“Henry,” George said.
“Yes.”
“It would also be too bad for friends to become strangers.”
“Yes, it would.”
“I spoke hastily about the book. It will be good and sell well.”
“Thank you, George. And I, for my part, don’t really want you to go to hell.”
“I hardly thought so.”
“Good night, George. I’ll see you soon.”
“Let us hope so.”
Henry opened the door and went out. He felt better after the pacific exchange, but at the same time he began to develop a premonition that grew stronger with each step in the street until it was so strong that he could not dispel it by reason or disregard, and the premonition was that Ivy was dead.
He walked rapidly down the street toward the Hawkins, exercising restraint to keep from breaking into a trot, and his compulsion to hurry was as irrational as his conviction of death, for if Ivy was dead hurrying had no point. But he hurried, nevertheless, and he had covered half the distance to the hotel before he remembered that he had agreed to wait for Lila at the Greek’s. Well, she would probably inquire for him there, and George would tell her where he had gone. She could follow if she chose, and if she did not choose, it did not matter. His only concern now was to see as quickly as possible if his premonition was true or not, and he could not doubt that it was.
To give the premonition credence, there was the fact that Ivy had already tried once to kill herself, and had almost succeeded. In addition to this, he attached an ominous significance to the report that she had apparently gone immediately from the diner to the hotel. Hotel rooms were often used by suicides. He had read about; such deaths in the newspapers, and there were probably many more that were kept quiet or passed off as being natural. The odd thing about it was that many such suicides could much more easily have destroyed themselves elsewhere, in their homes or offices, for instance, and it was possible that they were trying in a twisted sort of way to remove the shame and sorrow of their self-destruction from the places and people they knew and loved, simply be removing the act to a strange place among strangers. It could be that Ivy had been so motivated. She had had the day alone above the bookstore in which to kill herself, but she had thought of him in the end, as she had not thought of him in her first attempt, and had gone away to a hotel to save him trouble.
He saw the sign of the hotel hanging high above the sidewalk ahead of him. Increasing his pace until he was in fact moving at a kind of awkward lope, he crossed an intersection and was no more than thirty feet from the hotel’s entrance when he stopped abruptly in his traces with a gasp, as if he had suddenly been struck a powerful blow to the solar plexus, and he had for a moment an absurd fear that he was going to faint. For there ahead of him, coming from the opposite direction, was Ivy herself with a man. The man had a hand on her arm in casual, public intimacy, and she seemed to be allowing this intimacy with complete congeniality, but whether she was congenial or not, she was certainly not dead.
The absurd faintness having passed, Henry was furious. He felt that he had been made a fool of, as though Ivy had maliciously put into his mind by telepathy the premonition of her death, and it was far too much to bear calmly at the end of a day in which he had been a fool too many times before. But the fury left him, passing only a little less quickly than the faintness, and he wondered in dismay, remembering her in his bed that morning, if she was attempting now with this stranger a kind of radical surgery that had failed with him.
Moving again, he went into the hotel lobby and saw the floor indicator above the closed elevator doors moving upon the number two. He started up the stairs three at a time, staying always a floor behind the elevator, until he found the indicator unmoving on the number six. Looking down the hall to his right, he was just in time to see a door closing.
He stood looking at the door in indecision. He assumed, from what he had seen, that Ivy had willingly admitted the man to her room. He guessed at her motive and feared the consequences of her behavior, but he had no desire, by intruding where he was not wanted, to make a fool of himself again. He was still standing and looking at the closed door, wondering if he should intrude or retreat, when Ivy cried out. It was not a loud and piercing cry. It had more of the quality of a plaintive cry of despair, rising barely above the volume of a normal voice, and he was not certain, after it was gone, that he had heard it at all.
But it was enough to make him act decisively. He went down the hall to the door and tried the knob. The door, unlocked, swung inward before pressure. Ivy, on the floor, was struggling with a man who was trying to pinion her flailing arms, and as he stood fixed in the doorway, she lifted her shame-filled eyes over the shoulders of the man and saw him standing there. Her lips formed the shape of his name, but she made no sound.
Henry, for a couple of seconds, went blind with rage. Everything was obscured by a pink mist deepening through red to black, and he stepped forward into the mist as it began to lift, striking with all his strength at the kneeling figure of the man. The man, Charles Neal, had not heard the door open behind him, but he was made aware of Henry’s presence by the direction of Ivy’s gaze and the sudden rigidity of her body. He whirled to one side, and this turning saved him from the force of Henry’s blow. Henry’s fist brushed his jaw, spinning him away and sending him sprawling. He rolled to the wall beyond the bed and came up like a cat onto his feet. In his hand as he rose, apparently by some kind of legerdemain, was a switch knife. The long blade of the knife sprang out of its handle, shining, with a snick of sound. Slowly, with a calculated deadliness of purpose that went oddly with the insane light in his shallow eyes, Charles Neal, feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the knife held low and ready with the blade angled up.
Henry’s movement was hampered by his overcoat, which weighed suddenly a thousand pounds, but it was too late now to remove it, and it was luck for him that it was, for it saved him from the shining blade. Charles Neal feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the blade upward in a short, flashing arc. Henry, falling back and aside, felt a dull blow in the belly, a hot prick of flesh above his navel. The blade caught and held for a second in the thick fabric of his coat, and his motion away from the blow pulled Neal off balance for that second. He stumbled, bent over, and Henry brought a heavy fist down like a club on the back of his neck at the base of the skull. Driven to his knees, he remained for another second in the kneeling position, and then he lay down on his face on the floor with a rattle of breath.
Henry looked down at him and drew his own breath with heavy labor.
No one, he realized, had spoken a word or made an unnecessary sound since he opened the door, and except the sound, of breathing, the room was now utterly sill.
Lifting his eyes and looking around, he saw that he was alone with the stranger at his feet. Ivy was gone.
Chapter 11
She could never remember leaving the room or descending the stairs or crossing the lobby. She could only remember being suddenly in the street, in her torn dress, in the cutting cold. It did not occur to her that she was doing a cowardly thing in running away to leave Henry, who had looked for her and found her and come to her in time to save her, alone and unarmed against a dangerous man with a knife. It did not occur to her, as it had not previously occurred to her that it was a wicked thing to attempt suicide in his bathroom, because she was blinded to the implications and effects of her action by the one imperative need to escape the circumstances that had closed upon her. She was not, in fact, merely running away from the sordid situation in the room she had left, nor was she running from the danger. Her flight was a symbol and a gesture. She was really fleeing the aberrant and threatening part of herself that made sordidness and danger probable, if not certain.