the street, about to descend the three imitation-stone steps between the threshold and the sidewalk, its asphalt glistening now after the rain, people hurrying by in hopes of reaching home before the next shower, before their delay (they must have waited somewhere a long while) causes alarm, before dinner time, before nightfall.
The click of the lock has set off the customary mechanism: I have forgotten my key inside and I can no longer open the door to get it back. This is not true, of course, but the image is still as powerful of the tiny steel key lying on the right-hand comer of the marble table top near the brass candlestick. So there must be a table in this dim vestibule.
It is a dark piece of furniture, its mahogany veneer in poor condition, which must date from the second half of the preceding century. On the dull black marble, the little key stands out with all the clarity of a primer illustration. Its flat, perfectly round ring lies only a couple of inches from the hexagonal base of the candlestick, etc., whose ornamental shaft (fillets, tori, cavettos, cymae, scotias, etc.) supports … etc. The yellow brass glistens in the dark, on the right side where a faint light filters through the grille covering the window in the door.
Above the table a large oblong mirror is hanging on the wall, tilted slightly forward. Its wooden frame, the gilding faded on the unidentifiable carved leaves, delimits a misty surface with the bluish depths of an aquarium, the central part occupied by the half-open library door and an uncertain, fragile, remote figure—it is Laura standing motionless on the other side of the threshold.
“You’re late,” she says. “I was beginning to worry.”
“I had to wait until the rain stopped.”
“Was it raining?”
“Yes, a long while.”
“Not here … And you’re not even wet.”
“No—because I waited.”
My hand releases the little key I had just set down on the marble when I glanced up toward the mirror. Memory of the contact with the already cooled metal (which my palm had warmed a moment before) still remains on the sensitive skin of my finger tips as I turn all the way around to face the street, immediately starting down the three imitation-stone steps leading from the door to the sidewalk. With a habitual gesture—futile, insistent, inevitable—I check to discover whether the little steel key is in the usual pocket where I have just slipped it. At this moment I notice the man in black—shiny raincoat with the collar turned up, hands in his pockets, soft felt hat low over his eyes—waiting on the opposite sidewalk.
Though he appears to be more concerned to avoid notice than the rain, his motionless figure immediately attracts attention among the people hurrying past after the shower. Moreover, they are less numerous now, and the man, feeling exposed, gradually draws back into the recess afforded by one housefront—that of number 789 A, whose stucco is painted bright blue.
This house has three stories, like all its neighbors (which constitute, about a yard closer to the curb, the general alignment of the street), but it must be of more recent construction, for it is the only one without a fire escape: a skeleton of black intersecting lines form superimpozed Z’s on the façade of each apartment building and end about ten feet from the ground. A thin removable ladder, usually raised, offers means to reach the sidewalk and permit escape from the fire blazing on the stairs inside.
A skillful burglar, or a murderer, could catch hold of the lowest rung, hoist himself up, and then simply climb the metal steps to the French window of any floor and enter the room he chooses, merely by breaking a single pane. At least this is what Laura imagines. The sound of the broken pane, whose splinters tinkle on the floor at the end of the corridor, has awakened her with a start.
She remains sitting bolt upright in her bed, motionless, holding her breath, not turning on the light in order to conceal her presence from the criminal who, having carefully thrust his hand between the sharp points of glass into the hole he has just poked with his revolver barrel or its heavier cross-hatched butt, or with the ivory handle of his switchblade, is now opening the window latch without making a sound. The harsh light of a nearby streetlamp casts its even larger shadow across the bright housefront, above the distorted shadow of the fire escape, whose various networks of parallel rays cross-hatch the whole surface of the building in a precise and complicated pattern.
When I open the bedroom door, I find Laura in this same posture of anxious expectation: sitting up in bed, leaning back against the bolster on both arms, head raised. The light from the corridor, where I have pressed the switch in passing, gleams in the dark room on the young woman’s blond hair, pale flesh, and nightgown. She must have been asleep, for the material of the nightgown is rumpled into countless creases.
“It’s you,” she says. “You’re so late. You frightened me.”
Standing on the threshold of the wide-open doorway, I answer that the meeting lasted longer than usual.
“Nothing new?” she asks.
“No,” I say, “nothing new.”
“Did you drop something on your way upstairs?”
“No. Why? And I walked as softly as I could … Did you hear anything special?”
“It sounded like broken glass on the tiles …”
“Maybe it was my keys, when I set them down on the marble.”
“Downstairs? No, it was much closer … Just at the end of the corridor.”
“No,” I say, “you were dreaming.”
I step into the room. Laura leans back, but she is not completely relaxed. She stares up at the ceiling, eyes wide, as if she were still hearing suspicious creaks, or as if she were trying to remember something. After a pause she asks, “What’s it like outside?”
“It’s a quiet night.”
Her transparent nightgown reveals the dark nipples of her breasts.
“I’d like to go out,” she says, without looking at me.
“You would? Where?”
“Nowhere. Out into the street …”
“At this time of night?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t … It’s raining.”
I would rather not mention to her now the man in the black raincoat waiting in front of the house, on the sidewalk across the street. I start to close the door, but just at that moment, even before my hand has reached the edge of the door which I am about to push back, the light goes off in the corridor, and my silhouette, dark against the lighted doorway, immediately vanishes.
Made threatening perhaps by the raised arm, the extent of the movement, the muffled impact of the fist against the wood in the sudden darkness, the half-glimpsed image has alarmed the young woman, who utters a faint moan. She then hears, on the thick carpeting which covers the entire floor of the room, the heavy footsteps coming closer to her bed. She tries to scream, but a firm warm hand presses against her mouth, while she feels the sensation of a crushing mass which slides toward her and soon overwhelms her altogether.
With
