“Warm weather on its way,” Champ said grimly.
She pulled at his sleeve. “Let’s get out. Maybe we still can make it. This is an awful set-up to be caught in — a dead end without any turns!”
“It’s too late, you fool, it’s too late. We’ve got the whole District of Columbia on our hands.”
A fellow and his girl were coming up the street arm in arm from the lower corner. A man suddenly accosted them from an areaway, dropped back again. The couple turned, went hastily back the way they had come, turning their heads repeatedly to look over their shoulders.
“Roping us off, eh?”
“The back yard, Champ. We can get out that way.”
“If they’re on this street, they’re on the next one over.” He turned briefly away, shrugged into a suit coat. Instantly the ghostly blue of his shirt darkened to invisible black. He took the gun out again from under it. “They’re not getting me alive,” he said quietly.
The futile bleating coming down through the ceiling sounded weirder than ever in the tense prickling stillness; it was like the monotonous fluting tune an Indian snake charmer plays, or the whistle of a peanut stand on a lonely street corner.
Champ Lane had always had a sense of humor; perverted, perhaps, but it was there. His eyes flicked upward. “Move over, whoever you are,” he chuckled, “there’s two more coming up!”
The girl in the room with him winced, drew in her breath sharply, as though something sharp had cut her.
Out in the street a taxi halted, was reversing with difficulty. A directing figure jumped off the running board as it started back the wrong way on a one-way street. Lights were going out by the roomful in the houses opposite. They became strangely blank, inscrutable. A woman came hurrying out of one of them guided by a policeman, a birdcage in her hand. He gave her a parting shove at the elbow and she went waddling down the street to safety.
“Any minute now,” said Champ Lane, showing his teeth in what might have been a grin.
Suddenly the mourners’ lament above broke off short, razor-clean. The waspish buzzing of a door-bell battery, clearly audible through the paper-thin floor, took its place. Z-z-z-z. Footsteps hurried to and fro across the planking up there, scuffled briefly as though someone were being forced to leave against his will.
Then, incredibly, it sounded right there in the same flat with them — louder, as angry as a stirred-up hornet’s nest at the other end of the long hall.
“What do they expect me to do?” he said, “Walk down to the door with my hands up? Take it,” he instructed her briefly, “or else they’ll know for sure which flat—”
She moved down the hall on soundless feet. “Yes?” she breathed into the perforated disk on the wall.
“Everybody out! Everybody down to the street! That’s a Department of Justice order!”
She came back. “They’re clearing the house.”
“Gas, that means,” he said.
“Champ,” she pleaded hoarsely, “don’t just stay in here with your back to the wall and die! Don’t count on your arsenal in the kitchen, you’ve got a whole Government against you! The minutes are going, once they’ve emptied the other flats it’ll be too late—”
An incessant throbbing of feet was sounding from the galvanized iron framework of the staircase outside — all going one way — all going down. It was vibration rather than sound. The warning buzz kept sounding distantly as doors opened. Below, above, somewhere on the same floor. The thin, keening sound suddenly burst into full volume again, but it wasn’t overhead any more, it was going down and around the stairwell, ebbing to the street below.
Champ surged forward swiftly.
He was at the window again. A bowed figure in widow’s weeds, face veiled, was being hurried on reluctant feet across to the other side of the street, a policeman on one side of her, the building superintendent on the other, holding her up.
She, Champ’s wife, must have been at the door without his knowing it; he would probably have shot her down if he had. She came running back. “The roof, Champ, the roof!”
“Whaddya think they are — hicks?” was all he said, not turning his head.
“Then do your dying out in the open hall at least, not sealed up in this sardine can! The stairs’re still clear from this floor up. Let’s give it a try, at least. We can always beat it down in again, if it’s no go—” She was pulling at his left arm with both of hers.
“All right,” he said suddenly, “get started, up there. I’m going to begin it from here. It’s coming anyway — and I never yet fired second in my life. Here goes your friend with the raincoat.”
She could just about make out the figure, across his shoulder and through the curtains and the window glass, up on top of a stoop there on the other side, signaling to someone unseen on this side.
He didn’t touch the curtain or the pane. “Watch your eyes.” She squinted them protectingly. It went off like a cannon, the flash lighting up both their faces, and bits of glass spattered all over them like raindrops. The curtain quivered violently; a singed hole was in it now. The figure on the stoop took a nose dive down the whole twenty brownstone steps, rolled all the way across the sidewalk into the gutter.
Instantly a whole unguessed insect world came to life. Swarms of yellow butterflies fluttered from every areaway, from every stoop, all up and down the street. Whole hivefuls of angry bees seemed to loose themselves against both windows, and hop around inside the room like Mexican jumping-beans. In an instant there wasn’t a shred of glass left in either frame. Champ jerked back, cursing, and threw himself flat on his belly pulling her down with him. The curtains were doing a buck-and-wing. Wisps of smoke came from the roof line across the way and floated off into the nigh t sky. A searchlight beam suddenly shot down from somewhere, found the range of the windows, and bleached the room inside talcum-white.
They were both flat on their stomachs, wriggling snake-like for the safety of the hall, the girl in the lead. Champ swung bodily around his gun, like a rudder steering a floundering boat, ducked his chin to the carpet, and shot up the beam to a cornice across the street. Glass fluted plaintively, the white-hot whorl that centered the beam went yellow, then red, then out. The beam itself snuffed out, like an erased white line. They couldn’t see anything themselves for a minute, much less the others over there around it.
He felt his way after her, hand on her uprighted heel; then they both reared behind the hall wall. “C’mon,” he said, “we’re good for ten minutes yet, after that. They probably think Frankie or somebody else is in here with me.”
A window in the hallway looking out on a shaft that led to the back shivered to pieces just after they’d gone by, their flitting forms must have silhouetted against the light-toned wall behind them.
“Tomcats out on the back fence too,” he gritted. He pitched his gun into the kitchen, grabbed up an unspiked one from a china cabinet where they were hanging from hooks like cups. The place was a regular munitions depot. At the door he took the lead, slithered out to the turn of the stairs, peered down to the floor below. She took the branch leading up.
“Champ, don’t!” she breathed. “Isn’t the rap tough enough as it is?”
His gun blasted just once, malevolently, and thick door-glass jumped apart somewhere below. A swarm of bees winged up to the second floor with a noise like a coffee grinder, and the smooth wall broke out with blackheads. But he was already on his way up to the third at her heels. “Tommy gun,” he said. “All they need is tin hats and a flag!”