They shrugged her off. Their gnat-like attention went back to the borzoi again, as being the more interesting of the two rival bids for attention.
The hotel had every earmark of one of those shady places catering to card sharps, confidence men, and other fly-by-nights. It held no terrors for her, though. She had met its type of denizen on the dance floor every night of her life, for years past. She went up to the desk with the assurance of one who doesn’t expect to be turned away. An evil-looking night-clerk with a cast in his eye, a collar that hadn’t been changed in a week, and a whiff of stale alcohol on his breath, shifted over a little to match her position.
She leaned comfortably over the desk on the point of one elbow. “Hello, there,” she said breezily.
He widened his mouth and showed her a space between two of his teeth. It was probably supposed to be some kind of a grin.
She swung her handbag around on the end of its strap with her free hand. First around one way, then back around the other. “What room’s my girlfriend got?” she said unconcernedly, staring off across the mildewed lobby. “I wanna run up a minute and tell her something I forgot. You know, Joanie. The one in the light-green dress. I only just now left her this minute in the drugstore, but—” She gave him a snicker; “this can’t wait, it’s too good.” She bent over and slapped hilariously at her own thigh. “Is she gonna die!” she brayed.
“Who’s that, Joan Bristol?” he asked, with a fatuous look that was an invitation to her to share the joke with him, whatever.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she rattled off, as if that were to be taken for granted. Giggling, she poked him in the side. “Listen, you wanna hear something funny?” She bent her head over in the direction of his ear, as if about to whisper something to him confidentially. He inclined his head accommodatingly.
Suddenly, with the typical volatility of the gamin-part she was playing, she changed her mind. “Wait a minute, I want to tell her first. I’ll tell you when I come down.” She took a step away from the desk, but not without chucking him under the chin first. “Stay there now, Pops; don’t go ’way.” Then quite by way of parenthesis, still all a-chortle over this other, more important matter: “What room’d you say it was, again?”
He fell for it. She’d worked hard at the little act, and it had gone over. “Four-oh-nine, sugar,” he said amiably. He even straightened his weather-beaten tie, caught up in the momentary mood she had managed to create. Of intimacy that took no account of visiting-hours, it was so close. Of harmless, giddy frivolity.
He took a step in the direction of the decrepit switchboard, which it was also evidently part of his duties to attend to.
“Oh, skip that,” she called out ribaldly, flinging her hand at him. “She don’t have to put on airs with me. Who’s she kidding? I know she’s two weeks behind in her rent.”
He guffawed with mealy-mouthed laughter, and the intended announcement over the house-phone went by the board.
She stepped into the Cleveland-Administration elevator with an exaggerated swing of her hips, and the venerable contraption started to creak slowly upward under her. The stationary doors were not solid, but grilled ironwork. As the descending ceiling of the street-floor came down and cut her off from his sight, it seemed to scrape the raffish smirk from her face in time with its own passage, like a slowly-falling curtain of sobriety passing over her features, and dimming them again to taut gravity.
She and the colored man toiled upward for four endless, snail-like floors together, and then he stopped the mechanism and let her off. He seemed to intend to wait for her return there, at floor-level, so she got rid of him with a pert: “That’s all right, I’ll be in there quite some time.”
He closed the rickety shaft-door, and a line of light ebbed reluctantly down the glass, like something being slowly siphoned off; left it shadowed and blank.
She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn’t have to enter such doors, shouldn’t have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn’t order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel.
It seemed like a long corridor, but maybe that was because her thoughts were quick. They were churning wildly, while her feet carried her toward the imminent showdown that lay just ahead, around the turn.
“How am I going to get in? And if I do, how am I going to know, how am I going to find out if she killed him? They don’t tell you these things. Not the whole majestic State of New York can make such words pass their lips, as a rule, so how can I, alone, unaided? And even if I do, how am I going to get her back there, all the way up to East Seventieth Street, without causing a big commotion, calling on the police for aid, involving Quinn in it far worse than he is already, getting the two of us held on suspicion for days and weeks on end?”
She didn’t know. She didn’t know any of those things. She only knew she was going ahead, there was no backing out for her. She could only pray, to the one friendly auspice there was in all this town for her, as she drew closer, closer.
“Oh, Clock on the Paramount, that I can’t see from here, the night is nearly over and the bus has nearly gone. Let me go home tonight.”
The door-numbers were stepping up on her. Six on this side, seven on that, eight back on this side again. And then a dead-end, the corridor ended in a door, the last of them all, at right angles to it: 409, there it was. It looked so neutral, so impersonal — and yet behind it lurked her whole future destiny, in shape unseen.
On this single slab, she thought, on this great square of old, dark, scabrous wood, depends whether I become a human being again or remain a rat in a dance-hall for the rest of my life. Why should one door have so much power over me?
She looked down at the back of her own hand, as if to say: Was that you? Gee, you had guts just then! It had knocked just then on the wood, without waiting for the rest of her.
The door swept open before she had time to plan anything, to think what to do when it should open, and they stood looking at each other eye to eye, this unknown woman and she. Hard, enamelled face very close to hers, so close she could see the caked pores in it, like fine mesh. Hostile, wary eyes, so close she could see the red-streaked vessels in their corners.
The upper hall at Graves’ house came back to her again, the memory of creeping through there in the dark with Quinn, and she knew, without being conscious of it, that she must be smelling the same perfume again; that was what was doing it, linking the two experiences.
The eyes had already changed. This thing was going to go fast. Hostile wariness had already become overt challenge. A husky voice came up from somewhere below to join them. A voice that didn’t let you kid around with it.
“Well, what’s the angle? Didje come around to borrow a cup of sugar or didje hit the wrong door? Anything in p’tic’lar in here y’want?”
“Yes,” said Bricky softly, “there is.”
She must have taken a draw on a cigarette just before she opened the door, the other, and been holding it until now and speaking through it. Smoke suddenly speared from her nostrils in two malevolent columns. She looked like Satan. She looked like someone it was good to stay away from. She was still willing to have it that way herself — so far. Her arm flexed, to slap the door closed in Bricky’s face.