Short Stories: Five Decades (119 page)

He had a severe twinge of guilt as he watched the brave little raincoated figure vanish through the doorway. Perfidy did not come easily to him. He even took a step toward the door, to tell her to come back, but at that moment the old lady called, “Young man, I believe we’ll take this one,” waving the Christopher Fry about like a captured bird.

When he escorted the old couple to the door and opened it for them, he looked across the street and could have sworn that he saw Paulette Anderson walking uptown, holding the arm of a man with wavy gray hair. They seemed to be in earnest conversation.

One more shot, he decided, and then the hell with it.

He went through his address book with the utmost care. He didn’t want to have any more Dorothea Toyes sprung on him.

He stopped at the Ms.
Marsh, Susan
**. She wasn’t preternaturally tall, but she was a good size and you could be sure she wouldn’t ever ask a man $50 for the pleasure of her company. She was a dark girl with green eyes who was politically advanced, although in a quiet, unpushy way. The reason Christopher knew she was politically advanced was that the only books she ever showed an interest in were written by people like Fanon and Marcuse and Cleaver and LeRoi Jones and Marshall McLuhan. She had beautiful legs. It was unsettling to sell books of that nature to a girl with legs as beautiful as that.

She had once told Christopher that he had a good mind. It was then that he had put her name in his address book and given her two stars. She had been caught in the shop by a rainstorm and they had got to talking. It turned out she was from a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe that she despised. She had been one of the youngest girls ever to graduate from Radcliffe and had intended to take her master’s in philosophy when she had seen the irrelevance of it all. She expressed disapproval of every book Christopher was displaying at the moment in the window and he said, “Actually, the whole world would be better off if they didn’t print another book for the next fifty years.”

That’s when she said he had a good mind. “Books are dividers,” she said. “They form a false elite. To immerse ourselves in the masses, we need song, ritual and bloodshed.” She had invited him to a meeting that night she said might interest him, but he had a date with June and he had to decline.

Now, seeing her name in his book, he remembered the rainy afternoon and the quiet beauty of her green eyes and her sensational legs. A girl with legs like that, he thought, doesn’t use them just for walking, no matter what her politics are.

He reached for the phone. But just as he was about to pick it up, the front door opened and a huge young man without a hat entered the shop, took three steps into the room and stopped, staring the length of the shop at him with a pensive but at the same time somehow threatening expression on his heavy, handsome face. Six feet, four, Christopher thought automatically. At least.

Christopher moved away from the phone to the new customer, who remained planted and silent in the aisle in a tentlike raglan tweed coat, his face ruddy and athletic, with an old diagonal scar pinkish on his forehead, running down almost into one eye.

“May I help you, sir?” Christopher said.

“No,” the man said, continuing to stare fixedly at him. “I’m browsing. This is The Browsing Corner, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m browsing.” But the man never looked at a book, just at Christopher, as though he were measuring Christopher for some unpleasant uniform or deciding whether he could use him for some unpleasant purpose.

Christopher turned away to fuss with a display of books on a table. The man didn’t move and the only sound from him was a rather hoarse breathing. He was too well dressed to be a stick-up man and he didn’t have the look of somebody who was interested in books. Naturally, Christopher couldn’t call Susan Marsh with a customer like that in the shop.

Christopher was pleased when a young couple came into the shop and negotiated their way around the huge man in the middle of the aisle and asked if he had a copy of
The Red Badge of Courage
. Christopher knew he didn’t have a copy, but he told the young couple to wait while he looked in back. He stayed in back as long as he dared. By that time, the young couple were gone, but the man was still there, still with that fixed, pensive, animal-like stare.

“Have you found anything you like?” Christopher ventured.

“I’m still browsing,” the man said. He had the gift of immobility. While Christopher moved nervously from Popular Fiction to Drama to Biography to Greeting Cards, the man stood there, still, mountainlike, only unblinking his eyes flicking in their sockets, to follow Christopher’s movements.

This is the worst Saturday afternoon I have lived through in my life, Christopher thought, after it had gone on for what must have been at least half an hour.

Finally, the man said, “Hah!” and shrugged. He smiled slowly. “Thank you,” he said, “it’s been a nice browse, Christopher.” Massively, he departed.

Christopher looked after him, confounded. Christopher! How did the man know his name? He could have sworn he had never seen him before in his life. The city is full of nuts, he said to himself. And it’s getting worse.

For some reason, he was trembling and he sat down to calm his nerves. Then he remembered he had had his hand on the phone to call Susan Marsh when the tall stranger had come into the shop. It was a lucky thing he wasn’t in the middle of an intimate conversation when the door had opened.

He strode over to the phone, determined not to let himself be shaken. His hand was almost steady as he dialed Susan Marsh’s number.

Sue watched closely as Harry Argonaut put the machine together on the carpet in her living room. The time might come when she would have to do it herself and there was no room for error. Harry Argonaut wasn’t his real name. It was his nom de plume or, more accurately, his
nom de guerre
. He was a small, pudgy, slow-moving man. Although he was only twenty-four, he was already bald. Fred Drabner, who had brought over the detonating device after lunch, was seated in an Eames armchair, watching Harry Argonaut attach the last two wires. The machine was to be used that night in Newark. Newark had been picked for the demonstration because it was one of the most explosive communities in America and the bombing of a bank in the heart of the city would create maximum confusion and with luck provoke some shooting by the police and perhaps a few spectacular arrests of innocent passers-by.

The room was quiet as Harry worked. It was a nice room, luxuriously furnished, because Sue got a whopping allowance from her family in Grosse Pointe. Now she gave almost all her money to the movement, but she had leased the apartment and furnished it before she had seen the light. Since it was on a very good block just off Park Avenue, in a converted town house with high-rent apartments and no doorman, it was a perfect place for making bombs.

Harry Argonaut, whose accent could have come from any part of the country, hadn’t told them yet who was going to take the machine to Newark. He gave out information sparingly and at the latest possible moment.

He was caressing the little machine lightly when the telephone rang.

Sue looked inquiringly at Harry, waiting for orders.

“Answer it,” he said.

She went over to the leather-topped English mahogany desk in front of the windows and picked up the phone. She was conscious of Harry Argonaut and Fred Drabner watching her intently in the lamplight. All the curtains were drawn and the room looked like evening.

“May I speak to Miss Marsh?” the man said on the phone.

“This is Miss Marsh.”

“This is Christopher Bagshot, Miss Marsh.”

“Who?”

“From the bookstore.”

“Oh, yes.” Her tone was noncommittal and she watched Harry Argonaut for signs.

“I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight, Miss Marsh.”

She thought the man sounded strange, as though the simple sentence was for some reason costing him a great deal of effort to get out.

Harry Argonaut was moving his lips elaborately, silently mouthing the question, “Who is it?”

“Hold on for a moment, please, Mr. Bagshot,” Sue said. “A friend of mine is just leaving and I have to say goodbye.” She put her hand over the phone. “It’s a man called Bagshot,” she said to Harry. “He works in the bookstore on Madison Avenue.”

“What does he want?” Harry asked.

“He wants to take me to dinner tonight.”

“Let me think,” Harry said. That was one reliable thing about Harry—he always took time to size up every situation and figure out what advantage might be drawn from it. “Do you know him well?” he asked.

“I’ve spoken to him four or five times, that’s all.”

“Do you think he suspects anything?”

“Oh, no. He’s a harmless little man.” She regretted the little. Harry was no taller than Mr. Bagshot.

“Why is he calling at this hour on Saturday to ask you for dinner?”

Sue shrugged. “Maybe his girl stood him up and he’s lonely.”

“How did he get your telephone number?”

“It’s in the book, for one thing,” Sue said. She was used to Harry’s intense questioning by now. “And I have a charge account with him besides.”

“Get an unlisted number first thing Monday,” Harry said.

Sue nodded. She wondered if Bagshot was still on the phone.

Harry thought for thirty seconds, kneeling on the carpet, his eyes closed in concentration.

“Tell him you can’t give him an answer now,” he said, “but that you have to pass by his shop in a half hour or so and you’ll drop in and tell him then. Go ahead.”

Sue nodded. She didn’t know what was in Harry’s mind, but whatever it was, it was part of a greater plan.

“Mr. Bagshot,” she said, “are you still there?”

“Yes.” His voice was eager.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long, but—”

“Oh, that’s perfectly all right, Miss Marsh,” he said.

“I’m a little up in the air right now,” Sue said, “and I’m late for an appointment. But I’ll be passing by your shop in a half hour or so. I ought to be sorted out by then, and if I can possibly make it, I’d adore having dinner with you.” Being in the movement was a lot like being in the theater. The better you were as an actress, the more effective you were as a revolutionary.

“That’s fine, Miss Marsh,” Bagshot said. The way he said it, you could tell his life was full of postponements, if not worse. “I’ll be waiting.”

She hung up.

“Well done,” Harry Argonaut said.

She flushed with pleasure. Coming from him, that was high praise, indeed.

Without speaking, Harry got up off his knees and went to the hall closet and took out the blue tennis bag that a small boy had delivered to her apartment three days before. She had asked the boy no questions and had put the bag in the closet, hiding it behind a leather-and-canvas valise from Mark Cross that her father had given her as a Christmas present.

Harry brought the tennis bag into the living room and opened it. It was jammed with crumpled sheets of the
Newark Evening News
and the
Newark Star-Ledger
. While Sue and Fred Drabner watched him silently, he took out some of the newspapers and made a nest of those that remained and lovingly fitted the machine into the nest. Then he zipped up the bag and snapped a small padlock through the two overlapping eyelets in the brass zipper tags.

“Now,” he said to Sue, “you’re going to put on your nicest, most respectable dress and you’re going to walk over to Madison Avenue carrying the tennis bag. You’ll go into the shop and tell this fellow Bagshot that you haven’t been able to get hold of this man you have a tentative date with, but you’ll know definitely by six o’clock. You have some shopping to do, meanwhile, you say, and can you leave the bag there until you come back. You’ve got all that now?”

“Yes,” Sue said and repeated word for word what he had told her.

“It’s always safer policy,” Harry said, “to store material in a place other than the one where the material is assembled. That way, if one cover is broken, all the others remain intact.”

Sue wished Harry would let her take notes when he delivered his rare instructive generalities, but she knew it was out of the question.

“After you deposit the bag,” Harry Argonaut said, “you come back here. I will not be here and neither will Fred. At a quarter to six, your phone will ring. A voice you will not recognize will say, ‘I’ll meet you at a certain corner.’ If the person adds, ‘At the southwest corner of Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, at six-thirty,’ you will do the following. You will add ten to twenty-three, that makes Thirty-third Street, subtract one from eight, that makes Seventh Avenue, you will add one hour to the time, that makes seven-thirty, and you will reverse the compass points, that makes northeast corner. Got it?”

“Repeat, please,” Sue said.

Harry repeated his instructions patiently. Then he made her repeat them back to him twice, until he was satisfied there would be no mistake. When he was certain that she knew what she was to do, he went on, “At six o’clock, you will go to the bookshop. You will tell the man that you’d be delighted to have dinner with him, but you have to go to a cocktail party, but that you’ll meet him at a restaurant at eight-fifteen. Choose the restaurant yourself. Make sure that it is a crowded one, where you are well known. After you have made the contact and delivered the bag, take a taxi downtown to the Village. Get out in front of a restaurant there. When the taxi has gone, hail another taxi and go to the restaurant where you’re going to meet the man from the bookstore.”

“All clear,” Sue said.

“Keep him out as late as possible. If he suggests going to his place, by all means do so. Just be back here at four
A.M
., for possible further instructions.”

Sue nodded, then frowned.

“What is it?” Harry asked. He was terribly alert, even for the smallest signs.

“I have no money for all those taxis,” Sue said. “I gave Fred my last ten dollars yesterday. And my allowance doesn’t come in before the first.”

Harry thought patiently about the absence of money. “Cash a check,” he said.