A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The bathroom door opened unexpectedly. It had a full-length mirror set into it. As this swung around, blurring perspective, the lights reflected on it came to a head and produced a bright but soundless flash, like sheet-lightning or the flash-bulb of a camera.

A woman stepped out into the middle of the incipient crisis, cool and casual. She wasn’t a girl, she wasn’t that young any more, but she still looked satisfactorily young. She had that innate something about her that spells good breeding and demands consideration. Not just a cheap stray to be disregarded.

She was looking only at the man.

“What is it?” she said evenly. “What does she want?”

“She’s got me mixed up with somebody she claims she met in the bar—”

“How could you have been down there? The two of us have been light here in the room since eight o’clock—”

There was a body-turn swift as a bolero dancer’s, and the girl was gone again, just as springy and sudden as she’d come in.

The little splash of spread-out sparks from the cigarette she’d flung down headlong slowly soaked into the carpet and glimmered out.

The man stood there frozen, as if a snake had just fallen unexpectedly onto his shoulder from somewhere and then dropped harmlessly off again.

Terry had to call down for help and have a bellboy come up and give him a hand, before he could wrestle the heaving, forward-straining Mike away from the door and back toward the bed out of which he’d cannoned when he first learned of what had happened. At that, the call, brief as it was, had cost him considerable ground, because he’d had to hang onto Mike with only one arm hooked around and under Mike’s arm while making it with the other. When the auxiliary, actually a stocky man of fifty, arrived, they managed between the two of them to establish sufficient counterweight to stall and reverse Mike’s impetus. But in a respectfully passive way, not actively using their arms to oppose or push him at all. Terry in fact simply used the backs of his own shoulders as an impediment, and gained leverage by digging his heels in front of him and pumping backward. The tripartite mass of figures they made somewhat resembled the classical Laocoon statuary-group, except that they weren’t marble, weren’t motionless, and had clothes on. Finally by a series of lurching drags, first on one side then on the other, they got him back within orbit of the bed, much as men move a frigidaire or some other equally ponderous object without casters. Then he suddenly stopped straining, went spent, and sank down heavily onto the edge of the bed.

“No, Mike, don’t,” Terry lamented. “You’ll give yourself another stroke.”

“It’s you that’ll be giving it to me,” Mike accused. “And the likes of all the rest of you.”

Terry held out a drink and Mike promptly gave it back to him, all over the face.

Terry wiped himself off on his sleeve. The droplets clinging to his jawline had made him look for a moment as though he had a curious, beaded beard. He had the uncomplaining look on his face of a dutiful son who has just been buffeted and accepts the justice of it, even though he may not be sure just exactly what it was for.

The mature bellboy had retired by now.

Terry waited a tactful moment or two until Mike’s breathing had subsided still further, then took a chance on pouring out another.

This time Mike put it where it belonged, down his own gullet. His face slowly went back to red again, from the almost-black it had been before.

“Who is she?” he demanded, clapping the glass down. “How’d she get in there? I thought you had every way in and out spotted. How’d she get through?”

“We have, we have. It was just a blind coincidence, one of those things that happen every now and then; that there’s no way of preventing because they’re completely unforeseeable, unguessable beforehand. I did some checking after she left. They’re old friends, from years back. She didn’t come to see him, didn’t even know he lived here. She came in to see someone else, a woman friend. He and she must have come face-to-face in one of the little lounges or passageways that weren’t being spot-covered by us — the ground floor is honey-combed with them — and he gave her his room-number. Then later on, after she left her other friend, she looked him up to talk over old times. No sex, she’s not that type. There was no particular reason to single her out; she might have ridden the elevator along with other people, and been thought to be accompanying them.

“It was just one of those flukes, Mike,” he said. “Like that bit with the taxi.”

“It’s always just one of those flukes, with him,” Mike brooded darkly. “For three and a half years now, it’s been just one of those flukes, over and over and time after time. Till I ask myself: which is the punisher and which him that’s punished? Who’s on the right side and who on the wrong?”

His face screwed up blindly for a minute, and he acted as if he were going to cry. But didn’t.