Doorways in the Sand Page 8

  I got out and headed for the bus station. A long ride lay ahead. I would arrive too late, but the next day I would see the Rhennius machine during normal viewing hours and figure a way to get at it for a private showing later on.

  And I did.

  Voila! Lincoln stared to my right again and everything else seemed in its proper place. I pocketed the cent, steadied myself, began to climb.

  Halfway up, brassy bongs bloomed in my ears, my nervous system came unzipped and my arms turned to putty. The free end of the line was swinging widely. Perhaps it had struck something, or gotten into range of the camera. Academic, whichever.

  Moments later, I heard a shouted, “Raise your hands!” which probably came to mind a lot more readily, say, than “Stop climbing that rope and come back down without touching the machine!”

  I did raise them, too, rapidly and repeatedly.

  By the time he was threatening to shoot, I was across the beam and eyeing the window. If I could spring, catch hold, pull, vault, pass horizontally through the eighteen-inch opening I had left myself and hit the roof rolling, I would have a head start with a variety of high routes before me. I would have a chance.

  I tensed my muscles.

  “I’ll shoot!” he repeated, almost directly beneath me now.

  I heard the shot and there was glass in the air as I moved.

  IT WAS THE SOUND OF THE STEAM, whistling through, rattling the ancient pipes, that drew me across the fine line to the place where identity surprises itself. I balked immediately and tried to go back, but the heating system wouldn’t let me. In close-eyed preconsciousness I clung to the transitory pleasure of being without memory. Then I realized that I was thirsty. And then that something hard and uncomfortable was indenting my right side. I did not want to wake up.

  But the circle of sensations widened, things fell together, the center held. I opened my eyes.

  Yes . . .

  I was lying on a mattress on the floor in the corner of a cluttered, gaudy room. Some of the clutter was magazines, bottles, cigarette butts and random articles of clothing; some of the gaud was paintings and posters that clung to the walls like stamps on a foreign parcel, bright and crooked. Strings of glass beads hung in a doorway to my right, catching what seemed like morning light from a large window directly across from me. A golden blizzard of dust fell through its rays, stirred perhaps by the donkey who was nibbling at the potted pot that occupied the window seat. From the sill, an orange cat blinked at me in yellow-eyed appraisal, then closed her eyes.

  A few small traffic sounds came from a point beyond and below the window. Through the sun patterns on the streaked glass, I could make out the upper corner of a brick building sufficiently distant to indicate that a street did indeed lie between us. I made my first dry swallowing movement of the morning and realized again how thirsty I felt. The air was dry and rank with stale odors, some familiar, some exotic.

  I shifted slightly, testing myself for aches. Not bad. A small throbbing from the frontal sinuses, not sufficient to herald a headache. I stretched then, feeling a fraction fitter.

  I discovered the sharp object prodding my side to be a bottle, empty. I winced as I recalled how it had gotten that way. The party, oh yes . . . There had been a party . . .

  I sat up. I saw my shoes. I put them on. I stood.

  Water . . . There was a bathroom around the corner through the beads in the back. Yes.

  Before I could move in that direction, the donkey turned, stared at me, advanced.

  By a splinter of a second, I’d say, I saw what was coming, before it came.

  “You are still fogged up,” the donkey said, or seemed to say, the words ringing strangely in my head, “so go quench your thirst and wash your face. But do not use the window back there for an exit. It could result in difficulties. Please return to this room when you have finished. I have some things to tell you.”

  From a place beyond surprise, I said, “All right,” and I went on back and ran the water.

  There was nothing especially suspicious beyond the bathroom window. No one in sight to be the wiser, no one to do anything about it if I decided to cross over to the next building, then up, up and away. I had no intention of doing it just then, but it made me wonder whether the donkey might be something of an alarmist.

  The window . . . My mind went back to that bar of black, to the snap of the gun, to the glass. I had torn my jacket on the frame and scraped my shoulder where I hit. I’d kept rolling, rolled to my feet and taken off running, crouched. . . .

  An hour later I was in a bar in the Village carrying out the second part of my instructions. Not too quickly, though, as the fugitive feeling was still with me and I wanted to hang onto my faculties long enough to regroup myself emotionally. Consequently, I ordered a beer and sipped it slowly.

  Small gusts of wind had been tumbling bits of paper along the streets. Random flakes of snow had angled by, turning to damp splotches wherever they touched. Later, the middle state was omitted and cold raindrops alternately sprayed, dripped, ceased altogether, drifted in patches of mist.

  The wind whistled as it slipped about the door, and even with my jacket on I felt chilly. So ten or fifteen minutes later when I’d finished the beer, I went looking for a warmer bar. That was what I told myself, though from some more primitive level the flight impulse still operated, assisting in the decision.

  I hit three more bars in the next hour, drinking one beer per and moving on. Along the way, I stopped in a package store and picked up a bottle, as it was late and I was loath to go too blotto in public. I began thinking about where I would spend the night. I’d get a taxi by and by, I decided, let the driver find me a hotel and complete the intoxication business there. No sense in speculating what the results would be and no need to hurry things along. At the moment I wanted people about me, their voices, walls that echoed a tinny music. While my last memories of Australia were messy and blurred, I had been bright-eyed and strung tight as a tennis racket on departing the hall. I could still hear the snap and the brittle notes of the glass. It is not good to think about having been shot at.

  The fifth bar that I hit was a happy find. Three or four steps below street level, warm, pleasantly dim, it contained sufficient patrons to satisfy my need for social noises but not so many that anyone begrudged my taking up a table against the far wall. I took off my jacket and lit a cigarette. I would stay awhile.

  So it was there that he found me, half an hour or so later. I had succeeded in relaxing considerably, forgetting a bit and achieving a state of warmth and comfort, let the wind go whistle, when a passing figure halted, turned and settled onto the seat across from me.

  I did not even look up. My peripheral vision told me it was not a cop and I did not feel like acknowledging an unsolicited presence, especially the likely weirdo.

  We sat that way—unmoving—for almost half a barbed minute. Then something flashed on the tabletop and I looked down, automatically.

  Three totally explicit photos lay before me: two brunettes and a blonde.

  “How’d you like to warm up with something like that on a cold night like this?” came a voice that snapped my mind through years to alertness and my eyes forty-five degrees upward.

  “Doctor Merimee!” I said.

  “Ssh!” he hissed. “Pretend you’re looking at the pictures!”

  The same old trench coat, silk scarf and beret . . . The same long cigarette holder . . . Eyes of unbelievable magnitude behind glasses that still gave me the impression of peering into an aquarium. How many years had it been?

  “What the devil are you doing here?” I said.

  “Gathering material for a book, of course. Dammit! Look at the pictures, Fred! Pretend to study them. Really. Trouble afoot. Yours, I think.”

  So I looked back at the glossy ladies.

  “What kind of trouble?” I said.

  “There’s a fellow seems to be following you.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Acr
oss the street. In a doorway last I saw him.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Couldn’t really tell. He’s dressed for the weather. Bulky coat. Hat pulled down. Head bent forward. Average height or a bit less. Possibly kind of husky.”

  I chuckled.

  “Sounds like anybody. How do you know he’s following me?”

  “I caught sight of you over an hour ago, several bars back. That one was fairly crowded, though. Just as I’d started toward you, you got up to leave. I called out, but you didn’t hear me over the noise. By the time I’d paid up and gotten out myself you were part way up the street. I started after you and saw this fellow come out of a doorway and do the same. I thought nothing of it at first, but you did wander awhile and he was making all the same turns. Then when you found another bar, he just stopped and stared at it. Then he went into a doorway, lit a cigar, coughed several times and waited there, watching the place. So I walked on by as far as the corner. There was a phone booth, and I got inside and watched him while I pretended to make a call. You didn’t stay in that place very long, and when you came out and moved on, he did the same. I held off approaching you for two more bars, just to be positive. But I am convinced now. You are being followed.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I buy that.”

  “Your casual acceptance of the situation causes me to believe that it was not wholly unexpected.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Does it involve anything I might be able to help you with?”

  “Not in terms of the headache’s causes. But possibly the immediate symptoms . . .”

  “Like getting you away from here without his noting it?”

  “That is what I had in mind.”

  He gestured with a bandaged hand.

  “No problem. Take your time with your drink. Relax. Consider it done. Pretend to study the merchandise.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Accident, sort of, with a butcher knife. Have they graduated you yet?”

  “No. They’re still working on it.”

  A waiter came by, deposited a napkin and a drink before him, took his money, glanced at the photos, gave me a wink and moved back toward the bar.

  “I thought I had you cornered in History when I left,” he said, raising the drink, taking a sip, pursing his lips, taking another. “What happened?”

  “I escaped into Archaeology.”

  “Shaky. You had too many of the Anthro and Ancient History requirements for that to last long.”

  “True. But it provided a resting place for the second semester, which was all I needed. In the fall they started a Geology program. I mined that for a year and a half. By then, several new areas had opened up.”

  He shook his head.

  “Exceptionally absurd,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  I took a big, cold swallow.

  He cleared his throat.

  “How serious is this situation, anyway?”

  “Offhand, I’d say it’s fairly serious—though it seems to be based on a misunderstanding.”

  “I mean, does it involve the authorities—or private individuals?”

  “Both, it seems. Why? You having second thoughts about helping me?”

  “No, of course not! I was trying to estimate the opposition.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I do owe you an appraisal of the risk . . .”

  He raised a hand as if to stop me, but I went on anyway.

  “I have no idea who that is outside. But at least a couple people involved in the whole business seem to be dangerous.”

  “All right, that is sufficient,” he said. “I am, as always, totally responsible for my own actions, and I choose to assist you. Enough!”

  We drank on it. He rearranged the pictures, smiling.

  “I really could fix you up for tonight with one of them,” he said, “if you wanted.”

  “Thanks. But tonight’s my night for getting drunk.”

  “They are not mutually exclusive pastimes.”

  “They are tonight.”

  “Well,” he said, shrugging, “I’d no intention to force anything on you. It is just that you aroused my hospitality. Success often does that.”

  “Success?”

  “You are one of the few successful persons I know.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You know precisely what you are doing and you do it well.”

  “But I don’t really do much of anything.”

  “And of course the quantity means nothing to you, nor the weight others place upon your actions. In my eyes, that makes you a success.”

  “By not giving a damn? But I do, you know.”

  “Of course you do, of course you do! But it is a matter of style, an awareness of choice—”

  “Okay,” I said. “Observation acknowledged and accepted in the proper spirit. Now—”

  “—and that makes us kindred souls,” he went on. “For I am just that way myself.”

  “Naturally. I knew it all along. Now about getting me out of here . . .”

  “There is a kitchen with a back door to it,” he said. “They serve meals here during the day. We will go out that way. The barman is a friend of mine. No problem there. Then I will take you a roundabout way to my place. There is a party should be going on there now. Enjoy as much as you want of it and sleep wherever you find a warm corner.”

  “Sounds very inviting, especially the corner. Thanks.”

  We finished our drinks and he put the ladies back in his pocket. He went to talk with the bartender and I saw the man nodding. Then he turned and gestured with his eyes toward the rear. I met him at the door to the kitchen.

  He guided me through the kitchen and out the back door into an alleyway. I turned up my collar against the continuing drizzle and followed him off to the right. We turned left at an intersecting alley, passed among the dark shapes of trash containers, splashed through a lake of a puddle that soaked my socks and emerged near the middle of the next block.

  Three or four blocks and twice as many minutes later, I followed him up the stairs in the building that held his quarters. The dampness had raised a musty smell and the stairs creaked beneath us. As we ascended, I heard faint sounds of music mixed in with voices and a bit of laughter.

  We followed the sounds, coming at last to his door. We entered, he performed a dozen or so introductions and took my coat. I found a glass and some ice and some mix, took it and myself and my bottle to a chair and sat down, to talk, watch and hope that enjoyment was contagious while I drank myself into the big blank place that was waiting somewhere for me.

  I found it eventually, of course, but not before seeing the party through to the dust-and-ashes stage. As everyone else present was headed along paths that led in the same direction, I did not feel too far removed from the action. Through the haze, the sound, the booze, everything came to seem normal, appropriate and unusually bright, even the re-entrance of Merimee, clad only in a garland of bay leaves and mounted on the small gray donkey that made its home in one of the back rooms. A grinning dwarf preceded him with a pair of cymbals. For a while, nobody seemed to notice. The procession halted before me.

  “Fred?”

  “Yes?”

  “Before I forget, if you should oversleep in the morning and I’m gone when you get up, the bacon is in the lower drawer on the right in the refrigerator, and I keep the bread in the cupboard to the left. The eggs are in plain sight. Help yourself.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  “One other thing . . .”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “About this trouble in which you find yourself?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I do not know quite how to put it . . . But . . . Do you think it possible you could be killed as a result?”
<
br />   “I believe so.”

  “Well—only if it grows extremely pressing, mind you—but I have some acquaintances of a semisavory sort. If . . . If it becomes necessary for your own welfare that some individual predecease you, I would like you to have my phone number committed to memory. Call if you must, identify him and mention where he can be found. I am owed a few favors. That can be one.”

  “I . . . I don’t really know what to say. Thank you, of course. I hope I don’t have to take you up on it. I never expected—”

  “It is the least I could do to protect your Uncle Albert’s investment.”

  “You knew of my Uncle Albert? Of his will? You never mentioned—”

  “Knew of him? Al and I were schoolmates at the Sorbonne. Summers we used to run arms to Africa and points east. I blew my money. He hung onto his and made more. A bit of a poet, a bit of a scoundrel. It seems to run in your family. Classical mad Irishmen, all of you. Oh yes, I knew Al.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this years ago?”

  “You would have thought I was just pulling it on you to get you to graduate. That would not have been fair—interfering with your choices. Now, though, your present problems override my reticence.”

  “But—”

  “Enough!” he said. “Let there be revelry!”

  The dwarf banged the cymbals mightily, and Merimee extended his hand. Someone placed a bottle of wine in it. He threw back his head and drew a long, deep swig. The donkey began to prance. A sleepy-eyed girl seated near the hanging beads suddenly sprang to her feet, tearing at her hair and blouse buttons, crying, “Evoe! Evoe!” the while.

  “See you around, Fred.”

  “Cheers.”

  At least, that is sort of how I remember it. Oblivion had crept perceptibly nearer by then, was almost touching my collar. I leaned back and let it go to work.

  Sleep, that unwrinkleth the drip-dry garment of concern, found me later at that dust-and-ashes place where the people go out one by one. I made it to the mattress in the corner, sprawled there and said good night to the ceiling.

  Then—

  With the water streaming in the basin, lather on my face, Merimee’s razor in my hand and me in the mirror, the mists fell away and there was Mt. Fuji. From this station, couched in the center of my most recent dark space, was the thing I had sought, freed by whatever arcane cue had just occurred: