“But I find the most interesting similarity,” continued Prometheus, apparently impervious to the cold dawn which was making Ellery rattle like an old gourd, “in the way you react to your environment. The crowd, not the individual, is the thinking unit. And the thinking power of a crowd, as last night’s unfortunate events demonstrated, is of an extremely low order. You’re bursting with ignorance, and ignorance breeds panicky fears. You’re afraid of nearly everything, but most of all you’re afraid of personal contact with the problems of your time. So you’re only too happy to huddle together inside the high magic wall of tradition and let your leaders manipulate the mysteries. They stand between you and the terrors of the unknown.
“But once in a while your priests of power fail you and suddenly you’re left to face the unknown in person. Those on whom you relied to bring you salvation and luck, to shield you from the mysteries of life and of death, no longer stand between you and the dreadful darkness. All over your world the magic wall has crumbled, leaving your people paralyzed on the edge of the Pit.
“In such a state of affairs,” said Prometheus, “is it to be wondered at that a single hysterical voice, screaming a single silly taboo, can frighten thousands into running away?”
Ellery awoke on the bench to pain and an early sun burnishing his tutor. There were people in the Plaza and automobiles were rushing by. It seemed to him that someone was making an awful lot of noise and he got up angrily.
The cries were coming from the west, hoarse and exultant.
Boys voices, booming in the canyons.
Ellery limped up the steps, crossed the street, and made his way stiffly toward Sixth Avenue.
There’s no hurry, he thought. They’re peddling the obituary of the C.A.T. So many dead, so many injured, so many dollars’ worth of wreckage. Read all about it.
No, thank you. Hot coffee will do nicely instead.
Ellery limped along trying not to think at all.
But bubbles kept bobbing up.
Obituary of C.A.T. Obituary of Cat... now that would be something. Obituary of Cat. Come seven.
Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.
Ellery laughed.
Or as another immortal put it, I should of stood in bed.
Brother Q, you’re through. Only you had to rise from the dead. To chase a Cat.
What next?
What do you do?
Where do you look?
How do you look?
In the fresh shadow of the Music Hall marquee the boy’s mouth was going through an acrobatic exercise under his popping eyes.
Never an ill wind, thought Ellery as he watched the pile of papers dwindle.
And he began to pass, to cross Sixth Avenue for his coffee, when a shouted syllable made sense and something on top of the heap flew up and lodged in his brain.
Ellery fumbled for a coin. The coin felt cold.
“Extra.”
He stood there being elbowed right and left. There was the familiar Cat, but he had an eighth tail and it was not a question mark.
8
Her name was Stella Petrucchi. She lived with her family on Thompson Street, less than a half a mile below Washington Square. She was 22 years of age; of Italian parentage; of the Roman Catholic faith.
For almost five years Stella Petrucchi had been employed as a stenographer in the same law office on Madison Avenue and 40th Street.
Her father had been in the United States for forty-five years. He was a wholesale fish merchant in Fulton Market. He came from Livorno. Stella’s mother was also from the province of Toscana.
Stella was the sixth of seven children. Of her three brothers, one was a priest and the two others were in business with George Petrucchi. Of her three sisters, the eldest was a nun of the Carmelite order, one was married to an Italian cheese and olive oil importer, the third was a student at Hunter College. All the Petrucchi children but the priest, who was the eldest, had been born in New York City.
They had thought at first that Stella was part of the immortal debris littering, the vicinity of Metropol Hall, overlooked in the streetcleaning. But the silk cord around the girl’s neck gave her the special distinction conferred by the Cat and they found that when they pulled her head back by the tumbled black hair and exposed her throat.
A pair of patrolmen had run across her body a block and a half from Metropol Hall at just about the time the Mayor was giving reporters the statistics of the carnage. It was lying on the cement of an alley between two stores, ten feet from the Eighth Avenue sidewalk.
She had been strangled, said the Medical Examiner’s man, some time before midnight.
The identification was made by Father Petrucchi and the married sister, Mrs. Teresa Bascalone. Mr. and Mrs. George Petrucchi collapsed on being informed of the tragedy.
A man, Howard Whithacker, 32, who gave a West 4th Street rooming house address, was closely questioned.
Whithacker was a very tall, lean, blackhaired man with closely set diamond black eyes, a horny skin, and Gothic cheekbones. He looked considerably older than the age he gave.
His occupation, he stated, was “unsuccessful poet.” On being pressed, he grudgingly admitted that he “kept body and soul together” by working as a counterman in a Greenwich Avenue cafeteria.
Whithacker said that he had known Stella Petrucchi for sixteen months. They had met in the cafeteria late one night the previous spring. She had been out on a date and had stopped in with her escort at two in the morning. The escort, “a deep Bronx troglodyte with handpainted mermaids on his tie,” had jeered at Whithacker’s midwestern speech. Whithacker had picked up a baked apple from the counter between them, leaned over, and crammed the apple into the offending mouth. “After that, Stella used to drop in almost every night and we became kind of friendly.”
He denied angrily having had an affair with the girl. When this line of questioning persisted, he became quite violent and had to be subdued. “She was a pure, sweet soul,” he yelled. “Sex with her was out of the question!”
Whithacker talked reluctantly about his background. He hailed from Beatrice, Nebraska. His people were farmers; the original stock had been Scotch — a great-grandfather had come up out of Kentucky in 1829 in a group of Campbellites. There was Pawnee blood in the family and a splatter of Bohemian and Danish. “I’m one of the percentage Americans,” said Howard Whithacker. “All decimal points. You know?” At home, he said, he attended the Disciples of Christ church.
He was a graduate of the University of Nebraska.
At the beginning of the war he had enlisted in the Navy, “winding up in the Pacific. I was blown into the water by a kamikaze who darn near made it. My ears still ring sometimes. It had a remarkable effect on my poetry.”
After the war, finding Beatrice confining, he went to New York — “financed by my brother Duggin, who thinks I’m poetry’s gift to Gage County, Nebraska.”
His sole published work since his arrival two years before consisted of a verse entitled “Corn in the Coral.” It had appeared in Greenwich Village’s newspaper, the Villager, in the spring of 1947; Whithacker produced a greasy clipping to prove it. “My brother Duggin is now convinced I’m not another John Neihardt. However,” he said, “I have received considerable encouragement from fellow-poets in the Village, and of course Stella adored me. We have regular 3 A.M. poetry-reading sessions in the cafeteria. I live Spartanly but adequately. The death of Stella Petrucchi leaves an empty pigeonhole in my heart; she was a dear child without a brain cell in her head.”