That was the last thing of all, the bright orange of her hat peering blurredly through the cigarette haze and shadows, all the way back there behind him, as in a dream, as in a scene that wasn’t real and never had been.
2
The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution
Midnight
Ten minutes later and only eight blocks away in a straight line — two straight lines: seven blocks up one way and then one over to the left — he got out of the cab in front of an apartment house on the corner.
He put the change left over from the fare into his pocket, opened the vestibule door with his own key, and went inside.
There was a man hanging around in the lobby waiting for somebody. He was on his feet, drifting aimlessly around, from here to there, from there to the next place, the way a man waiting in a lobby does. He didn’t live in the building; Henderson had never seen him before. He wasn’t waiting for the car to take him up, because the indicator was un-lighted; it was motionless somewhere up above.
Henderson passed him without a second glance, and pushed the button for himself, to bring it down.
The other had found a picture on the wall now, and was staring at it far beyond its merits. He stood with his back to Henderson. In fact he made it a point to seem unaware there was anyone else in the lobby with him at all, which was overdoing it a little.
He must have a guilty conscience, Henderson decided. That picture wasn’t worth all that close attention. He must be waiting for someone to join him down here, someone whom he had no right to escort out.
Henderson thought: what the hell did he care, what was it to him anyway?
The car arrived and he stepped in. The heavy bronze door swung closed by itself after him. He thumbed the six-button, the top of the rack. The lobby started to drop from sight, seen through the little diamond-shaped glass insert let into the shaft door. Just before it did so he saw the picture-gazer, evidently impatient at being kept waiting this long by his prospective date, finally detach himself and take a preliminary step over toward the switchboard. Just a vignette that was no possible concern of his.
He got out on the sixth floor and fumbled for his latch key. The hall was quiet; there wasn’t a sound around him but the slight tinkle of the loose change in his own pocket as he sought for the key.
He fitted it into his own door, the one to the right as you came off the car, and opened it. The lights were out, it was pitch dark on the other side of it. At this, for some reason or other, he gave a sound of scornful disbelief, deep in his throat.
He snapped a light switch, and a small neat foyer came into existence. But the light only took care of just this one cubicle. Beyond the arched opening facing him across it, it was still as dark, as impenetrable, as ever.
He closed the door behind him, flung down his hat and coat on a chair out there. The silence, the continuing darkness, seemed to irritate him. The sullenness was starting to come back into his face again, the sullenness that had been so conspicuously there at six, out on the street.
He called out a name, called it through into the darkness lying beyond the inscrutable arched opening. “Marcella!” He called it imperatively, and not particularly friendlily.
The darkness didn’t answer.
He strode into it, speaking in that same harsh, demanding tone as he went. “Come on, cut it out! You’re awake, who do you think you’re kidding? I saw the light in your bedroom window from the street just now. Grow up, this isn’t going to get us anywhere!”
The silence didn’t answer.
He cut diagonally through the dark, toward some particular point on the wall, known to him by heart. He was grumbling in a less strident voice now. “Until I come back, you’re wide awake! The minute you hear me, you’re sound asleep! That’s just dodging the issue!”
His arm was reaching out before him. The click came before it had touched anything. The sudden bath of light made him jump slightly; it had come too soon, before he was expecting it.
He looked along his own arm, and the switch was still inches out past it; they hadn’t come together yet. There was a hand just leaving it, sidling away from it along the wall. His eyes raced up the sleeve the hand protruded from and found a man’s face.
He gave a startled half turn, and there was another one looking at him from that direction. He gave an additional turn, still further rearward, having nearly reversed himself now, and there was a third, directly behind him. The three stood impassive, motionless as statues, in a half circle around him.
He was so stunned for a minute by the triple, deathly silent apparition that he stared questioningly around the room in search of recognition, of orientation, to see if he was in the right place at all, if it was his own apartment he’d entered.
His eyes came to rest on a cobalt blue lamp base on a table over by the wall. That was his. On a low-slung chair cocked out from a corner. That was his. On a photograph folder standing on a cabinet. One panel held the face of a beautiful, pouting, doe-eyed girl with masses of curly hair. The other held his own face.
The two faces were looking in opposite directions, aloofly, away from one another.
So it was his own home he’d come back to.
He was the first one to speak. It seemed as if they were never going to. It seemed as if they were going to stand staring at him all night. “What’re you men doing in my apartment?” he rapped out.
They didn’t answer.
“Who are you?”
They didn’t answer.
“What do you want here? How’d you get in?” He called her name again. This time parenthetically, as though demanding of her an explanation of their presence here. The door toward which he’d turned his head as he did so, the only other door that broke the walls besides the arched opening through which he’d just come, remained obliviously closed. Secretively, inscrutably closed.
They’d spoken. His head snapped back to them. “Are you Scott Henderson?” They had narrowed the semicircle about him a little now.
“Yes, that’s my name.” He kept looking around toward that door that didn’t open. “What is it? What’s up?”
They continued, with maddening deliberation, to ask their own questions instead of answering his. “And you live here, is that right?”
“Certainly I live here!”
“And you’re the husband of Marcella Henderson, is that right?”
“Yes! Now listen, I want to know what this is about.”
One of them did something with his palm, made some sort of a gesture with it that he failed to get in time. It only struck him after it was already over.
He tried to get over to that door and found that one of them, somehow, was in his way. “Where is she? Is she out?”
“She’s not out, Mr. Henderson,” one of them said quietly.
“Well, if she’s in there, why doesn’t she come out?” His voice rose exasperatedly. “Talk, will you? Say something!”
“She can’t come out, Mr. Henderson.”
“Wait a minute, what was that you showed me just now, a police badge?”
“Now, take it easy, Mr. Henderson.” They were executing a clumsy sort of a group dance, the four of them. He’d shift a little one way, and they’d shift with him. Then he’d shift back again the other way, and again they’d shift with him.
“Take it easy? But I want to know what’s happened! Have we been robbed? Has there been an accident? Was she run over? Take your hands off me. Let me go in there, will you?”
But they had three pairs of hands to his one. Each time he’d get rid of one pair, two more would hold him back somewhere else. He was rapidly working himself up into a state of unmanageable excitement. The next step would have been blows. The rapid breathing of the four of them filled the quiet room.