RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (27 page)

"God bless your heart!" the sentimental Mrs. B. immediately reacted, with profuse emotion.

She had to release Martine's hand for a moment, to plumb for and bring up a handkerchief, to maintain the effectiveness of her own sight.

There was an incurving hissing rush of tires. Martine was suddenly swept up bodily in a double grip, an arm about her waist, a hand riveted to her own (which she had carried extended out toward the street by the act of "tightrope-walking"), by some blurred form leaning out above a running board.

For a moment she had a dizzying sensation of being carried along in thin air, clear of the ground. Then she was drawn inward, deposited onto an upholstered seat. A car door cracked shut. There was the vertigo of a vehicle making a violent out-curve again.

Outside, to the rear of it, there was Mrs. B's heartrending scream of despair. Somewhere even further back, a man's alarmed shout. Then a crashing report, as a revolver-shot was fired for warning into the air.

Inside, there was a momentary silence. A lull. The vibration told her they were picking up speed, hurtling along.

Her hand reached out tremulously and found the side of a man's face. She explored it with gossamer sensitivity, came to the lips at last, traced their shape.

They contracted slightly, delivered an impalpable kiss against her questioning fingertips.

She gave a deep sigh of unutterable relief.

"It's you," she murmured. "For a moment I wasn't sure."

The chief's rage was something homeric, and he wasn't a man given to displays of ungovernable anger as a rule. He raised his office swivel chair from the floor, not once but repeatedly, and brought it crashing down until one of its pediments splintered and flew off. He was prevented from throwing the desk telephone from him only by the fact that it was attached to an extension bracket which limited its range. Likewise the water cooler, which was too heavy to lift above its base. At least by a man wearing a truss.

"The fool!" he roared. "The fool! The blazing fool! He's taking her straight to her death. We try to save her life, we work for weeks at it, taking every possible human precaution, and he snatches her away from us, takes her straight to her death! They won't live an hour on their own! They haven't a chance! Jesus, if I had him here this minute--!" And he gripped the outside edges of his desk with his bare hands until the knuckles showed through like white operation scars.

He not only demoted the two unhappy plainclothesmen who had had her in cimarge, who had been on that particular shift, but insulted their parentage and was prevented from dismissing them from his presence with actual blows only by Cameron's restraining grip on his wrist.

That attracted his wrath to Cameron himself.

"And you!" he yelled, turning on him. "What were you doing? Where were you? A blind girl he takes away from you! A blind girl, in broad daylight! Twelve o'clock noon! She's not the blind one; you are! You should have told us you need a seeing-eye dog, I would have made arrangements."

"Do you want my badge now?" Cameron asked respectfully. "Or shall I wait until I'm officially noti--"

This did nothing to assuage the tirade.

"Oh, a quitter as well as an incompetent! The easy way out, hunh? Lie down flat on your back the minute-- You're not only stupid, but yellow!"

"I wouldn't take that, sir, from anyone but--"

The chief's voice rose to an exasperated scream. Or at least as much of a scream as a basso is capable of. "Well, what are you standing there for? Do you want written instructions? Do you want me to take you by the hand and show you the door? They've already been gone over an hour and forty minutes!"

He raised both arms high overhead, packed two massive fists, and brought them down upon the longsuffering desk with a crash that went echoing all up and down the corridors outside, and made people think a steam-pipe had burst.

"Go after them! Catch up with them, no matter where they went! Bring them back here! I want them back here, in protective custody, before the thirty-first of May!"

One of Cameron's unfortunate characteristic fits of indecision seemed to strike him, then of all times.

"If they went west, by train, maybe I can still overhaul them," he mumbled. "But if they went east, by water,--I'm sunk."

The chief flung himself, suddenly, over toward where his coat was hanging upon a clothes-tree. He might only have been in search of a handkerchief, to staunch his perspiring brow. But he also had his holster hanging by it.

"So help me," he intoned in a hollow, gasping voice, "I'm going to be brought to trial, yet, for shooting one of my own men in my own office!"

Cameron didn't wait to find out what he was looking for.

And now they were on a train. Locked in a room within a train. The never-ending darkness was not still any more, stable, as it had used to be for her; it hummed like a low but constant wind; it whined a little, and there would be a slow, curving shift of the equilibrium. Around toward the right. Or around toward the left. Then the whine would die down and motion would straighten itself out again. There was a continuous, even accompaniment; like dice being rattled in a dice box. But very even, not syncopated. Once, everything became hollow for a brief while, and her ears wanted to close up; that must have been a tunnel. Then the various sounds lost their resonance and they were out in the open again.

(For me, she thought wryly, but without complaint, all life is a tunnel; a long, never-ending tunnel, which has no other end.)

The sensation of rushing was there, except that, without vision, it was impossible to tell if you were going forward or backward. At times she'd even grow confused and think they were rushing backward, instead of ahead. But she knew that the way she was sitting, the way he'd placed her, she was facing the same way the train was, so that feeling was just an illusion, a mirage, of the senses.

Everything jittered a little; it gave her the sensation of mild "pins and needles" in her feet as they rested on the floor.

She sat there with her head resting on his shoulder.

"Read the scenery to me," she said.

She felt his outside arm move past her, and the shade went up a little, then clamped fast at its new position.

"It's green," he said. "And wavy. It undulates a little as we go by. The basic color is green, but in all its different shades. Some of it is dark, and some of it, way over there, where there are meadows in the sun, is light, like apples."

"I know, I know. I can see it."

"There was a cow, by a fence, just now. It was looking at the train with such a dumb, questioning expression; its head up and its grazing interrupted. Red-brown, with a white streak on its forehead."

"Poor cow. Dear cow. Lucky cow."

"A little creek just went by. It went by so fast. I bet it never moved so fast in its life before. Ffft--and gone. It didn't look like water, it looked like silver plate; the sky was reflected in it."

"I remember," she said. "Little creeks used to look like that. They haven't changed, have they?"

"They haven't changed. A little white house just went by."

"I wonder who lives in it? I bet they're not afraid of dying, like we are."

"Now here come some trees. They're very dark green and their shadows are slanting away from the sun. They're even hitting the windowpane, and making it dark, light, dark, light, dark, light . . ."

She reached out and put her fingertips to the glass. "Am I touching their shadows?"

"Yes. Light; now it's dark; light again."

"I can't tell. But it's sort of nice. Like being out there with them."

There was a sudden knock on the door, and fright blotted out all the colors in a swirl of inky-black.

The shade came down with a snap. He got up and left her. She could tell he was standing over where the door was, but there was no unlocking sound. She knew he'd taken out a gun, though the woolen fabric of his clothing made not the slightest whisper.

"Who is it?"

"It's the steward, sir. With the tray you ordered."

"Say something else."

"What do you want me to say, sir?"

"Say 'mulligatawny.'"

"Mulli-gaw-tanny," came through the door.

She nodded to him; he must, though she could not see him, have nodded back to her.

"Hit something on the tray. Make it sound out."

Silverware clashed faintly against crockery.

"Put it down on the floor, right by the door."

A pause. "It's down, sir. Down flat."

"Now go to the door at the end of the aisle, go out, and let me hear it close hard after you."

"Your change, sir. You got nigh fifteen dollar' coming back to you out of that twenty you pushed out to me under the door before."

"Keep it. I want to hear that end door close good and hard."

The slam even penetrated to where they were.

Then, and only then, he unlocked their room door.

She woke up and the strange noises of a strange city were in her ears. She opened her eyes; the darkness remained, but the lids of her eyes nevertheless went up. To lift them was instinctive.

Noises, street sounds, told her so much more than other people. To them, the hum of traffic was the hum of traffic anywhere in the world. To her--.

There was a sharp, brittle edge to them, so the atmosphere was cold. There was a certain grating squeak to them, so that told her the place was hilly, vehicles had to climb up, had to coast on their brakes going down. Cable cars keened unmercifully every now and then, going around a turn. The air had a certain tang, a tingle, an aliveness, to it. It made you want to do things; it made you get them done. She didn't imagine they loitered going along the streets; she didn't imagine they were downcast or depressed. It was a good place for a city to be. San Francisco, they called it.

So she had seen San Francisco, as much as many people, and more than some. Cool, hilly, brisk, and stimulating.

She had seen San Francisco, but yet she couldn't tell if she were alone in this hotel bedroom or not.

"Allen," she said softly. "Allen, are you in here with me?"

There was no sound of breathing, other than her own.

It frightened her a little, to be alone in a room in a strange city. But she quickly forced herself to calmness, kept from crying out his name wildly, as her first impulse was.

He'd be back soon. He hadn't gone far, nor for long. He wouldn't do that to her. She trusted him.

She found the silk wrapper at the foot of the bed,. put it on, and got out of the bed. She tapped one foot about on the floor, in a circle, as if she were doing a little dance step sitting down, and found her slippers.

She got up and moved carefully about the room. She found a door and opened it. Hollow sounds from a distance reached her. It was the outside door. She quickly closed it. She found another, opened that. A beaded chain tickled her nose; the empty sleeve of a coat met her fingers inertly. It was a closet door. She found at last a third, cold and slippery to her fingers. A mirror panel in it.

She contemplated taking a shower. She'd better not. The fixtures were new to her, and she might scald herself unmercifully. Back home she knew on which side the hot was and which the cold.

There was imminent disaster about her all the time, but the thought never even occurred to her. She'd never been inclined to feel sorry for herself. No matter what they took away, you still had so much left.

She went back to the main room and dressed herself.

A key turned in the door, and the door opened.

"Up, dear?" he said.

But there was someone with him. The rustle of entry was double.

She stood still and kept her head turned the other way. He'd warned her never, if possible, to let others know or see she was blind. Knowledge of her total helplessness was liable to increase her danger; that, she supposed, was what he feared. And when she looked at anyone, they could tell as a rule, and when she didn't, they couldn't.

"Put it down there," he said.

Then he said, "No, never mind; I'll do that myself."

Change clinked. The door closed. They were alone.

"All right, Marty," he said. "He's gone."

She came toward him, knowing unerringly where he was, and answered his kiss with her own, and he held her in his arms for a moment.

"I brought up some coffee for you," he said. "There's a little table here he opened."

They sat down together.

"Careful, dear," he said. "The sugar lumps have jackets on them."

"I know," she said indulgently. "I can tell."

"How nice you look, how lovely; so fresh and sweet."

"Is my hair all right? Sometimes the part gets away from me; that's one thing I have to guess at."

"Like an arrow."

She heard a match scrape, and smelt the fragrance of his cigarette smoke. "I have our tickets for--" He dropped his voice, "--a ship. I don't think we should stay on, even here. Trains keep coming in, all the time, from back there. Would you be afraid to--leave your own country, go to the other side of the water with me?"