A curious heady excitement began to take hold of him as his cab rolled through familiar streets towards the district where most of his childhood had been spent. On impulse, he told the hackie to stop and let him out. He had checked most of his bags at the airport, keeping only a light valise which he could easily handle, and he wanted to take this stage of the journey slowly, on foot, to let the impact of old associations seep into his mind.
The first major fact to register on him was that his old home had gone.
He stood on a street-corner and looked at the towering stack of low-priced apartments which had taken the place of the plaster-peeling rabbit-warren of a tenement he had known.
The same kind of street gangs chased past him; the same wheezing old cars rolled by; the same crowded buses clanged and burped down the street. But the building wasn’t there.
An unexpected pang of nostalgia touched him. He had never imagined he could regret the disappearance of a place which had brought him so little of pleasure to cherish. He changed hands on his valise and limped on. As he went, he found people staring at him; a small boy bravely threw a dirty word at him and dissolved into laughter. He knew, now, why such things were done, and felt no resentment.
A block or two north, he remembered, was a bar and grill where he had done odd jobs during his mother’s illness. The way to it would take him past the school he had attended. He turned northward, making mental comparisons as he went.
The atmosphere was different from what he recollected. He had a sense of something like tranquillity, contrasting with the frenzied modernity of Ulan Bator with its cosmopolitan influx of strangers. Maybe this was the ultimate effect of the crisis in whose shadow he had been born. The closest he could come to summing it up in a single word was “chastened’. But there was no regret apparent.
He found himself rather liking the sensation, and wishing he had been back earlier.
The bar and grill had changed in layout and décor, but it was still there. It seemed more prosperous than in the old days. There were high stools at the counter, but he went to a table, earning a grimace from the lounging counterhand; he found it much too difficult to perch on a stool.
“What’ll it be ?” the counterhand called.
He was hungry after his journey, Howson found. “Small portion of steak and French fries, and a can of beer,” he responded.
While he was waiting for the food to come from the kitchen, the counterhand eyed his visitor curiously. It was plain why, but Howson waited until he raised the question openly.
“Here y’are, shorty,” the young man said in a friendly enough manner, setting the plate and glass on Howson’s table.
“Hey — I think I seen you around here some place, a long time back. Didn’t I?”
He would have been about twelve when Howson left, probably; it was quite possible he remembered. “You might have,” Howson agreed cautiously. “Does Charlie Birberger still run this place?”
“Mm-hm. You a friend of his ?”
“I used to be,” Howson hesitated. “If he’s in, maybe he’d come and have a word with me.”
“I’ll ask,” said the counterhand obligingly.
There was an exchange of shouts; then Birberger himself, older, fatter, but otherwise unchanged, came blinking into the bar. He caught sight of Howson and stopped dead, his mind a kaleidoscope of astonishment.
He recovered quickly, and waddled across the floor with a jovial air. “By God! Sarah Howson’s boy! Well, I never expected to see you in this place again after all we heard about you! Making out pretty well, hey ?”
“Pretty well,” Howson said. “Won’t you sit down?”
“Uh? Oh, sure!” Birberger fumbled a chair away from the table and entrusted his bulk to it gingerly. He put both elbows on the table, leaning forward. “We see about you in the papers sometimes, y’know! Must be wonderful work you’re doing Must admit, I never expected you’d wind up where you are Uh — been a pretty long time since you were in here, hey ? Ten years!”
“Eleven,” said Howson quietly.
“Long as that? Well, well!” Birberger rambled on. There was a faint quaver in his rotund voice, and Howson was suddenly struck by a strange realization: damn it, the man’s scared !
“Uh — any special reason for coming back?” Birberger probed clumsily. “Or just looking up the old place?”
“Looking up old friends, more,” Howson corrected. He took a sip of his beer. “You’re the first I’ve met since I flew in an hour or two back.”
“Well, it’s good of you to count me as an old friend,” Birberger said, brightening. “Y’know, I often think of the days when I useta let you help out in here. I remember you had quite an appetite for a—” He might have been going to say “runt’, but caught himself and finished with a change of mental gears: “Uh — young fella !”
He sat back. “Y’know, I like to think maybe I managed to give you a helping hand now and again. With your mother sick, and all…”
Howson could see the rose-coloured filters going up in his memory. He hid a smile. Charlie Birberger had been an irritable, hard-to-geton-with employer, given to bawling out his assistants mercilessly — especially Gerry Howson.
Well, no matter. He nodded as though in agreement, and Birberger’s original disquiet faded still further.
“Hey, tell you something!” the fat man said. “I still have all the cuttings from the papers about how they found you. I guess I could dig them out and show you. Hang on !”
He hoisted himself to his feet and disappeared into the back rooms. In a few minutes he returned with a dusty album, which he made ineffectual attempts to blow clean as he sat down again.
“There !” he said, opening it and turning it so that Howson could read the yellowed cuttings it contained.
Howson laid down his knife and fork and leafed through the album curiously. He hadn’t realized that the discovery of a telepathist had created such a furore in the city. Here were front-page items from all the leading local papers, some of them with pictures of Danny Waldemar and other UN personnel.
He had come to the last page and was about to hand the book back with a word of thanks, when he checked. The final item seemed to be completely irrelevant; it was a single paragraph reporting the marriage of Miss Mary Hall and Mr Stephen Williams, and the date was about two years after his departure.
“This one,” he said, putting a finger on it. “Is it connected with the rest?”
Birberger craned to study it. He frowned. “Now what in—? If it’s there, sure as hell there’s a reason. Must have something to do with — Good God, I remember!” He stared in astonishment at Howson. “Don’t you know the name? I’d have thought you of all people…”
Blankly, Howson returned the gaze. And then he had it.
He shut his eyes; the impact was almost physical. In a husky tone he said, “No — no, I never knew her name. She was deaf and dumb, you see, so she couldn’t tell me. And after she got her speech and hearing she only came to see me a few times.”
“She never wrote you?” Birberger was turning back the leaves of the album. “After all you did for her, too! I’m really surprised. Yes, here we are: ‘A plane from Ulan Bator today brought in eighteen-year-old Mary Hall, the deaf-and-dumb girl who befriended novice telepathist Gerry Howson. She told reporters at the city airport that the operation to give her artificial speech and hearing was completely successful, and now all she wanted was the chance to lead a quiet, normal life.’ Look!”
At first glance he must have missed it because he wanted to, Howson told himself. For the newspaper photo wasn’t a bad one. There she was, standing at the door of the plane: smartly dressed, true, and wearing makeup and with her hair properly styled — but recognizably the girl he had known.