Free The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich Page B

apparently. I couldn’t see—his back was between us, but the tumbler came back empty.
    He held his head a moment longer, then he let go of it. The head fluctuated, weaved in a halolike orbit, but it stayed up.
    The bartender withdrew, driving the gallery of onlookers that had hedged us in back before him. “Go back to your own places now, you men. Don’t nobody come near this table, understand? This lady wants to sit here.” And to me in parting, “I’ll keep my eye out. Just call me if anybody crowds you or tries to put the touch on you.”
    â€œThank you,” I said.
    I sank unobtrusively into the chair beside that erect, unseeing head, and the place and all the faces faded from view, the noise and the smoky haze, and we were alone together—me and the crossed-out line from somebody’s book. Not just a cheap woman’s book, the book of the recording angel himself. The Book of Destiny.
    I waited for him to look around at me and see me there beside him. I wanted the reaction to come from within him, unforced. He was staring straight ahead into the nothingness that faced him. That always faced him day and night. What was he seeing there, I wondered; murder?
    She had done this to him; it must be she, of course. The thing was, had she done it living or dead? Which had come first, the descent or the crime? The descent, almost certainly. She was only dead months. He’d already left the St. Albans, started on the downward way a year or two ago. He’d even been dispossessed from the other place, the Senator, the last rung of the ladder over the pit, well before it had happened. Then, perhaps, had he gone back, sought her out, and wreaked retribution on her for what she’d done to him? It appeared plausible.
    He moved slightly, and I saw him looking downward at the floor around his feet. Looking around for something on that filthy place where people stepped and spat all day long. In a moment more I had guessed what he was looking for and I opened my handbag and took out the cigarettes I had provided myself with and held the package ready, with one protruding, as my first silent overture.
    His eyes stopped roaming suddenly, and they had found the small arched shape of my shoe, planted there unexpectedly on that floor beside him, and the tan silk ankle rising from it.
    I watched, breathless, afraid to move. He stared steadily, and then pain clouded his eyes, and he turned his head aside toward the wall, but still bent downward as it was. The dream was too old; it had fooled him too many times for him to believe in it now.
    Then he turned back again to see if it would be gone, that hallucination on the floor. It wasn’t. I could see a cord at the side of his neck swell out as he kept himself from looking up to where the face should be but, he knew, wouldn’t be. He was afraid to look up. He shaded his forehead with one trembling hand for a minute. I heard him murmur: “You’ll go away if I do.”
    I edged out my forearm, with the cigarettes in my hand, a little farther along the rim of the table toward him, and that caught at his eyes and he saw that. He closed his eyes to give it time to vanish. He opened them again, and it was still there.
    â€œAh, Mia, don’t,” he pleaded. “Don’t kid me like this!” And he ground his hands into the sockets of his eyes to rub the apparition out of them.
    Thus he gave me her name, and I knew that the quest for “Marty,” at least, was at an end. The quest if nothing else.
    I spoke to him softly, reassuringly, as to a child, as to someone very sick who must not be frightened, whose confidence must be gained. “Yes, I’m here,” I said. “I’m real. I’m really here.”
    The voice, I guess, disabused him. He made a confused turn of the head, and we were looking at one another at long last. The bum and the widow.
    He pawed out toward me tentatively and still half