“Yeah, sure. I guess so. Say — speakin’ of phones, I guess I might as well call this girl. Where’s it at?”
“Back there,” the druggist said, pointing.
“O.K., thanks.” The Security man pushed through the space between the two counters. He stood looking sourly down at the stand of phone books. He pulled the top sheet out of the note dispenser, looked at it for impressions, and saw none that made any sense. He slipped the paper into his pocket, looked at the books again — six of them, counting the Manhattan Classified-and shook his head. Then he stepped into the booth, dropped coins into the slot, and dialed Rogers’ office.
3
The clock on Rogers’ desk read a few minutes past nine. Rogers still sat behind his desk, and Finchley waited in the chair beside it.
Rogers felt tired. He’d been up some twenty-two hours, and the fact that Finchley and their man had done the same was no help.
It’s piled up on me, he thought. Day after day without enough sleep, and tension all the time. I should have been in bed hours ago.
But Finchley had gone through it all with him. And their man must feel infinitely worse. And what was a little lost sleep compared to what the man had lost? Still Rogers was feeling sick to his stomach. His eyes were burning. His scalp was numb with exhaustion, and he had a vile taste in his mouth. He wondered if his sticking to the job was made any the less because Finchley was younger and could take it, or because the metal-faced man was still following his ghost up and down the city streets. He decided it was.
“I hate to ask you to stay here so late, Finch,” he said.
Finchley shrugged. “That’s the job, isn’t it?” He picked up the piece of Danish pastry left over from supper, swirled his cold half-container of old coffee, and took a swallow. “I’ve got to admit I hope this doesn’t happen every night. But I can’t understand what he’s doing.”
Rogers toyed with the blotter on his desk, pushing it back and forth with his fingertips. “We ought to be getting another report fairly soon. Maybe he’s done something.”
“Maybe he’s going to sleep in the park.”
“The city police’ll pick him up if he tries to.”
“What about that? What’s the procedure if he’s arrested for a civil crime?”
“One more complication.” Rogers shook his head hopelessly, drugged by fatigue. “I briefed the Commissioner’s office and we’ve got cooperation on the administrative level. It’d be a poor move to issue a general order for all patrolmen to leave him alone. Somebody’d let it slip. The theory is that beat patrolmen will call in to their precinct houses if they spot a metal-headed man. The precinct captains have instructions that he’s to be left alone. But if a patrolman arrests him for vagrancy before he calls in, then all kinds of things could go wrong. It’ll be straightened out in a hurry, but it might get on record somewhere. Then, a few years from now, somebody doing a book or something might come across the record, and that’ll be that. We can’t keep the media bottled up forever.” Rogers sighed. “I only hope it’d be a few years from now.” He looked down at his desktop. “It’s a mess. This world was never organized to include a faceless man.”
It’s true, he thought. Just by being alive, he’s made me stumble from the very start. Look at us all — Security, the whole ANG-handcuffed because we couldn’t simply shoot him and get him out of the way. Going around in circles, trying to find an answer. And he hasn’t yet done anything.
For some reason, Rogers found himself thinking, “Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.” Emerson. Rogers grunted.
The telephone rang.
He picked it up and listened.
“All right,” he said finally, “get back to your partner. I’ll have somebody intercept and pick that paper up from you. Call in when your man gets to wherever he’s going.” He hung up. “He’s made a move,” he told Finchley. “He looked up an address in a phone book.”
“Any idea of whose?”
“I’m not sure…” Rogers flipped the Martino dossier open.
“The girl,” Finchley said. “The one he used to know.”
“Maybe. If he thinks they’re still close enough for her to do him any good. Why did he have to look up the address? It’s the same one as the one on the wedding announcement.”
“It’s been fifteen years, Shawn. He could have forgotten it.”
“He may never have known it.” And there was no guarantee the man was going to the address he’d copied. He might have looked it up for some future purpose. They couldn’t take chances. Everything had to be covered. The phone books had to be examined. There might be some mark — some oily fingerprint, wet with perspiration, some pencil mark; some trace -
Six New York City phone books. God knew how many pages, each to be checked.
“Finch, your people’ll have to furnish a current set of New York phone books. Worn ones. We’re going to switch ’em for a set I want to run through your labs. Got to have ’em right away.”
Finchley nodded and reached for the phone.
4
A travel-worn young man, lugging a scuffed cardboard suitcase, came into the drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Seventh Street.
“Like to make a phone call,” he said to the druggist. “Where is it?”
The druggist told him, and the young man just managed to get his suitcase through the narrow gap between the counters. He bumped it about clumsily for a few moments, and shifted it back and forth, annoying the druggist at his cash register, while he made his call.
When he left, the druggist’s original books went to the FBI laboratory, where the top sheet of notepaper had already checked out useless.
The Manhattan book was run through first, on the assumption that it was the likeliest. The technicians did not work page by page. They had a book with all Manhattan phones listed by subscribers’ addresses, and they laid out a square search pattern centering on the drugstore. A machine arranged the nearest subscribers’ addresses in alphabetical order, and then the technicians began to work on the book taken from the store, using their new list to skip whole columns of numbers that had a low probability under this system.
Rogers hadn’t supplied the technicians with Edith Chester’s name. It would have done no good. By the time the results came through, the man would have reached there. If that was where he was going. Furthermore, there was no proof he’d only looked up one address. Eventually, all six books would be checked out, and probably show nothing. But the check would be made, and no one knew how many others afterward.
Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.
5
Edith Chester Hayes lived in the back apartment on the second floor of a house off Sullivan Street. The soot of eighty years had settled into every brick, and industrial fumes had gnawed the paint into flakes. A narrow doorway opened into the street, and a dim yellow bulb glowed in the foyer. Battered garbage cans stood in front of the ground floor windows.
Rogers looked out at it from his seat in an FBI special car. “You always expect them to have torn these places down,” he said.
“They do,” Finchley answered. “But other houses grow older faster than these get condemned.” His voice was distracted as though he were thinking of something else, and thinking of it so intently that he barely heard what he was saying. He hunched in his corner of the back seat, his hand slowly rubbing the side of his face. He paid no attention when one of the ANG team that had followed the man here came up to the car and leaned in Rogers’ window.
“He’s upstairs, on the second floor landing, Mr. Rogers,” the man said. “He’s been there for fifteen minutes, ever since we got here. He hasn’t knocked on any door. He’s just up there, leaning against a wall.”