There was no warning, no preparation, no explanation.
The day before he hadn’t been in the office, no one had heard of him, known he was coming. Then all at once there he was, had a desk, belonged there, was a full-fledged member of the firm. As suddenly as that. Moreover, there seemed to be no reason for it. No one was displaced, he didn’t substitute anyone. No one had left just previously, he was just added to those that were there already. And to make this even less understandable, there had been less business lately, not more. Even before he showed up, there had been too little work to go around, rather than too much. This had been an open secret among them for some weeks; it might have been seasonal, it might have been temporary, but it had been actual.
To the others it meant merely a raising of the eyebrows, a secretive shrug of the shoulders toward one another. And then forgotten. But Marshall felt a shadow fall over him.
At the end of the newcomer’s first day, when they first exchanged a few words, Marshall and he, as they both happened to come vis-á-vis going out the door, he said he’d been transferred from the company’s Kansas City branch. It wasn’t said in general; it was said to Marshall only, for Marshall was the only one within speaking range at the moment.
When Marshall asked Ponds the next day if the company had a branch in Kansas City, without telling him why he wanted to know, he was badly shaken but by no means completely taken by surprise to hear him say, “No. Never. And now that you mentioned it, I wonder why not. Might be a good idea to have one there.”
The shadow deepened.
Next day, Marshall, unable to endure dwelling alone with his knowledge of the incriminating (as far as he was concerned) misstatement any longer — it had kept him intermittently awake during the previous night — sought to trap him into some sort of exposure. An exposure he shouldn’t have sought, for he would have been the sufferer by it had he elicited it, but he couldn’t resist.
They brushed elbows briefly in the doorway again,
“Where’d you say you were transferred from?”
“Detroit.”
“I thought you said Kansas City.”
“I couldn’t have,” Wise answered briefly. “The company has no branch there.”
He’s found that out since, Marshall told himself grimly. Just as I did.
“I was sure you said Kansas City,” he persisted.
“If I did, it was just a slip of the tongue.”
You don’t make slips of the tongue like that, Marshall assured himself. There’s no similarity between the two place-names. They’re not even alliterative. You might say Portsmouth for Portland, Columbus for Columbia. You never say Kansas City for Detroit.
“I heard you,” he said coldly. Though what was to be gained by forcing this admission from him, he didn’t know.
“I was excited, I guess. My first day here, and all that. Tongue might have gotten twisted.”
Still, was all Marshall could say to himself, a man always knows where he just came from, he never gets excited enough to forget that.
“You from Detroit, yourself?” he said warily.
“Not originally. Matter of fact, I was only there a very short time.” And then just when Marshall thought he wasn’t going to go any further, he threw away the match he’d just used and finished: “I came on from New York. That’s always been my headquarters. Stopped off at Detroit first a spell, and then headed here.”
Danger. New York.
They’d separated now. A trifle stiffly. Mutually stiffly.
And why had he used that word “Headquarters”? Of course it had had a capital, of course! That cold glint in his eyes for a moment just then had capitalized it. He hadn’t said “home” he hadn’t said “birthplace.” Why “Headquarters”? Why?
Marshall glanced cautiously over his shoulder after him.
He was glancing covertly over his shoulder after Marshall.
New York. Be careful. Watch out.
He took that home with him. He had that to keep him intermittently awake through the night now, instead of the other. He’d exchanged a nebulous suspicion for a cold hard fact, that was the good all his tricky questioning had done him.
The week dawdled to completion. They had no further exchanges. The man might have found Marshall too bristly to take to him readily. And on Marshall’s side were the towering cumulus clouds of fear and suspicion, rising higher and higher into the blue.
In his mind’s eye, Marshall was already looking at him askance. And as a matter of fact, when the man passed too close to him once or twice, he did that with his physical eye as well.
Every afternoon when he’d leave, all the way home he’d think about him. Nothing but him.
He’s been planted there to watch me. That’s the way they do it, that’s how they go about it. It’s written all over him. It’s a dead giveaway, any time you watch him a little without letting him see you, as I was doing this afternoon. He hardly does any work at all. Just fools around. He’s not a bona fide member of the firm.
He’d still be thinking about him when he arrived home, when he kissed Marjorie.
“Oh, so-so. Just about average. No, not a very hard day.”
He gives me a wider berth, now, than any of the others, that’s another thing. He’s chummy with everyone else, but he steers clear of me as much as he can. That gives away who his quarry is, inversely. That makes it obvious.
He’d still be thinking about him when they sat at the table.
“Press, what on earth are you doing? Not the salt, dear, the sugar. That’s coffee you’re drinking.
“I’m sorry. I must be in love.”
“You wouldn’t be with that coffee, if you’d gone ahead and done that to it.”
He’s a plant. He’s working there under cover. He’s been put there to watch me. They’re not sure yet. Not sure enough. They want him to get more evidence than they have already.
A stinging pain went through his finger, and he whipped it loosely, blew on it, sucked it.
“Well, for heaven’s sake. I strike the match for you, I hand it to you, and then you just sit there and hang onto it until it bums your finger! What are you dreaming about?”
“You,” he said glibly. It was so easy to lie to her.
Does he report, at intervals? I wonder if he reports back to them? He must. He’d have to. That’s what he’s here for; that kind of job requires it. I wonder what he reports, when he reports. I wonder whom he reports to.
He was using the typewriter, that time today, and then he stopped right in the middle of what he was doing, remember? And I caught him looking right over at me. Sitting staring square at me, in a speculative sort of way. And then he dropped his head and went ahead typing some more. Maybe that was one of them, right then and there.
Would he do it openly, right in the same room with me?
It wasn’t office detail, that much he knew. It was something personal, private unto himself. He’d seen him fold and envelope it, he’d seen him put it into his inner coat pocket. Any office communication would have been turned over for mailing; they had a boy for just that. That wasn’t his job anyway, Wise’s, to write anything for mailing out.
So the pros outnumbered the cons; they did that with him every time.
In his mind, then, the next step after that, in logical sequence, was: If I could only get a look at what he’s got in his pocket sometime, if I could put my hands on it, I might find out something. Something that would tell me who he really is, what he’s really doing here, who it is he writes to.
He began to watch, no longer Wise but rather Wise’s coat. The coat into which he’d seen that typed sheet go that day.