life in general being what it is. Why did he feel pity? Well, she wasn’t much more than a kid, and she was in a hell of a mess, and once he might have felt a hell of a lot more than he was now capable of feeling. Rolling her over onto her back, he lifted an eyelid, felt her pulse, turned away with a whispered curse.
“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it to hell.” Methodically, with slow professional assurance, he searched the room. Closet, drawers, two pieces of luggage. He was looking for nothing in particular, and he found nothing. In the bathroom, he looked into the medicine cabinet and found the unlabeled box. He opened it and looked at the shiny green tablets and put it back. Moving back through the bedroom into the living room, he found the telephone and dialed Headquarters.
“Lieutenant Ridley in Homicide,” he said.
He waited, looking at the wall with milky blue eyes that had the curious shallow look of blindness. After a few seconds, he said, “Lieutenant? Sergeant Tromp. She’s here. Came in just a few minutes ago. Now she’s gone out again. Like a light, I mean. What? Yeah, plastered. I sent her to take a shower, and she passed out on the bed.”
At the other end of the line, Lieutenant Ridley said, “Can you bring her out of it?”
“I doubt it. She’s really been tying one on.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter much. Let her sleep it off. I’ll send a man around to keep an eye on the place. We can bring her down in the morning.”
“That’s what I thought. She’s a crazy dame, Lieutenant. Talks crazy.”
“All drunks talk crazy.”
“I got an idea this was different. Something behind the liquor.”
“What did she say?”
“Crazy stuff. Stuff about the color of her hair. About going to prison for it.”
There was a long silence. The wire hummed. Sergeant Tromp waited with the patience he had learned on the road going no place much, and Ridley came back in his own good time. His voice possessed a sudden hushed quality, as if he were looking at the truth written in cobwebs and was afraid to breathe on it.
“Housman,” he said.
“What?”
“The hair. The stuff she was talking. It’s from a poem by a guy named Housman. You wait for relief, Sergeant. Put him in the hall.”
“Right.”
Sergeant Tromp hung up and cursed again. Imagine the guy pinning it down like that. You say something about hair and right away he says Housman. A real fancy college boy. It didn’t make it any different because he tried to cover up by calling people guys and dames, either, the poetry-reading bastard.
CHAPTER 9
She awoke in the loneliest hours of time, in the desolate waste between midnight and dawn. She was cold, bitterly cold, and the cold was something that originated in her interior and worked its way outward through flesh and bone. Having exhausted the powers of delusion and alcohol to obscure reality, she was now focused and magnified in her own eyes, lonely and terrified and without resources. Her head throbbed, but she was hardly aware of the pain. She was aware primarily of the cold, the bitter cold. She began to shiver, her teeth rattling in her mouth, and she tensed her muscles and ground her teeth together with a harsh, grating sound.
Remembering the policeman, she sought his elusive name among the confusion of distorted impressions in he: mind, but it was no use. She couldn’t remember it. Worse than that, she couldn’t even remember what he had said to her, or what she had in turn said to him. In Christ’s name, what had she said? That could be very important That could be the difference between escape and destruction. She must try to remember, to be on guard, to go back through the mist from detail to detail until her recollection was complete.
Then it occurred to her that what the policeman had known before he came might be much more important than anything she had said to him. For, after all, he had come, had he not? How could she have been blind, even briefly, to the awful significance of his simple coming? It meant, of course, that Angus Brunn had been found and that there was, in spite of all the clever things she had done, a thin red line from him to her.
The newspaper. What had she done with the newspaper? She sat up on the edge of the bed and tried to recall when she had last had it in her possession. She had bought it at the corner stand. A cab had struck her, and she had dropped it in the street, but the driver, who was very frightened and therefore very considerate, had retrieved it for her. Had she brought it upstairs when she left the cab? Was it now out in the living room? The problem was reduced to that simplicity—was it or was it not in the living room?
She got up and limped through darkness into the living room, the bruised muscles of her thigh protesting the action sharply. In the living room, moving by memory through the sparse scatter of furniture she found a lamp and produced light. The newspaper, still folded as she had clutched it in her hands, was lying on the floor by the chair in which she had sat while the policeman was here. She went over and picked up the paper and opened it in her hands.
The story was there, on the front page, with a picture of Angus Brunn’s body on the floor, and she had a wild notion, as her eyes flicked to the picture, that she had just missed seeing herself disappear through the kitchen door. But then, after the first tendency toward hysteria, she was quite calm, and she read the story through in careful detail, word for word. The police, she learned, had nothing definite to reveal except that they were checking as a matter of routine a few people whose names and telephone numbers were found in a notebook the victim had kept. Which explained quite logically and simply how they had come so soon to her. Her name and number had been in the notebook. Such things were always logical and simple, after all, if one only took the trouble to find out about them.
The truth was, it was too much so. Much too simple. Like all over-simplifications of catastrophe, like the grim hypothesis of the wrath of God, it possessed a special quality of terror. She stood with the terror mounting within her, and the newspaper dropped from her hands to the floor, and she knew that nothing was now left to her but flight. She would have to flee the gathering wrath, not because she was really convinced that there was the slightest chance of escaping it, but because it always seems better to die in Samarra than in Baghdad. She thought of flight, not in terms of space, but time. There was no secure place on today’s earth, nor would there be on tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s earth, the earth in time before Jacqueline and Stella, each dead in her own way, had been a place of security and could now be a place of sanctuary if only, somehow, she could survive to reach it. If she could only reach it, the hamlet of the real beginning in the scent of lilies, space would become time and time would become space, and she would be by the simple transit of her body the person that she had been then instead of the person that she was now. In regression toward the womb was immunity to life.
Turning away, acting with decision under a strong compulsion that was next to the last one she would ever feel, she returned to the bedroom and packed a few essential articles in a small bag. Carrying the bag and a purse containing all her available money, she turned off the lights in the bedroom and living room and walked quickly out of the apartment and down the stairs and out the front door into the street, and it was, at the moment of her exit, exactly three o’clock.
She intended to leave the city by bus, because there were few trains to her tiny destination, and taking a train might entail a long and perilous wait. It was fully three miles to the bus station, but the streets were nearly empty of traffic in that arid hour of the morning, and so she walked. At first she kept looking for
