Lombard put his wallet away again unopened. “Wrong number,” he said firmly, and resumed his descent.
12
The Fourteenth, Thirteenth, Twelfth Days Before the Execution
The Girl
She’d already been perched on the stool several minutes when he first became aware of her. And that was all the more unusual, in that there were only a scattering of others at the bar as yet; her arrival should have been that much more conspicuous. It only showed how unobtrusively she must have approached and settled into place.
It was at the very beginning of his turn of duty, so her arrival must have occurred only moments after his own taking up of position behind the bar, almost as though she had timed it that way: to arrive when he did. She had not yet been there when he first stepped out of the locker room in freshly starched jacket and glanced about his domain-to-be, that much he was sure of. At any rate, turning away from waiting on a man down at the other end, he became aware of her sitting there quiescently, and immediately approached.
“Yes, miss?”
Her eyes held his in a peculiarly sustained look, he thought. And then immediately thought, in postscript, that he must be mistaken, he must be only imagining it. All customers looked at him when they gave an order, for he was the means of bringing it to them.
In this gaze of hers there was a difference, though; the impression returned a second time, after having been discarded once. It was a personalized look. A look in its own right, with the giving of the order the adjunct, and not just an adjunct to the giving of the order. It was a look at him, the man to whom she was addressing the order, meant for him in his own right. It was a look that said, “Take note of me. Mark me well.”
She asked for a little whisky with water. As he turned away to get it, her eyes remained on him to the last. He had a trivial and fleeting feeling of being at a loss, of being unable to account for her bizarre scrutiny, that evaporated again almost as soon as it had risen. That did not bother him much, it was just there and gone again at first.
Thus, the beginnings of it.
He brought her drink, and turned away immediately to wait on someone else.
An interval elapsed. An interval during which he did not think of her again, had forgotten her. An interval during which there should have been some slight alteration in her position, if only a shift of her hand, a raising or edging of her glass, a look elsewhere about the room. There wasn’t. She sat there not moving. As still as a pasteboard cut-out of a girl seated on a bar stool. Her drink was not touched, remained where he had left it, as he had left it. Only one thing moved: her eyes. They went wherever he went. They followed him about.
A pause came in his activities, and he encountered them again, for the first time since his original discovery of their peculiar fixity. He found now that they had been on him all the while, without his guessing it. It disconcerted him. He could find no meaning for it. He stole a look into the glass, to see if there was anything awry with his countenance or jacket. There wasn’t, he was as other times, no one else was looking at him in that prolonged steadfast way but she. He could find no explanation for it.
It was intentional, of that there could be no doubt, for it moved about as he moved about. It was no glazed, dreamy, inward mulling stare that just happened to be turned his way; there was intelligence behind it, directed at him.
Awareness of it having once entered his mind, it could not be dislodged again; it remained with him to stay and trouble him. He began watching her covertly from time to time himself now, each time thinking himself unobserved. Always he found her already looking at him when he did, always he left her continuing to look at him after he had already desisted. His sense of being at a loss deepened, became discomfort, little by little.
He had never seen a human being sit so still. Nothing about her moved. The drink remained as neglected as though he had not brought it at all. She sat there like a young, feminine Buddha, eyes gravely, uninterruptedly on him.
Discomfort was beginning to deepen into annoyance. He approached her at last, stopped before her.
“Don’t you care for your drink, miss?”
This was meant to be a hint, a spur to get her to move on. It failed; she blunted it.
Her answer was toneless, told nothing. “Leave it there.”
The circumstances were in her favor, for she was a girl, and girls are under no compulsion to be repetitious spenders at a bar, as a man customarily is if he expects to continue to be welcome. Moreover, she was not flirting, she was not seeking to have her check lifted, she was not behaving reprehensibly in any way; he was powerless against her.
He drew away from her again, worsted, looking back at her all the way down the curve of the bar, and her eyes followed him as persistently as ever.
Discomfort was settling into something chronic now. He tried to shrug it off with a squirming of the shoulders, an adjustment of his collar about the nape of his neck. He knew she was still looking, and he wouldn’t look over himself any more to confirm it. Which only made it worse.
The demands of other customers, the thicker they came, instead of harassing him, were a relief now. The necessary manipulations they brought on gave him something to do, took his mind off that harrowing stare. But the lulls would keep coming back, when there was no one to attend to, nothing that needed polishing, no glass that needed filling, and it was then that her concentration on him would make itself felt the most. It was then that he didn’t know what to do with his hands, or with his bar cloth.
He upset a small chaser of beer as he was knifing it atop the sieve. He punched a wrong key in the cash register.
At last, driven almost beyond endurance, he tackled her again, trying to come to grips with what she was doing to him.
“Is there anything I can do for you, miss?” he said with husky, choked resentment.
She spoke always without putting any clue into her voice. “Have I said there is?”
He leaned heavily on the bar. “Well, is there something you want from me?”
“Have I said I do?”
“Well, pardon me, but do I remind you of someone you know?”
“No one.”
He was beginning to flounder. “I thought maybe there was, the way you keep looking at me—” he said unsteadily. It was meant to be a rebuke.
This time she didn’t answer at all. Yet neither did her eyes leave him. He finally was the one had to leave them again, withdraw as discomfited as ever.
She didn’t smile, she didn’t speak, she showed neither contrition nor yet outright hostility. She just sat and looked after him, with the inscrutable gravity of an owl.
It was a terrible weapon she had found and she was using. It does not ordinarily occur to people how utterly unbearable it can be to be looked at steadily over a protracted period of time, say an hour or two or three, simply because it is a thing that never happens to them, their fortitude is not put to the test.
It was happening to him now, and it was slowly unnerving him, fraying him. He was defenseless against it, both because he was confined within the semicircle of the bar, couldn’t walk away from it, and also because of its very nature. Each time he tried to buffet it back, he found that it was just a look, there was nothing there to seize hold of. The control of it rested with her. A beam, a ray, there was no way of warding it off, shunting it aside.
Symptoms that he had never noted in himself before, and would not have recognized by their clinical name of agoraphobia, began to assail him with increasing urgency; a longing to take cover, to seek refuge back within the locker room, even a desire to squat down below the level of the bar top where she could no longer see him readily. He mopped his brow furtively once or twice and fought them off. His eyes began to seek the clock overhead with increasing frequency, the clock that they had once told him a man’s life depended on.