There were eight people paid out along it. They broke into about three groups, each self-contained, oblivious of the others, but he had to look close to tell where the divisions came in. Physical distance had nothing to do with it; they all stretched away from him in an unbroken line. It was the turn of the shoulders that told him. The limits of each group were marked by a shoulder turned obliquely to those next in line beyond. They were like enclosing parentheses, those shoulders. In other words, the end men in each group were not postured straight forward, they turned inward toward their own clique. The groupings broke thus: first three, then a turned shoulder, then three again, then another turned shoulder, then finally two, standing vis-à-vis.
No singles, no solitary drinkers there. He was about to pass on his way, then suddenly he looked again, something caught his eye, held him fast out there. His eye had just run down the bartop, automatically checking the number of glasses against the number of people, and found something awry, out of true.
There were nine glasses, there were eight people. There was one more glass than there was a person to drink from it.
He counted both over again, to make sure. It was easy to tabulate the people; it was not so easy to tabulate the glasses, for there were hands continually dropping in and out amidst them, impeding his clearness of view.
Again they came out nine, even after he’d checked them for chaser-glasses, which would have been counted two to a drinker. There weren’t any of those. Everyone in the place happened to be drinking beer at the moment.
Nor was the extra glass a discard. It stood, not before anyone, but by itself, at the far end, with only empty space before it where its user should have been.
It was what he had been looking for: the aloof, solitary, removed symbol. Only it was not a person, it was an inanimate glass mug.
The first hieroglyph.
He went in.
He skirted all the others, he went down by the far end, where it was, where all the eloquent empty space was. There was a gap of long yards there, between the last drinker and the wall. He moved in there, not directly in front of it, but very close to it.
He looked at it, and it paid off twice. Just a beer mug and yet it paid off by his very looking at it.
They had handles, as that type of receptacle always does; they were octagonal in shape, thick and bulky, with enormously indented bottoms, to the profit of the purveyors, and they had handles. The handles of all the others were in line, they pointed one way, away from the door, inward toward the back of the shop. The handle of this one and this one alone was in reverse, it pointed outward toward the street.
The second hieroglyph.
He bought a beer himself, to draw the barman to him, to lubricate the questions he was about to ask. The chase had suddenly come to a head again; landed in one spot, if only briefly, like the tormenting, buzzing, circling gadfly it was.
He said to the barman, “Whose is this?”
The barman said, “Fellow that just went back there a minute.”
So he was still in the place. The quantity of liquid still in it, the fact that it was allowed to stand there undisturbed, had already told him that.
He didn’t have much time; he slashed straight through to the next question, letting his informant like it or not as he chose. “What color suit’d he have on?”
“Brown,” the barman said reservedly. The barman gave him a look. The barman didn’t like it, but — “brown,” the barman said.
The third hieroglyph. All at one time, all in one place, all out of a crass beer mug. Drinking isolated in a crowd, left-handed, wearing a brown suit.
He asked a third question. “How long has he been in here, ’d you notice?”
His ten cents was running out, evidently. There was a time-lag before he got the answer. He got it finally, but it came slow, like the last of anything. Or like when something’s drying up, there isn’t going to be any more.
“Two or three hours, I guess.”
That took it back to about the right time.
The fourth hieroglyph.
“Has he been on this stuff the whole time?”
This time it backfired. He would have had to be a rye-buyer to get any more answers.
“What are you doing, young fellow, taking a census in here?” the barman snarled, and he moved up the line, to where there was more profit and less interrogation.
He didn’t have to ask any more; he couldn’t have, anyway. A door broke casing somewhere unseen behind him, and the glass’s owner was returning.
Quinn didn’t turn his head. There was a strip of mirror-panel matching the bar straight before him. “I’ll get him in that,” he said to himself, and kept his eyes riveted front.
The mirror stayed blank for a minute, next to his own image. Then the mirror filled in next to that, took imprint. A face climbed up on it from the rear, that on the mirror-surface leant from below his own; steadied when it had gained the level of his own, stood still.
A tortured, beaten hat was down low over it, but not low enough to hide it. It was the face of a man about forty-five, but it had leaped ahead twenty years — perhaps in this one night? — to meet its own old age. Only the hair-coloring, the line of the neck, a few things like that, told that its owner was still young in years, that it, too, should have been still young. It was haggard and white with strain, silver in its whiteness where the electric light seeped in under the hat brim and caught it.
There was something wrong with him. Quinn could tell that at a glance; anyone could have.
He didn’t stand there upright against the bar. He crouched protectively against the wall, almost seeming to hug his whole right side to it, as if sheltering it, screening it from observation, there where the wall came across, ending the bar. It wasn’t the inert lean of intoxication, it was the furtive, concealing lean of one seeking protection; very subtly expressed, but yet implicit in every line of his body. Even when he raised his hand, as now, and drank, he turned a little away, toward the wall. Very little, the slightness was one of attitude rather than of actual physical measurement, but he turned a little away, in mental hiding.
I’ve got him, Quinn said to himself. And this time it’s something bad, no kid being born to a frightened father.
He drank again, and again he crouched a little like that, cowered. Only the left hand always came up; never the right was seen. The right was a secret between his guardian body and the wall.
The gun, Quinn wondered?
What did he see in his beer, dreaming into it like that? The ghost of a dead man, maybe? Was that why he couldn’t take his eyes off it, his staring haunted eyes?
I’ll try out his reaction, Quinn decided. I know already, but I’ll give it the fifth hieroglyph.
He took his mug with him and ambled over and pretended to fool around with a cigarette-vending machine they had standing there. That way he had them all well out in front of him, in a straight line. He set the mug precariously down atop the machine, and then unnoticed gave it a little nudge off into space.
It gave a shattering whack on the floor. Not terrifying, just, say, mildly startling. Eight heads turned and glanced casually around, then turned back again and went ahead with their own concerns.
But the ninth. His shoulder-blades had contracted into a vise, pinching his back together. His head had gone sharply down, as if to avoid a blow at the back of his neck. He didn’t turn to look, he couldn’t; shock held him in a strait jacket for a moment. And then as it slowly eased, Quinn could see his sides swelling in and out with his enforced breathing. And when he raised his hand a moment later its outline was all blurry even to Quinn’s steady eye, it vibrated so.