Part 12 (2/2)

”Now, I haven't said a word to them about the fire - we'll keep that to ourselves, until we find out one way or the other. But don't lie to them, Marie. They're only trying to help you. If they ask you, tell them openly about this craving of yours, this fascination matches have for you, without letting them know you've already given in to it.” He stroked her hand rea.s.suringly. ”How about it?”

She was much calmer now, she was over her first fright. ”Do you swear they won't try to hold me here against my will, use force - a strait jacket or something?”

”I'm your husband, I wouldn't let anything like that happen to you,” he said. ”You stay here just for tonight of your own free will, and I'll come back tomorrow for you, without fail, and we'll hear what they have to say.”

”I don't like to leave the kid like that. Who'll look after him, Harry? Who'll get his meals?”

”I'll send him over to Mrs. Klein, let him eat supper there and stay overnight - the mother of that little fellow he plays with.”

”All right,” she agreed. ”I'll do it - but you'll see, they'll tell you there's nothing the matter with me. Wait'11 you hear what they say.” And as they stood up, she smiled confidently, as if already sure what the outcome would be. He made the necessary arrangements with the reception clerk, and as the nurse led her away she was still smiling. He didn't like that.

He went to the office but he couldn't keep his mind on what he was doing, tried three times to make out a new report on the Lapolla fire and tore up each attempt. How could he keep faith with his firm, present evidence that it was arson, and not involve her? There must be a way, but it would have to wait until he was calmer, could think more clearly. He went back to the flat at three, to meet the kid when he came back from school.

”Your mother's on a visit,” he told him. ”You ask Mrs. Klein if it's all right for you to stay overnight at their house.” The kid was tickled, and went sailing out. Then in about ten minutes he came back again; the Kleins lived on the next block. ”Darn it, Sammy's getting a new brother and they can't have any company in their house!”

Jordan knew he could have taken him out to a cafeteria with him, if the meal was all that mattered, but the kid was so disappointed he felt sorry for him. ”Got any other pals you could stay with?” he asked him.

”Sure, I could go to Frankie's house, he's a swell guy!”

”All right, but you give me the address first. I'll stop up there later on tonight, and if I don't like the looks of the place I'm bringing you home with me again.” Vizetelly was the name; he jotted down the number of the house, it was in their own immediate neighborhood but a little farther to the east. It was a jim-dandy place, the kid a.s.sured him, he'd been there lots of times before. Jordan just smiled and let him go. Then he gave a sigh and went back to the office again.

He stayed on at his desk long after everyone else had gone, moiling over the Lapolla report under a shaded light when it got too dark to see any more. The best he could do with it was to doctor up the statement of the taxi driver who had turned in the alarm, making it appear he had seen an unknown woman run out of the doorway 15 to 20 minutes before the fire had been discovered. The Herk Company wouldn't cross-question the driver over and above his say-so, he felt pretty sure; the trouble was, if it ever got to the ears of the Fire Marshal's office - ouch! It was the first time he'd ever put down a deliberate falsehood in one of his reports, he thought wryly; but to let it go down on the record as being accidental, knowing what he did, would have been an even greater misstatement. That Was.h.i.+ngton Heights affair of the week before ought to be reopened too, he realized, but an indemnity payment had already been made, and it would be a mess to tackle it now. He clasped his head dejectedly between his hands. Finally he shoved the report out of sight in the drawer, got up and looked at the clock. It was after nine, he'd stayed hours overtime. He snapped out the light, felt his way out, and locked up the silent office after him.

He went into a beanery and bought some food, just out of pure habit, then found he couldn't touch it after all. He sat there smoking one cigarette after the other, wondering what the verdict was going to be. They must have examined her by this time. They wouldn't wait to do it at one or two in the morning. Maybe he could find out if he called. Maybe they'd let him talk to her. He could cheer her up, find out how she was taking it. Why not? She wasn't bedridden, there was nothing the matter with her physically. Finally he couldn't stand it any more, had to know, took a deep breath, and stood up. Ten-twenty-five, the clock said. He shut himself in a booth and called the Psychiatric.

”Would it be at all possible for me to say a word to Mrs. Marie Jordan?” he asked timidly. ”She was entered for observation at noon, room 210. This is her husband.”

”This is not a hotel, Mr. Jordan,” was the tart rejoinder. ”It's absolutely against the regulations.”

”Not allowed to call her to the phone, eh?” he asked forlornly.

”Not only that,” the voice answered briskly, ”the patient was discharged half an hour ago at her own request, as of perfectly sound mind and body.”

Jordan straightened up. ”Oh Lord!” he groaned, ”do you people know what you've done?”

”We usually do,” she snapped. ”Just a second, I'll look up the report the examiner left with us, for your information.” He was sweating freely as he waited for her to come back. Then she began to read: ”Marie Jordan, age thirty-eight, weight one hundred forty, eyes blue, hair - is that your wife?”

”Yes, yes! What has he got to say?”

”Perfectly normal,” she quoted. ”Strongly developed maternal instinct, metabolism sound, no nervous disorders whatever. In short, no necessity for undergoing treatment of any kind. I would like to call your attention, Mr. Jordan, to a short postscript in Dr. Grenell's own handwriting. Dr. Grenell, you may not know, is one of our biggest authorities in this field. He usually knows what he's saying and he seems to feel rather strongly about your wife's case.” She cleared her throat meaningly. ”This seems to my mind a glaring instance of willful persecution on the pan of the patient's husband. The shoe seems to fit on the other foot, judging by his habit of following her furtively along the street, so that she was finally compelled to go out only when she thought him asleep, as well as the fact that he imprisoned her in a locked room, mounting guard outside her door, and had hallucinations that the food she prepared for him was drugged. A chemical a.n.a.lysis of the specimen submitted to us proved the charge unfounded. Subjection to treatment of this sort over a period of months or years will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on this woman's mind and bodily health, but so far there are no signs of it. I have told her she is ent.i.tled to police protection if it recurs. Case discharged. Grenell, M.D.”

”Tell Dr. Grenell I congratulate him,” groaned Jordan. ”He's turned a pyromaniac loose on the sleeping city!” And he hung up and just stood there weaving back and forth on his heels for a minute in the narrow confines of the booth.

Maybe she was sane, maybe they were right - but then she was a criminal, in the worst sense of the word, without even the usual criminal's excuse for her actions, hope of gain! He kept shaking his head. No, he was right and they were wrong, in spite of all their experts and all their findings. She'd been lucky and she'd fooled them, that was all. Her actions alone convinced him that bedtime drink had had something in it, but the sediment must have gone to the bottom of the radiator pan and in scooping it up he hadn't gotten any of it. He didn't blame them in a way, he'd deliberately withheld the key to the whole thing from them, thinking only to spare her; as a result it had boomeranged. Sure he'd locked her in her bedroom and sure he'd followed her along the street - what they didn't know was he'd caught her dropping burning matches into a box of kindling under the staircase of a vacant tenement at one in the morning! Well, the h.e.l.l with them, they hadn't helped him any! It was in his own hands again, as it had been at the start. He'd have to handle it the best he could without outside help.

Strongly developed maternal instinct! Sure she had it, why not? She was perfect in every way, A-l, except for this one horrible quirk that had cropped up? Strongly developed - The kid! His extremities got cold all at once. She'd been discharged half an hour ago, she'd look him up the first thing, he'd told her where he was going to take him! He didn't trust her in anything now. He was going up there and get the kid quick, before she did! He didn't think she'd really harm him, but she might take him away with her, not show up at home any more, disappear, afraid of him now or sore at what he'd done to her. Not while he knew it! He wasn't going to let that kid out of his sight from now on, sleep right in the same room with him even if she had come back to the flat! A woman that didn't have any more moral sense than to cremate people alive, slip a sedative to her own husband - no telling what she'd end up by doing!

He nearly shattered the gla.s.s, by the speed with which he got out of the phone booth. He tossed money at the cas.h.i.+er without waiting for change, jumped into a cab in front of the place, gave the fellow the Kleins' address. ”Hurry it up will you - every minute counts!”

”Do the best I can, Cap,” the driver promised.

”That ain't good enough,” Jordan grunted. ”Double it, and it'll still be too slow to suit me!”

But they'd started from way downtown, very near his office. Quarter-to-eleven had run up to nearly 40 after, even with the driver using a stagger system on the lights, before they got up into the East Side Eighties. He jumped out in front of the Kleins' place, paid the cab, and ran in. He rang the bell of their flat like fury. Klein came to the door himself, there was subdued excitement in the place, all the lights lit. ”s.h.!.+” he warned proudly, ”my wife's presenting me with an addition to the family.” He whipped a long black cigar out of his vest pocket, poked it at Jordan with a grin. Jordan fell back a step in sudden recollection.

”Oh, I remember now! He told me that this afternoon, he didn't come here after all, went someplace else - my kid -” He fumbled in his clothes for the slip of paper he'd written the name and address on.

”Yeah, your wife was here asking for him a little while ago. She thought he was up here too,” Klein said. ”I didn't know anything about it, but I heard Sammy, that's my youngster, telling her he'd gone to some other boy's house -” He broke off short in surprise, watched the other man go tumbling down the stairs again, holding a sc.r.a.p of paper in one hand; looked down at his feet and saw the cellophaned cigar he'd just presented him with lying there. He bent down and picked it up, shaking his head. ”No fatherly feeling at all,” he muttered.

Jordan was hanging onto the paper for dear life, as though that would get him over there quicker. Vizetelly, that was the name, why hadn't he remembered sooner! She must have beaten him to it by this time, been there and already taken the kid away. If she went home with him from there, all right, but if she took it into her poor warped mind to beat it off with him, hide herself away someplace, how was he ever going to -?

The sickening keen of a fire siren, off someplace in the distance, stopped him for a minute like a bullet, turned his spine to ice; he went right on again with a lurch. Too far away to mean anything, but Lord, what a thought that had been just now! But it didn't fade out, instead it rose and rose and rose, and suddenly it burst into a full-throated scream as the trucks went tearing across the lower end of the side street he was following, first one and then a second and then a third; and when he turned the corner he saw people running, just like he was running himself only not so fast and not so scared, toward another side street two blocks up. And that was the one the paper in his hand told him to go to.

He shot across the thronged avenue with the immunity of a drunk or a blind man, and felt some squealing car sweep his hat off his head, and didn't even blink or turn to look. Oh no! he was praying, there are 20 other houses on that block, it can't be just that very one, 322, that's laying it on too thick, that's rubbing it in too strong - give a guy a break once in awhile! He turned the corner, and he saw the ladders going up, the hoses already playing on the roof, the smoke quilting the sky, black on top, red underneath, and it was on the near side, the even-numbered side. He had to slow up, he was knocking people over every minute as the crowd tightened around him. 316 - gee, he'd better get him out in a hurry, those people must live in the house right next door! 318 - a cop tried to motion him back and he ducked under his arm. Then he came up flat against a solid wall of humanity dammed up by the ropes they'd already stretched out, and a yell of agony wrenched from him as his eyes went on ahead unimpeded. One more doorway, 320, with people banked up in it, kept back by a fireman, and then the one beyond, just a hazy sketch through the smoke-pall, blurred oilskinned figures moving in and out, highlighted with orange by some hidden glare inside. Gla.s.s tinkling and the crowd around him stampeding back and axes hacking woodwork and thin screams from way up, as in an airplane, and a woman coming down a ladder with a bird cage, and somebody hollering, ”My kid! My kid!” right next to him until he thought he'd go nuts. Then when he turned to look, it was himself.

He quit struggling and grappling with them after a while because he found out it used up too much strength, and he only lost ground, they shoved him further back each time. He just pleaded with them after that, and asked them over and over, and never got any answer. Then finally, it seemed like, hours had gone by, they had everyone out - and no sign of his kid anywhere. He didn't even know what the people looked like, he ran amuck among the huddled survivors yelling, ”Vizetelly! Vizetelly!” He found the man in as bad a shape as he was himself, gibbering in terror, ”I don't know! I can't find my own! I was in the tavern on the corner when they came and told me!”

This time they had to fling him back from within the black hallway of the building itself, coughing and kicking like a maniac, and the cop they turned him over to outside had to pin him down flat on his back on the sidewalk before he'd quit struggling. ”He's up there, I tell you! Why don't they get him out! I'm going to get him myself!”

”Quiet, now, quiet, or I'll have to give you the club! They've gone up again to look.”

The cop had let him up again but was holding onto him, the two of them pressed flat against the wall of the adjoining building as close as they dared go, when he saw the two firemen coming down the ladder again. One of them crumpled as he touched the ground and had to be carried away. And he heard what the other one yelled hoa.r.s.ely to his commanding officer, ”Yeah, there is something up there in the back room of that top floor flat, can't tell if it's a kid or just a burnt log, couldn't get near enough. I'm going up again, had to get Marty down first.” A boom like dynamite from inside, as if in answer.

”There goes the roof!” said somebody. A tornado of smoke, cinders, and embers blew from the door like an explosion, swirling around them where they stood. In that instant of cringing confusion Jordan slipped the cop's revolver out of its holster with his free hand, hid it under his own coat. The man, wheezing, eyes smarting, already disheveled from their previous struggle, never missed it.

It was only later, tottering down the street alone, that he began to fully understand 'why he'd done it. She'd done this, like the others, and he'd known it from the beginning, that was why he had the gun on him now. Some day, sooner or later, he'd find her again. He'd never rest from now on until he had, and when he did! He didn't have to overhear what that woman tenant had been gabbling hysterically to one of the a.s.sistant marshals, to know. ”I tell you I saw a woman that didn't belong in the house running out of the door only ten minutes or so before it started! I happened to be by the window, watching for my husband to come home! She was all untidy-looking and she kept looking back all the way to the corner, like she'd done something she shouldn't!” He didn't have to see the man Vizetelly straining a kid to him and rolling grateful eyes upward, to know what that ”burnt log” in the top floor-rear stood for now. The only life lost, the only person missing, still unaccounted for, out of all that houseful of people - his kid and hers! It couldn't have worked out more d.a.m.nably if she'd plotted it that way on purpose. And maybe she had at that, demented fire wors.h.i.+per that she was! Strongly developed maternal instinct, and fire was happiness to her, and she'd wanted her kid happy too. He sucked in his breath as he stumbled along. He was going to go crazy himself pretty soon, if he kept on thinking of it that way. Maybe he already was.

They'd wanted to s.h.i.+p him off in an ambulance at first, to be treated for shock, but he'd talked them out of it. He had the cure right with him now under his coat, the best cure.

He was going home first, wait awhile, see if she'd show up not knowing that he already knew, and if she didn't, then he was going out after her.

The porter took him up when he sagged in, and stared at the strange whiteness of him, the hand clutched to his side under his coat as if he had a pain, but didn't say anything. When the operator had gone down again he got his key out and put it to the door and went in.

He was too dazed for a minute to notice that he didn't have to put the lights on, and by that time he'd already seen her, crouched away from him in the furthest corner of the living-room, terror and guilt written all over her face. There was the answer right there, no need to ask. But he did anyway. He shut the living-room door after him and said in a lifeless voice, ”Did you do that to 322 tonight?”

Death must have been written on his face; she was too abjectly frightened to deny it. ”I only went there - I - I - oh, Harry, I couldn't help it! I didn't want to, but I couldn't help it - my hands did it by themselves. Take me back to the hospital -”

”You'd only beat that rap again, like you did before.” He was choking. ”You know what you've taken from us, don't you?” She began to shake her head, faster and faster, like a pendulum. ”Come closer to me, Marie. Don't look down, keep looking at my face -”

It went off with a roar that seemed to lift them both simultaneously, so close together had they come, almost touching. She didn't fall; there was a mantel behind her; she staggered backward, caught it with both upturned hands, and seemed to hang there, gripping life with ten fingers. Her eyes glazed. ”You shouldn't have - done that,” she whispered. ”You'll wake up the kid.”

The door came open behind him; he turned and saw the kid standing there, staring from one to the other. She was still upright, lower now, one hand slipped from the mantel edge. ”Almighty G.o.d,” he said. He stood staring at the boy. Then he said, ”You go out to the telephone and say you want a policeman. You're a big guy, son, you know how to use it. Close the door. Don't stand there looking in at us.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

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