Mystery

“That’s what he told me,” Tom said, and went outside. The door closed silently behind him.

“You got in, but did you buy?” the vendor chanted.

Tom glanced at the shoeless figure leaning against the wall. He nearly laughed out loud—relief made him feel lighter than air. He walked past the entrance of the Traveller’s Hotel toward the vendor and knelt on the sidewalk beside him. “You had me worried,” he whispered. “Why didn’t you—?”

The vendor was a foot shorter than von Heilitz. Two doglike teeth jutted from his upper jaw, and ragged brown scars sewed shut both of his eyes. “A basket, or a hat?”

“A hat,” Tom said.

“Three dollars, pick your size, pick your size.”

Tom gave the man bills and picked up a hat at random.

“Did you hear a fight, or a scuffle, or anything like that, a couple of hours ago? It would have been outside the bar across the street.”

“I heard the Angel of the Lord,” the vendor said. “And I heard the Lord of Darkness, walking up and down in the world. You’ll look handsome, in that hat.”

Tom gave the hat to a sailor as he passed through the bar to go back to his room, and the sailor placed it on the head of a pretty whore.

Laughter, soft conversation, and music filtered into the fourth-floor hallway. Tom let himself into his room and went to the window without turning on any of the lights. The man in the white shirt was picking his teeth with a fingernail, and a young woman in skin-tight shorts, high heels, and a halter top whispered in his ear. The man shook his head. She leaned against him, and rubbed her breasts against his arm. The man stopped picking his teeth. He turned his head and uttered two or three words, and the girl jumped away from him as if she had been touched with a cattle prod.

Tom pulled a chair up to the window and sat down, his chin on his forearms. After three or four minutes, he pushed up the window. Warm, moist air flowed over him. Steady traffic passed before the hotel on Calle Drosselmayer, and now and then a taxi pulled up and let out couples and single men who walked across the sidewalk and up the steps to the hotel.

At one o’clock, the man in the white shirt went into The Home Plate. He came out ten minutes later and went back to the wall.

Tom had been at least partially reassured by his talk with Hobart Ellington, and for a long time as he watched the street beneath him, he waited for the sound of Lamont von Heilitz coming into the adjoining room. Tom had never seen what went on at night in downtown Mill Walk, and while he waited, expecting the old man to come in at any minute, he watched the street life, fascinated. The number of cars and other sorts of vehicles on the street had actually increased, and more and more people packed the sidewalks: in couples, their arms around each others’ waists; in groups of five or six, carrying bottles and glasses, having an ambulatory party. Men and women on the sidewalk now and then recognized people in the cars and open carriages, and shouted greetings, and sometimes ran through the traffic to join their friends. Neil Langenheim rolled by in an open carriage, too drunk to sit up straight, as a wild-haired girl nuzzled his red face and moved to kneel on top of him. Moonie Firestone went past in the front seat of a white Cadillac convertible, her arm slung comfortably around the neck of a white-haired man. At one-thirty, when the traffic was at its height, he heard footsteps in the hall, and jumped up to go to the connecting door; when the footsteps continued down the hall toward the party in Glenroy Breakstone’s room, he went back to the window and saw the head of a girl with shoulder-length blond hair nestled on the shoulder of a black-haired man driving another long convertible. It was Sarah Spence, he thought, and then thought it could not be; the girl moved, and he saw the flash of her profile, and thought again that she was Sarah. The car moved out of sight, leaving him with his uncertainty.

By two-thirty the crowds had gone, leaving only a few wandering groups of young people, most of them men, moving up and down the sidewalk. The man in the white shirt had vanished. At three, a tide of men and women poured out of The Home Plate and stood uncertainly outside as the lights went off behind them, then drifted off. The noises from down the hall ceased, and loud voices and footsteps went past the door. One car went up Calle Drosselmayer. Traffic lights flashed red and green. Tom’s eyelids closed.

Noises from the street—a junk man tossing cases of empty bottles onto his cart—brought him half of the way into wakefulness hours later. It was still dark outside. He staggered to his bed and fell across the covers.