Читать книгу Seven Out of Time - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 6

Table of Contents

"Here's your change, mister."

I thrust the card into my coat's side pocket as I straightened. "Keep it," I told the bookseller grinning.

"And keep the book too. I don't need it any more." The way he stared at me, pop-eyed, was excruciatingly funny. I laughed aloud as I strode out of that musty old store of his. I didn't know where Furman Street was—like most Manhattanites I thought of Brooklyn as some strange bourne the other side of the moon—but I'd soon find out. I looked around for a policeman, saw one standing on the corner observing a bevy of giggling young females board a bus. "Furman Street," he repeated, scratching his head. "Never heard of it."

"It's in Brooklyn," I suggested.

"Oh, Brooklyn." He looked disgusted. I felt that I ought to apologize for wanting to go there but decided not to, waited silently as he stripped off a white glove and from somewhere in the inner mysteries of his uniform dug out a dog-eared small book with a red paper cover. "How do you spell it?"

"B-R—"

"No! Fur—That street."

"F-U-R-M-A-N."

The cop wet a thumb and started turning frayed pages. "Fairfield," he muttered. "Flatlands. Freedom Square. Here it is, Furman Avenue."

"No," I said. "Furman Street."

"Oh! Yeah, there's a Furman Street too. What's the number?"

I glanced at the card. "Four hundred nineteen."

"Yeah. Yeah, I got it. You take the IRT subway. It says here IRT Sub Borough Hall four blocks west."

"I see." But I didn't, not quite. "Does that mean the Borough Hall station is four blocks west of Furman Street or that I walk four blocks west from the station?"

The policeman took off his cap and made a more thorough job of scratching his head. "Hanged if I know." Then he got a sudden inspiration. "I'll look in the front of the book."

"When I went to school," I said wearily, "the answers were in the back of the book. Thanks for your trouble but if it's as complicated as all that I'll take a taxi."

I hailed one, gave the driver the address and climbed in. For the first time that day I felt like smoking. I got my pipe out, tamped into its bowl the mixture that after much experimentation I've found suits me exactly, puffed flame into it.

The bit was comfortable between my teeth and the smoke soothing. I shoved over into a corner, leaned back, stretching out diagonally legs too long to be comfortable in any vehicle. The change of position brought my face into the rear view mirror and, not from any Narcissism but to relax my brain as my body was relaxed, I studied it critically.

There are two things that irk me about that phiz of mine. It is unconscionably young-looking in spite of my twenty-seven years and the staid and serious mien I assume when I can remember the appearance expected of an attorney, even a junior attorney, on the staff of Sturdevant, Hamlin, Mosby and Garfield. Then too, my nose is slightly thickened midway of the bridge, and there is a semicircular scar on my left cheek, mementoes of a certain encounter with a son of Nippon who wielded his Samurai sword a bit too dexterously for my comfort.

Otherwise mine is not too unpleasant a countenance with which to live. I have a thick shock of ruddy brown hair, eyes that almost match it in hue and a squarish jaw I like to think appears strong and determined. I'll never take first prize in a beauty contest, but neither do babes scream at the sight of me. Not even grown-up ones.

Madison Avenue died and was buried in the Square of the same name. We were on Fourth Avenue for a while and then on Lafayette Street. The old Tombs Prison, abandoned now, lifted its formidable granite wall on the left, was succeeded by the white majesty of the government buildings that front Foley Square. The Municipal Building straddled Chambers Street like a modern Colossus of Rhodes and then the blare of City Hall Park was raucous in my ears.

An overalled truck driver disputed the right of way with my cabby. "Where the hell do you think you're goin'?" he wanted to know.

Where did I think I was going? Why did I think I was going towards Evelyn Rand when all the evidence I had of any connection between her and this Achronos Astaris was the faint hint of her perfume on his card?

Evidence? I was a hell of a lawyer! That card need never have been anywhere near Furman Street or Astaris.

Hundreds of them must have been inserted between the leaves of the art gallery's catalogues, and that had been done at the gallery. She'd never been on Furman Street. She had never heard of this Astaris nor he of her.

But the card carried her perfume. I fished it out, lifted it to my nostrils and sniffed. All I smelled was paper and ink.

The fragrance had not, then, come from this bit of pasteboard. But I'd smelled it, I was certain that I had smelled in the street outside that bookstore and again inside. I was a blithering ass. Evelyn had been in that store seconds before I'd entered it. I was running away from, not towards her. "Hey," I yelled to the driver. "Turn around. Turn around fast and go back to where we started from."

"Nix, fella," the cabby grunted. "It's ten days suspension of my license if I turn here on the bridge."

"What bridge?" But staring out of the window I saw that we were on the bridge to Brooklyn and I knew that the ordinance prohibiting a U-turn on it was rigidly enforced. "Okay," I grunted, resignedly. "Guess I've got to wait."

That was the longest, most chafing mile I've ever ridden. The noon rush was just beginning and the roadway was jammed, but at long last the taxi reached the trolley-cluttered plaza at the other end and slowed. "Well," my driver growled at his windshield. "Yuh change your mind again or is it go back?"

"Go on." That wasn't I who'd answered. It was a woman's voice; but so clear, so imperative that the cab's sudden burst of speed thrust me back into my corner and before I'd recovered myself it already was wheeling down a narrow street liberally supplied with one-way arrows.

And with signs that said, TO BOROUGH HALL. Some woman in a car alongside had said 'Go on' to her own driver and somehow her voice had carried to mine. Simple. So simple that in deciding it no longer mattered if I delayed an hour in returning to that bookstore, that I might as well go on and interview Achronos Astaris, I had no sense of yielding to any guidance outside my own will.

And then the driver veered the cab to the curb, braked hard.

"I got a flat, buddy," he turned to inform me, quite unnecessarily, as he heaved out of his seat. "Take me five, six minutes to fix. That's Borough Hall right ahead there. Mebbe if you'd ask a coupla guys where this here Furman Street is while I'm workin' it'll save us time."

"I've got a better idea," I grunted. "I'll pay you off now and walk the rest of the way. According to the cop's book it's only four blocks from here." I, paid him his fare and alighted. If travelling in Brooklyn was a matter of asking questions, I could do that with the best.

Asking questions was one thing, getting informative replies another. In turn a newsstand attendant, a brother attorney hurrying, briefcase in hand, toward the nearby Courthouse and a bearded derelict standing hopefully beside a little portable shine-box shrugged doubtful shoulders and looked blank. Finally, I approached a policeman with some trepidation. If he produced a little red booklet—

But he didn't. "Furman Street," he said. "That's over on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. Cross this here street and go past that there corner cigar store and keep going and you'll walk right into it."

I heaved a sigh of relief. It was exceedingly premature. My brisk pace slowed as I found myself in a maze of narrow, decorous streets labelled with such curious names as Orange, Cranberry, Pineapple. I entered a still narrower one designated College Place and brought up facing a blank wall that forbade further progress. I extricated myself from that Cul-de-sac, walked a little further and halted.

I had lost all sense of direction.

From not far off came the growl of city traffic, the honk of horns, the busy hum of urban life, but all this seemed oddly alien to this street where I was, this street of low, gray- facaded houses with high stone stoops and windows shuttered against prying eyes. Years and the weather had spread over them a dark patina of age yet there was about them a timeless quality, an air of aloofness from the flow of events, from the petty affairs of the very mankind for whose shelter they had been erected. The houses seemed to possess the street so utterly that no one moved along the narrow sidewalks or appeared at the blinded windows, or let his voice be heard.

I was strangely alone in the heart of the city, strangely cloistered in drowsy quiet.

Into that quiet there came a low sonorous hoot, swelling 'til the air was vibrant with it, fading away. The sound came again and I knew what it was. A steamboat whistle. I recalled that the taxi had not run far from the Bridge, that the East River must be very near. I recalled, too, what the policeman had just said about Furman Street's being on the edge of Brooklyn Heights. It would overlook the River, then, and the direction from which the whistle had come would be the direction in which lay the thoroughfare I sought.

I turned in that direction, saw a drugstore on the nearest corner, and started for it. I'd get straightened out there.

The shop was small, low-ceiled, the shelving and showcases white and very clean. There was no soda fountain. Glass vases filled with colored water, red and green, stood at either end of a high partition.

I heard the clink of a pestle on a wedgewood mortar behind that partition. It stopped when I cleared my throat loudly. A dark green portiere moved aside to open a doorway and the spectacled, white-coated pharmacist came out.

"How do you do?" he greeted me pleasantly, tugging at one drooping wing of a pair of walrus mustaches. "Warm for this time of the year, isn't it?" He came leisurely toward me, smiling.

"I wonder if you can direct me to Furman Street."

"Certainly." The druggist took me by the arm, impelled me gently to the door, opened it. "You haven't far to go, but it makes a difference which number you want. The two hundreds are that way," pointing, "but it's shorter to the four hundreds if you go up Plum Street." He indicated a thoroughfare at an acute angle to the one he'd first gestured to.

"I'd better go up Plum, then," I said. "The number I'm looking for is four-nineteen."

"You must be mistaken, sir. There is no such number on Furman."

I answered his smile with my own. "But there is. I'm positive that is the address." I brought the card out of my overcoat pocket and once more read it. The number was distinctly and indubitably 419. "Look here." I displayed the pasteboard to the pharmacist. "Isn't that 419 Furman Street?"

The druggist looked at the card. Then he looked up at me, and the smile was gone from his face. "Listen, old man." His hand was on my arm, solicitously. "Furman Street is very long and there might be an easier way for you to get to where you want to go than along Plum. Sit down here a minute," he led me to a bentwood chair in front of a showcase, "while I go in back and look up just where four-nineteen is."

I couldn't quite make him out, but he was being so decent to me that I couldn't argue with him. I sat down and watched him hurry back behind the partition to consult, as I supposed, another one of those little red guidebooks.

I was mistaken. I have exceptionally keen hearing and so I caught from behind that mirrored wall something I definitely wasn't supposed to hear. The pharmacist's whisper, suddenly excited: "Tom! Grab that 'phone and dial Dr. Pierce. I think that fellow out there is the patient that got away from his asylum last night."

Another whisper came back: "How do you figure that?"

"He just asked me for four-nineteen Furman. Four-nineteen, mind you. And he showed me what he said was a card with that number on it. But there wasn't any card in his hand. There was nothing in it at all."

"Certainly sounds like a nut," I heard the other whisper respond. "You go back out there and keep him talking and I'll get Pierce's keepers over here. Here, you better take this gun along in case he gets violent."

That got me out of the chair and out of that store in a rush. I was a block away before I slowed and stopped.