She looked like a girl of seventeen, as sweet and innocent as a beautiful woman could be at that age.
But one thing had not changed. Behind those flashing eyes was a mind packed with the lust and chicanery of thirty-eight years of begging and sixty-one years of life.
She knew. She stopped ripping at her clothes and stared at Doughface Jack. “I’ve heard lots about you,” she stated slowly. “I’ve heard them talking here in the park and on the streets. They’re afraid of you. The police can’t stop you. All you have to do is look at a man and that man can no longer stand. Yes, Jack, I have heard a great deal.”
He was too happy to be near her to care too much what she said. He was glowing with companionship.
“Yeah,” he said disinterestedly.
“They’ve tried to shoot you and club you but they can’t. All you have to do is look upon them and they drop. . . . Jack.”
“Yeah?”
“Listen, Jack, has it occurred to you that you could have anything you want in the whole world?”
“Yeah, but what’s the use . . . ?”
“Use?” she cried with an exultant laugh. “Use? Why, you precious fool, can’t you see it?”
“What?” said Doughface.
Her voice was sibilant and lovely. “It would be easy,” she said, “for you to rule the world.”
He wasn’t paying much attention in that instant. A rumble was in the air and whistles shrilled from afar. He stepped swiftly to a crosswalk and stared at the street a block away. An Army camion was there and men were leaping out of it, rifles with bayonets fixed gleaming in the light. A machine-gun crew was hurriedly slamming their weapon on its tripod.
“Geez,” said Doughface, terrified, “we got to get out of here! It’s the Army!”
Chapter Nine
DOUGHFACE JACK was thoroughly frightened. He snatched at the girl’s arm and strove to head her around the fountain and across the park. She, too, was infected by his terror and followed blindly.
He brought up short. He had seen bright buttons gleaming across the park and he heard a camion roaring there as it surged to the curb to discharge its men in olive drab.
Doughface took a dozen false steps north and again he heard camions. He whirled in a panic and again skirted the fountain striving to get out of the trap to the south. But there was no exit there. A hundred men in company front were marching across the lawn straight toward them.
Doughface felt sick. He could feel a steel-shod rifle butt clanging down upon his silver skull. His mind, lacking any solution, was, for the moment, completely blank.
The girl shook herself as though she had been drugged and was just coming to life. She took check on the situation. Doughface Jack was patently too much in a funk to meet these soldiers, and the soldiers, just as clearly, were there to shoot Doughface on sight.
But they had only guessed that their quarry was here. Outposts had reported no man passing them. Doughface must then be somewhere within an area a block square and every inch of that area would be covered.
She could save herself. It would be easy to scream for help and thereby avert death by bullets. And life, at last, tasted very sweet to her.
But she didn’t. She grabbed Doughface by the shoulder and yanked him into the shrubbery. Against his amazed face she slapped handfuls of dirt. She roughed up his clothes. She bashed in his hat. Then, on hands and knees, she went back to the bench where she had so lately sat and located the dark glasses, the tin cup, a few nickels and some pencils.
She put the glasses on Doughface.
“Whatcha doin’?” he complained, shivering as he listened to the marching feet which drew nearer and nearer.
She broke a stick from a shrub and pushed it into his hand. “Haven’t you ever panhandled?”
“Yeah,” said Doughface, “but I can’t figure these so’diers would make such hot suckers.”
“Be still and follow me.”
She crawled back to the gravel, Doughface after her. Suddenly she shoved him to earth. “Don’t move. Just moan!”
Doughface got it. He drew himself up in a knot and moaned piteously.
“HELP! HELP!” screamed the girl. “IT'S HIM! IT'S THE MAN WITH THE EVIL EYE!”
Doughface thought for an instant that he was betrayed but when he glanced up and saw the innocence of her beautiful face his doubts were vanquished.
“help!” screamed the girl. “There he goes! There he goes! Oooooh, Father! Father, speak to me! Oooooh, he’s dead. I know he’s dead!”
Whistles shrilled in the darkness. Boots thudded over the lawns. A young lieutenant, his face white with strain, charged up, automatic in hand to behold a beautiful woman weeping.
“Oooooooh, I know he’s dead,” she moaned. “I know it! He killed him, he killed him!”
“Quick, lady, which way did he go?”
“Oh, he’s dead, I know he’s dead!”
Doughface pushed out a moan and drew up in a tighter knot. The “I am Blind” sign was still on the gravel. The tin cup and pencils and dark glasses told their story well as did the scattered coins which gleamed in the lamplight.
“Quick, damn it,” said the jittery lieutenant, “which way did he go?”
“Oh, my father, my poor, poor father,” moaned the girl.
“For god’s sake!” cried the lieutenant, “are you going to let that murderer get away? Which way did he go?”
The girl pointed with a trembling hand. “That way,” she choked. “That way. The beast! To strike down a poor old blind beggar . . .”
“We’ll get ’im!” yelped the lieutenant. His whistle shrilled and he signaled with his arm for his men to come up on the double.
The other sides of the square were closing in.
“He’s over there in those shrubs!” cried the lieutenant.
“Clear the way beyond!” bellowed a captain.
“Machine guns!” roared a major. “Rake that shrubbery!”
Machine gunners began to trip their chattering guns. Bullets whipped and sang a deadly chorus through the shrubs.
“Company A,” roared the major. “Into line!”
“Company advance!” cried the captain. “charge!”
They charged the cover and bayonets flicked and stabbed through wood and earth.
“Nothin’ here!” cried a sergeant.
“He’s got to be there!” yelped the lieutenant. “That old man and girl . . .” He pointed and then stopped, looking foolish.
The old man and the girl were gone.
And they were running with all their might and the shrubs took long strips from their clothing. They were going south back toward Times Square.
“Y’all right?” panted Doughface.
“Never felt this good in my whole life,” said the girl. “If we can get into the thick of it those soldiers won’t dare shoot. Keep hold of that cup and those glasses!”
“I got ’em,” puffed Doughface.
A sentry loomed before them. He saw them and started to raise his rifle and shout at the same time. The sentry went down in a heap.
The driver of a camion saw them coming a hundred feet away and he started to shout. But Doughface had seen him first. He slumped over his wheel, arms loose and dangling.
A taxi was cruising past. The girl was startled by it. She had not thought that a taxi looked this way.
And Doughface stopped it, careful not to knock the driver out. Doughface thrust the girl into the machine.
“Drive,” said Doughface.
“Where?” said the startled cabbie.
“Fifth Avenue,” stated the girl. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”
The cabbie gave them a sour look. He could judge people very well by the kind of clothes they wore. “Y’got any money, pal?”
“Sure,” said Doughface, reaching into his pocket.
But he didn’t have any money.
“I thought so,” said the cabbie. “Gwan, scram, y’dead beats!”
Doughface had no ti
me to think about it. The cabbie went sideways into a pile under his meter. Doughface was aghast.
“Can you drive?” he asked the girl.
“Of course not. Can you?”
“I th-think so,” said Doughface. He popped out and then into the driver’s seat. He had seen it done often enough. He crashed the gears into reverse, saw that he was wrong and ground them brutally into high.
His luck held. The car started ahead and Doughface sat up straight and gripped the wheel hard enough to crush the wood.
The girl looked back anxiously. Some soldiers were coming and whether or not they would connect the cab with Doughface was a problem. But Doughface had his hands full already without further worry. The taxi was lurching like a bucking bronc.
They came to a crossing and the light was against them. Doughface was a little slow on finding the brake and through they went. He looked around hopelessly, thinking certain a policeman would see. But none did.
His luck was still holding.
He made it into Fifth Avenue, nursing the throttle to discover what happened where. “Geez,” he called back, “this is the nuts.”
“Don’t go too fast,” begged the girl. “This is the first time I was ever in a car.”
“Don’t worry none,” said Doughface, exuberant in his control of power. “I’ll . . .”
But he didn’t. A yellow and green bus stopped squarely before him and he missed the brake with his foot. He had barely time to twist the wheel violently to the right. Belatedly he found the brake and tromped on it, coming to an abrupt stop almost up against a parked limousine.
He was bewildered. He knew he couldn’t get out of this without making a scene and if he gathered a crowd that would be a tip-off to the soldiers twenty blocks behind.
For a moment he strove to back up and get out. But it was too much in his excited state.
“We gotta beat it,” said Doughface, leaping out.
The girl was by his side as he raced to the walk. Already an inquiring officer was walking slowly over toward the curiously parked taxi.
Doughface had the glasses on again and the tin cup in his hand. The girl led him.
It gave her a sense of power she had never known to be finding the way for another human being. Always it had been herself that had been led. It was wonderful not to have to stop uncertainly to search for a curb, poking about with a stick, hoping that somebody would take pity. . . .
Chapter Ten
DOCTOR PELLMAN paced nervously across the carpet of the police commissioner’s office. A National Guard colonel, New York’s police chief, the commissioner and two inspectors sat and watched him.
Each time Pellman would stop, all the men would sit up straight and open their ears expectantly. But always Pellman resumed his pacing, more worried than before.
At last he stopped, tall with anger, before the colonel. “If you had only waited ten minutes,” he said, shaking his finger under the colonel’s nose, “we would now have all this straightened out!”
The colonel looked at his shiny boots and his face got cordovan. “I had my orders!”
“Yes, you had your orders,” said Pellman, “but damn it, man, you also had my wire.” He shook his head hopelessly. “If you’d only thought.”
“Soldiers don’t think,” said the colonel gruffly. “They obey orders.”
Pellman turned to the police commissioner and his young face was strained. “You’re responsible for this too, remember,” said Pellman. “If you hadn’t let that broadcast order go out, Doughface Jack wouldn’t be so much on the qui vive.”
“The what?” blinked the commissioner, removing the long cigar from his orator’s mouth.
“At every turn he expects to be nabbed,” said Pellman. “He’s scared to death. He’s no killer. He’s just a poor chap that was unlucky enough to be the object of a miracle. He probably didn’t even know he could kill people just by looking at them until he met those thick-headed fools that grilled him.”
“They paid for it,” growled the commissioner.
“Sure, half of them are dead. But what they did is being paid for by others—good United States citizens. Don’t forget that,” stated Pellman.
“Sure,” ventured an inspector, “they’re payin’ all right. About a third of these people he’s looked at are dead by this time and the other two thirds are dying. I say he ought to go to the chair.”
“You say it,” said Pellman. “Then why the devil don’t you go out and get him?”
The inspector squirmed. “I . . . er . . .”
“I know,” said Pellman, striding up and down the rug again. “I’m responsible for this. It’s up to me. I put his brain together and therefore I’m the killer. . . .”
“Ah, nuts!” said the commissioner. “You didn’t have anything to do with it. How’d you know what was going to happen?”
Pellman paid no heed. He gave very little evidence of being what he was—a small-town doctor. He showed none of his decades of wisdom in that youthful face of his. But he had been room companion to death so often that people alive or dead could not impress him very much.
“Turn the militia on him!” growled Pellman to himself. “And now what will he do? He won’t show his face in New York. He’ll try to leave the city and head for the country and then we’ve pushed him beyond any chance of getting him at all. There’ll be no tracing him just as soon as he gets beyond the radius where he has been publicized. And the stupid papers. Running his face on every front page of every edition. You’d think they’d be able to realize something once in a while. Of course when a man calls him by that silly name, Doughface gets mad and it begins all over again. But he can walk down an avenue through an entire crowd and, unless he’s molested, nobody hears a thing about it.”
“Professor Beardsley is still waiting,” said a clerk through the inter-office phone.
“Let him wait!” barked Pellman savagely. “The stupid fool. He ought . . .”
“Sssh,” said the commissioner. “That phone worked both ways.”
“What if it did? Gentlemen, it’s not often I get mad and I wouldn’t be angry now if it weren’t for that cowardly fool out there. I don’t dare meet him. I’d kill him. All he had to do was to tell Doughface that everything was all right and Doughface would have allowed himself to be confined in some country estate with perfect happiness.”
“Huh,” said the colonel. “I’m not worried about Doughface Jack’s happiness. He’s done for two of my men, remember?”
“What if he has?” said Pellman. “Was it his fault?”
“His fault or not,” said the commissioner, “he’ll swing, I’m afraid. Murder, Doctor Pellman, is, after all, murder. And whether it is done with the eyes, a knife or a gun, it is still murder.”
“And you’ll use more force,” said Pellman in disgust. “I . . .”
The phone jangled and the commissioner grabbed for it. The man at the other end was shouting so loudly that Pellman could hear it halfway across the room.
“I tella you, I’ma Grik. I’ma gooda Grik. But he come inna here, he knocka me down, he taka da clothes, he poota da rope ona me and thissa gal, she go widda heem. He feexa me right. He makka me so small I slide outa da rope.”
“Did you hear where they were going?” demanded the commissioner.
“Sure. Why you think I call? They go to da train. They go to da Washington and taka da country. They ona way righta now. You gotta do asomething. Me gooda da Grik. I losa . . .”
The commissioner banged the phone on the hooks. “They’re heading for the station. That’ll be Pennsylvania. Come on!”
Chapter Eleven
TRYING to appear indifferent, Doughface Jack and Rita entered the Pennsylvania Station. They wore street clothes at Rita’s express command, and they carried luggage which had been growing heavier and heavier block by block. Suntan powder helped mask Jack’s identity. Redcaps assaulted them and wrested the bags away.
Doughface was upset. “How we gonna pay?”
he whispered for the hundredth consecutive time.
“Never mind,” said Rita with a mysterious smile.
He was not at ease in this expansive place. The ceiling was too high and the other walls too far away and the crowd which milled consisted of far too many. The uniformed redcaps and trainmen and guards gave him an uneasy chill. It was all right for Rita to be so cool about all this. She hadn’t done anything and she wouldn’t be shot on sight or burned later.
He sidled up to the ticket window, the fashionable black hat well down over his face. “Gimme,” he said nervously, “two tickets to Washington, DC.”
The clerk nodded and began to pull out green slips.
“Drawing room,” whispered Rita.
“Huh? Oh—yeah—drawing room, mister.”
The agent reached for his phone and checked for a reservation. There was one and he began to prepare the slips, from time to time looking expectantly at Doughface for the money.
Doughface felt a wad of bills thrust into his hand. He blinked at them and then shoved them through the wicket. After the tickets and change had been given back to him, he pulled Rita aside.
“Whereja get it?”
“Now, Jack, don’t be cross.”
“Whereja get it?” he repeated roughly.
But she smiled at him and he melted on the instant. “A man with a diamond stick pin had it in his pocket,” said Rita winningly. “He didn’t need all that money anyway and, besides, I put the wallet back.”
“The wallet . . . why . . . Say, what . . . ?”
“You don’t think a beggar, and a blind beggar at that, wouldn’t learn to take advantage of New York crowds, do you?” challenged Rita.
Remembrance came as a shock to him. Here was a glamorous woman in expensive blue sports clothes—a woman who had so lately worn a sign which said, “I am Blind.”
She didn’t let him think about it. “Let’s get aboard right away before something happens.”
He followed her and the redcaps followed him and they hurried toward the gates.
Doughface Jack didn’t recognize Pellman until the doctor stood squarely before him, seemingly from nowhere.
The Scifi & Fantasy Collection Page 62
