The Soameses lived in a two-bedroom, five-room apartment in an ancient walkup; because they needed three sleeping rooms, the “front room” had been converted into a third bedroom, and this room served both as the girls’ bedroom and Marilyn’s workshop. “Marilyn ought to have her own room,” sighed Mrs. Soames, “but what can we do?” Billie had rigged up a partition — a drape on a long curtain pole — to cut off part of the room for Marilyn’s “office”; here she had her work table, her typewriter, her stationery, her telephone; there was a modest illusion of separate quarters. The arrangement was also necessary because Marilyn often had to work at night and Eleanor went to bed early.
The location of the telephone prompted Celeste to make an ulterior suggestion. When she arrived to take up her duties she found Stanley occupying his own bed in the boys’ room. On the plea that she could not very well share a bedroom with a boy as big as Billie — and obviously she had to be within call of her patient during the night — Celeste moved Stanley into the front bedroom, to Eleanor’s bed, and Eleanor moved to the boys’ room. “You’re sure this won’t interfere with you?” Celeste asked Marilyn anxiously; she was feeling wretched about the whole thing. But Marilyn said she had trained herself to work under impossible conditions: “With a boy like Stanley in the house you either learned how to turn your ears off or you cut your throat.” Marilyn’s easy reference to “throat” made Celeste sick; on her third day she became aware that she had been unconsciously avoiding that part of Marilyn’s generous anatomy. It was a strong throat, and in the days that followed it became for Celeste a sort of symbol, a link between the lives of all of them and the death that waited outside. She trained herself to look at it.
The transfer of Eleanor to Stanley’s bed created a problem and sharpened Celeste’s feeling of guilt. Mrs. Soames said it was “not good” for brother and sister to share a bedroom at Eleanor’s and Billie’s ages. So Billie was sent to his parents’ room and Mrs. Soames moved over to the boys’ room to sleep with Eleanor. “I feel as if I’ve created a revolution,” Celeste wailed, “upsetting your lives this way.” And when Mrs. Soames said, “Why, Miss Martin, don’t give a thought to us. We’re so grateful you could come nurse our baby,” Celeste felt like the most callous doubledealing spy. There was a small portion of consolation for her in the thought that the bed she had to sleep on in the front room, an antique cot borrowed from a neighbor, was as hard as the floor of a flagellant’s cave. On this she did penance for her chicanery. She almost angrily rejected the family’s offer of any one of their own beds in exchange.
“It’s so mean,” Celeste moaned to the Queens and Jimmy during their second-night rendezvous in a First Avenue areaway. “They’re so sweet about everything I feel like a criminal.”
“I told you she’s too peasant-like for this job,” jeered Jimmy; but in the dark he was nibbling her fingertips.
“Jimmy, they’re the nicest people. And they’re all so grateful to me. If they only knew!”
“They’d smother you with onions.” said Jimmy. “Which reminds me...”
But Ellery said, “What’s the mail situation, Celeste?”
“Marilyn goes downstairs for it first thing in the morning. Mr. Soames leaves the house before the first delivery—”
“We know that.”
“She keeps her current correspondence in a wire basket on her desk. I won’t have any trouble reading it,” said Celeste in a trembly voice.” Last night I managed to do it in the middle of the night, when Marilyn and Stanley were asleep. There are opportunities during the day, too. Sometimes Marilyn has to go out in connection with her work.”
“We know that, too,” said the Inspector grimly. Marilyn Soames’s unpredictable excursions, sometimes in the evening, were keeping them all on the edge of ulcers.
“Even if she doesn’t, she always eats lunch in the kitchen. I can even read her mail while Stanley’s awake, because of the heavy curtain.”
“Wonderful.”
“I’m glad you think s-so!” And Celeste found herself irrigating Jimmy’s dusty-blue tie.
But when she returned to the Soames flat she had color in her cheeks and she told Marilyn that the walk had done her oceans of good, really it had.
Their meeting time was set by Celeste at between 10 and 10:15. Stanley was not tucked in for the night much before 9, she said, and he rarely fell asleep until 9:30 or so. “Being in bed all the time he doesn’t need so much sleep. I can’t leave till I’m sure he’s dropped off, and then too I’ve been helping with the supper dishes.”
“You mustn’t overdo that, Miss Phillips,” said the Inspector. “They’ll get suspicious. Practical nurses don’t—”
“Practical nurses are human beings, aren’t they?” sniffed Celeste. “Mrs. Soames is a sick woman who slaves all day and if I can save her some work by doing the supper things I’m going to do it. Would it put me out of the spy union if I told you I also pitch in to the housework? Don’t worry, Inspector Queen, I shan’t give anything away. I’m quite aware of what’s at stake.”
The Inspector said feebly that he just thought he’d mention it, that was all, and Jimmy reeled off some verse that he said he had made up but which sounded remarkably like one of the Elizabethan things.
So they met at 10 o’clock or a little later, each night in a different place by prearrangement the night before. For Celeste, at least, it took on the greenish cast of fantasy. For twenty-three and a half hours a day she worked, ate, spied, and slept among the Soameses; the half hour away was a flight to the moon. Only Jimmy’s presence made it bearable; she had come to dread the taut, questioning faces of the Queens. She had to brace herself as she walked along the dark street to the appointed spot, waiting for the signal of Jimmy’s soft wolf-whistle. Then she would join them in the doorway, or under the store awning, or just inside the alley — wherever the agreed rendezvous was — and she would report the increasingly pleasant monotonies of the past twenty-four hours and answer questions about the Soames mail and the telephone calls, all the while clinging to Jimmy’s hand in the darkness; and then, feeling the pull of Jimmy’s eyes, she would run back to what had come to signify for her the endearing sanity of the little Soames world.
She did not attempt to tell them how much the aroma of Mrs. Soames’s rising bread reminded her of Mother Phillips or of how, by some witchery, Marilyn had become the best of remembered Simone.
And of how frightened, how icily frightened, she was during every moment of every waking hour, and beyond.
To tell any of them.
Especially Jimmy.
They speculated interminably. Beyond meeting Celeste each night, there was nothing else to do. Over and over they came back to the reports on Cazalis. They were exasperating. He was acting exactly as if he were Dr. Edward Cazalis, Noted Psychiatrist, and not a cunning paranoiac bent on satiating his appetite for death. He was still working with his board on occasional private case histories sent in by psychiatric stragglers. He even attended a meeting called by the Mayor at which the Queens were present. At this meeting Cazalis was studied closely by men trained in the art of dissimulation; but it was a question who was the best actor present. The psychiatrist was affably discouraging; he said again that he and his board were wasting their time; they had cracked a few of their reluctant colleagues but the remainder were adamant and nothing was to be expected of them. (And Inspector Queen reported to the Mayor with a garmented face that in the trickle of suspects turned over by Dr. Cazalis and his coworkers there was exactly none who could be the Cat.) “Haven’t you fellows made any progress at all on your end?” Cazalis asked the Inspector. When the Inspector shook his head, the big man smiled. “It’s probably someone from outside the metropolitan area.”