You’d think they’d have caught him by now.
At the beginning, he took it for granted he’d be caught, and didn’t expect it would take long. When he watched firefighters battle the blaze on Cauldwell Avenue, he’d have been unsurprised if some inspector had picked him out of the crowd, had walked right up to him and taken him into custody. All right, mister. We know you set the fire. Care to tell us why?
And he’d have told them why. They might not have understood, but he’d have made the effort.
But no one approached him, or even looked twice at him. And in the weeks that followed he realized that no one ever looked twice at him, that he might have been invisible for all the attention he received.
When he was a boy he used to like a radio program about a character named Lamont Cranston, alias the Shadow. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. The Shadow, an announcer explained each week, had the power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him.
And didn’t he have that power?
Except he achieved it through no exercise of will. And he wondered if it might not be an effect of the losses he had sustained, the four sacrifices that had set him upon his own sacrificial mission. Could not those deaths, coming one upon another as they did, have taken away bits of his own very self? He had not felt the same since then, and knew he never would. Was it not possible that part of what he’d lost had been that quality that commanded attention from others? He was not literally invisible, like Lamont Cranston, but when people did see him he didn’t make much of an impression on their awareness. They took no notice of him and retained no memory of him.
As time passed, he came to take his invisibility for granted, to view it as a protective shield that would guarantee him invulnerability while he did his terrible work. He’d continued to take precautions, he’d made sure no one was looking when he hurled his jars of gasoline and when he wielded his razor, but he no longer expected to be captured, or even seen.
He hadn’t even thought about security cameras. Nor had he fully appreciated the nature of the manhunt that would be an immediate result of the three Chelsea bombings, or that they’d be tied almost immediately to the triple murder on Twenty-eighth Street. He should have assumed the latter, he’d deliberately constructed a pattern, choosing the three establishments because they, like the whorehouse, were cleaned every morning by the very same young man who’d discovered the body on Charles Street.
It was hard now to recall why he’d established that pattern in the first place. He’d seen and recognized the young man; following him, it seemed as if he was being specifically led to the sites of his next sacrifices. It hadn’t occurred to him to question this at the time, and now, looking back on it, he failed to see what his purpose might have been. You couldn’t say it had no rhyme or reason. It had rhyme, certainly, but the reason was less readily apparent.
No matter. It was done.
He sat at the window, watching the city.
The apartment was a comfortable one, light and airy, comfortably furnished, with two window air conditioners that kept the place almost too cool throughout an August heat wave. It was spacious as well, occupying the entire top floor of a narrow three-story frame house on Baltic Street, in the part of Brooklyn known as Boerum Hill. He remembered Baltic Street from Monopoly; it and Mediterranean were the cheapest properties on the board. This Baltic Street was nicer than that, although he imagined the neighborhood had been marginal twenty or thirty years earlier. Now, like so much of Brooklyn, it had benefited from gentrification, and was attracting middle-income New Yorkers, unable to find space they could afford in Manhattan, or in long-desirable parts of the borough like Brooklyn Heights.
Evelyn Crispin, the woman whose apartment this was, was one such person. She was fifty-one years old, and worked as a legal secretary at a Wall Street law firm. She had been married in her twenties, and a wedding picture in a frame on her dresser showed her as a young and pretty bride, standing beside a beaming groom. He’d died a few years later, killed in an automobile accident, and shortly thereafter she’d moved to New York to start a new life. It had evidently been a solitary life, and for the past fifteen years she’d led it in this Baltic Street apartment, which she shared with a cat whose name William Harbinger did not know.
The cat, nameless or not, demanded periodically to be fed. It did so now, weaving itself around his ankles, rubbing its body against him to attract his attention. He went into the kitchen, got a can of cat food from the cupboard. There were only two left on the shelf, and when they were gone he’d have to figure out what to do about the cat.
He opened the can, spooned the food into its dish, placed the dish on the floor. Watching the animal eat, he was reminded that he ought to eat something himself, and opened a can of lentil soup and another of roast beef hash, which on balance did not look all that different from what he’d just fed to the cat. He heated the soup in a saucepan and the hash in a frying pan, transferred the contents to a bowl and a plate, and sat at the kitchen table to eat his meal. When the cat hopped up onto the table to investigate, he took it by the scruff of the neck and tossed it across the room. That would do for now, but next meal it would try again; the beast was capable of learning, but not of retaining what it learned.
When he was finished eating he washed his dishes in the sink, wiped them dry with a red-and-white checkered dishtowel, and put them away. He was, he thought, the ideal tenant. He washed the dishes, made the bed, and fed the cat. He even watered the plants, although he suspected he was overwatering at least one of them.
He checked the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, and it had obligingly made ice of the water he’d put in the ice cube trays. He filled a bucket with the cubes, refilled all four trays with tap water, and dumped the bucket of ice cubes in the bathtub. Then he closed the bathroom door and returned to the front room and his chair by the window.
He missed his books, his histories, his diaries of old New Yorkers. As far as he knew, they were still in his storage locker in Chelsea, but that wasn’t a safe neighborhood for him. In a sense, no neighborhood was especially safe. His picture had been in all the papers and on all the news programs, and America’s Most Wanted had shown it to the whole country. (Let’s get this coward off the streets! had been the urgent message of the show’s intense host, and he’d found this puzzling. He didn’t expect the public to understand what he was doing for them, but in what respect could he be seen as cowardly? Evil, perhaps; he could see how they might view his actions as evil. But certainly not cowardly.)
In Chelsea, though, the residents could be expected to feel more personally connected to what he had done, and to have looked more intently at his photograph. He couldn’t expect to pass unnoticed there. Nor could he be certain that the police had not already traced the storage locker, in which case they were very likely keeping it under surveillance. He missed his books, but he didn’t need them, and didn’t care to risk walking into a trap.
The phone rang, and he let it ring. There was an answering machine, but he’d disconnected it, not wanting people leaving messages. There weren’t many calls, and this was the day’s first. There’d been a call early on from her office, and he’d returned that call the following morning, explaining that Ms. Crispin had been called out of town suddenly for a family emergency, that she’d asked him, a neighbor and friend, to notify them, and that it was impossible to say when she might return. Two days later he called them again to report that her aunt had in fact died, that Ms. Crispin was the woman’s sole heir, and would remain in Duluth. “She’s not even coming back for her things,” he said, sounding aggrieved himself. “I’m supposed to pack everything and ship it to her. She must think I don’t have anything better to do.”