He nodded. Not to her, in inward confirmation to himself. He said, “Can I sit here a minute?” and motioned to a small table desk. He took something out of his pocket and snapped it open. He carefully tore out something along a punctured line. Then he snapped the folder closed again and returned it to his pocket. A blank oblong remained before him. He uncapped a fountain pen and began to write across it.
He looked up once to ask, “Am I boring you?”
She gave him the wholly natural, unforced smile that comes when two people understand one another perfectly. “You’re being very good company. Quiet, but entertaining.”
This time he was the one smiled, to himself. “How do you spell your name?”
“B-e-a-r-e-r.”
He gave her a look, then bent to his task once more. “Not quite phonetic, is it?” he murmured deprecatingly.
He had written the numeral 100. She had come closer, was looking down on the bias. “I’m rather sleepy,” she remarked, and yawned artificially and tapped her hand over her mouth once or twice.
“Why don’t you open the windows. It may be a little close in here.”
“I’m sure it isn’t that.” She crossed over to them, however, and did so. Then came back to him again.
He had added another cipher. “How do you feel now, better?” he questioned with ironic solicitude.
She glanced briefly downward. “Considerably refreshed. You might almost say revivified.”
“It takes so little, doesn’t it?” he agreed acidly.
“Surprisingly little. Next to nothing at all.” She was enjoying her own pun.
He didn’t go ahead writing. He allowed the pen to flatten against the desk without taking his hand from it. “This is preposterous, you know.”
“I haven’t gone to you for anything. You’ve come to me for something.” She nodded. “Good night.”
The pen upended again in his hand.
He was standing in the open doorway, facing inward in the act of taking leave of her, when the car arrived and the elevator door opened in answer to his ring. He was holding a small tab of paper, a leaf torn from a memo pad, folded once and held within the pronged fingers of one hand.
“I hope I haven’t been rude,” he was saying to her. A rueful smile etched into his profile for a minute. “At least I know I haven’t bored you. And please overlook the exceptional hour of the night. After all, it was rather an exceptional matter.” Then in answer to something that she said, “You don’t have to worry about that. I wouldn’t bother writing a check if I were going to stop payment on it afterward. That’s a pretty small dodge, any way you look at—”
“Down, sir?” the attendant reminded him, to attract his attention.
He glanced over. “Here’s the car.” Then back to her again. “Well, good night.” He tipped his hat to her decorously and came away, leaving the door ajar behind him. She closed it lingeringly in his wake, without looking out after him.
In the car he raised the tab of paper and glanced at it.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he blurted out, with a stab of the hand toward the carman. “She only gave me one name here—”
The operator slowed the car, prepared to reverse it. “Did you want to go back again, sir?”
For a moment he seemed about to assent. Then he scanned his watch. “No, never mind. I guess it’ll be all right. Go ahead down.”
The car picked up speed again and resumed its descent.
In the lobby below he stopped long enough to consult the hallman, flashing the paper at him for a moment. “Which way is this from here, up or down, any idea?”
On it were two names and a number. “Flora,” the number, and “Amsterdam.”
“It’s finally over,” he was telling Burgess breathlessly on the phone a minute or two later, from an all-night drugstore on Broadway. “I thought I had it, and there was one last link, but this time it’s the last. No time to tell you now. Here’s where it is. I’m on my way there now. How soon can you be there?”
Burgess, overreaching himself in the headlong sweep of the patrol car that had brought him over, recognized Lombard’s car standing out by itself in front of one of the buildings, at first sight empty; jumped hazardously off in full flight and came back. It was only when he’d gained the sidewalk and approached from that direction that he made him out sitting there on the running board, screened from the roadway by the car body at his back.
He thought he was ill at first, the way he was sitting there in a huddle on the car step; bowed over his own lap, head lowered toward the sidewalk underfoot. His posture suggested someone in the penultimate stages of being sick to his stomach; everything but the final climax.
A man in suspenders and undershirt was standing a few steps off, regarding him sympathetically, arrested pipe in hand, a dog peering out from around his legs.
Lombard looked up wanly as Burgess’s hastening footfalls drew up beside him. Then he turned his head away again, as though it were too much effort even to speak.
“Is this it? What’s the matter? You been in there yet?”
“No, it’s that one back there.” He indicated a cavernous opening, occupying almost the full width of the building it was set into. Within, to one side, could be made out a glistening brass upright, set into the bare concrete flooring. Across the façade, in gilt letters backed with black sandpaper, was inscribed the legend: Fire Department, City of New York.
“That’s number—,” Lombard said, flourishing the tab of paper he still held in his hand.
The dog, a spotted Dalmatian, edged forward at this point to muzzle at it inquiringly.
“And that’s Flora, these men tell me.”
Burgess opened the car door and pulled it out behind him, forcing him to his feet to avoid being unseated.
“Let’s get back,” he commented tersely. “And fast.”
He was flinging himself bodily against the door, with futile wrenches of breath, when Burgess came up with the passkey and joined him outside it.
“Not a sound from in there. Has she answered them below on the announcer yet?
“They’re still ringing.”
“She must have lammed.”
“She can’t have. They would have seen her leave, unless she went out some roundabout way— Here, let me use this. You’ll never get it that way.”
The door opened and they floundered inside. Then they stopped short, taking the scene in. The long living room, which was a continuation of the entrance gallery with simply a one-step drop in height, was empty, but it was mutely eloquent. They both got it right away.
The lights were all on. An unfinished cigarette was still alive and working, sending up lazy spirals of bluish-silver from the rim of an ash stand with a hollow stem. The floor-length windows were open to the night, showing an expanse of black, with a large star piercing it in one corner, a smaller one in another, like a black-out cloth held in place by a couple of shiny thumbtacks.
Directly before the windows lay a silver shoe, turned on its side like a small, capsized boat. The long narrow runner of rug that bisected the polished flooring, from just past the drop-step to just short of the windows, showed corrugated ridges, frozen “ripples” that marred its evenness, at one end. As though a misstep had sent a disturbance coursing along it.
Burgess went to the window, detouring around the side of the room to get there. He leaned out over the low, inadequate, decorative guard-rail on the outside of it, stayed that way, bent motionless, for long minutes.
Then he straightened, turned back into the room again, sent a quiet nod across it to where Lombard had remained, as if incapable of further movement. “She’s all the way down below there. I can see her from here, in the service alley between two deep walls. Like a rag off a clothesline. Nobody seems to have heard it, all the windows on this side are still dark.”