The agent stamped her ticket ad handed it to her through the small aperture in the bars. “Bus leaves at five-ten, lady. About an hour’s wait.”
“Thank you.”
She took the ticket and crossed to a hard bench near the doors to the loading dock. She sat on the bench in the prim posture that was part of her personality, knees and ankles together and eyes turned straight ahead. She was, as a matter of fact, challenged by her temporary failure to remember the name of the town of her birth, trying to remember the face of the mother who had borne her, and she couldn’t remember that either, not at all, though she kept trying very hard until the face of Jacqueline intervened, and she began to think instead of what Jacqueline had said in the booth at the Bronze Lounge.
Give yourself up, Jacqueline had said. Go to the police and tell them he attacked you, she’d said. The cold, measured words returned, repeating themselves in the high vault of the station, and beneath the icy syllables was the current of fury and dreadful fear. Evil words, words of death, counseling a cruelly realistic course of action which was terrifying to consider. It was so much easier, once one had discovered the way, merely to return to the simplicity of one’s beginning. Bus leaving at five-ten. Three dollars and fourteen cents to innocence.
Her level line of vision was broken by bodies going one way and by bodies going the opposite way, and once a body paused and remained motionless in the line of vision for some time, but she was not aware of any of this. Someone sat beside her on the bench and looked at a magazine and got up after a while and went away, and she was not aware of that, either. A disembodied, amplified voice announced the departure of busses to points north and points south after having previously announced that the bus going north was loading on dock number six and that the bus going south was loading at dock number nine, and she heard and understood the voice, even though she did not hear anything else or see anything at all, because it was necessary and important to know if it was her bus, the bus to innocence, that the voice was talking about.
At five precisely the voice announced that the bus was loading. She listened carefully to the dock number and then got up and lifted her small bag from the floor at her feet and walked out into the great concrete annex where the bus waited. Several other people who were also waiting for the bus went out ahead of her or behind her, and one of those behind her was the policeman who had followed her from the apartment, and just when she was about to hand her ticket to the driver standing beside the open door of the bus, the policeman took hold of her arm and said gently, “Going someplace, sister?”
She knew immediately what he was and why he was there, but for some reason, now that it was apparent that she was going no place she had ever wanted to go, it made no particular difference. She turned to face him, a very ordinary-looking man to be even a minor agent of destruction, and she said quietly, “I was going on the bus. I was going home.”
He noted the tense, the quiet capitulation, and he felt for her a passing pity. But he only said, “I got a better idea. I got the idea we’d better go down to Headquarters.”
Submitting to the pressure of his fingers, she went with him back into the station and waited by the open door of a telephone booth while he called Headquarters for transportation. From where she stood, she could see outside into the street. As she watched, the pale vestigial tubes and bulbs of the night winked out and were dead. Soiled gray light was a thin smear on concrete and glass.
It was the morning of the last day.
Chapter 10
Later, she sat in a small, bare room at Headquarters. On the whole, everyone was quite kind to her. She was spoken to softly the few times she was spoken to at all, and the only really bad part about it was the waiting and the trying not to think what was going to happen.
After a long time, a man came into the room and spoke to her, and she recognized him as the sergeant of police who had come to her apartment yesterday.
“Good morning, Miss Gait,” he said. “Do you remember me?”
“Yes. Not your name, though. I can’t remember your name.”
“It’s Tromp. Sergeant Tromp.”
“Oh, yes. It’s not a difficult name. I should have remembered.”
His lips moved in a trace of a smile. “It’s all right. You weren’t in the best of condition for remembering, as I recall. If you’ll come with me now, please, there’s something we’d like you to do.”
She followed him out into the hall and down the hall into another room which was much larger and brighter than the first. She was placed in a line with four other women on an elevated platform under a glaring bulb that cast its light downward with such force and intensity that it seemed to rebound with a kind of material resiliency. She thought there were people in the room beyond the reach of the brilliant light, thought she heard the whisper of movement, but the glare blinded her, and she could not be sure. None of the other women said anything, and neither did she. It was very hot under the light, and she was thankful when a voice said, “Step down, please,” and she was permitted to descend from the platform.
Sergeant Tromp met her at the door and said, “Thank you, Miss Gait. Now we can go back.”
“Back where?” she said.
“To the room you came from.”
“What am I waiting for?”
“Like I told you last night, Lieutenant Ridley wants to see you.”
“Will it be long?”
“No. Not long now.”
He left her in the same room, and she sat in the same chair. After a while, she found that she was thinking too much about what might happen to her, and so she tried to concentrate on a calendar that hung on the wall opposite. It was a large calendar with a separate page for each month of the year, and no one had turned the calendar now for three months. The picture above the number was very bright and gay in spite of a film of dust that had gathered on its surface. It was mostly in primary colors, reds and yellows and blues, and it was a picture of a small boy with a rooster in his arms. Beyond the boy there was a lot of sky with some fluffy white clouds floating across it. She wondered what the boy’s name was, and if the rooster had a name, and if there were really a boy and a rooster like that, or if they were only something the artist had just thought up. The boy had bright red hair. It was the brightest red hair she had ever seen on anyone, even in a picture. Sergeant Tromp returned and said, “Now, Miss Gait” She got up and followed him again, and this time they turned the opposite direction in the hall and went down to a closed door which opened after knocking on it briefly. She went past him into a room that was slightly larger and slightly less bare than the one in which she had waited, and he closed the door again between them, leaving her to face alone a man who stood up behind a desk to meet her.
“Miss Gait?”
“Yes.”
“Sit down, please.”
He indicated a chair before the desk, and she went over and sat in it. The chair had arms and an upholstered seat and was considerably more comfortable than the chair in the other room. On the man’s desk, the desk of the man who must be Lieutenant Ridley, was a cardboard container almost full of coffee, and she could see by the scum of cream on top of the coffee that he had allowed it to become stone cold. She thought at first that Lieutenant Ridley himself was an old man, then she thought that he was a young man, and finally she decided that he was a young man with an old face, which is what he was. His eyes looked as if he hadn’t slept much recently, which he hadn’t.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said.