Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  I unlocked one of the double glass doors that let into the basement and went in. All the lights were out. It would be better to leave them out and not bring Sale in asking questions.

  With my hand moving along the wall to guide me, I went down the basement corridor to the elevator, the least obtrusive way to get to the fourth floor. I unlocked the elevator door and pushed the button. It clanked once and started down towards the basement. While I was waiting, I noticed that there was a light under a door on the other side of the corridor.

  I knew the door. It opened onto a concrete stair leading down into the steam-tunnels which branched all over the campus like arteries in a body, carrying steam from the university powerhouse to heat the buildings. One of the janitors must have left the light on. I crossed the hall and unlocked the door to turn out the light, but I couldn’t find the switch. I left the door open so a janitor would see it in the morning.

  The elevator was waiting and I got in and went up to the fourth floor. All the lights were out but the door of the Dictionary office was still open. I had the air-raid warden’s flashlight, and I switched it on and entered the office, closing the door behind me.

  The making of a historical dictionary is a long process. For five years Alec had been co-editor of the Middle English Dictionary, with a dozen people working under him. One thing his death meant was that the Dictionary would have to find a new editor. I had never had anything to do with the Dictionary directly, but Alec had given me a general idea of it.

  It was intended to put in print for the first time, in ten handy volumes weighing about fifteen pounds each, all the meanings of all the words written in English between the death of William the Conqueror and the time of Caxton, the first English printer. This meant that the editors and sub-editors and infra-editors had to read all the books and manuscripts remaining from four hundred years of English writing. They had to keep a file of every word read and examples of every use of every word. That is the first half of the process of making a historical dictionary.

  The second half is the actual writing of the dictionary, listing every meaning of every word and at least one example of each meaning.

  Since the reading in the Midwestern Dictionary office had been going on for a mere seven years, and not more than a dozen people spent only six or seven hours a day reading, the first half of the process was not yet complete. But there was already a roomful of tall steel filing cabinets filled with examples of the uses of Middle English words filed in alphabetical order.

  I went into this inner room to look up ‘taillour.’ My throat was constricted with excitement. For the first and last time in my life, I knew how philologists must feel when they’re on the track of an old word used in a new way.

  If the word meant anything, it could mean that Alec had hidden his evidence against Schneider in the Dictionary office, filed under ‘taillour.’ A philologist like Alec would think of something like that.

  But Schneider was a philologist, too. I remembered with a tremor of misgiving that I had given the word away in front of him. Perhaps he had already been here.

  I flashed my torch on the black cabinets standing along the walls like coffins on end. None of their doors was open. I swung the light along the letters of the alphabet which were painted on the cabinets in white. A had two cabinets because so many words begin with A. B had one. I found the white T on the door of a cabinet and opened it. The cardboard boxes on the shelves looked undisturbed.

  I pulled out the first box on the top shelf and put it on the table and removed the lid. Turning the light on the stacked cards filed upright in the box, I found the tab marked ‘Taillour.’ I put the torch on the table shining towards me but it rolled and I fixed it in place with a heavy horseshoe paperweight. Then I pulled out the cards behind the tab. The thing I was looking for dropped out from among them and rolled on the table.

  It was a tiny oilskin envelope rolled into a cylinder no bigger than a .22 shell and tied with tape. I tore off the tape and unrolled and opened the envelope. It contained a closely folded sheet of very thin paper. I unfolded the paper and saw at a glance what it was: I had seen it the week before: the schedule of the new A S T Program.

  Schneider could explain the copy as an indiscretion, I thought, but he’ll have a hard time explaining the trimmings. Maybe I’ve got him.

  I heard a faint sound of friction against the composition floor of the outer office and reached for my light to douse it. Before my hand touched it, the lights flashed on over my head and I straightened up blinking. Dr. Schneider dropped his left hand from the light switch beside the door, stepped forward a pace, and closed the heavy door behind him without turning.

  His right hand stayed where it was at chest level, holding a Lüger pointed at me like a long thin finger with an empty, questioning tip.

  I tried to palm the yellow envelope and the paper but he said, “Put it down, Dr. Branch. Evidently you have found what I was looking for. I was about to examine the T file when the noise of the elevator disturbed me.”

  “Yes,” I said, putting it down, “you mingle philology with homicide and espionage, don’t you?” I hoped the light would bring Sale upstairs if I could stall the Lüger long enough. I looked at the windows. All the blinds were drawn. I could have used the ceiling lights myself.

  “I am not a spy, Dr. Branch. Nor am I a homicide.”

  “Nor is this anything but a game of cops and robbers.”

  “This is not a game, sir. I refuse to allow my enemies to persecute me. You are forcing me to inflict death upon you in order to protect my personal honor.”

  It sounded like the kind of nonsense a man talks when final disillusion has deprived words of all meaning for him, but his gun was as steady as part of the building. Yet he sounded faintly regretful, like a mosquito-lover who has to kill a mosquito.

  To prolong the conversation I said, “Your personal honor seems to be extraordinarily flexible. Have you thought of offering it to the government as a substitute for rubber?”

  “I have heard more dignified last words, Dr. Branch. I fear that your nature is essentially trivial. Your imagination seems unable to embrace the fact that I am on the point of shooting you.” His face and eyes and voice were very weary, as if he had lived past the love of life and the fear of death.

  I hadn’t. He was standing nearly ten feet away from me, but I felt the cold iron of his gun in the pit of my stomach.

  Tell him to give it to the W.P.B., one part of my brain piped in hysterical glee, and another part said calmly, You’ve got twenty-five years on him. If you don’t move now, you’ll never move again.

  “You can’t mean it, sir,” I babbled. “Don’t kill me, sir, don’t kill me. I’m sick.” I rolled up my eyes and gasped, “I feel faint.”

  I fell to the floor hard and he took three steps towards me and I rolled under the table onto my hands and knees. He shot and splintered a leg of the table in front of my face. I dived for his legs with chips in my eyes and he shot again and the bullet tugged at the padding in the left shoulder of my coat.

  I got his legs and he went over backwards. The gun flew out of his hand and his head smacked very pleasingly against the doorjamb. I picked up the gun and stood over him. He didn’t stir.

  I examined the Lüger and saw that it was empty except for the two used shells, and looked around for another weapon. There was the gilded horseshoe paperweight on the table. I picked it up and hefted it. It would do. I put the gun on the table and, with the horseshoe in my right hand in case he was shamming, kneeled down to examine him.

  He was breathing stertorously and the whites of his eyes showed. I touched one eyeball with my finger. He wasn’t shamming and I put the horseshoe down.

  I left Schneider as he was and went down the central stairs to get the policeman with the broken nose. I met him on the first floor coming in. Sale had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He pointed both at me.

  “Hands up,” he said. His face gleamed yellowly, li
ke wax, above the flashlight beam. I put up my hands.

  Then he recognized me. “So it’s you, professor! I thought I heard a noise like a shot. What’s up?”

  “The murderer,” I said. “On the fourth floor. I laid him out.” I lowered my arms.

  “No kiddin’, professor! Show me.”

  He followed me up the flight of stairs to the fourth floor and down the corridor to the Dictionary office. At the end of the hall I thought I saw green eyes glaring at me from the darkness at the top of the west stairs. I pointed Sale into the office and went to the end of the hall to turn on the corridor lights. Nothing on the stairs, not even a cat.

  I turned out the lights and went back to the lighted office. Sale met me at the door with his gun in his hand and his broken nose poised like a hammer.

  “This guy is dead, professor,” he said. “I got to put you under arrest.”

  “Dead? Are you sure? He was just unconscious when I looked at him a minute ago.”

  “He’s dead, professor. His brains are leaking out.”

  “Let me see him, will you?”

  “If you like it. But put up your hands.”

  He circled me in the hall and walked behind me when I went into the office. I saw the top of Schneider’s head in the doorway. It had a deep hole in it, bleeding red and white onto the floor.

  “My God, I didn’t see that,” I said.

  “You see it now. He’s dead. Murdered.” He was still behind me and I couldn’t see his face but he smacked his lips over the last word.

  “Murder, hell,” I said. “It was self-defense. He shot at me.”

  “You’ll have a chance to prove self-defense,” Sale said. “Now I got to take you to the station.”

  “Just a minute. I’ve got proof here that this man was a spy.”

  “Go and get it and give it to me,” Sale said. I looked at him over my shoulder. He was standing three feet away with his gun leveled at my kidneys. My kidneys are important to me.

  I stepped over Schneider’s head and shoulders into the inner room. The oilskin envelope and paper and the Lüger were gone from the table, but something else was there that made me feel sick. The gilded horseshoe was lying on the table. One end of it was splattered with red blood flecked with white. And the rest of it was covered with my fingerprints.

  I thought of the green eyes in the stair-well at the end of the hall. I hadn’t been quick enough. Ruth Esch was very quick indeed. Perhaps she was as quick as Peter Schneider. My stomach heaved and I was sick on the floor.

  Sale stood and watched me silently with his gun on me. When I had finished he said:

  “Where’s your evidence, professor?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Is this what you used to kill him?” He pointed at the horseshoe.

  “Somebody used it to kill him,” I said. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “That’s right,” Sale said. “You just laid him out and he died naturally.”

  “Better take it with you,” I said, and picked it up.

  “Put that down, you bastard,” Sale yelled. “Fingerprints!” He started towards me. I was facing him with the horseshoe in my right hand, my back against the table. I leaned to the left as if to replace the horseshoe on the table on my left side.

  When it was nearly touching the table, I threw the horseshoe backhand at Sale’s gun. The two pieces of metal clanged and the horseshoe ringed his wrist. The gun went off and dropped to the floor and I dropped after it.

  Sale got me in the side with the toe of his boot but I got the gun. He put up his hands as I stood up with it.

  “Nice work, professor. Just an old horseshoe pitcher, eh? But you’re crazy, professor. You can’t get away.”

  I wasted three words, “I’ve been framed.”

  “Sure, sure. We’ll get you, professor.”

  The conversation bored me and I picked up the flash and locked him in the inner room, which had a heavy oaken door. I had to move Schneider to do it.

  Before I reached the head of the stairs, I heard a police whistle.

  I was a fool. He could whistle out of the window. But what could I have done to him? Tie and gag him? Sure, and suffer for it later. But I had his gun.

  I ran down the steps to the basement as fast as I could in the dark. If Shiny was at the corner, I might get away in his cab before the police arrived. I didn’t know where to.

  I ran out the door at the back and around the corner of the building. No cabs in sight. Far down the street, I saw two policemen running towards McKinley Hall.

  I thought of the open door leading into the steam-tunnels and ran back into the building. When I got to the door it was closed and the light behind it was out. Could there be a janitor here this early? Maybe Sale closed it and turned out the light.

  The door wasn’t locked and I opened it. Nothing but darkness. I still had the flashlight and turned it on and flashed it down the steps. The concrete basement room at the foot of the stairs was bare and the door in the grey wall which led into the tunnel was closed.

  I heard a sound of running feet behind and above me on the first floor of the building and put out my light. The bulb which lit the stairs from the first floor into the basement corridor was switched on. I stepped inside the door and closed it except for a crack through which I could watch the lighted stairs. A bareheaded man with a gun in his hand came down the stairs two at a time.

  I recognized the wide grey shoulders and the sullen Indian face. He paused at the foot of the stairs and looked up and down the basement corridor, his gun following his glance. Then he turned and ran out the back of the building.

  Christ, was Gordon after me already? I thought of following him and throwing myself on his mercy—he was probably more intelligent than the local police—but I dropped the idea as soon as I picked it up. I was in a box that it would be hard to argue myself out of. The only way to get out was by running.

  There was a pounding on the double doors at the west end of the corridor, and then the crash of glass. The police. I closed the door quietly and went down the concrete stairs into the steam-tunnel.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE BASEMENT WAS HOT—perhaps the steam was on: it was just past the equinox and the weather was turning cold. As soon as I opened the second door, I knew the steam was on. It was like opening the door of a moderate hell. The air rushed out to take me like black flames. I closed the second door behind me and switched on the flashlight.

  The two huge steampipes, green-painted, hung before me like twin segments of impossible serpents glowing with impossible energy. To my right and left they were lost in darkness in the endless man-made cave. I chose the left at random and started down the tunnel, the flashlight beam dancing before me like a wild hope. Then I remembered the closed door I had left open and the dark light I had left on.

  Somebody might be waiting for me at the first turning. I put out the light and, with the unlit flashlight in my left hand and the gun in my right, went on in darkness. The concrete roof nearly brushed my hair as I walked and I felt the whole building above me like a weight on my neck. The sweat ran down in my eyes from the heat and I couldn’t stop to take off my coat.

  I went faster as my senses grew used to the darkness. At least I heard no one following. I half-turned my head to listen and walked into a wall. The clang of my flashlight against the concrete sounded like a gong.

  I switched it on—it wasn’t broken—and saw that the tunnel jogged to the left. Something on the tunnel floor caught my eye, a shining object. I picked it up and looked at it. It was a small metal cylinder, a lipstick. Women go everywhere nowadays, I thought. I put the lipstick in my pocket in case I should meet a woman, and held my gun cocked for the same reason as I went on.

  I turned out the flash and went on in the hot darkness of the forest-floor of the twentieth-century jungle. The forest that bears no fruit, the rivers of steam and brooks of sewage that quench no thirst. I remembered something Alec had said about the carnivores creeping
on rubber tires in the urban valleys. The blessings of civilization, I thought.

  Not that I couldn’t have done with a small armored motorcycle. Or even my car would do. If I could get to my car, I could get away into the country. But my car was parked on the campus and I didn’t dare try to reach it.

  I barely raised my feet and my leather soles hissed along the concrete. I walked with my hands held out to protect my face, like a blind man in an unfamiliar room. I felt as if I had walked a mile; the hot air was palpable and seemed to resist movement like water.

  I switched on the flash for a moment and saw a dark open arch in the left wall about fifty feet ahead of me. I walked to it with the light on and the gun ready.

  There was a sign stencilled on the wall in black letters at the side of the opening: Natural History Museum. It was nice to know where I was but I hadn’t gone as far as I thought. Hardly more than a quarter-mile. At least the museum wasn’t on the campus, which might now be surrounded by police. It stood in its own grounds across the street from the campus on the north side. It was a chance to get away.

  I found the door out of the tunnel and beyond it the stairs leading up into the museum. I mounted them cautiously and opened the door at the head of the stairs. No light and no noise. I stepped out into the hall.

  Across and down the hall from where I stood, there was pale light like moonlight falling through a great arched doorway. I tiptoed to the doorless arch and looked in.

  Fixed lights from outside, street-lights probably, shone through the high windows into a huge hall that seemed to have no ceiling. Impossible monsters, one of them twenty feet high, watched me from every side. You’ve got the jungle on the brain, I said to myself. Out of one jungle into another.

  I recognized the room. The tall monsters were the mounted skeletons of prehistoric saurians. I could see the light shining bleakly through their ancient ribs.

  There was a slight rustle on the other side of the room and I stepped out of the doorway and sidled along the wall into dark shadow. I heard no other sound. Probably the noise was a prehistoric mouse no more than five feet tall.