I got out of the cab outside the tunnel-like black entrance of the rookery she lived in. They never had any lights on the stairs there, but I’d brought a little pocket-flash along in my bag for just that purpose. This was the very sort of place Jimmy had specifically warned me not to venture into alone, particularly at night, but I’d got newer instructions since — from somebody else.
I groped my way down the long Stygian bore that led back to where I knew the stairs to be — from my memory of past visits alone. When I’d found the bottom one with my foot, and the dim light coming in from the street behind me would have failed to penetrate any deeper, I stopped for a moment. I reached into my bag for the pocket-flash, to light me the rest of the way up.
Did you ever have a feeling of someone being near you, without seeing anything, without hearing anything move? Animals have that faculty of detection, I know, but that’s through their sense of scent. Scent wasn’t involved in this. Just some sort of a pulsing that told of another presence, reached me. To one side of the battered staircase, or perhaps around behind it.
I got the flash out and it shot a little white pill of light up the stairs in front of me before I’d even realized I’d nudged the little control-lever on. It must have been obvious which direction I was going to turn it in next, by the way it shook and slopped around in my hand.
The voice was so quiet. So reassuringly quiet. It seemed to come from right beside me, my very elbow almost. “Don’t turn the light this way, Mrs. Shaw.”
Mrs. Shaw. So then I knew what it was.
“Weill’s man. Don’t be frightened, Mrs. Shaw. We’re covering every one of these places you’ve showed up at tonight. Just act as you would at any other time.”
I went on up the stairs, after I’d gotten my breath back and my heartbeat had slowed a little, thinking resentfully: “The fool! The Other One himself couldn’t have frightened me any worse!”
That was what I thought.
I knocked when I got up to her door, and then let myself in without further ado. I had to; the old lady didn’t have the use of her legs.
She was sitting there propped up in bed, the way I usually found her. She didn’t seem glad to see me. Her face always lit up as though I were a visiting angel when I came in, and she’d start to bless me in Italian. Tonight she just stared at me with an intentness that almost seemed to have hostility in it. She didn’t utter a word of greeting, held my gaze steadily.
She had just this one large barren room, and then a black hole of a kitchen without any window at all, leading off from it. I closed the door after me. “Well, how are we tonight?” I greeted her.
She gave an impatient swerve of her head away from me, almost as though she resented my coming in on her, as though I were unwelcome. I pretended not to notice the unmistakable surliness — not to mention ingratitude — of the reception I was getting.
The air of the room was stagnant, murky; none of these people were great believers in ventilation. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to let a little fresh air in here?” I suggested. I crossed to the window and raised it slightly from the bottom. She glared at me.
“How’s your plant getting along?” I asked her, crouching slightly to peer out at it. I’d sent her over a potted geranium, to cheer her up. She kept it out there on the window-ledge.
A look of almost ferocious vindictiveness passed over her face, as I straightened up and turned away. “You no got to worry about it; iss all ri’,” she let me know in husky defiance. It was the first remark she’d uttered since I came in. She was kneading her fingers palsiedly. Or maybe she was trying to convey something with them, I don’t know.
I drew out my usual bedside chair and sat down by her. She wouldn’t turn to look at me, kept Staring stubbornly straight ahead, as though I were not there at all.
I tried to win her over. “Have you been using that electric heater? Does it take any of the stiffness out, make you feel any better?”
She said gruffly, “Lotsa bett’.”
She had folded her arms across her chest now in a sort of stubborn sulkiness, and she kept jabbing one hand surreptitiously out from underneath the opposite arm. Not toward me, more — toward the door.
I said finally, in a low confidential voice: “What’re you trying to tell me?”
Her face flashed around toward me. She bared her almost toothless mouth in a grin that held frightened supplication in it. “I no tella you noth’. What you hear me say? Do I tella you anything?”
“I’ll do my own telling,” the new voice said.
Someone had come out of the kitchen and was standing right behind my chair. Its back had been turned that way.
I rocketed to my feet, chest going up and down like a bellows. A hand slipped around from behind me and riveted itself to my wrist, steely and implacable. The chair slashed over, discarded.
“Remember me?” was all he said.
The old lady, as if released from a spell, began to jabber now that it was too late: “Signora! This man he come here early tonight, he say he know you make visit every time on firsta month, he’ssa going to wait for you. I not can make him go ’way, I no can get up from bed and call policeman. He say if I tella you he’ss in there he shoot me. All time he have gun point at me, I no can’t spik—”
He chopped the gun-butt around horizontally at her forehead, without letting go of me, and she flopped back stunned on the pillow. I never saw anything more brutal in my life.
He gave it a little dextrous flip, then, that brought his grip back to the heft. “Now let’s take up where we left off the other night, you and me.”
I saw he was going to let me have the bullet then and there. He swung me around toward him by my arm, and brought the gun up, to contact-point against my side. He wasn’t taking any chances this time.
He’d maneuvered me out away from the bed — I suppose so there’d be room enough for me to fall. But that had unnoticeably changed our respective positions now. He was between me and the door. His back was to it, and I was toward it. But I couldn’t see it, or anything else, just then. I never even heard it open. I only heard the terminal thud it made at the other end of its arc, when it brought up flat against the wall. And I heard the harsh order that topped the thud.
“Drop that gun, Nelson, you’re covered three ways!”
There was an awful moment of suspended motion, when nothing seemed to happen. Then the gun loosened, skidded down my side and hit the floor.
A man’s head and shoulders showed up, one at each side of him, and there was a third one overlapping a little behind him. His two sleeves tightened up, as if drawn from behind, and so did the neck of his coat-collar. The front buttons pulled tight, to nearly up under his chin.
He’d even forgotten to let go of my wrist, he was still holding it until after they clicked the handcuff on his own.
They said to me, “You must have seen him the minute you got in, to tip us off so quickly—”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t see him until just a minute ago, right before you broke in.”
“Then how did you manage to—?”
“I knew he was here the minute I stepped through the door. I could tell by the frozen expression of her face and eyes she was under some kind of restraint or compulsion. And the air was close with stale cigarette-smoke. He’d smoked one or two too many, back there, while he was waiting for me to show up. I knew she never used them herself. But it was too late to back out through the door again, once I’d shown myself; he would have shot me down from where he was. So I stepped over to the window under the excuse of getting some air into the room, and gave that potted plant she kept on it a soundless little nudge off into space.”