Marshall swung a random, spindly bar stool by its long legs and the glass door of the booth shattered, and it pelted all over the man inside, so that he had to throw his arm across his face to ward it off. The jazz squawked off-key, as though every instrument were a chicken and their necks had all been wrung at once, then floundered in its death throes, and beat the air a little with crazed wings, and expired. The dancers thinned to isinglass cutouts — you could see right through their bodies — and then even that thinned, and they were gone. The little table lamps went out all over the room, as though he’d inadvertently damaged a master switch and the current was slowly failing.
“No you won’t!” he panted. “You won’t say a word! I’ll see that you don’t! I’ll kill you first, myself, if I have to!” And he went for Lansing’s throat with both his hands, and seized it, and tried to pull him away, out of there.
Then he was torn loose, and pinned back against the wall, by the shoulders, by the arms, held there flat against it and all spread out.
Only his head inclined away from it a little. Then a fist swung, and crashed into it, and it ricocheted back and smote the wall, and for a minute he would have dropped, but they still held him up.
“Get a cop in here,” a voice ordered. “Are you all right, sir? Are you all right?”
Lansing came out of the booth still with an arm shielding his face. Then as he took it down, it seemed to wipe his whole face off with it, like some sort of curdling magic. And in its place was another face, older, and ashen with fright, lined, and rather flabby, and balding at the temples.
And when he looked at her, through the blood that was coming down over one eye, she was gone too. She and the little table, the little lamp, the goblets of champagne.
A policeman came in and stood there before him, listening to them tell it. Nodding, head inclined judiciously.
“I’ll pay for it,” Marshall blurted out terrifiedly. “I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay double for it. Only, for God’s sake, let me go free. Don’t let him take me with him. Don’t let them lock me up, put me in jail.” And he tried to take the policeman’s coat-sleeve and pluck at it pleadingly.
“That’s up to you, are you the owner here?” the policeman said to one of the men. “It’s whatever you say; do you want to press charges?”
The owner squeezed his chin to a thoughtful, graduating point.
Marshall fumbled, brought out money, all the money he had on him, held it in palsied readiness in his hands.
“How much does one of them booth windows come to, about?” the policeman asked dubiously.
“Twenty dollars, say,” the owner estimated. “He said double, though.”
“And what about you, mister?” the policeman said to the man who’d been in the booth. “Did he hurt you in any way?”
“No,” the man stammered confusedly. “No. Just gave me a bad fright for a minute. I saw him swing it and I threw up my arm in time. I... I was just about to call my wife, tell her I was kept over. I’d be a little late. But I think maybe I’ll change my mind, go home after all...” And he turned and scuttled off.
“Give him twenty-five dollars,” the policeman growled to Marshall. And he did it for him, took it out of his hand and handed it over to the owner. “And get the hell out of here, and don’t let me catch you around again, here or anywhere else!”
Outside, the flanges on the corner lamppost said “Pine Street” and “Third Street.” But he could still hear the ghostly music from Churchill’s, all the way at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway.
3
The biggest, the heaviest hand in the whole world was on his shoulder. Bearing down, clutching him. An earthquake of a hand, shaking him. Shaking the whole world with him. Making the room he was in, the place, wherever it was, vibrate and throb and jiggle; clatter loosely and strain at the seams.
He’d always known that some day such a hand would find him out, descend upon him. For years he’d dreaded it in anticipation. He’d always known how it would feel. And now it felt just as he’d known that it would feel. The feeling of sick helplessness that it gave, he’d lived that a thousand times before.
The hand of Nemesis, it must be. The hand of reprisal, at long last. The hand of the punishing law. What else could be that heavy, that insistent in its claim?
His eyelids fluttered, and he instinctively tightened the double-armed overlapping clutch in which he held his coat, hugging the bottle that nestled upright on the inside of it, slanted against the pit of his arm.
“No,” he rebelled automatically. “No. I haven’t done anything. Let me alone. Go away.”
His eyes darted about, and he saw that he was surrounded, that he was in some sort of a police trap. They were on both sides of him. For, outside the window, a man, slowly going by, was pointing directly in at him, with an extended centrally focused forefinger that slowly moved along as he, Marshall, moved along. Grim-eyed, lantern-jawed, elderly, with whiskers and wearing a tall hat with stars around its band. “I want you!” he scowled, and his speech, strangely enough, instead of being audible took the visible form of lettering.
“All right, son. All right, son. Now how about it?” This time the speech was audible, and no lettering appeared. Marshall swung his face to that side, and looked up the forbidding blue serge uniform to the face that topped it. This was elderly too, and whiskered like the first, but it was less grim than the other, there was something more humane about it. The headgear was different too, instead of the starred top hat it had a rather slouchy kepi with a visor to it.
“How about what?” Marshall quailed.
“Have you got a ticket or haven’t you?”
Marshall shook his head; not in negation, but trying to clear it, to get the word in and absorb its meaning. “What kind?” he mumbled. “Ticket for what?”
“This is a train, boy. You’ve got to have a ticket to be on here. I don’t know what you’re doing here, I don’t know how you got on — I must have missed you the first time I came through — but if you haven’t got a ticket, you’re coming with me.”
“Train!” said Marshall, terrified, shooting his eyes this way and that. “What train? What train is this?”
And he saw that though the hand wasn’t shaking him any more, just resting heavy and inflexible on his shoulder, the creaking and the throbbing and the shuddering still kept up. The man with the starred hatband outside the window had long ago lost pace, fallen behind. There was, now, a capped figure in wooden shoes wielding a stick, with the legend “Chases dirt.”
The conductor was looking at him half in compassion, half in complete disgust.
“This is the train for New York, son.”
And he spaced each word and said it again, slow, as though he realized himself what a terrible, what a shattering thing he was saying; although he couldn’t have.
“This, is, the, train — that, takes, you, to, New York, son. Now, do you get it? All, the, way, to, New York.”
Marshall’s neck jerked abruptly, almost as though a noose had lighted about it and a trap had sprung under his feet, as if he had been hanged while sitting down; and his face went down toward his chest, and he heeled his hands to his eyes.
“New York,” he winced, like a man who has just incautiously caught a glimpse of hell and seared his eyes with it. “New York.”
“How’d you happen to get on here, if you didn’t know that?” the conductor asked him curiously.