“For how long?”
“A long time.” He smiled. “One of us was a member of Lincoln’s cabinet. But it was not until just before your First World War that we felt we could see what was coming; until then we’d been merely observers. We opened our first agency in Mexico City in nineteen thirteen. Now we have branches in every major city.”
“Nineteen thirteen,” I murmured, as something caught at my memory. “Mexico. Listen! Did—”
“Yes.” He smiled, anticipating my question. “Ambrose Bierce joined us that year, or the next. He lived until nineteen thirty-one, a very old man, and wrote four more books, which we have.” He turned back a page in the folder and pointed to a cabin in the first large photograph. “That was his home.”
“And what about Judge Crater?”
“Crater?”
“Another famous disappearance; he was a new York judge who simply disappeared some years ago.”
“I don’t know. We had a judge, I remember, from New York City, some twenty-odd years ago, but I can’t recall his name.”
I leaned across the counter toward him, my face very close to his, and I nodded. “I like your little joke,” I said. “I like it very much, more than I can possibly tell you.” Very softly I added, “When does it stop being a joke?”
For a moment he studied me; then he spoke. “Now. If you want it to.”
You’ve got to decide on the spot, the middle-aged man at the Lexington Avenue bar had told me, because you’ll never get another chance. I know; I’ve tried. Now I stood there thinking; there were people I’d hate never to see again, and a girl I was just getting to know, and this was the world I’d been born in. Then I thought about leaving that room, going back to my job, then back to my room at night. And finally I thought of the deep-green valley in the picture and the little yellow beach in the morning sun. “I’ll go,” I whispered. “If you’ll have me.”
He studied my face. “Be sure,” he said sharply. “Be certain. We want no one there who won’t be happy, and if you have any least doubt, we’d prefer that—”
“I’m sure,” I said.
After a moment the gray-haired man slid open a drawer under the counter and brought out a little rectangle of yellow cardboard. One side was printed, and through the printing ran a band of light green; it looked like a railroad ticket to White Plains or somewhere. The printing said, “Good, when validated, for one trip to verna. Non-transferable. One-way only.”
“Ah—how much?” I said, reaching for my wallet, wondering if he wanted me to pay.
He glanced at my hand on my hip pocket. “All you’ve got. Including your small change.” He smiled. “You won’t need it any more, and we can use your currency for operating expense. Light bills, rent, and so on.”
“I don’t have much.”
“That doesn’t matter.” From under the counter he brought out a heavy stamping machine, the kind you see in railroad ticket offices. “We once sold a ticket for thirty-seven hundred dollars. And we sold another just like it for six cents.” He slid the ticket into the machine, struck the lever with his fist, then handed the ticket to me. On the back, now was a freshly printed rectangle of purple ink, and within it the words, “Good this day only,” followed by the date. I put two five-dollar bills, a one, and seven-teen cents in change on the counter. “Take the ticket to the Acme Depot,” the gray-haired man said, and, leaning across the counter, began giving me directions for getting there.
It’s a tiny hole-in-the-wall, the Acme Depot; you may have seen it—just a little store front on one of the narrow streets west of Broadway. On the window is painted, not very well, “Acme.” Inside, the walls and ceiling, under layers of old paint, are covered with the kind of stamped tin you see in old buildings. There’s a worn wooden counter and a few battered chrome-and-imitation-red-leather chairs. There are scores of places like the Acme Depot in that area—little theatre-ticket agencies, obscure bus-line offices, employment agencies. You could pass this one a thousand times and never really see it; and if you live in New York, you probably have.
Behind the counter, when I arrived, a shirt-sleeved man smoking a cigar stump stood working on some papers; four or five people silently waited in the chairs. The man at the counter glanced up as I stepped in, looked down at my hand for my ticket, and when I showed it, nodded at the last vacant chair, and I sat down.
There was a girl beside me, hands folded on her purse. She was pleasant-looking, rather pretty; I thought she might have been a stenographer. Across the narrow little office sat a young Negro in work clothes, his wife beside him holding their little girl in her lap. And there was a man of around fifty, his face averted from the rest of us, staring out into the rain at passing pedestrians. He was expensively dressed and wore a gray Homburg hat; he could have been the vice-president of a large bank, I thought, and I wondered what his ticket had cost.
Maybe twenty minutes passed, the man behind the counter working on some papers; then a small, battered old bus pulled up at the curb outside, and I heard the hand brake set. The bus was a shabby thing, bought third- or fourth-hand and painted red and white over the old paint, the fenders lumpy from countless pounded-out dents, the tire treads worn almost smooth. On the side, in red letters, it said “Acme,” and the driver wore a leather jacket and the kind of worn cloth cap that cab drivers wear. It was precisely the sort of obscure little bus you see around there, ridden always by shabby, tired, silent people, going no one knows where.
It took nearly two hours for the little bus to work south through the traffic, toward the tip of Manhattan, and we all sat, each wrapped in his own silence and thoughts, staring out the rain-spattered windows; the little girl was asleep. Through the streaking glass beside me I watched drenched people huddled at city bus stops, and saw them rap angrily on the closed doors of buses jammed to capacity, and saw the strained, harassed faces of the drivers. At 14th Street I saw a speeding cab splash a sheet of street-dirty water on a man at the curb, and saw the man’s mouth writhe as he cursed. Often our bus stood motionless, the traffic light red, as throngs flowed out into the street from the curb, threading their way around us and the other waiting cars. I saw hundreds of faces, and not once did I see anyone smile.
I dozed; then we were on a glistening black highway somewhere on Long Island. I slept again, and awakened in darkness as we jolted off the highway onto a muddy double-rut road, and I caught a glimpse of a farmhouse, the windows dark. Then the bus slowed, lurched once, and stopped. The hand brake set, the motor died, and we were parked beside what looked like a barn.
It was a barn—the driver walked up to it, pulled the big-sliding wood door open, its wheels creaking on the rusted old trolley overhead, and stood holding it open as we filed in. Then he released it, stepping inside with us, and the big door slid closed of its own weight. The barn was damp, old, the walls no longer plumb, and it smelled of cattle; there was nothing inside on the packed-dirt floor but a bench of unpainted pine, and the driver indicated it with the beam of a flashlight. “Sit here, please,” he said quietly. “Get your tickets ready.” Then he moved down the line, punching each of our tickets, and on the floor I caught a momentary glimpse, in the shifting beam of his light, of tiny mounds of countless more round bits of cardboard, like little drifts of yellow confetti. Then he was at the door again, sliding it open just enough to pass through, and for a moment we saw him silhouetted against the night sky. “Good luck,” he said. “Just wait where you are.” He released the door; it slid closed, snipping off the wavering beam of his flashlight; and a moment later we heard the motor start and the bus lumber away in low gear.