Mr. Steems could not afford to cease to drive his taxicab. To do so would be to invite inquiry. He could not refuse passengers. To do so would be instantly suspicious. He was caught in a vise of circumstance. But he had the sustaining conviction of blamelessness. What happened was not his fault. And anyhow he was one of those fortunate people who develops fury as a fine art. It was his custom always to get mad enough soon enough to avoid all need for thought. He went through life in an aura of pleasurable indignation, always assured that anything that happened was somebody else’s fault.
That process took over now. When a passenger flagged him down and got in his cab and gave an address, Mr. Steems was blameless. When the passenger vanished into thin air, leaving souvenirs behind, Mr. Steems merely felt his resentment increase. By the end of the second day he seethed as he cleaned up after each departed fare. He raged as he packed his lodgings with the baggage and parcels that mysteriously remained.
Somebody, he muttered darkly to himself, was gonna have to pay for this funny business! Somebody was gonna pay plenty! When they tried to get their stuff back they’d see!
That prospect of future justification and revenge ended his mental efforts. He did call up Susie to find out if her mother had turned up yet —she hadn’t, and he generously offered to take Susie out on a date to take her mind off her troubles. But Susie got almost hysterical, and Mr. Steems took refuge in a beer and embittered mutterings. He wasn’t responsible for what happened to people who rode with him!
“What’s a guy gonna do?” he asked bitterly of his beer glass. There was the possibility that he could cease to drive the cab from which every passenger seemed to vanish into thin air. But he dismissed that notion with incredulous horror. “They want a guy to starve to death?” he demanded truculently.
He would definitely not consider starving to death. But he couldn’t fathom the mystery. He’d completely forgotten the clue that might have given him the answer. Mr. Thaddeus Binder had been the first passenger to vanish. He had left the deerskin behind, loaded with his possessions. The deerskin remained, and now frequently was loaded with other people’s possessions. But Mr. Steems could not add that together. And even if he had, Mr. Steems would have failed to understand. He would have needed to be told that Mr. Binder had made an experiment to prove that compenetrability was possible. Maybe even that wouldn’t have helped, however; besides, he didn’t remember Mr. Binder. He recalled male passengers by their tips and some female ones by their hips. Mr. Binder was gone from his recollection.
A third day passed. Susie’s mother did not reappear. Susie took an unreasoning dislike to Mr. Steems. She said he didn’t care. As a matter of fact, nobody cared more than he did, but he was in a fix. Susie conferred tearfully with Patrolman Cassidy. Her mother’s disappearance was duly reported to the Bureau of Missing Persons. There were a surprising lot of people missing all of a sudden. Patrolman Cassidy discovered the fact and grew ambitious. He considered that in Susie’s mother’s case he had a lead. He began to work from that standpoint.
After the fourth day of the phenomenon of the disappearing passengers, Mr. Steems’s lodgings began to get crowded—with suitcases, packages, storage batteries, saxophones in their cases, groceries of all kinds. One wall of his room was solidly banked with suitcases alone. After the fifth day, the space beneath his bed was filled and a second wall partly obscured. On the sixth day he began really to run out of space.
That day—the sixth—was the day the newspapers broke the story. The headlines were impressive.
52 MISSING IN CITY! MONSTER AT WORK?
And there it was. Up to a given hour, fifty-two citizens of all ages and both sexes had disappeared from the city’s streets, and other disappearances were being reported almost hourly: a list of unfortunates who had seemingly gone out of existence like snuffed candle flames. . . .
Mr. Steems read the list with a jaundiced eye. “I never seen none of ‘em,” he said bitterly to the missing persons’ luggage piled against the walls about him. “I don’t ask nobody their name an’ address when they get in my cab! It ain’t none of my business!” Then Mr. Steems again hurled the crushing, unanswerable question at an imaginary interrogator: “Whadda you want a guy to do? Stop runnin’ his taxi an’ starve to death?”
The newspaper account pointed out that none of the known missing had any reason to disappear. Some had vanished as early as eleven in the morning, and some as late as half-past twelve at night. All had dropped out of sight while on their way from one part of the city to another. Several had last been seen entering a taxicab. Anxious relatives were demanding that the police take drastic action. They demanded the questioning of taxi drivers—
“Yeah!” cried Mr. Steems furiously. “Not only that old bag hadda vanish, so Susie don’t speak to me no more, but now they’re gonna get everybody scared to ride in taxicabs!” He slammed down the paper and went to the corner saloon. He had a beer. He believed that he thought better with a beer. It was a delusion. He brooded. “Whadda they want?” he muttered oratorically, a little later. “It’s them Commies start stories like that! Them newspaper guys, they’re Commies!”
He had another beer, and his rage mounted to the point where he dropped a nickel in the saloon pay phone and furiously called a newspaper.
“Whadda you guys tryin’ to do?” he demanded shrilly. “You wanna drive a honest, self-respectin’ guy outa business ? You go printin’ stuff about people vanishin’ outa taxicabs, and how am I gonna make a livin’? You wanna drive a guy to crime?”
He hung up and went to his cab, muttering embitteredly. Three blocks away he picked up a fat man for a fare. The fat man had an evening paper in his hand. He gave an address. He said in mock fear, “You’re not the Taxi Monster, are you?”
Mr. Steems let in the clutch with a violent jerk. He drove a full hundred yards, hissing like superheated steam awaiting release. Then he spoke in a tone of suppressed frenzy. He expressed his opinion of newspaper reporters in terms that would have curdled sulphuric acid. He worked up to scathing comment on people who made jokes at guys who were only trying to earn an honest living. His voice rose. His bitterness increased. When—it was then nine forty-five p.m.—when he came to a red light and a large truck forced him to halt, he was expressing himself at the top of his lungs. There were stores on either side of the street. Their signs lighted his face clearly.
A squad car came to a halt beside him. Patrolman Cassidy said, “That’s him!” and got out and walked to the side of the cab. Mr. Steems was saying shrilly, “It’s guys like you—guys that because you got some money think you can raise hell with any guy that’s got to make a living—it’s guys like you that ruin this country! Yah, you capitalists—”
“Say,” said Cassidy in Mt. Steems’s ear. “What’s the matter?”
Mr. Steems jumped. Cassidy! Outrage upon outrage! He said furiously, “That guy in the back asked me if I’d killed anybody in my cab yet, on accounta that fancy piece in the paper—”
Patrolman Cassidy looked. Then he said, “That guy in the back? What guy in the back?”
Mr. Steems turned. There was no guy in the back at all. But on the deerskin seat cover was a watch, a monogrammed fountain pen in silver and gold, seventy-five cents in small silver, a hearing aid, three pants buttons, a glittering pile of zipper teeth, and a belt buckle.
Patrolman Cassidy signaled to the squad car. He stepped into the cab himself.
“We’re going to Headquarters,” he said in deadly calm. “I’ve been checking, and Susie’s mother ain’t the only one that was last seen getting into your cab, Mr. Steems! We’re goin’ to Headquarters, and don’t you try nothing funny on the way, you hear?”