer than iron and yellow - but gold? He slipped it into his pocket. A jeweler would be able to tell him in a minute - not that that would prove anything, either.

"What time was the alarm sent in?" he asked the marshal.

"The first one came in at the central station about 3:30, then two more right on top of it."

"Who turned the first one in, got any idea?"

"Some taxi driver - he's got an early morning stand down at the next corner."

Jordan traced the cab man to the garage where he bedded his car. He caught him just as he was leaving on a new s.h.i.+ft.

"I heard gla.s.s bust," he said, "and first I thought it was a burglary, then when I look I see smoke steaming out."

"Had you seen anyone go in or leave before that happened?"

"Tell you the truth, I was reading by the dashlight, didn't look up oncet until I heard the smash."

At the emergency ward, where the three worst sufferers had been taken, Jordan found none in a condition to talk to him. Two were under morphine and the third, a top-floor tenant named Dillhoff, swathed in compresses steeped in strong tea to form a protective covering replacing burned-away tissue, could only stare up at him with frightened eyes above the rim of the gauze that m.u.f.fled even his face. His wife, however, was there at the bedside.

"Yah, insurance!" she broke out hotly when Jordan had introduced himself. "He gets his money - but vot do I get if my man diess?"

He let her get that out of her system first, then - "Some of those people that Lapolla forced to vacate were pretty sore, weren't they? Did you ever hear any of them make any threats, say they'd get even?"

Her eyes widened as she got the implication. "Ach, no, no!" she cried, wringing her hands, "we vas all friends togedder, they would not do that to those that shtayed behind! No, they vas goot people, poor maybe, but goot!"

"Was the street door left open at nights or locked?"

"Open, alvays open."

"Then anybody could have walked into the hallway that didn't belong there? Did you, at any time during the past few days, pa.s.s anyone, notice anyone, in the halls or on the stairs that didn't live in the house?"

Not a soul. But then she never went out much, she admitted.

He left on that note, got in touch with the rewrite man who had shaped the account sent in by the reporter who had covered it. "What'd he say that made you people label it 'suspicious' orgin?"

"I put that in myself for a s.p.a.ce-filler," the writer admitted airily. "Anything with three alarms, it don't hurt to give it a little eerie atmosphere -"

Jordan hung up rather abruptly, his mouth a thin line. So he'd been on a wild-goose chase all day, had he, on account of the careless way some city rooms tossed around phrases! There wasn't a shred of evidence, as far as he'd been able to discover, that it was anything but accidental.

Parmenter, when he went back at five after seeing Lapolla and getting a statement from the Chief Fire Marshal himself, nodded in agreement after listening to him outline the results of his investigation. "Make out your report," he said briefly, "I'll see that a check's sent to Lapolla as soon as he files his claim."

Jordan wound up both reports, the one he'd been working on that morning and the new one, then went home, still heartily disgusted with the methods of city journalism. The kid scuffled to the door to let him in, gamboled about him. Marie planted an amiable kiss on his cheek. "Something you like dear - giblets," she beamed.

It was when she turned her head to reach for something behind her, near the end of the meal, that he looked twice at her neck. "Something missing on you toni -"

She touched her throat absently. "Oh, I know - my locket, isn't that what you mean?"

"What'd you do, lose it?"

"No," she said slowly, "it finally came off, after all these years. I left it at the jeweler's to be fixed."

"That reminds me -" he said, and touched bis side pocket.

"Reminds you of what?" she asked calmly.

"Oh nothing, never mind," he answered. If it was worth anything, gold, maybe the jeweler'd give him some trinket in exchange he could surprise her with. He got up and went out again right after the meal, said he'd be right back. "My wife's locket ready yet?" he asked the little skullcapped man behind the counter.

"What locket?" was the tart response. "She left no locket with me. I haven't seen your wife in three months, Mr. Jordan."

Must've been some other shop then. He coughed to cover up the mistake. "Well, as long as I'm in here, take a look at this. Worth anything?" He spilled the shapeless calcinated blob of metal onto the gla.s.s counter. The old man screwed a gla.s.s into his eye, touched a drop of nitric acid to it, nodded.

"Yop, it's gold. Wait, I find out if it's solid or just plated."

He took a file, began to sc.r.a.pe it back and forth across the surface. There was a tiny click, as though he'd broken it. He turned back to Jordan, holding his palm out in astonishment to show him. There were two blobs now instead of one, both identical in outline but thinner; two halves of what had been a locket before it fused together in the fire. A little powdered gla.s.s dribbled off one, like sugar, as the jeweler moved his hand.

"What's that, there?" said Jordan, pointing to a scorched oval of paper adhering to one side. "Lemme use that gla.s.s a minute!"