Now would be the time, now would be the moment Burgess would approve of, she felt sure. Now he was like wax as he ran through this bright midday sun. That crowd back there had taken away his last prop. He had tested it, found it no protection, and accordingly he no longer had a sense of immunity even in broad daylight on these bustling city streets.
The curve of his resistance might start upward again from here on, if she didn’t act now while she had the chance. The law of diminishing returns might set in from here on. Familiarity might very well breed contempt, for all she knew.
Now was the time; it was simply a matter of pinning him against the nearest wall, putting in a quick call to Burgess, and having him take charge in time to be in at the death. “Are you ready to admit now that you did see a certain woman at the bar that night in company with the man Henderson? Why did you deny having seen her? Who paid or coerced you to deny it?”
He had stopped for a moment, down there ahead at the next corner, looking all about him for a way of escape like a trapped, scurrying animal. Panic was on him at white heat. She could tell by the abortive, zigzag false starts he kept making, looking for sanctuary. To him she was no longer a girl, something he could have buffeted senseless with one arm if he chose. To him she was Nemesis.
She threw up her arm again, as the distance rapidly closed between them. It only stung him like the flick of a whip to an added spurt of frenzied disorientation. He was walled in there on the corner by a thin but continuous line of people waiting to cross over, standing elbow to elbow along the curb. There was an adverse light on above.
He gave one last look at her, rapidly nearing him now, and then plunged through them like a circus performer tearing through a paper hoop.
She stopped short, as short as though both her flailing feet had caught simultaneously in a hidden crevice along the sidewalk. A brake keened out along the asphalt, scorching itself to death.
She flung up both hands, ground them into her eyesockets, but not before she had seen his hat go up in the air, in a surprisingly high loop, clear over everyone else’s head.
A woman screamed for prelude, and then a vast bay of horrified dismay went up from the crowd in general.
13
The Eleventh Day Before the Execution
Lombard
Lombard had been following him for the past hour and a half and there’s nothing slower to be followed on the face of the earth than a blind mendicant. He moved like a tortoise that counts its life span by centuries, instead of a man that counts his by years. It took him an average of forty minutes to traverse each block length, from one corner to the next. Lombard timed it with his watch several times
He didn’t have a seeing eye dog. He had to rely on his fellow pedestrians to get him safely over the crossings, each time he came to one. They never failed him. Cops held up traffic well into the green, if he hadn’t quite made it by the time the change over came. Hardly anyone that passed failed to drop something into his cup, so it paid him to walk slow.
It was painful to Lombard in the extreme; he was active, unhandicapped, and with an acutely heightened sense of time value these days. Several times it was all he could do to hang back in the wake of this endless, creeping progress that was like a variation of the Chinese water-drop torture. But he curbed himself, kept him grimly in sight, sucking impatiently at cigarettes for a safety valve, standing immobile for long stretches at a time in doorways and shop-window indentations to let him accomplish some distance then closing in rapidly again in a few hectic strides, and falling motionless once more, to once more let his quarry eke out a little further microscopic progress. Breaking it up that way into fits and starts took a little of the curse out of it.
It couldn’t keep forever, he kept reminding himself. It couldn’t last through the whole night. That figure up ahead of him was a human being in a human being’s body. He had to sleep sometime. He’d have to turn in out of the open and go behind walls and lie down to rest sometime. His kind didn’t beg straight through the night hours until day break, the law of diminishing returns alone would be enough to discourage that.
And finally it came. Lombard had thought it never would, but it did at last. He turned aside, went within walls, and quitted the open. It was in a sector that had unnoticeably become so derelict as they both advanced through it, that no bounty could be expected from it. It was in need of alms itself, instead of being able to bestow. It was blocked off at one end by overhead railway tracks carried on a viaduct of rough-faced granite blocks.
His burrow was a mouldering tenement just short of this. Lombard had had to be careful, although he hadn’t realized even yet that the end was this close at hand. He’d had to remain well back, for the streets were desolate hereabouts, with few other footsteps to blur his own, and he knew they had supersensitive ears as a rule.
When he saw him enter, therefore, he was further back than he would have wished to be. He hurriedly closed in for the last time, trying to reach it in time to ascertain which floor it was, if possible. He stopped at the doorway and cautiously entered in turn, just deep enough within to be able to listen.
The cane taps were still going up, with infinite slowness. They sounded a little like drops of water from a faulty spigot striking into an empty wooden bucket. He held his breath, listening. He counted four breaks in them, changes of tempo, one for each turn of the stairs. They were duller on the level landings than on the incline of the stairs themselves. Then they dwindled off to the back, not the front, of the building.
He waited until he’d heard the faint closing of a door up there somewhere, then he started up in turn, treading stealthily but fast, with all the energy he’d had to hold suppressed until now unleashed at last. The acutely tilted flights of worn stairs would have prostrated anyone else; he was hardly aware of them.
There were two of them at the back, but he could tell which it was, because one of them, even at this distance, was obviously a water-closet.
He waited a moment at the top step until his rapidity of breath was completely quelled again, then advanced carefully toward it. Again he reminded himself how acute of hearing they were said to be. But he accomplished his purpose to perfection; not a floorboard wavered, due more to his superb muscular co-ordination than to any particular lightness of weight. He was and always had been a swell machine; something that belonged under the hood of a racing car instead of in a flimsy sack of skin.
He put his ear over against the door seam and listened.
There was no light coming from it, of course, because for him in there was never any light, so it would have done him no good to put it on. But he could hear an occasional sound of moving about. It put him in mind of an animal that withdraws into a hole, and then keeps turning for some little time afterward, getting itself comfortable, before it finally settles down for good.
There were no sounds of voice. He must be in there alone.
This was long enough. Now for it. He knocked.
The moving around died instantly, and there was nothing more. A cessation. A place trying to make itself seem empty. A frightened, bated stillness, that he knew would go on for as long as he was out there — if he permitted it to.
He knocked again.
“Come on,” he said sternly.
His third knocking was harshly imperative. The fourth would be blows.
“Come on,” he said brutally in the silence.
The flooring creaked timidly in there, and then a voice, almost with breath accompanying it, it was emitted so close to the door seam, asked, “Who’s out there?”