Deadline at Dawn

“Look. Don’t it look cruel? Don’t it look sneaky and underhanded, like it was just waiting to pounce and dig its claws into someone, anyone at all—?”

He chuckled a little, but only with moderate conviction. “All cities look like that at night, kind of shady and dim, tricky and not very friendly—”

“I hate it,” she said with whispered vehemence. “It’s bad. And it’s alive, it’s got will-power of its own, no one can tell me different.”

“It’s never done me any favors,” he admitted. “I feel about like you do, I guess. Except I never thought of it as just one person, like you do; I thought of it more as — conditions, breaks.”

Ahead of them a new skyline was looming, to take the place of the one that had dropped down out of sight behind them by now. The great gap in the middle of the city made by Central Park closed up again and they entered the East Side. New York, from Fifty-ninth Street to One Hundred and Tenth, is not one city but two; everyone knows that but few stop to think of it. Two widely-separated cities, more far-apart from one another than St. Paul is from Minneapolis or Kansas City, Missouri, from Kansas City, Kansas.

The famous East Side, the Gold Coast, the Butterfield-8 Exchange, that thin veneer of what the Victorians used to call elegance, and what moderns call smartness, spread very thin, not more than three blocks deep anywhere along its entire extent, Fifth to Park or so, and then behind that all the rest of the way to the river, pretty much the same drab huddle as anywhere else in the town.

The driver brought them out at Seventy-second, tacked to correct the unavoidable discrepancy the park-outlet had imposed, and went down Fifth a couple of blocks. Quinn stopped him at Sixty-ninth, a block past, so that he wouldn’t be able to identify their destination too exactly. “We’ll take it from here,” he said to him clippedly.

They got out and paid him and put the little valise down between them, like a sort of dry-land anchor, and then just stood waiting for him to get out of the way. He stepped on the gas and went down Fifth again, toward where there was more life and better chances.

As soon as he was safely gone they walked as far as the next corner, Seventieth, and turned it, but no more. Then as soon as they were safely within the sheltering shadows of the side-street just beyond the corner, they stopped again briefly and made their arrangements to separate.

It was their first separation since they’d been one in purpose. She didn’t like it. She would have rather there weren’t to be any at all, not even such a brief one as this. But she didn’t urge him to let her go right in with him, because she knew he wouldn’t have heard of it. It would make the attempt more of a blind risk, at that. This way she could serve as a sort of look-out. But she didn’t like it; still and all, she didn’t like it.

“You can see it from here. It’s on this side, on the even-numbered side, just past the second street-light down there,” he said guardedly, looking all around to make sure they weren’t observed. “Don’t come any nearer than this, just in case. Wait here with your valise. I’ll be back in no time. Don’t be frightened. Take it easy.”

She was already, but she would have died rather than let him know. It wasn’t in the way he meant, anyway. He meant: don’t be frightened for yourself. She wasn’t. She was something she’d never been before. She was frightened for someone else. She was frightened for him.

“Don’t take any chances. If you see any lights, if it looks like he’s gotten back already, don’t go all the way in — just drop the money inside the door. Let him pick it up from there in the morning. It doesn’t have to go right smack back in the safe. And be careful — he may even be in bed already, with the lights out, and you won’t know it.”

He gave his hat brim a determined tug, moved away from her down the silent street. She watched him go. Watched his figure getting smaller all around the edges, shrinking down to half-size and even less. She didn’t move a muscle; she was like some sort of pointer, except that she had no paw raised from the ground. Her heart was putting on more steam than it needed just for her to stand still like that.

The second light hit him a glancing blow, just on one side of him, then he darkened up again. She saw him glance cautiously around, and she knew he was up to it. It was just a skinny slice of stone from here, sandwiched in among the rest, with a stoop running down from it. He turned aside, went up that to the entrance. A pair of swinging, glass outer doors flicked out, then flattened back again.

He went in.

The act of restitution was under way.

The moment he had entered, she picked up her valise and started moving slowly down that way after him, in spite of his cautioning her to stay where she was. She wanted to be as near him as she could. She kept rooting for him as she edged along.