She quirked her upper lip in deprecation. “It won’t be for very much longer, anyway. Only three more days. Two more nights. Two whole ones, and then a half one, ending at mid—”
He reached over and backed the joint of one finger lightly against her lips, and broke the word in the middle.
A customer came in and sat down, near the door so that he wouldn’t have to take up too much time walking to and from his table. Instantly he began to read his morning paper propped against a sugar bowl, and as he read, without taking his eyes from his reading, he rapped against the table’s edge with a spoon or something, to hasten service.
The noise reached her and she looked over there for a moment. Shawn could all but read her thoughts, they were so evident in her half-wistful, half-reproachful expression. That man has so much more time than I, and yet he’s in such a hurry. He has a whole lifetime ahead of him, and yet he can’t wait five minutes for his food. I have three days until the darkness comes, and yet I sit here, limply waiting.
He said to her, “If you won’t let me take you home, will you come some place else with me, then? Some place where—I have a couple of friends, someone who may be able to help us?”
“Where?” she said listlessly.
“You won’t be frightened? Now don’t be frightened, I don’t mean to frighten you.”
She looked at him steadily. “The police,” she said. “That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”
He watched her carefully a minute, to see how she’d take it.
“Isn’t it?” she repeated.
He fooled around with the dish holding ashes, turning it a little, as if it were a dial attached to the tabletop, and watching it as he did so. “We don’t have to use that word,” he said placatingly. “That’s just a name for them that doesn’t have to enter into it in your case. Look, let’s put it like this. I’m a businessman, let’s say, any kind at all, a salesman, it doesn’t matter what it is. I work for somebody who’s smarter than I am, who knows more than I do. That’s why I’m working for him, instead of him for me. I came along last night and—did what I did. Now I want to take you to my boss, McManus, the man I work for, talk it over with him, that’s all it is. Nothing in that to frighten you. He’s a wiser man than I am, and he’s older, more experienced. He’s kind, he’s considerate, he’s understanding. Not with people that are punishable, maybe, but that’s a different thing. That hasn’t anything to do with this. He wouldn’t do anything to harm or frighten you—”
“You like your boss, don’t you?”
“I think he’s swell,” he said simply. Then he quickly went ahead with his persuasive efforts, as if to allow them to slacken for a single moment was to risk losing her. “He’s got a kid of his own, a daugher. She’s not as old as you are yet; fourteen, I think, or fifteen. He shows you her picture, if you—if you get him talking about her. That kind of man, I mean. We’ll go and talk to him a little while; we’ll just talk it over, the three of us. It’ll be like talking to your own—” He quickly checked that word as he saw her face shadow. “He may be able to help us, he may be able to give us some good advice. At least we don’t lose anything, do we?”
He palmed one hand toward her, left it there suspended for a while, in unspoken continuation of the argument.
Then he allowed it to drop at last, uncertainly, as he saw her withdraw her own hands and rest them on the table’s edge, in some preparatory gesture.
She stood up slowly before him. He remained seated, face tilted, watching her anxiously.
“I have no other place that I can go,” she murmured.
He straightened alertly. “You mean—”
“I’ll go with you, Shawn, to the man you work for.”
PART TWO
4
Beginning of
Police Procedure
AFTER MCMANUS HAD PICKED SEVEN of them, he sent the rest back. He closed the door of his office, and went back behind his desk, and sat down. The seven he’d picked remained standing in line there, out before him, with the gaps still between them where the nonselectees had been until just now. He motioned desultorily with his hand, and they closed up. They were almost like soldiers at attention on a parade ground, though not quite as rigid. Their arms, for one thing, were held in varying positions; one held his clasped behind him, another held his folded before his chest, another’s were at rest at his sides, still another’s were gripped to the lapels of his coat and hung from there. None at least were in pockets.
All eyes were on him, with an unwavering intentness that almost created a tension in the room. They didn’t blink. They didn’t move. You couldn’t even hear them breathe at all, though there were that many of them gathered that close together. A water pipe somewhere would occasionally gurgle or whine a little in the stillness.
He took so long before beginning to speak that it almost seemed as if he didn’t intend to begin to speak.
He had taken up a pencil, an ordinary yellow desk pencil, and he kept tripping this as he spoke, bouncing it lightly now on its point, now on its other end, now on its point again. That too made a faint sound, a very small tap or tick each time. He was obviously unaware that he was doing it, for his eyes were on them.
He said, speaking slowly and quietly, “This thing I have on my hands is confidential. It’s got to stay confidential, by its very nature. It’s not to be discussed within-precincts any more than it would be on the outside. It’s not to be discussed with the other men, who haven’t been selected. As well as being confidential, you might say that it’s unofficial. It’s something that I’m doing on my own responsibility, without any official directives from above. In view of that fact, I can’t order you to take on the various assignments I have in mind. You’re at liberty to refuse, to ask to be excused. But only now. Not once the thing is under way. Once you accept, you’re under orders just as strictly as if the job was regulation. Is that clear?”
He waited.
“Now I’m going to give it to you in a nutshell. In capsule form. A man’s death has been predicted by another man. It’s supposed to happen three days from now, day after tomorrow night at midnight. There isn’t anything we can get him on, the second man, the forecaster, ahead of time. No law has been broken, no threat made. There’s an ordinance against telling fortunes, but we can’t even get him on that; the statement was simply made verbally, as a piece of conversation, and there’s freedom of speech in this country.
“I don’t believe in predictions, but that’s neither here nor there. I do believe that this prediction is going to happen, unless something’s done to stop it. But not because it’s a prediction; no, but because either the predicter himself or somebody working with the predicter is going to see that it happens, is going to carry it out.
“Now the big prediction has come as the climax to a lot of little ones. There’s been a slow build-up toward it, over a period of weeks and months. Each little preliminary prediction paid off, came true. Until now, of course, the victim is convinced the final big one will come true too. Why shouldn’t he? That was the main idea.
“And that’s where we come in. The way to tackle the final prediction is to hit the little ones first, break them wide open, find out what made them tick. The big one hasn’t happened yet, so we can’t go after that. The little ones have, so we can go after them. They’ll tell us about the big one—what’s behind it, who’s behind it, what direction it’s coming from, what it’s all about. Explain the little ones, and you’ve explained the big one.
“By doing that, we’ll be saving this guy in two ways. We’ll be saving him from the pay-off itself. And we’ll be saving him from his own belief in the pay-off. Which is doing him just as much or even more harm; which is killing him just as surely.
“Now, have you men got the idea?”
They gave him the answer by indirection, by continuing to stand there without moving.
“Now, if anybody wants to check out, there’s the door.”
One of them gla
nced around at it, as if he’d forgotten about its being there; other than that they didn’t move.
“All right,” he said briskly. “You’re under orders from now on. You men are volunteers. And you’re getting assignments that no detective’s had before, ever. I’m not sending you out to track down murderers. I’m not sending you out to trace missing jewels. I’m sending you out to track down prophecies. Yes, that’s what I said. I’m giving you prophecies to work on. Your job is to break them down into the practical, the—” He scoured his chin. “Well, what word’ll I use?—the understandable; to find a plausible explanation for them. How they were engineered, how they were rigged up. How they came to click, to latch on.
“Now here we go. These are your assignments.
“Archer: a telegram that reached the San Francisco airport fifty-five seconds before plane time on the night Harlan Reid was coming back. And kept him off it so that the postscript to the original prediction about the plane crashing—that is, that his own life wouldn’t be lost—rang the bell. His daughter didn’t send it. Find out who did. Find out why. And don’t let whoever did find out you’re finding out. Got it?”
“I’ve got it,” Archer breathed softly, “but, boy, could I use a ouija board!”
“And, by the way, you haven’t three days to do it in. We need that information now, if we’re to make any use of it.”
The door closed, and there were six of them left.
“Dominguez: you’re on a pair of shoes. A pair of women’s shoes that disappeared from the Embassy night club. That turned up in a pawnshop—or rather a rummage shop—all the way across town. Find out how they made that trip from the nightclub floor to the rummage-shop window. Find out who helped them make it, and why. And again I say, don’t let whoever did that know you’re finding out while you’re finding out. And you have the same time limit. Here’s the address.”
The door closed, and there were five of them.
“And you, Bradley. Find out how the number of Harlan Reid’s safe-deposit box, one-eight-oh-five, got into Tompkins’s head. And find out how the contents of the box got into Tompkins’s head. And don’t go near Tompkins, he’s another guy’s; work from the opposite end.”
“Is that an assignment!” the unlucky Bradley moaned.
“Don’t be frightened, Brad,” McManus reassured him. “It didn’t get into his head by short wave. It got in it some way that can be seen or heard or felt or smelled. That’s for you. You see or hear or feel or smell it.”
The door closed, and there were four.
“And now we come to the easier ones. That’s enough for the prophecies or whatever you’d care to call them. I’m just picking the high spots. I’ve left out a lot. I haven’t men enough, and I haven’t time enough. But that’s not wholly the real reason, either. I’m almost afraid to monkey with some of them, myself. They’d be too hard to get our teeth into. The Rumanian actress that ran a diamond bracelet up her gam. The little girl that just missed being run down. The stocks that went up and down, almost to order.
“The ones I’ve picked will do. If we can hang plausibility on those three pegs, we’ve saved a man’s mind from dying. I’m not worried about his body. Shawn is going to save that.
“Schaefer, you’re on a girl named Eileen McGuire. And when I say on, I mean on. You’re the slip she wears. You’re whatever it is they wear under their slips. You’re the skin on her. You don’t leave her any more than that does.”
The door closed, and there were three.
“Molloy, you’re on lions.”
The man gulped. “On what?”
“Lions. Find out what zoos there are within a five-hundred-mile radius of here. Check with every one of them and find out if they keep lions. If they do, keep your eyes open to make sure none escapes or is swiped—”
“Swipe a lion?” breathed the detective.
“Warn the keepers at all of them to keep extra close watch over their lion cages, the next two or three days. Especially at nights. And don’t overlook any traveling circuses or animal acts or what not that may come into your territory, while you’re at it. Anything on lions, report to me immediately.”
Molloy went out furtively touching a handkerchief to his forehead.
“And now I’m going to pair two of you off. We’ve come to the king pin. And if the old saying about two heads being better than one has anything to it, I’d really need the whole squad, just to break even. They say he knows what you’re thinking. I say: act like he does. Then you’ll be safe, then you can’t go wrong. Jeremiah Tompkins is his name, and he lives at—this place, here’s the address. He doesn’t look like much, but don’t kid yourselves by the way he looks that he’s no great shakes of a guy. Men before you have made that mistake, and lived to regret it. Don’t let him out of your sight if you can help it; but if you must let him out of your sight for a moment or two at a time, at least make sure that you don’t let him out of your hearing. Dictaphones and all the tricks of the trade.”
Sokolsky looked at Dobbs. “And he’s supposed to know what we’re doing, while we’re doing it?” he quavered in an apprehensive voice.
All McManus said to that was “How old are you, Sokolsky?” And then ran on without waiting for the answer.
“Be ready to pinch at a moment’s notice. Wait, if you can, until you’ve got something on him. But whether you’ve got something on him or not, he’s got to be in custody before midnight of tomorrow night, one full day before the deadline of the final prophecy. Now take it away!”
The door opened, and a mumbled voice could be overheard complaining in departure: “How d’ya keep from thinking so you don’t give away what you’re thinking—?”
Then it closed, and McManus turned to Shawn.
“And now we come to you. You’re right in at dead center. You’re covering the target.”
He stroked his chin reflectively.
“Are you afraid of lions, Shawn?” he queried.
“I never thought about ’em much,” Shawn admitted frankly. “I wouldn’t exactly—go to bed with one, if I had any choice in the matter. But—up to this point in my life, anyway—I haven’t had much truck with them. They’ve minded their business, and I’ve minded mine.”
“Well, from now on,” McManus told him dryly, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to mess around with them a little. Needless to say, you don’t have to take me too literally. This ‘lion’ that I’m matching you against might take almost any kind of shape. It might be a bullet, it might be a tight cord around the neck, it might be a poisoned cup of coffee. Then, again, it just might be a life-sized, honest-to-goodness lion. We don’t know. All we do know is the time set for it: midnight day after tomorrow. And that’s something. In fact that’s a whole lot.
“Your job is to keep him alive. I could fill that house up with fellows like you, send six of them, a dozen. Then the ‘lion’ would smell them, only defer its visit, come around some other time when it wasn’t expected any more. I don’t want that to happen. I want it to come when it was said it would come”— he banged his fist down peremptorily—“so that, by Jesus, it’ll never come again!
“So I’m sending you out there alone. You go into the back room where she’s resting, and wait’ll the matron says she’s feeling a little better. As soon as she is, you go home with her. You’re her house guest, her boy friend—I don’t care what you are.
“But see that that man stays alive past midnight, day after tomorrow night! Beyond that, you’re on your own.”
Shawn wheeled and went out without a word.
McManus was left there alone, with just his desk and his pencil. And the thing had begun.
5
The Wait:
Bodyguard Against Planets
THE WHEELS LOCKED AND THEY had halted in front of the place. She keyed off the ignition. “There it is.” She tilted her chin over at it.
Shawn looked at it. Looked at it good, with eyes starting from scratch, seeing it for the first time. He h
ad heard somewhere that a detective must look at a thing many times, to begin to understand it; that the more he looked, the better, learning a little more each time. That that was the whole warp and woof of being a detective, to look and look until at last you knew everything that the thing in itself could tell you. He’d never agreed with that; it wasn’t for him. That was all right for small things, for pieces of evidence; things that were to be detached from their surroundings and taken up for examination by themselves. But for things in the aggregate, the panorama, the scene in toto, the general setup, call it what you will, he liked the first look, with fresh unspoiled eyes. Nothing that came later could ever improve on it. The later looks simply blurred the clarity of the first impression. It was like trying to print more than one picture on the same strip of film. In the end you had neither a good first impression nor a good later one; you had simply a hash.
That didn’t mean he was so omniscient that all he had to do was look at a scene or situation and he knew all about it. But it did mean that whatever his impression of that scene was at first sight, it was likely to be closer to the truth than at second sight or third. He had good imaginative instinct, and he was weak on logical build-up. That may have been why they called him a dreamer.
And so he saw this big chunk of countryside, all included in their private estate, with the house itself simply a fractional part of it. Dead center only because they had happened to stop in that perspective to it. Otherwise it would have been little more than a gray-white marker half lost in the rolling green sweep it was set into. This rose gently to the rearward, and its final outline was blurred with a heavy feathering of trees. Birches they were, judging by their white bark. There were too many of them, and they straggled down too close, forming a phalanx of potential danger. For you couldn’t look under them, after your eyes had penetrated past the outermost two or three layers. Shadow set in, and inscrutability. Something could have crept down through them, and remained undiscovered until almost the last moment.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 16
