Rendezvous in Black

by Cornell Woolrich

  Again she nodded while his whispering continued.

  “Yes, I will. I’ll do just as you say. Whatever it is. No, I’m not afraid. Not with you.”

  His own voice rose a trifle, presently as the secret message reached its conclusion. A scattered word or two became audible.

  “Our only chance . . . no one . . . not a word to anyone . . . not even Mrs. B.”

  And then at last he kissed her. On the forehead, on the eyelids, finally on the lips, in dedication to their resolve, whatever it was.

  “They won’t have you, love,” he said fervently. “They won’t harm you. I’ll put the whole wide world between them and us.”

  She combed her hair carefully. She could do that herself. And strangely enough, she always did it standing directly before the mirror. From old habit. Though for her there was no mirror.

  Then she went to the chair where Mrs. Bachman had laid out her things. By feeling, she knew it was the black wool dress Mrs. B. had selected for her to wear today. Her fingers told her. This was no marvel, this was elementary. She knew the weave, she knew the self-covered buttons, she knew the sleeves, the collar. She knew all her clothes by heart—by finger-touch—of course. She only had to take the word of another in one respect: the color. Mrs. B. had told her this one was black. She put it on.

  She was dressed now. She could have even put on lipstick if she had wanted to, and made a good job of it. But she never used lipstick. She went to the room door—without a hesitant step—opened it, and went out. She found her way unerringly to the breakfast table, to her own chair at that table, and drawing it out, sat down to the breakfast Mrs. B. had ready for her on the table.

  She could do all these things.

  She reached, found her orange-juice glass, raised it to her lips. Mrs. B. left all containers of liquids only two-thirds filled for her; there was less danger of her spilling them that way. That was the only concession either one of them made to her disability. It was a matter of pride, to the two of them alike.

  She found her toast and buttered it herself. Mrs. B. filled her coffee-cup for her (but this was even done for people with sight), but she added the sugar and cream for herself. A delicate sense of weight and balance aided her in the two latter procedures. Uncanny as it seemed, she could tell fairly accurately how much a spoon held; whether it was heaped or leveled; how much was emptied over the spout of a pitcher, in the latter case by the downward pull of it in her hand.

  They chatted desultorily as they did every other day. Mrs. B. read to her from the morning paper. Then breakfast was finished.

  He’d located (after a great deal of trouble) and bought for her a unique clock that softly chimed off each hour with the appropriate number of strokes. It followed the European, and military, time system, progressing up to twenty-four for the post-meridian hours instead of falling back to one again. It did this quite cleverly by giving a double stroke instead of a single one for each hour-count past twelve. Thus the time required to count was not greatly increased. Its uniqueness lay in the fact that it was not a grandfather clock, but a mantel-clock that could be carried, even by her, from room to room at will.

  It struck off ten times now. She counted. Then—as if this had been a cue prompting her—she said to Mrs. B., “I’d like to take a walk. I’d like some fresh air. Let’s do it now instead of waiting for this afternoon.”

  “Why, of course, dear,” Mrs. B. agreed readily. She must have glanced from the window; there was a tiny spaced pause. “It is a beautiful sunny day out.”

  “I know,” Martine said simply. “I can tell.” She could. Without having to glance from a window.

  They separated, to make their several preparations apart. She went into her bedroom alone, went to the closet, took out her jewel case. Several rings she knotted into a handkerchief and thrust into her handbag. The Tiffany pearls he had given her, she put around her throat. The neckline of her dress, which was rather high, effectively concealed them. She took out one more thing. The rest, a number of clasps, brooches and bracelets, she left in the case. She found time to pencil a hasty little note: “These are for you, Edith dear. Preserve this slip carefully, it’s a form of will.” And put that in with them, closed the case up, and thrust it away.

  The one remaining thing she’d taken out, she had to have help with, couldn’t manage alone. It had a complicated safety catch. He’d given her it too, of course. Therefore it had a sentimental, though no longer a utilitarian, value to her. It also had a tremendous intrinsic value, but this did not enter into it as far as she was concerned.

  She called Mrs. B. in. “Will you fasten this for me?”

  “Why, you’re wearing your diamond wristwatch!” Mrs. B. gasped.

  “I want to look nice,” Martine said quietly. “It’s such a nice day. It’s that kind of day.”

  She could have broken it up into its component stones and scattered these along the sidewalk one by one, like pebbles, as she walked, and Mrs. B. would still have let her have her way; they both knew it.

  They left the house together, Martine’s hand tucked under her escort’s. Two well-dressed women, one young, one mature; you could not have told that one was sightless. And if you had, you might even have mistaken the elder one, with her glasses, for the disabled of the two.

  Mrs. B. said quietly, “Good morning.”

  There was no answer, but when a hat is raised, it makes no sound.

  Then, within a few paces, Mrs. B. said again, “Good morning.” And again there was no sound.

  But to the rearward of them now, from this point on, came a soft double tread, like an echo, a smothered bass accompaniment, to their own.

  “Where are we?” Martine said presently.

  “Around the corner. We’re boxing the block.”

  “Let’s—let’s go somewhere special. There’s only cement and dusty stone here. Let’s walk along the outside of the park. From Seventieth, in the downtown direction.”

  Mrs. B. didn’t demur.

  Presently Martine spoke again. “Are we there now?” Then answered her own question. “Yes, we are. I can smell the grass and the leaves of the trees. Isn’t it sweet and fresh?”

  Mrs. B. inhaled enjoyably.

  Martine lowered her voice a shade. “Are they still behind us?”

  There was another of those spaced pauses. Mrs. B. had turned her head. “Oh, yes. They should be, you know.”

  “I know they should,” Martine answered dryly.

  She spoke again after a while. “Tell me when we get near the statue of Lafayette.”

  “We’re near there now.”

  “Are you sure we’re walking in the downtown direction, the same way that the traffic is going?”

  “Why, of course, dear.” Mrs. B. was amused. “Why would I want to mislead you?”

  She asked another question. “Is it twelve yet?”

  A spaced pause. “About three to.”

  “Here comes the statue,” Martine said. “We’re in front of it now, I can tell. The pavement has changed. It’s smoother, ornamental flagstones all around the base.”

  Suddenly she said, “Let’s walk along the outside edge of the curb.”

  “That’s not safe, dear. Cars come along, and they’re liable to graze us.”

  “Let me do it.” Then she said, “Please.” That word, from her, that Mrs. B. could never resist.

  They shifted over; Martine took the outside position. Mrs. B. must have glanced back. “They’re motioning us to stay further in,” she reported.

  Martine tightened her hold on her arm playfully, in secret conspiracy. “Let’s pretend we don’t understand. They can’t make us if we don’t want to, can they?”

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” agreed Mrs. B. dubiously. “But why don’t we want to?”

  “I want to try something,” Martine said. “When I was a little girl, there was a game I used to love to play. A way of walking. I used to love to walk along the exact rim of the curb, and balance, and see if I co
uld keep from stepping down into the gutter.”

  “Not here, dear.”

  “Yes, here. I want to remember that feeling, from when I was a child. You’re right beside me. What can happen? Look, I’ll hold on to your hand.”

  A male voice said suddenly, from directly behind them, “What’s she doing?” One of the plainclothesmen must have closed in.

  Mrs. B.’s maternal instinct was aroused. “Leave her alone, can’t you?” she retorted brusquely. “Don’t watch her like a hawk every minute.”

  “Make them keep back,” Martine urged in a plaintive undertone.

  “Go on back with your friend,” Mrs. B. ordered none too gently. “Stop treading on our heels.”

  The slight aura of tobacco breath and flintiness of personality that had interjected itself into their own immediate atmosphere (noticeable to Martine alone) was withdrawn again. It had been almost extrasensory, anyway.

  “Is it twelve yet? I’ll stop at twelve,” she promised.

  “Just like a child,” said Mrs. B. with a tear in her voice. “One minute to.”

  “I’ve only missed my footing once,” she gloated. “I’m still good at it after all these years. And now my heels are high, and I have no—” She didn’t finish it. She seldom used the word “eyes” any more.

  “Your hand is shaking, dear,” Mrs. B. noticed.

  “That’s because my whole body is shaking, trying to keep my balance. It must be twelve to the minute now.” Suddenly she said in a hurried voice, as if the one thing had some connection with the other. “I love you very much; you’ve been like my own mother to me; always believe that, I love you very much.”

  “God bless your heart!” the sentimental Mrs. B. immediately reacted, with profuse emotion.

  She had to release Martine’s hand for a moment, to plumb for and bring up a handkerchief, to maintain the effectiveness of her own sight.

  There was an incurving hissing rush of tires. Martine was suddenly swept up bodily in a double grip, an arm about her waist, a hand riveted to her own (which she had carried extended out toward the street by the act of “tightrope-walking”), by some blurred form leaning out above a running board.

  For a moment she had a dizzying sensation of being carried along in thin air, clear of the ground. Then she was drawn inward, deposited onto an upholstered seat. A car door cracked shut. There was the vertigo of a vehicle making a violent out-curve again.

  Outside, to the rear of it, there was Mrs. B’s heartrending scream of despair. Somewhere even further back, a man’s alarmed shout. Then a crashing report, as a revolver-shot was fired for warning into the air.

  Inside, there was a momentary silence. A lull. The vibration told her they were picking up speed, hurtling along.

  Her hand reached out tremulously and found the side of a man’s face. She explored it with gossamer sensitivity, came to the lips at last, traced their shape.

  They contracted slightly, delivered an impalpable kiss against her questioning fingertips.

  She gave a deep sigh of unutterable relief.

  “It’s you,” she murmured. “For a moment I wasn’t sure.”

  The chief ’s rage was something Homeric, and he wasn’t a man given to displays of ungovernable anger as a rule. He raised his office swivel chair from the floor, not once but repeatedly, and brought it crashing down until one of its pediments splintered and flew off. He was prevented from throwing the desk telephone from him only by the fact it was attached to an extension bracket which limited its range. Likewise the water cooler, which was too heavy to lift above it base. At least by a man wearing a truss.

  “The fool!” he roared. “The fool! The blazing fool! He’s taking her straight to her death. We try to save her life, we work for weeks at it, taking every possible human precaution, and he snatches her away from us, takes her straight to her death! They won’t live an hour on their own! They haven’t a chance! Jesus, if I had him here this minute—!” And he gripped the outside edges of his desk with his bare hands until the knuckles showed through like white operation scars.

  He not only demoted the two unhappy plainclothesmen who had had her in charge, who had been on that particular shift, but insulted their parentage and was prevented from dismissing them from his presence with actual blows only by Cameron’s restraining grip on his wrist.

  That attracted his wrath to Cameron himself.

  “And you!” he yelled, turning on him. “What were you doing? Where were you? A blind girl he takes away from you! A blind girl, in broad daylight! Twelve o’clock noon! She’s not the blind one; you are! You should have told us you need a seeing-eye dog, I would have made arrangements.”

  “Do you want my badge now?” Cameron asked respectfully. “Or shall I wait until I’m officially noti—”

  This did nothing to assuage the tirade.

  “Oh, a quitter as well as an incompetent! The easy way, hunh? Lie down flat on your back the minute— You’re not only stupid, but yellow!”

  “I wouldn’t take that, sir, from anyone but—”

  The chief ’s voice rose to an exasperated scream. Or at least as much of a scream as a basso is capable of. “Well, what are you standing there for? Do you want written instructions? Do you want me to take you by the hand and show you the door? They’ve already been gone over an hour and forty minutes!”

  He raised both arms high overhead, packed two massive fists, and brought them down upon the long-suffering desk with a crash that went echoing all up and down the corridors outside, and made people think a steam-pipe had burst.

  “Go after them! Catch up with them, no matter where they went! Bring them back here! I want them back here, in protective custody, before the thirty-first of May!”

  One of Cameron’s unfortunate characteristic fits of indecision seemed to strike him, then of all times.

  “If they went west, by train, maybe I can still overhaul them,” he mumbled. “But if they went east, by water—I’m sunk.”

  The chief flung himself, suddenly, over toward where his coat was hanging upon a clothes-tree. He might only have been in search of a handkerchief, to staunch his perspiring brow. But he also had his holster hanging by it.

  “So help me,” he intoned in a hollow, gasping voice, “I’m going to be brought to trial, yet, for shooting one of my own men in my own office!”

  Cameron didn’t wait to find out what he was looking for.

  And now they were on a train. Locked in a room within a train. The never-ending darkness was not still any more, stable, as it had used to be for her; it hummed like a low but constant wind; it whined a little, and there would be a slow, curving shift of the equilibrium. Around toward the right. Or around toward the left. Then the whine would die down and motion would straighten itself out again. There was a continuous, even accompaniment; like dice being rattled in a dice box. But very even, not syncopated. Once, everything became hollow for a brief while, and her ears wanted to close up; that must have been a tunnel. Then the various sounds lost their resonance and they were out in the open again.

  (For me, she thought wryly, but without complaint, all life is a tunnel; a long, never-ending tunnel, which has no other end.)

  The sensation of rushing was there, except that, without vision, it was impossible to tell if you were going forward or backward. At times she’d even grow confused and think they were rushing backward, instead of ahead. But she knew that the way she was sitting, the way he’d placed her, she was facing the same way the train was, so that feeling was just an illusion, a mirage, of the senses.

  Everything jittered a little; it gave her the sensation of mild “pins and needles” in her feet as they rested on the floor.

  She sat there with her head resting on his shoulder.

  “Read the scenery to me,” she said.

  She felt his outside arm move past her, and the shade went up a little, then clamped fast at its new position.

  “It’s green,” he said. “And wavy. It undulates a little as we
go by. The basic color is green, but in all its different shades. Some of it is dark, and some of it, way over there, where there are meadows in the sun, is light, like apples.”

  “I know, I know. I can see it.”

  “There was a cow, by a fence, just now. It was looking at the train with such a dumb, questioning expression; its head up and its grazing interrupted. Red-brown, with a white streak on its forehead.”

  “Poor cow. Dear cow. Lucky cow.”

  “A little creek just went by. It went by so fast. I bet it never moved so fast in its life before. Ffft—and gone. It didn’t look like water, it looked like silver plate; the sky was reflected in it.”

  “I remember,” she said. “Little creeks used to look like that. They haven’t changed, have they?”

  “They haven’t changed. A little white house just went by.”

  “I wonder who lives in it? I bet they’re not afraid of dying, like we are.”

  “Now here come some trees. They’re very dark green and their shadows are slanting away from the sun. They’re even hitting the windowpane, and making it dark, light, dark, light, dark, light. . . .”

  She reached out and put her fingertips to the glass. “Am I touching their shadows?”

  “Yes. Light; now it’s dark; light again.”

  “I can’t tell. But it’s sort of nice. Like being out there with them.”

  There was a sudden knock on the door, and fright blotted out all the colors in a swirl of inky-black.

  The shade came down with a snap. He got up and left her. She could tell he was standing over where the door was, but there was no unlocking sound. She knew he’d taken out a gun, though the woolen fabric of his clothing made not the slightest whisper.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s the steward, sir. With the tray you ordered.”

  “Say something else.”

  “What do you want me to say, sir?”

  “Say ‘mulligatawny.’ ”

  “Mulli-gaw-tanny,” came through the door.

  She nodded to him; he must, though she could not see him, have nodded back to her.

  “Hit something on the tray. Make it sound out.”

  Silverware clashed faintly against crockery.