I turned and drifted away. I didn’t want to ask questions of anyone else; too many questions weren’t good. If she hadn’t known, nobody else would. I was little better off than I had been before. There once had been a 295 Read Street. But I still didn’t know if there’d ever been anyone named Nugent living in it. Or if there had been, how old he’d been.
I roamed around, without straying very far from the immediate neighborhood. I didn’t actually know what I was looking for — or that I was looking for anything — until Id suddenly sighted it: a red-brick building with a yawning wide-open ramp for an entrance. There was a Dalmatian stretched out on the sidewalk in front of it. I stopped to caress him. Then from that I worked into a harmless, friendly chat with the fireman sitting by in his suspenders reading a newspaper. He was graying and looked as though he was nearing the retirement age.
Something like this: “Keeping pretty busy these days?”
“Oh, we’re still getting them now and then.”
“Had any real big ones?”
“Not lately.”
“That must have been a pretty big one that took down those three buildings over on Read Street. Know where I mean?”
“That was before my time,” he said. “Yeah, that was a wow, from what I’ve heard. Five-bagger.”
“No kidding?” I said, continuing to play with the Dalmatian’s car. “About what year was that?”
“Oh — fifteen, seventeen years ago. I used to hear some of the older fellows speak of it. Spring of ’24, I guess. Well, it was either ’24 or ’23, somewhere thereabouts.”
Just a harmless little chat, about nothing much at all. It stopped after that. “Nice dog you’ve got there.” I ambled on.
I had a little something more now. I went, from there, to the reference room of the main library and I put in a requisition for the bound volume 1922-23 of the Herald-Times. It split like that, in the middle of the calendar year. I started at January 1, 1923, and worked my way from there on. Just skimming headlines and in-side-page column-leads. If it had been a five-alarm fire it must have made headlines at the time, but I wasn’t taking any chances on how accurate his memory was; he’d gotten it second-hand after all, and with firemen a blaze never shrinks but enlarges.
It was slow work, but in an hour and a half I’d reached the end of the volume. I went back and changed it for 1923–1924.
It came up after about another half-hour or so of page-scanning. I couldn’t very well have missed it. It was all the way over in November, so that fireman’s accuracy as to time of year hadn’t been so hot after all. At least he’d approximated the year. I finally found it on November 5:
TENEMENT HOLOCAUST TAKES 5 LIVES
I didn’t care much about the details. I was looking for proper names, hoping against hope. The five dead were listed first. Rabinowitz, Cohalan, Mendez — no, nothing there. Wait a minute, two unidentified bodies. Maybe it was one of them. I followed the thing through to the back. There it was, there it was! It seemed to fly up off the page and hit me in the eye like cinders. Nugent. I devoured the paragraph it was imbedded in.
A sudden gap in the smoke, caused by a shift of wind, revealed to the horrified spectators a woman and her two children balanced precariously on a narrow ledge running under the top-floor windows, their escape cut off by the flames mushrooming out both below and above them, at the fifth-floor windows and from the roof. The woman, later identified as Mrs. Stella Nugent, 42, a newcomer who had moved in only the day before, pushed both children off ahead of her into the net the firemen had hastily stretched out below to receive them, and then followed them down herself. All three landed safely, but it was found on examination that both children, Lee, 9, and Dorothy, 11, as well as the mother, had suffered badly gashed throats, probably from thrusting their heads blindly through the broken glass of shattered window-panes to scream down for help. The mother lapsed into unconsciousness and little hope is held for her recovery. Neither child could give a coherent account of what had happened immediately preceding their appearance on the window-ledge, nor could it be learned at once whether there were any other members of the family —
I went on to the next day’s paper, the sixth. There was a carry-over in it. “Mrs. Stella Nugent, one of the victims of yesterdays fire on Read Street, died early today in the hospital without regaining consciousness, bringing the total number of casualties to—”
I went ahead a little further. Then on the ninth, three days later:
Dorothy Nugent, n, who with her mother and brother — etc., etc. — succumbed late yesterday afternoon from loss of blood and severe shock. The Nugent girl, although unharmed by the firs itself, suffered severe lacerations of the throat from broken window-glass in making her escape from the flat, a fact which has somewhat mystified investigators. Her younger brother, who was injured in the same way, remains in a critical condition —
I followed it through just to see, but that was the last, there wasn’t any more after that. I quit finally, when I saw I’d lapped over into December. He’d either died by then or recovered, and either way it wasn’t of topical consequence enough any more to rate mention. Just a tenement kid.
So I still didn’t know one way or the other. But outside of that, I had about everything else, more than I’d ever dared hope to have! Given names, ages, and all! I had my age now. If he was nine in November 1923, I was 27 now. And by a peculiar coincidence, I was actually 26 years old myself.
But, of course, I wasn’t George Palmer any more.
I was about ready. I had about all the background I’d ever have, so there was nothing more to wait for. Even the handwriting obstacle had melted away, since the account had been opened in trust for me and therefore I hadn’t signed it anyway. I considered that an auspicious omen. Present identification wasn’t very difficult. The prosperous, the firmly rooted, have a hard time changing identities. To a bird of passage like me, rootless, friendless, what was one identity more or less? No close friends, no business associates, to hamper my change of skin. I was just “Slim” to the few of my own kind who knew me by sight, and “Slim” could be anybody, right name Palmer or right name Nugent.
I took two days for present identification, that was all it needed. I realized of course that meanwhile, from one minute to the next, a real Nugent, the real Nugent, might show up, but I went right ahead.
That was one bracket of the 50–50 chance that I’d willingly accepted.
The two days were up, and now for it. I left myself looking pretty much as I was. To look too trim might invite suspicion quicker than to look down-at-heel, as I had been all along. I wasn’t pretending to be anything other than what I was; I was only pretending my name was different.
I headed for the bank and I went straight inside. I didn’t hesitate, nor loiter around the entrance reconnoitering, nor pass back and forth outside it trying to get my courage up. My courage was up already. If I didn’t plunge right in I was afraid it would start oozing away again.
I still had the original newspaper with me. I stalked up to one of the guards and I tapped the ad with my fingernail. “What do you do about this? My name’s listed here.” He sent me over to one of the officers, sitting at a desk in an enclosure to one side of the main banking-floor.
I repeated what I’d said to the guard. He pressed a buzzer, had the records of the account brought to him, to familiarize himself with them before doing anything further. Not a word out of him so far. I tried to read his face. He shot me a searching look, but I couldn’t figure out what it was meant to convey. The documents were old and yellowed, you could tell they’d been on file a long time. He was holding them tipped toward him. I would have given anything to be able to see what was on them.