Hunt in the Dark

by Q. Patrick

  “I understand,” I said. It was crazy that all this shouldn’t sound crazy any more. “And this man, Nikki—tell us what he’s like.”

  “Nikki? He is young and tall and strong, with blond hair. And tonight he is wearing a blue turtle-neck sweater. The sleeves are rolled up to the elbow and on his right arm there is a tattoo—”

  Her voice suddenly went. I saw her face go white and cold. She half rose from the bench. Instinctively, Iris and I rose too. Marta was looking across the tables toward the little alley which stretched from the carousel down the open wall of the restaurant to the street. At first I didn’t see what she was seeing. And then I did. And it gave me a queer, cold, constricting sensation.

  Because outside in the alley, part of that rowdy, haphazard mixture of passers-by—soldiers, stout women with candy bars, Negroes with their girls, mothers and children—strolled a man. He was a tall, blond young man who walked with an arrogant swagger. He was wearing a navy blue turtle-neck sweater and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, revealing on his strong right forearm the violet splash of tattoo-marks.

  Nikki.

  He passed the window outside. He reached a lower door. He paused. Then abruptly he pulled open the door and entered.

  He was there in the restaurant with us—

  For one excruciating moment, he hesitated by the door; then he turned his back to us and started moving through the tables in the opposite direction. He hadn’t seen Marta.

  “I knew he would find me.” Marta’s voice came in a sharp whisper. “Peter, I must go. You stay here. He mustn’t see you with me.”

  “But—!”

  “No, no, Peter. If he knows you are with me—how can you help?”

  She pushed up the collar of the pathetic black coat. Silently, before we could do anything, she glided away from the table. There was another door close to us which led out by the carousel and down another little alley toward the great ramp of the roller coaster. Marta moved toward it. The broad, swaggering back in the turtle-neck sweater was still turned to us. Marta reached the door. Her hand went out for the handle. Iris and I stood absolutely motionless. Then, suddenly, Nikki spun round. He stared straight down the restaurant—straight at Marta.

  For a second she froze. It was like a little bird and a big hulking snake. Then Marta tugged open the door and ran out. Quickly, Nikki strode back to the door by which he had entered.

  They both were lost in the crowd outside.

  Iris and I stared at each other. “Peter, we can’t let this happen. Come on.”

  Marta had told us not to follow. We didn’t give a damn about that. I put money down on the table for the beers. Iris had already started for the door. I followed. We went out and passed the carousel together.

  I saw Marta at once. She was hurrying ahead of us, a forlorn little figure in an old black coat, down the dark alley toward the roller coaster.

  There was no sign of Nikki.

  Iris and I pressed on after Marta. We hadn’t any real idea of what to do. The roar of the roller coaster and the delighted shrieks of its passengers seemed to grow exaggeratedly loud, like the distorted sound track for a movie. People were moving by us all the time. Vague figures made ominous by the shadows. And then Marta was lost once again in the crowd.

  Ahead reared the towering wall of the roller coaster. To the right we could see the little ticket booth in its circle of bright lights. We could hear the harsh voice of the barker drumming up business. A steady stream of people was trickling up, paying their dimes and choosing their places in the showily painted cars that stood there on the rails ready for action.

  “Peter, where is she?” Iris’ voice was desperate.

  Behind us, back by the restaurant, the carousel had started to play the Merry Widow again. Damn it! Didn’t it know any other tunes?

  Iris and I stood in the shadow of the giant roller coaster. The Merry Widow played on and on.

  “Nikki can’t have got her, Peter. He can’t …”

  And then we saw Marta. She was in the stream of people going up the steps to the ticket booth. I saw at once what she was trying to do. She was going to take a trip on the roller coaster. She was trying to shake Nikki off that way.

  I started forward urgently. “Come on, honey, we’re going on that darn thing with her.”

  “No, Peter.” Iris’ hand went out to my arm, holding me back. “She doesn’t want us to follow. She said so.”

  “But I’m not going to let that hulking swine…”

  “Darling, she’s shaken him off. For her sake, we mustn’t do anything stupid. Don’t you see? In the long run we’re going to be much more help to her if we keep in the background. She’ll be safe on the roller coaster. Nothing can happen there.”

  I let her restrain me reluctantly, knowing that she was apt to make more sense than I.

  As we stood there, we saw Marta reach the booth, saw her fumble in her purse—a poignant little gesture—feeling for change. She bought her ticket and moved to the bright stationary cars. She stepped into a green one at the end of the chain. Green had always been Marta’s favorite color!

  It was half-empty. She sat down in the back seat, almost out of sight from the alley, pressing her face to conceal it into the turned up collar of the dowdy old coat, folding her hands in her lap.

  The barker’s harsh voice sounded over the more distant strains of the Merry Widow. “Anyone else? Any other happy customer for the most exciting, the most sensational ride in history?”

  We saw the little chain of cars with their laughing, frivolous passengers. We saw Marta still sitting alone at the back of the green car. There was a grinding of machinery indicating that the “most thrilling, most sensational ride” was about to begin.

  “Any more for the Hurricane Ride? Any more—?”

  I couldn’t bear it any longer. Sense or nonsense, I wasn’t going to let little Marta be there alone.

  “Iris, honey, I’m going. You can stay here if you like—” I started forward through the crowd.

  “No, Peter, come back.” Iris’ voice trailed after me.

  The crowd was thick, the ticket booth seemed miles away. And, as I struggled on, I saw the little cars start slowly to jolt forward. I was too late.

  I paused. It was no use going on. I stared ahead toward the moving cars.

  It was then that it happened. Out of the crowd at the foot of the steps ahead of me, a tall broad-shouldered figure suddenly materialized. He sprang up to the booth, passed it and jumped into the seat next to Marta, just as the cars rattled past.

  And the bright lights above the cars shone down on his blue turtle neck sweater, his blond hair, his heavy arrogant profile, the splaying tattoo-marks on his bare right arm.

  Nikki!

  It had all been done at lightning speed. Obviously, Nikki had seen her on the roller coaster from the start. He had waited to jump on at the last moment when she had no means of getting off. And I had been too far away. I hadn’t had the ghost of a chance of stopping it.

  I caught a glimpse of Marta’s face when she saw him. I caught a glimpse of his face too. It was like a nightmare.

  Dimly, I realized that Iris had caught up to me, that her hand was in mine. We stood there, paralyzed, watching the little cars as they gathered speed, dwindled, and then disappeared, plunging into a dark tunnel before they climbed up, up, on the most thrilling ride on earth.

  There was nothing we could do—nothing.

  The Merry Widow was still playing. We moved away from the great wall of the roller coaster, pointlessly. But we stopped when we reached the carousel. We had to. We stopped there, with our backs to it, staring up the looming scaffolding of the Hurricane Ride—waiting.

  “Peter,” Iris’ voice came brokenly. “This is my fault. It’s all my fault. I stopped you. I…”

  “Darling, don’t say that. You did the sensible thing. How were you to know? Come on, we’ve got to get to the ticket booth, be there wh
en they come out.”

  In the distance, miles away it seemed, I heard a chorus of screams as the cars plunged down some headlong descent. And there was always the roaring and rattling of machinery. It grew louder and louder, more and more ominous.

  “They’re almost at the top of the ramp,” breathed Iris. “In a second we’ll be able to see them up there.”

  We did see them then. The little string of cars with their twinkling lights came into view around a bend, way up on the top of the scaffolding, way above our heads.

  Iris’ hand in mine was as cold as ice. I could think of nothing but Marta up there in that little green car with Nikki. Marta—

  The Merry Widow, blaring so close, was almost deafening. The cars were right above us. Then, suddenly, there was a scream. It wasn’t like the other screams that had been before, excited, titillated. It was a high, thin, solitary scream—piercing through the night air, soaring over the wheezy rhythm of the Merry Widow.

  And, as I heard it, I saw that dreadful thing happen up there in the air above us. Vaguely, I saw a dark figure topple out of one of the cars and over the edge of the ramp. I saw it, in the eerie half-darkness, hurtling down like some broken, fluttering moth—down, down, past the gaunt skeleton scaffolding, down toward the pavement.

  Iris gave a little sob. We started running forward. Other people were running too, shouting hoarsely. We reached the place where the body had fallen. We pushed through the gesticulating cluster of people. A woman with red hair was screaming; two little boys were peering awesomely, their pink balloons wabbling on spindly sticks; a Chinaman watched with slanting, unrevealing eyes. Voices sputtered like firecrackers.

  “… fell off the roller coaster … always said those things were dangerous … dead, poor little thing … Dead …”

  We saw her then. We saw Marta. She was lying sprawled there, her old black coat crumpled around her, her little arms flung upward. Marta lying there dead—undeniably, cruelly dead.

  The crowd was crushing around us. My throat was as dry as if I’d swallowed wood ash. I couldn’t look any more. I found Iris’ arm and pulled her away out of the jostling crowd.

  Behind us, the carousel was silent. The Merry Widow had stopped.

  For a moment, that nightmare end to fifteen years of memories kept my feelings under anesthesia. There was only one acidly clear thought. Marta had chosen the back seat of the last car so that she would be less conspicuous from the crowded alley. But she had walked into a trap. No one looks back on a roller coaster. No one pays any attention to screams on a roller coaster. How horribly easy it must have been for Nikki after his last minute jump onto the car, to pick up that fragile little struggling body in his bare, powerful arms and throw it over the edge of the ramp— with no one to see or care.

  “You don’t know Nikki,” Marta’s voice trailed through my memory. I knew Nikki now.

  Iris’ voice blurred dimly with that memory of Marta’s. “Peter, how shall I ever forgive myself? It’s my fault. You could have prevented—”

  “No, honey. Stop. Don’t think that way.”

  Suddenly the crowd started seething around us, running, hurrying somewhere.

  “The roller coaster cars are coming back to the starting place.

  Nikki will be there.”

  I felt her hand, cold and taut, in mine. We were moving with the crowd back toward the ticket booth of the roller coaster. Up on the brightly lit platform above the steps I saw the little gayly painted chain of cars sliding into view. I saw the patrons, still apparently oblivious of the awful thing that had happened. They spilled out onto the platform, chattering amongst themselves. With them, boldly evident with his blue sweater and blond hair, swaggered the figure of Nikki.

  The crowd from below, hot on the scent of sensation, had started in a tumultuous wave up the steps—to hear the “inside story” from eye-witnesses. Who cared about Marta’s little body lying crushed there on the sidewalk now? A short man with a bald head scurried out of the ticket booth. He made a hopeless attempt to check the incoming tide, to keep the erstwhile passengers segregated. Somewhere far off, I heard the scream of a police whistle.

  “… she fell … lost her balance and fell … she jumped off … I saw her myself … suicide … ” Snatches came across the crowd to me—snatches from “eye-witness” accounts of people who a moment before hadn’t even known what had happened, people who hadn’t seen a thing but who weren’t going to lose out on the golden chance at the spotlight.

  In that crazy beer garden, I kept my eyes glued on Nikki. The sight of that arrogant, blond young man released my damned-up emotions. They came out as anger and hatred for this swaggering small time crook who had stolen Marta’s son and murdered her in cold blood. Implacable hatred for Nikki and for that other figure, hovering like a spider behind the scene, controlling all these murderous threads—the shadowy figure of Garr. Let me get my hands on them.

  The crowd was quite out of control. And, as I watched, I saw what Nikki was doing. Very deftly, he was letting the struggling mass of people push him toward the steps which led down to the alley.

  It was obvious that in this initial period of utter confusion no one had come around to realize that he was the man who had jumped into the seat next to Marta. No one as yet connected him, more than anyone else, with the “accident.” A particularly violent spasm in the throng catapulted him halfway down the steps. In a moment, long before they got around to thinking about him, he’d be out of danger, out in the whirling crowd where he could slip away unseen.

  Iris was watching him too. Suddenly, in a small, thin voice she said, “Remember, Peter, we promised Marta. We’re not going to the police—not until we’ve made them all pay for this, Nikki, the woman with the purple hat, Garr—all of them.”

  As she spoke, I saw a policeman battling his way stubbornly toward the center of the throng. My feet itched to run to him, to turn Nikki over to him and send him on his way to the electric chair where he belonged. But I had the same idea as Iris then. There was only one real way to make our peace with Marta’s ghost, now that a tragic mistake in judgment had put her beyond personal aid.

  Nikki was here in Coney Island tonight to make contact with the unknown woman in the purple hat. That was the main thing. He had killed Marta ruthlessly—because she had been a menace to that meeting’s success. And that meeting involved not only the life and death of Karl Pauly but also some vast, ominous scheme for destruction.

  Marta had asked us to do our best to see that the plot was foiled.

  With Karl kidnapped, with Marta dead, Nikki would feel safe. He had no idea that we knew of the meeting; he hadn’t seen us with Marta at the restaurant; he did not even know we existed. Let him go; let him think he was safe; let him keep his appointment at nine o’clock in Potter’s Waxworks Museum.

  And we would be there; we would track the woman with the purple hat until she led us to Garr; when the time was ripe, we would call Pine 3-2323 and send their plots spinning to hell; we would make them realize they couldn’t murder our Marta and get away with it.

  It was a risk, a wild risk. So what? Marta hadn’t hesitated to take it. Pitiful, heroic little Marta … !

  We were deliberately letting her murderer escape. But the time would come when he’d wish he’d been clamped into jail right away. Yes, that time would come if the Duluths had anything to say about it.

  Pine 3-2323—Leslie.

  Nikki had maneuvered himself down the last step now. I saw him mingle into the churning throng, pushing negligently past the policeman. In a few seconds, his tall, blond-headed figure had disappeared into the shadowy obscurity of the fringes of the crowd.

  I glanced at Iris. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We know where to find him at nine o’clock.”

  There was the grim light of battle in Iris’ eyes. She looked very, very beautiful and very determined. “Then you are game, Peter?”

  “What do you think? They’re all of them going
to be sorry for this—damn sorry if it’s the last thing I do.”

  “That,” said Iris, “makes two of us.”

  The crowd was still pushing and jostling around us. There were three policemen now as the center of attraction. Over hats and hair and bald heads, I caught a glimpse of white-coated figures; I caught a glimpse of a stretcher too—a stretcher for Marta. Ghosts of those fear-tormented eyes, that little worn face which had once been so radiant, haunted me. I didn’t need to look any more. I was angry enough as it was.

  I glanced at my watch. Twenty minutes of nine. I knew where the Waxworks Museum was. Near the subway station. I’d noticed it when we arrived.

  Iris slipped her hand through my arm. “To Potter’s Waxworks Museum,” she said.

  So that’s the way it happened. Because Aloma, our very vivid cook, had commandeered our apartment for the evening to celebrate the mysterious return of an unexpected husband “after a long absence up-state,” we had come to Coney Island. Most people don’t let their cooks evacuate them; we realized that. But Aloma was different, she was as essential to us as Mariguana to a moocher—and now our jaunt had led to—this! That’s what you get for having a cook with personality!

  We threaded out of the alley into a main, glittering thoroughfare. Coney Island swallows up its crimes as it swallows up everything else. Here all was gaiety and unconcern. Cheerful screams came from little cars whirling in a mad circle. Explosions rattled from a rifle range. Marta, her amazing story, and her tragic death, might all have been whiskey dreams in a bar.

  As we walked, I reviewed our data. It was miserably thin. The woman in the purple hat had something of vital importance for Garr. She was going to hum the first bar of The Blue Danube to Nikki in Waxworks Museum. He was going to give her instructions for her meeting with the next agent.

  We crossed the hysterically active thoroughfare and headed in the direction of the subway station, passing gaudy, frowsy little souvenir stores.

  Suddenly Iris said, “Peter, what are we going to do? Watch the meeting? Follow the woman with the purple hat to her next meeting—go on till we find Garr?”