by Algis Budrys
He looked up as he heard the door open and close. His eyes went automatically to the metal side of the display case across from him, which he used for a mirror. The case was scuffed, and a little dirty. The druggist saw the vague outlines of a man’s large silhouette, but the creaking of the floorboards had already told him as much. He peered for a look at the face, and brought one hand up to the temple bar of his glasses. He got out of his chair, still holding his paper in the other hand, and thrust his head and shoulders out over the counter.
“Something I can do for — ”
The man who’d come in turned his glittering face toward him. “Where’s your telephone books, please?” he asked quietly.
The druggist had no idea of what he might have done in another minute. But the matter-of-fact words gave him an easy response. “Back through there,” he said, pointing to a narrow opening between two counters.
“Thank you.” The man squeezed himself through, and the druggist heard him turning pages. There was a faint rustle as he pulled a sheet out of the telephone company’s notepaper dispenser. The druggist heard him take out a pencil with a faint click of its clip. Then the telephone book thudded back into its slot, and the man came out, folding the note and putting it in his breast pocket. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” the druggist answered.
The man left the store. The druggist sat back on his chair, folding the paper on his knee.
It was a peculiar thing, the druggist thought, looking blankly down at his paper. But the man hadn’t seemed to be conscious of anything peculiar about himself. He hadn’t offered any explanations; he hadn’t done anything except ask a perfectly reasonable question. People came in here twenty times a day and asked the same thing.
So it couldn’t really be anything worth getting excited about. Well — yes, of course it was, but the metal-headed man hadn’t seemed to think so. And it would be his business, wouldn’t it?
The druggist decided that it was something to think about, and to mention to his wife when he got home. But it wasn’t anything to be panicked by.
In a very brief space of time, his eyes were automatically following print. Soon he was reading again. When Rogers’ man came in a minute later, that was the way he found him.
Rogers’ man was one of a team of two. His partner had stayed with their man, following him up the street.
He looked around the drugstore. “Anybody here?”
The druggist’s head and shoulders came into sight behind the counter. “Yes, mister?”
The Security man fished in his pocket. “Got a pack of Chesterfields?”
The druggist nodded and slipped the cigarettes out of the rack behind the counter. He picked up the dollar the Security man put down.
“Say,” the Security man said with a puzzled frown, “did I just see a guy wearing a tin mask walk out of here?”
The druggist nodded. “That’s right. It didn’t seem to be a mask, though.”
“I’ll be damned. I thought I saw this fellow, but it’s kind of a hard thing to believe.”
“That’s what happened.”
The Security man shook his head. “Well, I guess you see all kinds of people in this part of town. You figure he was dressed up to advertise a play or something?”
“Don’t ask me. He wasn’t carrying a sign or anything.”
“What’d he do — buy a can of metal polish?” The Security man grinned.
“Just looked in a phone book, that’s all. Didn’t even make a call.” The druggist scratched his head. “I guess he was just looking up an address.”
“Boy, I wonder who he’s visiting! Well” — and he shrugged — “you sure do run into funny people down here.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the druggist said a little testily, “I’ve seen some crazy-looking things in other parts of town, too.”
“Yeah, sure. I guess so. Say — speakin’ of phones, I guess I might as well call this girl. Where’s it at?”
“Back there,” the druggist said, pointing.
“O.K., thanks.” The Security man pushed through the space between the two counters. He stood looking sourly down at the stand of phone books. He pulled the top sheet out of the note dispenser, looked at it for impressions, and saw none that made any sense. He slipped the paper into his pocket, looked at the books again — six of them, counting the Manhattan Classified-and shook his head. Then he stepped into the booth, dropped coins into the slot, and dialed Rogers’ office.
3
The clock on Rogers’ desk read a few minutes past nine. Rogers still sat behind his desk, and Finchley waited in the chair beside it.
Rogers felt tired. He’d been up some twenty-two hours, and the fact that Finchley and their man had done the same was no help.
It’s piled up on me, he thought. Day after day without enough sleep, and tension all the time. I should have been in bed hours ago.
But Finchley had gone through it all with him. And their man must feel infinitely worse. And what was a little lost sleep compared to what the man had lost? Still Rogers was feeling sick to his stomach. His eyes were burning. His scalp was numb with exhaustion, and he had a vile taste in his mouth. He wondered if his sticking to the job was made any the less because Finchley was younger and could take it, or because the metal-faced man was still following his ghost up and down the city streets. He decided it was.
“I hate to ask you to stay here so late, Finch,” he said.
Finchley shrugged. “That’s the job, isn’t it?” He picked up the piece of Danish pastry left over from supper, swirled his cold half-container of old coffee, and took a swallow. “I’ve got to admit I hope this doesn’t happen every night. But I can’t understand what he’s doing.”
Rogers toyed with the blotter on his desk, pushing it back and forth with his fingertips. “We ought to be getting another report fairly soon. Maybe he’s done something.”
“Maybe he’s going to sleep in the park.”
“The city police’ll pick him up if he tries to.”
“What about that? What’s the procedure if he’s arrested for a civil crime?”
“One more complication.” Rogers shook his head hopelessly, drugged by fatigue. “I briefed the Commissioner’s office and we’ve got cooperation on the administrative level. It’d be a poor move to issue a general order for all patrolmen to leave him alone. Somebody’d let it slip. The theory is that beat patrolmen will call in to their precinct houses if they spot a metal-headed man. The precinct captains have instructions that he’s to be left alone. But if a patrolman arrests him for vagrancy before he calls in, then all kinds of things could go wrong. It’ll be straightened out in a hurry, but it might get on record somewhere. Then, a few years from now, somebody doing a book or something might come across the record, and that’ll be that. We can’t keep the media bottled up forever.” Rogers sighed. “I only hope it’d be a few years from now.” He looked down at his desktop. “It’s a mess. This world was never organized to include a faceless man.”
It’s true, he thought. Just by being alive, he’s made me stumble from the very start. Look at us all — Security, the whole ANG-handcuffed because we couldn’t simply shoot him and get him out of the way. Going around in circles, trying to find an answer. And he hasn’t yet done anything.
For some reason, Rogers found himself thinking, “Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.” Emerson. Rogers grunted.
The telephone rang.
He picked it up and listened.
“All right,” he said finally, “get back to your partner. I’ll have somebody intercept and pick that paper up from you. Call in when your man gets to wherever he’s going.” He hung up. “He’s made a move,” he told Finchley. “He looked up an address in a phone book.”
“Any idea of whose?”
“I’m not sure…” Rogers flipped the Martino dossier open.
“The girl,” Finchley said. “The one he used to know.”
<
br /> “Maybe. If he thinks they’re still close enough for her to do him any good. Why did he have to look up the address? It’s the same one as the one on the wedding announcement.”
“It’s been fifteen years, Shawn. He could have forgotten it.”
“He may never have known it.” And there was no guarantee the man was going to the address he’d copied. He might have looked it up for some future purpose. They couldn’t take chances. Everything had to be covered. The phone books had to be examined. There might be some mark — some oily fingerprint, wet with perspiration, some pencil mark; some trace -
Six New York City phone books. God knew how many pages, each to be checked.
“Finch, your people’ll have to furnish a current set of New York phone books. Worn ones. We’re going to switch ’em for a set I want to run through your labs. Got to have ’em right away.”
Finchley nodded and reached for the phone.
4
A travel-worn young man, lugging a scuffed cardboard suitcase, came into the drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Seventh Street.
“Like to make a phone call,” he said to the druggist. “Where is it?”
The druggist told him, and the young man just managed to get his suitcase through the narrow gap between the counters. He bumped it about clumsily for a few moments, and shifted it back and forth, annoying the druggist at his cash register, while he made his call.
When he left, the druggist’s original books went to the FBI laboratory, where the top sheet of notepaper had already checked out useless.
The Manhattan book was run through first, on the assumption that it was the likeliest. The technicians did not work page by page. They had a book with all Manhattan phones listed by subscribers’ addresses, and they laid out a square search pattern centering on the drugstore. A machine arranged the nearest subscribers’ addresses in alphabetical order, and then the technicians began to work on the book taken from the store, using their new list to skip whole columns of numbers that had a low probability under this system.
Rogers hadn’t supplied the technicians with Edith Chester’s name. It would have done no good. By the time the results came through, the man would have reached there. If that was where he was going. Furthermore, there was no proof he’d only looked up one address. Eventually, all six books would be checked out, and probably show nothing. But the check would be made, and no one knew how many others afterward.
Commit a crime and the world is made of glass.
5
Edith Chester Hayes lived in the back apartment on the second floor of a house off Sullivan Street. The soot of eighty years had settled into every brick, and industrial fumes had gnawed the paint into flakes. A narrow doorway opened into the street, and a dim yellow bulb glowed in the foyer. Battered garbage cans stood in front of the ground floor windows.
Rogers looked out at it from his seat in an FBI special car. “You always expect them to have torn these places down,” he said.
“They do,” Finchley answered. “But other houses grow older faster than these get condemned.” His voice was distracted as though he were thinking of something else, and thinking of it so intently that he barely heard what he was saying. He hunched in his corner of the back seat, his hand slowly rubbing the side of his face. He paid no attention when one of the ANG team that had followed the man here came up to the car and leaned in Rogers’ window.
“He’s upstairs, on the second floor landing, Mr. Rogers,” the man said. “He’s been there for fifteen minutes, ever since we got here. He hasn’t knocked on any door. He’s just up there, leaning against a wall.”
“Didn’t he even ring a doorbell?” Rogers asked. “How’d he get into the building?”
“They never lock the front doors in these places, Mr. Rogers. Anybody can get into the halls any time they want to.”
“Well, how long can he stay up there? Some tenant’s bound to come along and see him. That’ll start a fuss. And what’s the point of his just staying in the hall?”
“I couldn’t say, Mr. Rogers. Nothing he’s done all day makes sense. But he’s got to make a move pretty soon, even if it’s just coming back down and starting this walking around business again.”
Rogers leaned over the front seat and tapped the shoulder of the FBI technician, wearing headphones, who was bent over a small receiving set. “What’s going on?”
The technician slipped one phone. “All I’m getting is breathing. And he’s shuffling his feet once in a while.”
“Will you be able to follow him if he moves?”
“If he stays in a narrow hall, or stands near a wall in a room, yes, sir. These induction microphones’re pretty sensitive, and I’ve got it flat against an outside wall of her apartment.”
“I see. Let me know if he does anyth — ”
“He’s moving.” The technician snapped a switch, and Rogers heard the sound of heavy footsteps on the sagging hall floorboards. Then the man knocked softly on a door, his knuckles barely rapping the wood before he stopped.
“I’m going to up the gain a little,” the technician said. Then the speaker was full of the man’s heavy breathing.
“What’s he upset about?” Rogers wondered.
They heard the man knock hesitantly again. His feet moved nervously.
Someone was coming toward the door. They heard it open, and then heard a gasp of indrawn breath. There was no way of telling whether their man had made the sound or not.
“Yes?” It was a woman, taken by surprise.
“Edith?” The man’s voice was low and abashed.
Finchley straightened out of his slump. “That’s it — that explains it. He spent all day working up his nerve.”
“Nerve for what? Proves nothing,” Rogers growled.
“I’m Edith Hayes,” the woman’s voice said cautiously.
“Edith — I’m Luke. Lucas Martino.”
“Luke!”
“I was in an accident, Edith. I just left the hospital a few weeks ago. I’ve been retired.”
Rogers grunted. “Got his story all straight, hasn’t he?”
“He’s had all day to think of how to put it,” Finchley said. “What do you expect him to do? Tell her the history of twenty years while he stands in her doorway?”
“Maybe.”
“For Pete’s sake, Shawn, if this isn’t Martino how’d he know about her?”
“I can think of lots of ways Azarin could get this kind of detail out of a man.”
“It’s not likely.”
“Nothing’s likely. It’s not likely any one particular germ cell would grow up to be Lucas Martino. I’ve got to remember Azarin’s a thorough man.”
“Edith — ” the man’s voice said, “may — may I come in for a moment?”
The woman hesitated for a second. Then she said, “Yes, of course.”
The man sighed. “Thank you.”
He stepped into the apartment and the door closed.
“Sit down, Luke.”
“Thank you.” They sat in silence for a few moments. “You have a very nice-looking apartment, Edith. It’s been fixed up very comfortably.”
“Sam — my husband — liked to work with his hands,” the woman said awkwardly. “He did it. He spent a long time over it. He’s dead now. He fell from a building he was working on.”
There was another pause. The man said, “I’m sorry I was never able to come down and see you after I left college.”
“I think you and Sam would have liked each other. He was a good deal like you; orderly.”
“I didn’t think I ever showed much of that with you.”
“I could see it.”
The man cleared his throat nervously. “You’re looking very well, Edith. Have you been getting along all right?”
“I’m fine. I work. Susan stays at a friend’s house after school until I pick her up on my way home at night.”
“I didn’t know you had children.”
“Susan’s
eleven. She’s a very bright little girl. I’m quite proud of her.”
“Is she asleep now?”
“Oh, yes — it’s well past her bedtime.”
“I’m sorry I came so late. I’ll keep my voice down.”
“I wasn’t hinting, Luke.”
“I — I know. But it is late. I’ll be going in a minute.”
“You don’t have to rush. I never go to bed before midnight.”
“But I’m sure you have things to do — clothes to iron, Susan’s lunch to pack.”
“That only takes a few minutes. Luke — ” Now the woman seemed steadier. “We were always so uncomfortable around each other. Let’s not keep to that old habit.”
“I’m sorry. Edith. You’re right. But — do you know, I couldn’t even call you and ask if I could see you? I tried, and I found myself imagining you’d refuse to see me. I spent all day nerving myself to do this.” The man was still uncomfortable. And as far as anyone listening could tell, he hadn’t yet taken off his coat.
“What’s the matter, Luke?”
“It’s complicated. When I was in their — in the hospital-I spent a long time thinking about us. Not as lovers, you understand, but as people — as friends. We never knew each other at all, did we? At least, I never knew you. I was too wrapped up in what I was doing and wanted to do. I never paid any real attention to you. I thought of you as a problem, not as a person. And I think I’m here tonight to apologize for that.”
“Luke — ” The woman’s voice started and stopped She moved in her creaking chair. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I know I’m embarrassing you, Edith. I would have liked to handle this more gracefully. But I don’t have much time. And it’s almost impossible to be graceful when I have to come here looking like this.”
