by Otto Penzler
Annixter exchanged a glance with Ransome, his producer, who was with him. It was a slightly puzzled, slightly anxious glance. But he smiled, then, at the hat-check girl.
‘Not quite “killed before his eyes”,’ said Annixter. ‘Just shaken up a bit, that’s all.’
There was no need to explain to her how curious, how eccentric, had been the effect of that ‘shaking up’ upon his mind.
‘If you could ’a’ seen yourself lying there with the taxi’s lights shining on you—”
‘Ah, there’s that imagination of yours!’ said Annixter.
He hesitated for just an instant, then asked the question he had come to ask—the question which had assumed so profound an importance for him.
He asked, ‘That man I was with—who was he?’
The hat-check girl looked from one to the other. She shook her head.
‘I never saw him before,’ she said, ‘and I haven’t seen him since.’
Annixter felt as though she had struck him in the face. He had hoped, hoped desperately, for a different answer; he had counted on it.
Ransome put a hand on his arm, restrainingly.
‘Anyway,’ said Ransome, ‘as we’re here, let’s have a drink.’
They went down the two steps into the room where the band thumped. A waiter led them to a table, and Ransome gave him an order.
‘There was no point in pressing that girl,’ Ransome said to Annixter. ‘She doesn’t know the man, and that’s that. My advice to you, James, is: Don’t worry. Get your mind on something else. Give yourself a chance. After all, it’s barely a week since—’
‘A week!’ Annixter said. ‘Hell, look what I’ve done in that week! The whole of the first two acts, and the third act right up to that crucial point— the climax of the whole thing: the solution: the scene that the play stands or falls on! It would have been done, Bill—the whole play, the best thing I ever did in my life—it would have been finished two days ago if it hadn’t been for this—’ he knuckled his forehead—‘this extraordinary blind spot, this damnable little trick of memory!’
‘You had a very rough shaking up—’
‘That?’ Annixter said contemptuously. He glanced down at the sling on his arm. ‘I never even felt it; it didn’t bother me. I woke up in the ambulance with my play as vivid in my mind as the moment the taxi hit me—more so, maybe, because I was stone cold sober then, and knew what I had. A winner—a thing that just couldn’t miss!’
‘If you’d rested,’ Ransome said, ‘as the doc told you, instead of sitting up in bed there scribbling night and day—’
‘I had to get it on paper. Rest?’ said Annixter, and laughed harshly. ‘You don’t get rest when you’ve got a thing like that. That’s what you live for—if you’re a playwright. That is living! I’ve lived eight whole lifetimes, in those eight characters, during the past five days. I’ve lived so utterly in them, Bill, that it wasn’t till I actually came to write that last scene that I realized what I’d lost! Only my whole play, that’s all! How was Cynthia stabbed in that windowless room into which she had locked and bolted herself? How did the killer get to her? How was it done?
‘Hell,’ Annixter said, ‘scores of writers, better men than I am, have tried to put that sealed room murder over—and never quite done it convincingly: never quite got away with it: been overelaborate, phoney! I had it—heaven help me, I had it! Simple, perfect, glaringly obvious when you’ve once seen it! And it’s my whole play—the curtain rises on that sealed room and falls on it! That was my revelation—how it was done! That was what I got, by the way of playwright’s compensation, because a woman I thought I loved kicked me in the face—I brooded up the answer to the sealed room! And a taxi knocked it out of my head!’
He drew a long breath.
‘I’ve spent two days and two nights, Bill, trying to get that idea back—how it was done! It won’t come. I’m a competent playwright; I know my job; I could finish my play, but it’d be like all those others—not quite right, phoney! It wouldn’t be my play! But there’s a little man walking around this city somewhere—a little man with hexagonal glasses—who’s got my idea in his head! He’s got it because I told it to him. I’m going to find that little man, and get back what belongs to me! I’ve got to! Don’t you see that, Bill? I’ve got to!’
If the gentleman who, at the Casa Havana on the night of January 27th so patiently listened to a playwright’s outlining of an idea for a drama will communicate with the Box No. below, he will hear of something to his advantage.
A LITTLE MAN who had said, ‘He’s not my friend. He’s just someone I met—’
A little man who’d seen an accident but hadn’t waited to give evidence—
The hat-check girl had been right. There was something a little queer about that.
A little queer?
During the next few days, when the advertisements he’d inserted failed to bring any reply, it began to seem to Annixter very queer indeed.
His arm was out of its sling now, but he couldn’t work. Time and again, he sat down before his almost completed manuscript, read it through with close, grim attention, thinking, ‘It’s bound to come back this time!’—only to find himself up against that blind spot again, that blank wall, that maddening hiatus in his memory.
He left his work and prowled the streets; he haunted bars and saloons; he rode for miles on ’buses and subways, especially at the rush hours. He saw a million faces, but the face of the little man with hexagonal glasses he did not see.
The thought of him obsessed Annixter. It was infuriating, it was unjust, it was torture to think that a little, ordinary, chance-met citizen was walking blandly around somewhere with the last link of his, the celebrated James Annixter’s, play—the best thing he’d ever done—locked away in his head. And with no idea of what he had: without the imagination, probably, to appreciate what he had! And certainly with no idea of what it meant to Annixter!
Or had he some idea? Was he, perhaps, not quite so ordinary as he’d seemed? Had he seen those advertisements, drawn from them tortuous inferences of his own? Was he holding back with some scheme for shaking Annixter down for a packet?
The more Annixter thought about it, the more he felt that the hat-check girl had been right, that there was something very queer indeed about the way the little man had behaved after the accident.
Annixter’s imagination played around the man he was seeking, tried to probe into his mind, conceived reasons for his fading away after the accident, for his failure to reply to the advertisements.
Annixter’s was an active and dramatic imagination. The little man who had seemed so ordinary began to take on a sinister shape in Annixter’s mind—
But the moment he actually saw the little man again, he realized how absurd it was. It was so absurd that it was laughable. The little man was so respectable; his shoulders were so straight; his pepper-and-salt suit was so neat; his black hard-felt hat was set so squarely on his head—
The doors of the subway train were just closing when Annixter saw him, standing on the platform with a briefcase in one hand, a folded evening paper under his other arm. Light from the train shone on his prim, pale face; his hexagonal spectacles flashed. He turned toward the exit as Annixter lunged for the closing doors of the train, squeezed between them on to the platform.
Craning his head to see above the crowd, Annixter elbowed his way through, ran up the stairs two at a time, put a hand on the little man’s shoulder.
‘Just a minute,’ Annixter said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
The little man checked instantly, at the touch of Annixter’s hand. Then he turned his head and looked at Annixter. His eyes were pale behind the hexagonal, rimless glasses—a pale grey. His mouth was a straight line, almost colourless.
Annixter loved the little man like a brother. Merely finding the little man was a relief so great that it was like the lifting of a black cloud from his spirits. He patted the little man’s shoulder affectionately.<
br />
‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ said Annixter. ‘It won’t take a minute. Let’s go somewhere.’
The little man said, ‘I can’t imagine what you want to talk to me about.’
He moved slightly to one side, to let a woman pass. The crowd from the train had thinned, but there were still people going up and down the stairs. The little man looked, politely inquiring, at Annixter.
Annixter said, ‘Of course you can’t, it’s so damned silly! But it’s about that play—’
‘Play?’
Annixter felt a faint anxiety.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I was drunk that night—I was very, very drunk! But looking back, my impression is that you were dead sober. You were, weren’t you?’
‘I’ve never been drunk in my life.’
‘Thank heaven for that!’ said Annixter. ‘Then you won’t have any difficulty in remembering the little point I want you to remember.’ He grinned, shook his head. ‘You had me going there, for a minute, I thought—’
‘I don’t know what you thought,’ the little man said. ‘But I’m quite sure you’re mistaking me for somebody else. I haven’t any idea what you’re talking about. I never saw you before in my life. I’m sorry. Good night.”
He turned and started up the stairs. Annixter stared after him. He couldn’t believe his ears. He stared blankly after the little man for an instant, then a rush of anger and suspicion swept away his bewilderment. He raced up the stairs, caught the little man by the arm.
‘Just a minute,’ said Annixter. ‘I may have been drunk, but—’
‘That,’ the little man said, ‘seems evident. Do you mind taking your hand off me?’
Annixter controlled himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Let me get this right, though. You say you’ve never seen me before. Then you weren’t at the Casa Havana on the 27th—somewhere between ten o’clock and midnight? You didn’t have a drink or two with me, and listen to an idea for a play that had just come into my mind?’
The little man looked steadily at Annixter.
‘I’ve told you,’ the little man said. ‘I’ve never set eyes on you before.’
‘You didn’t see me get hit by a taxi?’ Annixter pursued, tensely. ‘You didn’t say to the hat-check girl, “He’s not my friend. He’s just someone I met”?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the little man said sharply.
He made to turn away, but Annixter gripped his arm again.
‘I don’t know,’ Annixter said, between his teeth, ‘anything about your private affairs, and I don’t want to. You may have had some good reason for wanting to duck giving evidence as a witness of that taxi accident. You may have some good reason for this act you’re pulling on me, now. I don’t know and I don’t care. But it is an act. You are the man I told my play to!
‘I want you to tell that story back to me as I told it to you; I have my reasons—personal reasons, of concern to me and me only. I want you to tell the story back to me—that’s all I want! I don’t want to know who you are, or anything about you, I just want you to tell me that story!’
‘You ask,’ the little man said, ‘an impossibility, since I never heard it.’
Annixter kept an iron hold on himself.
He said, ‘Is it money? Is this some sort of a hold-up? Tell me what you want; I’ll give it to you. Lord help me, I’d go so far as to give you a share in the play! That’ll mean real money. I know, because I know my business. And maybe—maybe,’ said Annixter, struck by a sudden thought, ‘you know it, too! Eh?’
‘You’re insane or drunk!’ the little man said.
With a sudden movement, he jerked his arm free, raced up the stairs. A train was rumbling in, below. People were hurrying down. He weaved and dodged among them with extraordinary celerity.
He was a small man, light, and Annixter was heavy. By the time he reached the street, there was no sign of the little man. He was gone.
WAS THE IDEA, Annixter wondered, to steal his play? By some wild chance did the little man nurture a fantastic ambition to be a dramatist? Had he, perhaps, peddled his precious manuscripts in vain, for years, around the managements? Had Annixter’s play appeared to him as a blinding flash of hope in the gathering darkness of frustration and failure: something he had imagined he could safely steal because it had seemed to him the random inspiration of a drunkard who by morning would have forgotten he had ever given birth to anything but a hangover?
That, Annixter thought, would be a laugh! That would be irony—
He took another drink. It was his fifteenth since the little man with the hexagonal glasses had given him the slip, and Annixter was beginning to reach the stage where he lost count of how many places he had had drinks in tonight. It was also the stage, though, where he was beginning to feel better, where his mind was beginning to work.
He could imagine just how the little man must have felt as the quality of the play he was being told, with hiccups, gradually had dawned upon him.
‘This is mine!’ the little man would have thought. ‘I’ve got to have this. He’s drunk, he’s soused, he’s bottled—he’ll have forgotten every word of it by the morning! Go on! Go on, mister! Keep talking!’
That was a laugh, too—the idea that Annixter would have forgotten his play by the morning. Other things Annixter forgot, unimportant things; but never in his life had he forgotten the minutest detail that was to his purpose as a playwright. Never! Except once, because a taxi had knocked him down.
Annixter took another drink. He needed it. He was on his own now. There wasn’t any little man with hexagonal glasses to fill that blind spot for him. The little man was gone. He was gone as though he’d never been. To hell with him! Annixter had to fill in that blind spot himself. He had to do it—somehow!
He had another drink. He had quite a lot more drinks. The bar was crowded and noisy, but he didn’t notice the noise—till someone came up and slapped him on the shoulder. It was Ransome.
Annixter stood up, leaning with his knuckles on the table.
‘Look, Bill,’ Annixter said, ‘how about this? Man forgets an idea, see? He wants to get it back—gotta get it back! Idea comes from inside, works back inward. How’s that?’
He swayed, peering at Ransome.
‘Better have a little drink,’ said Ransome. ‘I’d need to think that out.’
‘I,’ said Annixter, ‘have thought it out!’ He crammed his hat shapelessly on to his head. ‘Be seeing you, Bill. I got work to do!’
He started, on a slightly tacking course, for the door—and his apartment.
It was Joseph, his ‘man,’ who opened the door of his apartment to him, some twenty minutes later. Joseph opened the door while Annixter’s latchkey was still describing vexed circles around the lock.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said Joseph.
Annixter stared at him. ‘I didn’t tell you to stay the night.’
‘I hadn’t any reason for going out, sir,’ Joseph explained. He helped Annixter off with his coat. ‘I rather enjoy a quiet evening in, once in a while.’
‘You got to get out of here,’ said Annixter.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Joseph. ‘I’ll go and throw a few things into a bag.’
Annixter went into his big living-room-study, poured himself a drink.
The manuscript of his play lay on the desk. Annixter, swaying a little, glass in hand, stood frowning down at the untidy slack of yellow paper, but he didn’t begin to read. He waited until he heard the outer door click shut behind Joseph, then he gathered up his manuscript, the decanter and a glass, and the cigarette box. Thus laden, he went into the hall, walked across it to the door of Joseph’s room.
There was a bolt on the inside of this door and the room was the only one in the apartment which had no window—both facts which made the room the only one suitable to Annixter’s purpose.
With his free hand, he switched on the light.
It was a plain little room, but Annixter noticed, with a
faint grin, that the bedspread and the cushion in the worn basket-chair were both blue. Appropriate, he thought—a good omen. Room Blue by James Annixter—
Joseph had evidently been lying on the bed, reading the evening paper; the paper lay on the rumpled quilt, and the pillow was dented. Beside the head of the bed, opposite the door, was a small table littered with shoe-brushes and dusters.
Annixter swept this paraphernalia on to the floor. He put his stack of manuscript, the decanter and glass and cigarette box on the table, and went across and bolted the door. He pulled the basket-chair up to the table and sat down, lighted a cigarette.
He leaned back in the chair, smoking, letting his mind ease into the atmosphere he wanted—the mental atmosphere of Cynthia, the woman in his play, the woman who was afraid, so afraid that she had locked and bolted herself into a windowless room, a sealed room.
‘This is how she sat,’ Annixter told himself, ‘just as I’m sitting now: in a room with no windows, the door locked and bolted. Yet he got at her. He got at her with a knife—in a room with no windows, the door remaining locked and bolted on the inside. How was it done?’
There was a way in which it could be done. He, Annixter, had thought of that way: he had conceived it, invented it—and forgotten it. His idea had produced the circumstances. Now, deliberately, he had reproduced the circumstances, that he might think back to the idea. He had put his person in the position of the victim, that his mind might grapple with the problem of the murderer.
It was very quiet: not a sound in the room, the whole apartment.
For a long time, Annixter sat unmoving. He sat unmoving until the intensity of his concentration began to waver. Then he relaxed. He pressed the palms of his hands to his forehead for a moment, then reached for the decanter. He splashed himself a strong drink. He had almost recovered what he sought; he had felt it close, had been on the very verge of it.
‘Easy,’ he warned himself, ‘take it easy. Rest. Relax. Try again in a minute.’
