“That’s the way goes,” I told him. it He drove along in silence for a while.
“Your place next block, isn’t it?” he asked.
I told him that it was.
He pulled up in front of the apartment and I got out.
“Some night,” he said, “how about a coon hunt with me? Start six o’clock or so.’
“That would be fine,” I said.
“The name is Larry Higgins. You’ll find me in the phone book. Call me any time.”
I told him that I would.
I climbed the stairs, and in front of my door someone had replaced the semicircle that had been cut out of the carpeting. I almost didn’t notice it because the light bulb in the ceiling was dimmer, if possible, than it had been before.
I almost stepped into the semicircle before I saw the carpet had been mended. I wasn’t thinking about the carpeting. There was too much else for a man to think about.
I stopped at the very edge of it and stood there stiffly, as a man may stand who toes a dangerous deadline. And the funny thing about it was that it was not new carpeting, but the same old worn, dirty carpeting as all the rest of it.
Was it possible, I wondered, that the caretaker could have found, hidden in some cranny, the very piece that had been cut out of the carpeting?
I got down on my knees to have a look at it and there was no sign at all that the carpet had been cut. It was as if a man had only imagined that the carpet had been cut. There was no sign of sewing and there weren’t any seams.
I ran my hand over the area where the semicircle once had been and it was carpeting. It wasn’t any phony paper spread across a trap. I felt the texture of it and the yielding thickness of it, and there was no doubt at all that it was honest fabric.
And yet I was leery of it. It had almost fooled me once and I was not inclined to let it fool me once again. I stayed there, kneeling in the hall, and above me and behind me I heard the tiny, gnatlike singing of the light bulb in the ceiling.
Slowly I got to my feet and found the key and leaned across that space of carpeting to unlock the door. Anyone who saw me would have thought that I was crazy—standing just off-center of the hall and leaning across all that space to get the door unlocked.
The lock snicked back and the door came open and I leaped across the space of replaced carpeting, never touching it, and was inside the room.
I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it as I turned on the light.
And the room was there, waiting for me as it always waited, a place that spelled security and comfort, the place that was my home.
But a place, I reminded myself, that would continue to be my home for somewhat less than another ninety days.
And after that? I wondered. What would happen then, not only to myself, but to all those other people? What would happen to the city?
“We Deal in Everything,” the card had said. Like the old junk dealer who bought anything at all—bottles, bones, rags, anything you had. But the junk dealer had been an honest buyer. He had bought for profit. And what were these people buying for? Why was Fletcher Atwood buying? Not for profit, certainly, when he paid more than a business might be worth and then didn’t even use it.
I took off my coat and threw it in a chair. I threw my hat on top of it. At the desk I dug out the phone directory and turned the pages to the Atwoods. There were a lot of them, but no Fletcher Atwood. There wasn’t any Atwood, even, who had an F initial.
So I dialed information.
She had a look then told me, in her singsong voice: “We have no such party listed.”
I hung up the phone and wondered what to do.
Here was an emergency that cried aloud for action, and how did one get action? And if you got the action, what would the action be? What do you do, what can you do, if someone buys a city?
And, first of all, how would you explain it so someone would believe you?
I ran through the list of names and none of them was hopeful. There was the Old Man, of course, and he was the one I should spill my guts to, if for no other reason than that I worked for him. But if I should even hint at what was happening, he probably would fire me as a rank incompetent.
There were the mayor and the police chief or possibly some judicial officer, like the county prosecutor or the attorney general, but if I even breathed it to any one of them, I would either get a quick brush-off as another crackpot or find myself locked up.
There was always, I told myself, Senator Roger Hill. Rog just might listen to me.
I put out my hand to pick up the phone, then pulled it back again.
When I got through to Washington, what exactly was it that I had to tell him?
I reviewed it in my mind: “Look, Rog, someone is trying to buy up the city. I broke into an office and I found the papers and there was this rack of clothes and a shoe box full of dolls and a big hole in the wall . . .”
It was too ridiculous to even think about, too fantastic to hope that anyone would take it seriously. If someone had tried to tell me that sort of story, I would have figured he was some kind of nut or other.
Before I went to anyone, I had to get more evidence. I had to nail it down. I had to be able to show who and how and why and I had to do it fast. There was a place to start and that was Fletcher Atwood. Wherever he might be, he was the man to find. I knew two solid things about him. He had no telephone and years ago he’d bought the Belmont place out on Timber Lane. There was some question, of course, that he had ever lived there, but it would be a place to start. Even if Atwood were not there, even if he never had been there, it was possible one would find something in the house that might be a help in picking up his trail.
My watch said that it was a quarter of seven and I had to pick up Joy and there was no time to change. I’d just put on aclean shirt and pick out a different tie and Joy wouldn’t mind. After all, we weren’t out to paint the town; we were only going out to eat.
I went into the bedroom without bothering to turn on the light, for the lamp in the living room threw a shaft of light clear across the bedroom. I pulled open a dresser drawer and got a shirt. I stripped off the plastic cover that the laundry had put on and pulled out the cardboard. I shook out the shirt and threw it across a chair back, then went to the closet to pick out a tie. And even as I was pulling the knob on the closet door, I realized that I’d not turned on the light and that I’d need to turn it on before I could pick out a tie.
I had the door open, perhaps a foot or so, and as I thought about the light I shut the door again, I don’t know why I did it, I could just as easily have left it open while I crossed the room to trip up the light switch.
And in that instant of opening and closing the door, which took less time than it takes to tell it, I saw or sensed or heardI don’t know which it was—the movement of some sort of life inside the darkness of the closet. As if the clothes had Come to life and had been waiting for me; as if the ties, hanging on their racks, had metamorphosed into snakes, hanging motionless, as ties, until it came the time to strike.
Had I waited for the sensing or the seeing or the hearing of that motion in the closet to slam shut the door, it might have been too late. But the motion in the closet had not a thing to do with my shutting of the door. I had already started to push it shut again before there was any motion—or, at least, before I had become aware of it.