Putting on his hat and overcoat, he went downstairs to the street and turned left toward the Greek’s as far as a public telephone booth on the corner. It was very cold in the booth, and the bulb which lighted it was growing dim. He found Lila’s number listed in the directory and dialed it. Her phone rang and rang in short bursts at the other end of the line, and he was about to give up and break the connection when her voice came on abruptly. “Hello,” she said. “This is Lila Galvin speaking.”
“Henry Harper,” Henry said.
There was a long pause before she spoke again, and in the pause a suggestion of wariness. Her voice, when she spoke, was so cool and impersonal that it seemed completely unrelated to the voice in which he had heard, a few hours ago, the soft solicitations and gutturals of passion.
“What do you want?” she said. “Why are you calling me at this hour?”
“Is Ivy there?”
“Ivy? Certainly not. I supposed that she was with you.”
“She’s gone. She was gone when I got home.”
“What made you think she came here?”
“I only thought she might have. It was the only place I could think of that she might go to.”
“Why did she leave? Was it because of something you did to her?”
He had been made sensitive to inference by his feeling of guilty responsibility, however irrational it might be, and he was, sitting cramped in the cold and dimly lighted booth, shaken of a sudden by a diffused and futile fury that was at once directed inwardly upon himself and outwardly upon both Ivy and Lila.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Whatever I have done to her is not one-tenth so bad as what you have done to her, or what she has done to herself. Anyhow, it will do no good to make accusations or call names. She’s gone, and where she may go finally and do to herself in the end is something I don’t like to think about. Neither do you, I’ll bet. You don’t like to think about what she may do to herself and, incidentally, to you.”
“Are you trying to threaten me?”
“If you’re threatened, it’s not by me.”
“I thought earlier tonight that you might have a little intelligence, but I see now that you’re a complete fool.”
“On the contrary, you thought earlier that I was a fool, and I was, but you’re beginning to think now that I may not be. Never mind that, however. There’s no use talking about it. I’ll look for Ivy, and if I can’t find her I may report to the police that she’s missing.”
“No! Wait a minute.”
He waited, listening to the humming wire, and he could feel in the little booth, as though it came through the wire on the sound he heard, the anxiety and calculation of the woman at the other end.
“Are you there?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’re quite right about making accusations and calling names. There’s nothing to be gained by it. Where are you now? Are you at home?”
“No. I’m in a sidewalk telephone booth.”
“Where can I meet you?”
“I’m not sure that I want you to meet me. Why should I?”
“Because you want to find Ivy, and so do I. I can be of help. You don’t have a car, do you?”
“No.”
“Do you propose to walk the streets all night? In my car, we may have a chance of finding her. At least we can check the cheap hotels in your area. I don’t suppose she had much money.”
“Twenty dollars, I think. Not much more.”
“That won’t last long, and God knows what she may do after it goes. We must find her, that’s all, and then she must come back to stay with me. I hope you’re convinced by this time that no other arrangement will work. She simply can’t be allowed to go on jeopardizing herself and causing endless trouble for others.”
“What she does is something she will decide for herself.”
“All right. Will you tell me where we can meet?”
“There’s an all-night diner down the street from here. The Greek’s. You’d better meet me there.”
“Give me the address.”
He told her how to find the place, and then he hung up and went there to wait for her. George, behind the counter, watched him with a frown as he crossed from the door and sat down on a stool. The customary warmth of his reception was totally lacking, and in the severity of George’s gaze there was more than a hint of disapproval.
“It’s apparent,” George said, “that you are feeling despondent tonight. Could it be because your conscience is bothering you?”
“Why the hell should my conscience be bothering me?”
“One’s conscience becomes a bother when one has done something he should not have done, or failed to do something he should have. Provided, of course, one has a conscience to begin with.”
It was obvious that George was making some kind of point about something, preferring for his own reasons to be devious instead of direct, but Henry was in no mood for subtleties. It had been, since the bad beginning of the abortive fiasco of the morning, a long and difficult day, coming to a kind of climax in the feverish episode in the apartment of Lila Galvin, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had not, on the whole, accounted very well for himself in the day’s events.
“George,” he said, “I have a notion that you’re referring obliquely to something specific in which I seem somehow to be involved. With all due respect for the subtlety of the Greek mind, which is notoriously devious, I’d appreciate it if you’d say directly what you mean.”
“Gladly,” George said. “I was referring to your shameful treatment of Ivy.”
“Oh? Am I to understand from this that you’ve seen her today?”
“She was here this morning to say good-by and to have breakfast.”
“I suppose she gave you a full report on all my qualifications as a son of a bitch. Is that it?”
“On the contrary, she had nothing bad to report. She said, merely, that you had ordered her to leave. Although I had doubts about her in the beginning, especially in relation to you and the book, I confess that I have become very fond of her since, and I don’t mind saying that I consider it more than likely that I was worried about the wrong person.”
“The hell with that! Did she say where she was going?”
“Not knowing, she couldn’t say. But she asked me to recommend a cheap hotel as a place to go for the time being, and I suggested the Hawkins.”
“Did she go there?”
“I don’t know.
“You going down there and see?”
“I don’t know why I should.”
“She’s a nice girl, Henry. She has her trouble.”
“She has a hell of a lot more trouble than you know about.”
“I will tell you one thing, Henry. I would never take a sweet girl with trouble into my house for shelter and then put her into the cold street for no sufficient reason. Sometimes I, too, am inclined to believe that it will be a lousy book that no one will buy.”
“By God, it looks right now as if it will never even be written. How the hell do you know I had no sufficient reason?”
“In spite of certain foolishnesses, she is a nice girl. It would be too bad if she came to a bad end.”
“All right, George. You can get off my back now. I’ll go down to the Hawkins and see if she’s there. Damn it, I intended to go from the start. Why the hell do you think I’m out prowling the streets, if not to try to find her?”
“In that case, I’ll spare you the ignominy of explaining how you got the scratches on your face that look as if they may have been made by fingernails.”
“That’s right, George. Spare me. And, incidentally, go to hell.”
Getting off the stool at the counter, he walked over to the door and stopped, making a pretense of adjusting his collar against the cold outside. He was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by others, and most of all he was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by himself. He wished, however, that it had not come to this between him and the Greek. He liked George and did not wish to lose his friendship, and he waited now inside the door in the hope that George would say a healing word. Having sustained the pretense of adjusting the collar as long as he could, he reached for the door handle and was about to leave when the Greek finally spoke.