“A friend.”
The voice became more frightened at that, instead of less. “I haven’t any. I don’t know you.”
“Let me in. I won’t hurt you.”
“I can’t do it. I’m alone in here and helpless. I can’t let anyone in.” He was worried about his day’s gleanings, Lombard knew. You couldn’t blame him for that. It was a wonder he hadn’t lost them, in the way that he took this to be, long before now,
“You can let me in. Come on, open up a minute. I only want to talk to you.”
The voice on the other side quavered, “Get away from here. Go on away from my door or I’ll holler down for help from the window.” But it was pleading rather than threatening.
There was a short stalemate. Neither of them moved. Neither of them made a sound. They were acutely aware of each other’s nearness. Fright on one side of the door, determination on the other.
Lombard took out his wallet finally, scanned it thoughtfully. The largest denomination in it was a fifty-dollar bill. There were some smaller ones he could have taken out in place of it; he chose the larger one instead. He dropped to his heels, worked it through the crack under the door until there was nothing left of it to hold on to any more.
He straightened up again, said, “Reach down and feel along the bottom of the door. Doesn’t that prove I don’t want to rob you? Now let me in.”
There was a postscript of hesitancy, then a chain head slid off its groove. A bolt sidled back, and last of all a key turned in the keyhole. It had been well barricaded.
The door opened grudgingly, and the sightless black lenses that he’d first marked out on the streets hours ago stared at him. “Anyone else with you?”
“No, I’m alone. And I haven’t come here to harm you, so don’t be nervous.”
“You’re not an agent, are you?”
“No, I’m not a police agent. There’d be a cop with me if I was, and there’s nobody with me. I just want to talk to you, can’t you get that through your head?” He pushed his way in.
The room was invisible in the darkness, nonexistent, a pall of sightlessness, just as the other’s whole world must be. For a moment a wedge of dull amber-tan lying along the floor from the hall light outside helped a little, then that went too as the door closed.
“Put on a light, can’t you?”
“No,” the blind man said, “this makes us more even. If you just want to talk, what do you need a light for?” Lombard heard a decrepit bedspring sing out somewhere near by, as he sank down on it. He was probably sitting on his day’s take, nested under the mattress.
“Come on, cut out the foolishness, I can’t talk like this—” He groped around him at knee level, finally located the arm of a rickety wooden rocker, shifted it over, and sank into it.
“You said you wanted to talk,” the other voice said tautly in the dark. “Now you’re in, now go ahead and talk. You don’t have to see to be able to talk.”
Lombard’s voice said, “Well, at least I can smoke, can’t I? You don’t object to that, do you? You smoke yourself, don’t you?”
“When I can get it,” the other voice said wearily.
“Here, take one of these.” There was a click, and a small lighter-flame peered out in his hand. A little of the room came back.
The blind man was on the edge of the bed, his cane crosswise on his lap in case it should be required as a weapon.
Lombard’s hand came away from his pocket holding, instead of cigarette’s, a revolver. He held it in close, but pointed directly at the other. “Here, help yourself,” he repeated pleasantly.
The blind man became rigid. The cane rolled off his knees and hit the floor. He made a spasmodic warding motion of the hands, up toward his face. “I knew you were after my money!” he said hoarsely. “I shouldn’t have let you in—”
Lombard put the gun away again, as calmly as he had taken it out. “You’re not blind,” he said quietly. “I didn’t need that stunt to prove it to myself either. But I needed it to prove to you that I was already on to you. The mere fact that you opened the door for a fifty-dollar bill was proof enough. You must have struck a match for a minute and scanned it. How could you know it wasn’t a one-dollar bill, if you weren’t a fake? A one is the same size and shape, feels the same, as a fifty. A one wouldn’t have made it worth your while to open the door, you probably came in with more than that on you yourself just now. But a fifty was worth taking a chance for; that was more than you’d collected.”
He saw a misshapen remnant of candle, went over and touched the lighter to it while he was still speaking.
“You are an agent,” the beggar faltered, wiping sweat from his forehead harassedly with the back of his hand. “I might have known—”
“Not the kind you mean, interested in whether you’re out taking the public’s money under false pretenses or not. If that’s any consolation to you.” He came back and sat down again.
“Then what are you? What do you want with me?”
“I want you to remember something you saw — Mr. Blind Man,” he added ironically. “Now listen to this. You were hanging around outside the Casino Theater, working the audience as it came out, one night last May—”
“But I’ve been around there lots of times.”
“I’m talking about one night only, one particular night. That’s the only one I care about, I don’t give a damn about the rest. This night that I mean, a man and a woman came out together. Now here’s the woman: she had on a bright orange hat with a tall black feeler sticking up from it. You put the bite on them as they were getting into a taxi, a few yards down from the entrance. Listen carefully, now. Without thinking what she was doing, she dropped a lighted cigarette into the cup you shoved at her, instead of the donation she intended. It burned your finger. The man quickly dug it out for you, and to make it up to you, gave you a couple of dollars. I think he said something like this: ‘Sorry, old man, that was a mistake.’ Now surely you remember that. It isn’t every night your finger gets burned by a live cigarette landing in your cup, and it isn’t every night you get two dollars in a lick from just one passerby.”
“Suppose I say I don’t remember?”
“Then I’m going to haul you out of here with me right now and turn you in at the nearest police station as an impostor. You’ll get a stretch in the workhouse, you’ll be down on the police blotter from then on, and you’ll be picked up each time they see you trying to work the streets.”
The man on the bed clawed at his own face distractedly, momentarily displacing the dark glasses upward past his eyes. “But isn’t that like forcing me to say I remember, whether I do or not?”
“It’s only forcing you to admit what I’m sure you do remember anyway.”
“Then suppose I say I do remember, what happens then?”
“First you tell me what you remember, then you repeat it to a certain plainclothesman, a friend of mine. I’ll either bring him down here or take you up there with me to see him—”
The mendicant jolted with renewed dismay. “But how can I do that, without giving myself away? Especially to a plainclothesman! I’m supposed to be blind, how can I say I saw them? That’s the same as what you were threatening to do to me if I didn’t tell you!”
“No, you’ll just be telling it to this one guy, not the whole force at large. I can strike a bargain with him, get him to promise you immunity from prosecution. Now how about it? Did you or didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did,” the professional blind man admitted in a low voice. “I saw the two of them together. I usually keep my eyes closed, even behind the glasses, when I’m near bright lights, like there were outside that theater. But the cigarette burn made me open them good and wide. I can see through the glasses, and I saw them both, all right.”