He knew only that when the punk had killed a man and their paths had crossed, he’d shown Marcellene Grayson exactly what she was headed for. The punk had drawn life and Brennan had scared hell out of the rich Miss Grayson, given her a tongue-lashing, and made her believe he was ogre enough to send her to the penitentiary if she didn’t act like a lady.
So tonight when she’d seen John Brennan, moisture had come in Marcellene Grayson’s eyes, and her husband had shaken Brennan’s hand; it was at that point that Brennan had got the hell out of Twenty-One.
Now, watching a juggler in a tan and green silk outfit do his act in the Century Club, Brennan wondered how much longer it would take him to get drunk.
Beside him Jean was silent. Then she was saying something about being back in a moment. He nodded hazily and was aware that Jean had left the table.
A pang went through him. He wasn’t being fair to Jean. A swell damn homecoming! Everything was wrong. So very wrong. He shouldn’t have planned any kind of short vacation in Baltimore. He should have kept right on moving, to Chicago and a nice, quiet, safe insurance job, where he could look at a cop and say “Sucker! Keep on being a civil servant — but if you every try to climb off the grinding treadmill of sordid life and sudden death and be a normal human, watch them kick you in the teeth!”
The floor show continued in a clatter of orchestral sound and a blurred line of girls in abbreviated costumes. Someone sat down at his table, and Brennan thought it was Jean. But when he looked up, he saw a man. A very small man, with a pointed face that was shriveled and wizened, with pointed ears and a darting, pointed tongue.
The man’s mouth was jerking spasmodically at the corner. He said, “Brennan! Thank—”
“You’re Mouser Cline,” Brennan remembered.
The little man’s eyes lost some of their wildness. He seemed less out of breath. “Yeah, that’s me, Brennan. You’re a great guy for remembering.”
Brennan was stonily silent.
“I been chasing all over town,” Mouser said, his eyes darting to the door. “Huntin’ you, Brennan. It’s all around that you’re back. In the paper and everything.” He reached out one claw-like, quivering hand, clutched at Brennan’s sleeve. “You’ve got to help me, Brennan. You’ll give a guy a break and not tell him to peddle his papers.” Mouser wheezed, daubed his narrow, pointed forehead with a handkerchief. “I’m still running my book, Brennan, like always. Straight and square and giving the suckers a break. I... It’s about the only thing a guy like me can do — but I do it clean.”
“And somebody’s after your scalp?” Brennan asked coldly.
“That’s right,” Mouser sobbed. “Andy Mondello has been putting the finger on the bookies, making them run things his way. His way means a crooked way, a lot more money, and Mondello gets his share. But I don’t play that way, Brennan. Since that time you took your own time to talk to a judge for me, I tried to play the game like Brennan would. It ain’t cost me yet — but I don’t want Mondello to bury me in the bay, Brennan.”
“I ain’t a cop,” Brennan said stonily, “You’ll get along without me, Mouser. I’m through.”
He slammed up from the table, twisted his way out of the club. Faces turned to stare at him, and Mouser Cline’s voice was rising, bringing a waiter and a pair of bouncers on the double: “I can’t help needing you, Brennan. You’re murdering me—”
Brennan sat in the dark apartment for a long time, stone sober, his head in his hands. He wondered where Jean had gone when she’d left their table in the Century Club. But it didn’t matter. Waiters had seen him leave, the hatcheck girl. They’d tell Jean he’d gone, and she would come on here, to the apartment.
He lighted a cigarette and it tasted flat. He turned on the radio, clicked it off again before it had warmed. Then he heard a key in the door. The click of her heels, the sound of her breathing. “It’s just me, baby,” he said.
She flicked on the light.
“They told me you’d left the Century Club,” Jean said. “So I came on here. I didn’t know that I’d find you here.”
“I wanted to pack,” he said. “We’re leaving for Chicago as soon as we can get a train.”
She opened her bag, drew out an envelope, handed it to him.
“What’s this?”
“Tickets to Chicago,” she said. She was quiet a moment and tears welled up in her eyes. “That’s where I’ve been, John. I... I guess I knew we’d be leaving for Chicago tonight.”
He stood with the tickets in his hand, looking at her. He saw the unbidden tears in her eyes. He saw a stranger. He saw that a part of her, somewhere tonight, had died. She hadn’t been a stranger when she’d met his train.
He saw she wasn’t going to say anything more. She had bought tickets, two of them. She was going with him, that part of her that hadn’t died. Without complaining. Without arguing, without a word of regret on her lips. Going because she felt she had been born for this, to be John Brennan’s wife.
All night he’d been thinking only of himself. Maybe it wasn’t so hot to be in her shoes, either, being born for something and not flinching from it, not running.
He turned and stared out the window. A few lights met his gaze. But his mind was seeing something more; the dingy part of Pratt Street, the milling crowds on East Baltimore, the newsboy and bur-le-cue barker and penny arcade crowd. Johns Hopkins and life and death.
Giovani and his kid Tony. Tony had died, sure, but every man had to die, and Tony might have died in the electric chair, or lived bitterly in and out of grey prison walls. And for all her wealth Marcellene Grayson could have died in the gutter, along with a poverty-stricken, uneducated pack of ratty little guys like Mouser Cline.
He saw a red-headed rookie named Donnavan, polishing a nutty kind of gold with his life’s blood, and rows of white crosses over men who’d been fighting side by side with Donnavan even though oceans and thousands of miles had separated them.
He saw Inspector MacLaren out in the night, heard the aged man’s words: It’s the way you got born, Brennan, the way your brain works and your body moves. And Mouser had said, You’re murdering me...
He could take no credit for having these things Mouser didn’t have, either. He’d just got born that way. It wasn’t as if he’d created something with his own hands to have and to hold exclusively.
Donnavan had tried to give, but hadn’t had it, only his life. And Brennan knew in that moment that a man who had those things, those workings of his brain and movements of his body, had no right to withhold them. No more than he did the air mankind breathed.
And if he withheld those things — what was it MacLaren had said? Here’s hoping you’ll have a good time living with yourself...
He would have a rotten time, Brennan knew now. Wondering how many Marcellene Graysons were sliding in the gutter; how many Giovanis were knowing their boys were going to the electric chair; how many Mouser Clines he had condemned to death and how many Mondellos were riding roughshod through life... And knowing, living with himself in the long years ahead, that the Donnavans had bled for nothing.
Sure, he couldn’t do much in one lifetime, and he himself would die one of these days. But there’d be others born his way, lots of them, if he helped to make it possible now.
He turned slowly from the window. His gaze met Jean’s. “These tickets — now that it’s here — I’d make a lousy insurance salesman, hon.”
“I know you would,” she said. Then her arms were about him, clutching him very tightly. She was laughing, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I’m alive again—”