Candy Garth said, “Here,” and extended a pink plastic hand mirror. Proudy accepted it and inspected his bandage.
“I made it look worse than it is. If a dressing doesn’t look bad, nobody ever believes the patient is hurt.”
“I’d hate to be hurt as bad as that bandage looks.”
“You’d be dead.”
Candy asked, “Is it going to leave a scar?”
“I’m afraid so. He’s losing hair up there. Of course a plastic surgeon could erase most of it.”
“I’ll keep it.” Sergeant Proudy rubbed his hands together. “When some rookie asks me what happened, I’ll just tell him I got it in the head with a fire ax. You got any aspirin?”
“I never carry it. My theory is that any patient too dumb to buy his own is too dumb to live anyway.”
“I’ll get some,” Candy said. She bustled out, and they heard the stair groan beneath her weight.
Barnes said, “That girl enjoys nursing. You ought to hire her, Dr. Makee.” He stood with his back to the fireplace, where the wreck of a table burned.
The physician shook his head and snapped his bag shut. “There was a time when I would have taken you up on that. Now I’ve had to learn restraint.”
Sergeant Proudy stood, swayed, and gripped the back of a chair to steady himself. “How much do I owe you, Doc?”
Dr. Makee winked at Stubb. “I can always tell when they’re getting better. They call me Doc.”
“How much? If it isn’t more than I got on me, I’ll pay you now.”
“Ten dollars. Quite a few years ago, I swore I’d never charge more than ten dollars for a house call.”
Stubb said, “Nobody else even makes house calls.” The bloody fire ax lay across his knees.
“I don’t either. I’m retired, or that’s what I keep telling people.”
“Here’s the aspirin,” Candy announced. “I’ll get you a drink, if the pipes aren’t frozen yet.” To Barnes she added, “Madame Serpentina’s packing. I listened outside her door.”
Stubb glanced at the dark and silent television. He whispered, “Where’s Free?” but Barnes only shrugged.
Sergeant Proudy gulped down two aspirin tablets and wandered across the room to look out the window.
“There he is!” Sim Sheppard shouted.
Everything stopped. Everyone turned to look. For perhaps twenty seconds, the prominent nose and small eyes of Sergeant Proudy appeared at the parlor window, still recognizable beneath a rakish cap of white surgical gauze.
Sim’s coffee was trampled in the snow. Steve Marshal’s attache case came unattached. No physicist could say how hard the front-runners struck the door. They were weighty men, most of them, police and sales alike; they had been sprinting, and they were unable to brake on the ice. Behind them were a dozen more even weightier and equally unable—or unwilling—to stop.
The weakened door made a sound much like that of a large model plane jumped upon by a small boy.
The Retreat
“You too, huh?” Barnes asked.
Stubb looked around at him. “Yeah, me too.”
It was night, and snow clouds hung over the city; there was no light anywhere that was not mankind’s. It might have been a city of clouds, with a few stars peeping through. They might have been in some vast, dark, rolling country, a land of hills and black pines.
“I thought they’d have more down.”
“It was almost quitting time when they got Candy out.” Stubb chuckled.
“What was that gunk under her robe?”
“Baby oil, I think.”
“I’m the one who’s supposed to know about novelties. If I had greased the floor in the hall …”
“They probably would have dropped her and broken her neck.”
“Or she would have gone through to the basement. How much does she weigh?”
“How the hell should I know? Two hundred, maybe.”
“Two hundred and fifty, at least. Maybe three hundred.”
“Maybe three hundred,” Stubb conceded. “Who gives a damn?” He tossed his cigarette into the snow. “It’s God-damned cold out here, Ozzie. You got a new place to stay?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Not me. They let me put my bag behind the counter in the Sandwich Shop up the street, and I’m still looking around.”
“Yes,” Barnes said again.
“We kind of worked together this afternoon, right? And it didn’t go too bad. Hell, with Candy it almost went good enough.”
Barnes nodded.
“Ozzie, I was wondering whether I could bunk with you. Just for tonight. I’ll get a place of my own in the morning.”
There was an instant’s silence, then the soft voice of the witch said, “Ozzie has no place to stay, Mr. Stubb.”
Both men whirled. “Where’d you come from?” Stubb asked.
“I fear he lied to you. He is here, staring at this ruined house, for the same reason you are. He wonders if he might not occupy his room one night more. Do not do it, gentlemen. It is very cold tonight. You would freeze.”
Stubb asked, “What about you, Madame S.?”
“I am here because I was forced to leave behind certain belongings. I have returned to fetch them.”
Stubb said, “We’ll help you carry ’em. Where are you going?”
“What is the nearest hotel of good quality?”
“The Consort. It’s only about four blocks.”
“From such a neighborhood as this? I am amazed. Then I go to the Consort. And yes, you may carry my things for me. You will save me the price of a taxi. Ozzie, you are a man and know about such matters. How may I pass through this fence?”
The barrier the wrecking crew had erected was not actually a fence, but a pack-train of yellow sawhorses carrying indolent orange lights, harnessed with an orange cord. Stubb cut the cord with his penknife, and Barnes moved one aside.
Not even the front wall of the house that had been Free’s was entirely gone as yet. Its outline remained, bricks hanging from their mortar to make a crazy arch that framed the dollhouse interiors of the front rooms. Under drifted snow, the hall was still recognizably the hall, with its stair vanishing upward into blackness. On its right, the parlor was changed mostly by the dying of the fire and the absence of the stuffed bird, its glass bell, and the table they had burned. To the left, Free’s bedroom seemed to bare all its poor secrets; his rumpled sheets cowered on the bed under a thin blanket of snow. Above, Candy’s room and the witch’s were only half exposed.
“Look!” Barnes pointed. “I saw something.”
“Where?” Stubb craned his neck and lifted his small body on tiptoe.
“Up there. Something moved.”
“Probably just the light.”
“Or Free. It could have been Free. I never saw him after this morning. Did you? Did anybody?”
The witch glanced back, her face half buried in the fur of her coat collar. “Free is dead.”
Stubb grunted. “You see the body?”
“I walk into it now.”
“Without a flashlight. Ozzie, you got a light?”
Barnes took out what appeared to be a small chromeplated pistol and pulled the trigger. A blue flame an inch long burned at the muzzle. “Butane,” he said. “You like it?”
“I’m crazy about it.” In the dim, blue light, Stubb examined the trampled snow. “Kids been in here. See that little sole with the hole in it? Neighborhood kid. Madame S., I hope you hid whatever you got, or it won’t be there now.”
“My things are here still. I feel them.”
Barnes hurried to catch up with her. “Hold onto the rail, please, Madame Serpentina, or you’ll fall.”
“Not on this. Not even without your light, Ozzie. I do not require it, nor would I if this place were entirely dark.”
Something creaked.
No one spoke; but there was in the air the almost palpable agreement not to speak, to ignore whatever it had been. The old house seemed to sigh. Perhaps there was no wind—the snow never stirred. Perhaps there was no sound.