Short Stories Read online

  “I don’t know. It’s a large room, there’s only two of us. Long enough for us to starve to death, I suppose.”

  “Starve?” I realized, all at once, just how hungry I was. This was a danger I hadn’t thought about. Keeping the water out, yes. The amount of air we had, yes. But it hadn’t occurred to me, until just now, that we were completely without food.

  Cowley got to his feet and paced about the dim room, stretching and roaming restlessly. “Assuming survivors,” he said, as though our earlier conversation were still going on, as though there had been no intervening silence, “assuming survivors, and assuming divers, how long do you suppose it will take? Perhaps the survivors will be rescued to day. When will the divers come? Tomorrow? Next week? Two months from now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Cowley laughed suddenly, a shrill and harsh sound in the closed room, and I realized that he wasn’t as calm as he had seemed. “If this were fiction,” he said, “they would come at the last minute. In the nick of time. Fiction is wonderful that way. It is full of last minutes. But in life there is online last minute. The minute before death.”

  “Let’s talk about other things,” I said.

  “Let’s not talk at all,” said Cowley. He stopped by one of the tables and picked up a billiard ball. IN the gloom, I saw him toss the ball into the air, catch it, toss it and catch it, and then he said, “I could solve all our problems easily. Merely throw this ball through the window there.”

  I jumped to my feet. “Put it down!” If you care nothing for your own life, at least remember that I want to live!”

  Again he laughed, and dropped the ball onto the table. He paced again for a while, then sank at last into a chair. “I’m tired,” he said. “The ship is very still now. I think I could sleep.”

  I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid that Cowley would wait until I was dozing and would then open the door after all, or throw the billiard ball through the window. I sat and watched him for as long as I could, but my eyelids grew heavy and at last, in spite of my fears, my eyes closed and I slept.

  When I awoke, it was dark again, the dark of a clouded midnight, the dark of blindness. I stirred, stretched my cramped limbs, then subsided. I could hear Cowley’s measured breathing. He slumbered on.

  He awoke as it was again growing light, as the absolute blackness was once again dispelled by a gray and murky gloom, the look of late evening, a frustrating halflight that made my eyes strain to see details where there were only shapes and vague forms and half-seen mounds.

  Cowley grumbled and stirred and came slowly to consciousness. He got to his feet and moved his arms in undefined and meaningless arcs. I’m hungry,” he muttered. “The walls are closing in on me.”

  “Maybe they’ll come today,” I said.

  “And maybe they’ll never come.” Once more, he paced around the room. At length, he stopped. “I once read,” he said, as though to himself, “that hunger is always the greatest after the first meal missed. That after a day or two without food, the hunger pains grow less.”

  “I think that’s right.” I don’t think I’m as hungry now as I was yesterday.”

  “I am,” he said, petulantly, as though it was my fault. “I’m twice as hungry. My stomach is full of cramps. And I’m thirsty.” He stood by a window, looking out. “I’m thirsty,” he said again. “Why don’t I open the window and let some water in?”

  “Stay away from there!” I hurried across the room and pulled him away from the window. “Cowley, for God’s sake get hold of yourself! If we’re calm, if we’re patient, if we have the self-reliance and strength to wait, we may yet be saved. Don’t you want to live?”

  “Live?” He laughed at me. “I died the day before yesterday.” He flung away from me, hurled himself into his chair. “I’m dead,” he said bitterly, “dead and my stomach doesn’t know it. Oh, damn this pain! Martin, believe me, I could stand anything, I could be as calm and solid as a rock, except for these terrible pains in my stomach. I have to eat, Martin. If I don’t get food soon, I’ll go out of my mind. I know I will.”

  I stood watching him, helpless to say or do a thing.

  His moods changed abruptly, instantaneously, without rhyme or reason. Now, he suddenly laughed again, that harsh and strident laugh that grated on my spine, that was more terrible to me than the weight of the water outside the windows. He laughed and said, “I have read of men, isolated, without food, who finally turned to the last solution to the problem of hunger.”

  I didn’t understand him. I said, “What is that?”

  “Each other.”

  I stared at him, and a chill breath of terror touched my throat and dried it. I tried to speak, but my voice was hoarse, and I could only whisper, “Cannibalism? Good God, Cowley, you can’t mean—”

  Again he laughed. “Don’t worry, Martin. I don’t think I could. If I could cook you, I might consider it. But raw? No I don’t believe I’ll ever get that hungry.” His mood changed again, and he cursed. “I’ll be eating the rug soon, my own clothing, anything!”

  He grew silent, and I sat as far from him as I could get. I meant to stay awake now, no matter how long it took, no matter what happened. This man was insane, he was capable of anything. I didn’t dare sleep, and I looked forward with dread to the coming blackness of night.

  The silence was broken only by an occasional muttering from Cowley across the room, unintelligible, as he muttered to himself of horrors I tried not to imagine. Blackness came, and I waited, straining to hear a sound, waiting to hear Cowley move, for the attack I knew must come. His breathing was regular and slow, he seemed to be asleep, but I couldn’t trust him. I was imprisoned with a madman, my only hope of survival was in staying awake, watching him every second until the rescuers came. And the rescuers must come. I couldn’t have gone through all this for nothing. They would come, they must come.

  My terror and need kept me awake all night long and all through the next day. Cowley slept much of the time, and when he was awake he contented himself with low mumbling or with glowering silence.

  But I couldn’t stay awake forever. As darkness returned again, as the third day ended without salvation, a heavy fog seemed to lower around me, and although I fought it, although I could feel the terror in my vitals, the fog closed in and I slept.

  I woke suddenly. It was day again, and I couldn’t breathe. Cowley stood over me, his hands around my neck, squeezing, shutting off the air from my lungs, and I felt as though my he’d were about to burst. My eyes bulged, my mouth opened and closed helplessly. Cowley’s face, indistinct above me, gleamed with madness, his eyes bored into me and his mouth hung open in a hideous laugh.

  I pulled at his hands, but they held me tight, I couldn’t move them, I couldn’t get air, air, I flailed away at his face, and my heart pounded in fear as I struggled. My fingers touched his face, perspiring face, slid away, I lunged at his eyes. My finger drove into his eye, and he screamed and released me. He fell back, his hands against his face, and I felt the warm jelly of his eye only finger.

  I stumbled out of the chair, looking madly for escape, but the room was sealed, we were prisoners together. He came at me again, his clutching hands reaching out for me, his face terrible now with the bloody wound where his left eye had been. I ran, and the breath rattled in my throat as I gulped in air. Choking, sobbing, I ran from him, my arms outstretched in the gloom, and I fell against one of the billiard tables. My hands touched a cuestick, I picked it up, turned, swung at Cowley with it. Cowley fell back, howling like an animal, but then came on again. Screaming, I jabbed the cuestick full into his open mouth.

  The stick snapped in two, part of it still in my hands, part jutting out of his mouth, and he started a shriek that ended in a terrible gurgling wail. He toppled face forward to the floor, driving the piece of stick through the back of his head.

  I turned away and collapsed over a table. I was violently ill, my stomach jerking spasmodically, my throat heaving and retching. But it had
been so long since I had eaten that I could bring nothing up, but could only lie helplessly, coughing and shaking and terribly, terribly sick.

  That was three days ago, and still they haven’t come. They must come soon now. The air is growing foul in here, I can hardly breathe any more. And I find that I am talking to myself, and every once in a while I will pick up a billiard ball and look longingly at the window. I am coming to long for death, and I know that that is madness. So they must come soon.

  And the worst thing is the hunger. Cowley is gone now, all gone, and I am hungry again.

  PAID IN FULL

  “Old bills,” I said. “I insist on that, they must be old bills.”

  “Of course,” he murmured, smiling at me in that secretive way he affected. His face always looked hooded to me, remaining me of those blackout shields on automobile headlights in the war. With that face, with that smile, with that insinuating honeyed voice, no word he said could possibly sound sincere or truthful. But surely no one can lie all the time.

  Most of what I knew of him I doubted. His name for instance, which he’d murmured was Sylvan Kelso, and which sounded too unlikely to be either the truth or a falsehood. His claimed feelings of friendliness for me, which I understood at once was artificial; I’ve had such buddies before, among insurance salesmen and candidates for minor political office. And the nation for which he claimed to be operating: Bulgaria! That couldn’t possibly be true.

  The only truth of which I was sure was that he wished to buy from me what I was perfectly willing to sell. Willing, that is, if all my conditions were satisfactorily met, which is why we were meeting for the third time here in this dim bar in Arlington, not far from Chain Bridge.

  “And small denomination,” I said to him now, as we sat crouched toward one another in the rear booth. “Nothing bigger than a twenty.”

  “Ahh,” he said, “that will make a bulky package.”

  “Not very,” I said. “Two packages, anyway. Half before, half after.”

  “Your distrust, Mr. Stilmont,” he assured me in oiled tones, “is quite unnecessary.

  “I’ve got to protect myself,” I told him.

  “Of course you must. Certainly.”

  “I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re liable to pull.”

  He spread doughy hands. “Not a thing, Mr. Stilmont,” he said, “I do assure you. After all, why should I do anything to offend you? This is merely our first transaction.”

  “Our only transaction,” I said, somewhat bitterly. “You know as well as I do there’s only the one valuable file I have access to. Once the deal is done, I’m sold out.”

  “Temporarily, Mr. Stilmont. But surely in the future, as you climb the ladder of success in government employment, additional occasions will arise when we can be of…profitable service to one another.”

  I was about to tell him the answer to that one was also no, but at the last second refrained. If Kelso really did think I might be useful again in the future, so much the better; it would make him less likely to double-cross me or make trouble for me.

  But whether he knew the truth about me or not, I surely knew the truth about myself. I had climbed the ladder of success in government employment as far as the Civil Service system could carry me. I hovered at the edge of the executive level now, and here I would hover until retirement. In order to attain the upper ranks in government service, it is necessary to have either one of two things: superlative ability or political influence. I had neither.

  Why do you suppose I’d undertaken this transaction in the first place? Do you think I’m a traitor, a spy? Do you think I’m here by choice? Let me tell you something that the progression of your own life has perhaps not yet demonstrated to you. Expenditures increase. Year by year, decade by decade, house by house, job by job, expenditures gradually but unceasingly increase. So long as income also increases—so long, in fact, as one continues to advance in one’s occupation—all is well. But when income levels off, when one has ceased to advance in one’s occupation, then, my friends, all is Hell.

  I won’t blame my wife, I won’t blame my children, and I won’t even blame myself. I am the victim, perhaps, of nothing more willful or malicious than a natural law, as though I’d been struck down by a slow lightning bolt.

  Be that as it may, the end result of these inexorable economics was my presence here for the third time in a grimy neighborhood tavern with the stout man who called himself Sylvan Kelso, whose assurances rang with such a tinny click, that I was constantly on the verge of throwing over the whole thing, rushing home, and struggling along without the forty thousand dollars.

  Well. I went over the points once more in my mind: Old bills. Small denominations. “Oh, yes,” I said. “One thing more. The most important of all.”

  Kelso smiled like drawings of the moon. “Merely state it, Mr. Stilmont,” he murmured.

  “No counterfeits,” I said. “I’ve heard of that stunt, don’t think I haven’t, people being paid off in counterfeit money smuggled into the country. I worked in the Treasury Department three years and believe me you can’t pass any phony money on me.” My having worked in the Treasury Department was true, but it hardly made me an expert on counterfeit bills; I’d been a file clerk, nothing more. So far as I know, I’ve never so much as seen a counterfeit bill in all my life.

  But I was relying on Kelso’s not knowing these details, and apparently he did not, for he smiled more moonlike than ever and said, “Not a chance of it, my dear Stilmont, not the slightest chance. That was a German trick anyway, we wouldn’t do anything of that sort.”

  “I just want you to know,” I said, “that I’m keeping my eyes open.”

  “As you certainly should,” he declared, thumping his fat palm on the table. “A cautious man is a delight to do business with.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “Now, what about payment?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” he said, lowering his voice, leaning toward me, “when you leave work, walk to the south-east corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street. Near the corner, on the 12th Street side, there will be parked a black taxicab with red lettering. The numeral seven will appear directly beneath the handle of the right front door. Tha taxi will be driven by a woman wearing an unusual hat.”

  “All taxis in Washington,” I said, overstating it slightly, “are driven by women wearing unusual hats.”

  “Then concentrate on the numeral seven,” he said. “You will enter this taxi, you will say ‘Dumbarton House, please,’ and the taxi will start off, with you in it.”

  I said, “Dumbarton House? Where’s Dumbarton House?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You won’t be going there. On the floor in back you will find an attache case containing the first half-payment and the camera, plus a typewritten sheet of directions for the camera’s use. You will, taking care not to be seen by passersby, assure yourself of the genuineness of the money, and that it appears in the proper amount, and then you will read the camera instructions until you are certain you can operate the camera correctly. You will then hand the instruction sheet to the driver, and tell her where you wish to be driven.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all for tomorrow,” he said. “The next day, Friday, you will photograph the proper documents as agreed. Once again, after you leave work for the day, you will find the same taxicab waiting in the same place as before. You will enter it, bringing both the camera and the attache case in which you received your first payment. Now empty, of course. You will be driven to a place where the film may be verified, and then you will take your second payment and go on with your life as though nothing at all had occurred.”

  “I want more detail about that last part,” I said. “Where I turn over the camera and get my second payment.”

  “Certainly,” he said. “As soon as we order another round of drinks. Barkeep! Two more vodka martinis.”

  Well. We got our fresh drinks, and we went over the details
of the transaction until I was satisfied, or at least prepared to settle for what I had. Then, understandably nervous and tense, I made my way to my home in Bethesda, downed some straight bourbon in the kitchen, and got into bed beside my sleeping wife. Since I had, in the last few years, developed the habit of spending an occasional evening at a local tavern, there was no excuse necessary; had my wife awakened, my breath would have been sufficient indication of my recent whereabouts.

  I slept badly, awaking time after time from terrible dreams in which monsters chased me while I ran through walls of molasses, and at the breakfast table had to listen to a recital of unpaid bills. I drove to work as usual, left my car in its usual slot at the parking garage on E Street, and arrived at work with trembling hands and a splitting headache. All the gins of a hangover, one might say, except that I hadn’t drunk enough the night before to justify such strong symptoms. No, it wasn’t alcohol, it was worry and fear and doubt and shame and shaky determination.

  A man does what he can with what he has. All I had of any value was one fairly unimportant national secret. That it was important enough to someone to earn me forty thousand dollars was my very good fortune, and I told myself again and again I’d be a fool to pass this by. Just once, in my lifetime, just once.

  An apparently chance encounter had led me into all this in the first place, and of course it was not by chance, but a recital of its appearance and subsequent reality seems unnecessary here. Kelso contacted me, that is sufficient, and found in me someone willing to listen.

  That day stretched like a taut rubber band, along which I crawled toward four-thirty an eternity away. Three times my duties took me near the cabinet in which the documents were filed. Harry, the archive guard, told me an unfunny joke about a bellydancer and an eel. We had known one another’s faces for years.

  Four-thirty, at long last. I walked to Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street, found the cab, boarded it, was driven aimlessly around Washington while I checked and counted the money—all here, all old bills, all so beautiful to the eye and the hand—and while I familiarized myself with the camera. This camera gave the appearance of a cigarette lighter. It had to be held directly above the flat document, on which a strong light was to shine. The camera should be ten to twelve inches above the document. And so on.