“Let’s use the word partner, instead,” said Harlingen. “It’s got a nice ring to it.”
When Murray broke the news to Mrs. Knapp the next afternoon she took it with surprising calm.
“Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Mr. Kirk,” she said. “And, of course, Mr. Collins will be a very good man to have in charge. Mr. Conmy always thought highly of him while he was here. And I understand that he’s done very well on the Coast, too. When will you be leaving?”
Then Murray realized that to her there never really was a Frank Conmy, a Murray Kirk, a Jack Collins. There was only an Agency, and its undisturbed efficiency was all that mattered. So doth efficiency, he mused, blight a soul.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Collins will be coming in next week, but then there’re papers to be drawn up and so on. It may take a month or so. Why?”
“Because there are a great many details to attend to, Mr. Kirk. There’s this business of the nun, for instance. I don’t—”
“Nun? What nun?”
“She came here from St. Alonsus Hospital this morning, and a man with her had a whole load of records to be microfilmed. She had a letter from you that says it’s to be done free, but if we tie up the machine for that—”
“Then we’ll buy them their own machine, Mrs. Knapp, if that’s the only other way out of it. If you get delivery on it next week it’ll make a nice Christmas present.”
“It’ll make a very expensive Christmas present. And there’s a great deal of correspondence on your desk, Mr. Kirk. Would you mind taking care of it before you go home for the day?”
“I’ll do that. Meanwhile, Mrs. Knapp, have one of the men get some big, empty boxes from the lab—you know, those cartons that the photographic paper comes in—and tell him to bring it to my office. And there’s a list of more or less newsworthy clients you had made up when that man from Peephole Magazine was here. I’d like that, too.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Knapp.
It was the first time she had ever questioned one of his instructions. He was, he saw, no longer on top of the case.
“Because I’m in the mood for it,” he said shortly. “So let’s get with it, Mrs. Knapp.”
It was slow work checking the files against the names on the list. When he was finished with the job and had two boxes well laden he called downstairs to McGuire, the building manager, and learned that the building had no furnace. Never did have, in fact.
“No, sir,” McGuire said, “we pipe in our heat from the New York Steam Company, Mr. Kirk. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.” From his tone he was clearly gratified that there was something that he could instruct a tenant on. “If you want to get rid of that stuff, best thing to do is find some place with an incinerator. Or send it down here, and we’ll give it to the disposal man when he comes around.”
“Thanks,” Murray said, “I’ll find an incinerator.” If he had any doubts about it, the note of rising interest in McGuire’s voice settled them completely. And there was always the fireplace at the St. Stephen.
But as it turned out, whoever had built the fireplace hadn’t allowed for the burning of such odds and ends as Murray crammed into it. The tapes sizzled and smoldered; the films sent out a smoke that shrouded the apartment in an acrid fog. It was only when all the windows had been drawn up and the door opened and held in place by a book that a proper draft swept up the chimney. Then Murray squatted down before the fire and fed handfuls into it, blotting out vain regrets as he did so.
Near the bottom of the load was a set of photographs, and one of them caught his eye. It showed in excellent detail the wife of a hapless polo player and the muscular young man who was her interest of that month caught by the photo flash during a moment best veiled in darkness. Murray studied the picture with interest, marveling at the way a woman could wear—even though otherwise unclad—a look of total insouciance at such a disastrous time. Her lover, on the other hand—
“Fifty artistic poses, fifty,” said Ruth at his shoulder, and he looked up at her dumfounded as she stood there, the same Ruth who had stood there a week, a lifetime before, yet somehow different. Then he scrambled to his feet, realized with angry embarrassment that he was still holding the picture, and pitched it into the fire.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “I knocked, but you were so busy that you didn’t hear me, and I just walked in. I didn’t know you were pasting up your album.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to have memorized the details of that picture. Who was it? Anyone I know?”
“Hardly. It isn’t anyone I know, either.”
“Oh, Murray, stop looking like that. Don’t you know I’m teasing? Really, you can be—”
“Let’s not go into that. When people walk in without invitation to insult me, it’s too much. Now you tell me whether I’m teasing or not.”
“You’d better be. Murray, we had the play at school, and Ralph was there. I had a long talk with him afterward.”
“That’s nice. How did the play go?”
“What difference does that make? I’m trying to tell you that I had a talk with Ralph, and he told me all about what happened. I mean, about you and Arnold, and about the partnership—Did you ever hear Ralph once he gets started? He goes on and on. I would have been here before this, if he hadn’t taken so long about it.”
“Here for what?”
“Murray, listen to me. What happened that night between us—you were right about me then, don’t you know that? You were only wrong about one thing. What I felt then—it was the strangest feeling I ever had—was a sense of freedom. It was as if I had been chained to a shadow all those years, and then suddenly I knew it was a shadow, and I was free. That’s why I came up here with you. Because I was free to do it, and I wanted to. Murray, do you understand what I’m saying? If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”
“That doesn’t leave me much choice, does it?”
“No, and if you think that looking like a stag at bay means anything to me, you’re mistaken. You can take that look off your face right now. Nobody with a sense of humor should try to look terribly hurt and noble. It doesn’t become him.”
“All right,” he said gravely, “then I’ll try to be the perfect debonair host. Would you care to remove your clothing? I have a new bath towel that will—”
“And don’t overdo the humor, either.” She placed a hand against his cheek and let it rest there, cold and wonderfully soothing. “Feel that? It’s from being scared. When I came up in the elevator I was scared silly. I knew what I was going to say, but I didn’t know what you would say, and I was terrified. And now, even though you haven’t really said anything yet, I’m not scared any more. What do you make of that?”
“Only that you’re damn sure of yourself. And if you want to see why, look into that mirror there.”
He turned her so that he was standing behind her, both of them facing the mirror on the wall above the fireplace, and then, free of his own shadow at last, he put his arms tight around her, so that he could feel the warm, firm weight of her breasts on them.
Ruth let her head fall back against his shoulder and smiled at the reflection in the mirror.
“What a handsome couple,” she said.
6
“Truly, truly,” Frank Conmy once said to him, “this is the dirty, beautiful, golden age of the filing cabinet.”
They were at Frank’s apartment in the St. Stephen that night, a clear, cold night, moonless but star-studded. Thirty stories below in Central Park sea lions barked zanily at the sky, and tigers snarled at the siren of an ambulance careening along Fifth Avenue.
Frank cocked an ear at the faraway sounds.
“Ah,” he said, “they always make a noise about it when they’re frightened, poor beasts. And the way they go on day and night, Murray, you’d swear they were always frightened. Well, I suppose they’re no different from the rest of God’s creation that way.”
Frighten
ed.
Always frightened.
And telling it to the unheeding stars.
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Copyright © 1958 by Stanley Ellin
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5035-0
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