Deadline at Dawn

They came out into the slumbering early-morning desolation, flitted quickly past the brief bleach of the close-at-hand street-light, and were swallowed up again in the darkness on the other side of it. The street-lights, stretching away into perspective in their impersonal, formalized, zig-zag pattern, only added to the look of void and loneliness. There was not a single one of those other, warmer, personal lights to be seen anywhere about, above or below, denoting human presence behind a window, living occupancy within a doorway.

It was like walking through a massive, monolithic sepulchre. There was no one abroad, nothing that moved. Not even a cat scenting at a garbage-can. The city was a dead thing, over here on its margins, and like a dead thing it was stark and clammy, it frightened them a little. They drew closer in together even as they moved forward; suddenly without noticing she was hanging on his arm and he had drawn his arm protectively closer against his side, pressing her suppliance to him. They were not walking now as they had walked the time before, coming over here; spaced and self-sufficient. They were huddled together shoulder to shoulder as they moved. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the exacerbated stillness, as though the street were one long plank bridging a hollow space beneath them.

He raised his hat in mock leave-taking, which only imperfectly covered up a very real trepidation. “Goodbye, Manhattan.”

She quickly sealed his mouth for a minute with a sort of superstitious intensity. “Sh, not so loud. Don’t tip our hand to it ahead of time. Don’t let on to it. It’ll cross us sure as you know.”

He looked at her and grinned a little. “You really take that halfway serious, don’t you?”

“More than you know,” she said somberly. “And I’m more right than you know, too.”

At the corner he stopped, put down the valise a second. Here along the avenue there was motion, in contrast to the side-street they had just issued from, but it was cold, jewel-like, and it had thinned since before. It was as though the string holding the red and white beads had broken, and the last lingering few were rolling off into the distance.

“You better go down and wait for me at the bus terminal. I’ll go over alone about — the other thing, first, and then I’ll meet you down there.”

She tightened her grip on his arm convulsively, as if afraid of losing him. “No, no. If we separate, we’re licked. The city’ll get its dirty work in. I’ll think, ‘Can I trust him?’ You’ll think, ‘Can I trust her?’ And before you know it— No, no. We’re staying together, every step of the way. I’m going right over there with you. I’ll wait outside the door while you go in.”

“But suppose he’s gotten home by now? You’ll only— They’re likely to pick you up for complicity.”

“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. You’d be taking it even without me, so we’re going to take it together. See if you can see a cab anywhere around; the longer we take getting over there, the more dangerous it’ll be.”

“On your money?”

“This reformation is on me,” she answered.

They got one finally, by a process of walking slowly north, and stopping and throwing up their arms in unison whenever a pair of the lighted beads raced close enough past to seem likely to see them. One pair swerved in as if about to leap the curb and run them down, swelled larger, stopped, and turned into a cab. They ran for it without waiting for it to correct its discrepancy of halting place, and clambered in one at the other’s heels.

“Take us up to the east side Seventies,” he said. “I’ll tell you where to stop when we get there. Go fast. Go up through the park, that’s quicker.”

It raced north with them, and then over through the classic fashionableness of Fifty-seventh, and then in at the Seventh Avenue entrance, stopping only when it had to for the red disks that seemed to multiply perversely so that one leaped up to bar them at every crossing. Then after that it didn’t have to stop any more, though the roadway used up some of the gain by becoming curved and indirect.

Once in the cab they hadn’t spoken until, at one of the halts, he asked her: “What’re you sitting way over in the corner, keeping your head back, like that for?”

“It’s watching us. It’s got a thousand eyes. Every time a street goes by, it’s like there was an eye hidden deep back along it somewhere, an eye that we can’t see, keeping tabs on us, giving itself the wink. We haven’t fooled it any. It knows we’re trying to run out on it. It’s going to trip us yet if it can.”

“Gee, you’re superstitious, aren’t you!” he commented indulgently.

“When you’ve got an enemy, and you’re wise to it, that don’t make you superstitious, that just makes you canny.”

Then later she peered rearward through the edge of the cab-window. Back toward the west side skyline, now that their passage through the park was giving it depth enough of perspective; towers rearing like menacing black cacti against the reflection-lightened sky.