“Here,” said Grawson, holding out the quarter and dropping it into the black palm.
The man lifted the whisk broom.
“No,” said Grawson. “Don’t touch me.” And he left the car.
He heard the quarter drop to the floor behind him, but he did not turn.
“Like an avenging eagle,” muttered Grawson, bundling up the platform, carrying his coat, the newspaper under one arm, his wicker suitcase in his left hand. “With arrows,” he added. “With arrows.”
Edward Chance had black hair, gray eyes, a thin face, not handsome, an unhappy face. There was little noticeable, little remarkable about Edward Chance, saving perhaps that he had once shot and killed a man. Chance had a good memory, and the patience to think things out, and ambition, and something to make up for. And his craft, medicine, was more than a business with him, more than a professional skill. It was a way of healing for his own heart too, and his heart had need of its healing, for the single bullet that had torn through the heart of Frank Grawson with such swift, irreversible finality had left its second wound in the heart of Cain.
Somehow Chance had expected Lester Grawson to appear, and now, five years later, five years, long years, after Frank Grawson had fallen to his knees, his face looking more surprised than anything, the pistol dropping off his limp fingers, the splash of red on his silken shirt, his brother, the gigantic, improbable Lester Grawson, as implacable as the winter or hungry dogs, had found him.
Chance studied the man across from him, over the green felt of the pool table, in the gaming salon on the third floor of the Manhattan Athletic Club. Grawson leaned over the table, lining up his shot, and the cue moved as though on wires, cleanly, swiftly, and struck the colored, wooden sphere with a sharp click, driving it into a side pocket.
“How did you find me?” asked Chance.
Grawson was lighting a small cigar. It was his fourth in the game. He chewed them down as much as smoked them, his large jaws absently, complacently grinding and shredding the brown leaves, leaving wet, black scraps of tobacco on his chin and mustache.
Grawson looked at him and grinned.
The man’s left eye flinched several times.
Chance had seen this twitching several times before in the evening. He had seen this type of thing before and wondered about it. Chronic, guessed Chance, origin obscure, a nuisance, perhaps not really aware of it. So much we don’t know. So much.
Grawson reached into his wallet and pulled out a small, stained, carefully folded piece of yellowed paper. It was a clipping from the New York Times. Chance had seen it before. He had even had one. It was the graduation list of his class, 1889, Harvard Medical School.
“Where did you get it?” asked Chance.
Grawson smiled, and pulled a wet piece of tobacco from his chin with the nail on his right forefinger. “Washington postmark,” he said.
“Clare,” said Chance, not bitterly.
Clare Henderson had done well for herself. The ruined fortunes of her family had been well recouped by judicious marriage. She was now the wife of a congressman from Virginia.
Beautiful, pale, black-haired Clare.
“Most likely,” said Grawson.
Chance watched the smoke from Grawson’s cigar, and the massive movements of the heavy jaw.
Grawson leaned to the table again, and sent another ball gliding smoothly across the felt and into the darkness of the pocket.
Again and again he shot, not missing.
Chance admired skill. He himself had skilled hands. He admired the work of carpenters, of ironworkers, carvers, saloon painters, the men who could handle ten-horse teams, the men who could use a rifle or a handgun well, and he admired Grawson, and the game was slowly taken from him, shot by shot.
Grawson stood up.
He replaced his cue in the rack.
“You’ve lost,” said Grawson.
Chance put his own cue back in the rack.
“You’re taking me back to Charleston to stand trial?” said Chance.
Grawson’s left eye trembled, and the lid flickered.
“Yes,” he said.
“May I see the warrant for my arrest?” asked Chance.
“It’s in the hotel,” said Grawson. “The warrant is my business.”
Grawson reached into his wallet again and placed a silver star on the green felt.
“This is warrant enough,” said Grawson.
Chance looked at the badge, the silver detective’s star, Charleston of the Sovereign State of South Carolina. Grawson replaced the star in his wallet.
“I don’t mind if you make trouble,” he said, smiling, dabbing the ashes from the cigar on the felt on the table, “but I would not advise it.”
“I don’t want any trouble,” said Chance, and he had spoken truly, for he was tired and now overcome with the shock, numb with the shock of being found. And now medicine, and himself, everything was finished, everything but the ride on the train, the formalities that would satisfy justice and the last climb, thirteen steps to the scaffold.
Chance felt as he had when he had resolved to die like a gentleman, as Clare had wanted, as Frank and Lester Grawson had expected, as he himself had expected. But that was before the moment the handkerchief had fluttered to the grass, the moment before he had raised his weapon with a gesture that now seemed incomprehensible to him, a gesture that was incredibly swift and sure and that terminated with a crack of a shot and a moon of blood on the shirt of a man twenty-four paces away. It the last instant, moody Edward Chance, the gentleman, or something within him deeper than the gentleman, deeper than his training and the proprieties of his tradition, had decided that he would live. That he did not want to die, and that thusly he must, and would, kill.
He saw the body of Frank Grawson in the white silk shirt, the scarlet sash, face down in the wet grass of Barlow’s meadow. He shook his head.
“You can get your coat and bag,” said Grawson. “I’ll wait.”
Chance looked at him quickly.
“You won’t run,” said Grawson. “If you did, I’d find you again.”
Those blunt eyes like shovels seemed to burn for a moment, With pleasure.
He would like that, thought Chance, he would like for me to run-to run once more-as I did from Charleston, after the killing, when I didn’t want more, when I wanted to get away, when I had to leave, when I cried and ran because there was nothing else to do, nothing else.
“Wait here,” said Chance.
“All right,” said Grawson, starting to light another cigar. “Take your time.”
Chance disappeared.
Grawson’s hands trembled for a moment on the cigar, and then he managed to get the tiny sheet of flame to the tobacco.
Grawson walked over to the window and looked down to the corner of 45th Street and Madison Avenue, at the gas lamps and the people in the street. A cab clicked by, drawn by two horses.
So it was coming to an end, thought Grawson. Five years was a long time to wait, but I could have waited more, plenty more.
He took the badge out of his wallet and looked at it, small in the fat palm of his huge hand, and then put it back again.
His letter of resignation to the Charleston Force had been tendered the day he had received the envelope from Washington. He had taken his savings and boarded the train for New York. The death in Barlow’s meadow had been a duel, in a sense self-defense. It would not be murder, at best. No formal charges had ever been filed, nor would they be. Grawson had not filed them, nor would he. His brother had had a pistol, had asked for the duel. And Clare, she would not file charges, for the scandal would be improper, and what was Frank Grawson, or indeed, Edward Chance, to her? And the state would not make charges. It was as Lester Grawson had wanted. It left him alone with Chance.