Gray light filtered through the dirty panes of the second-floor window.
Arthur Chesbro woke slowly, aching in every bone. When he opened his
eyes stickily and peered across the grimy little room he could not at
first believe what he saw.
"Polly!" he choked, amazement and outrage blended. His wife, apparently
unclothed, was snuggled close to old Harry Starkman, under a single
blanket.
She looked up, smiling. "Hush," she said. "I finally got him to sleep.
His chest sounds terrible and he has a fever, but if he sleeps he can't
be too bad--for now."
She got up gracefully, managing to swirl the blanket around her without
showing, Chesbro hoped, _too_ much. Then he noted that the youngster
from the hotel was gawking. He cleared his throat loudly and the kid
looked away.
Mrs. Goudeket grunted to her feet. "Fever?" she asked. "Let me." She
went to the sleeping old man and felt his forehead. "He's burning up,"
she announced grimly. "An old man to walk through the rain and then he
got his lungs full of gasoline fumes. I suppose it's pneumonia."
They were silent.
"Excuse me," said Mrs. Goudeket. "I'm going downstairs, nobody should
follow me until I come back."
Mickey Groff thought: sensible woman. Somebody had to speak up. He
stood for a moment over Sam Zehedi. The poor guy had died hard,
fighting it; his eyes were ugly and his mouth contorted. His face in
the dim light was bluish, the hue of a swimmer's lips when he's been in
too long on a cool day.
Groff went to the window. Some time during the night the rain had
lightened; it pattered now instead of drumming. There was mist. He
struggled with the window and managed to inch it open against the
swelling of its frame and old incrustations of paint. Fresh air swept
gratifyingly through the storage room--and then he thought of the
burgess.
Sharon Froman understood his glance. She threw her blanket over the old
man and said, "He'll be all right." She stretched stiffly. "The old
woman's taking forever," she said.
Arthur Chesbro said firmly, "Mrs. Chesbro will be the next to go
downstairs. To find her clothes and put them on."
Polly Chesbro grinned amiably. "This thing _is_ scratchy," she said.
Groff leaned out and peered through the mist. All he could tell was
that there was water below; how much of it the enigmatic surface did
not say.
Mrs. Goudeket puffed up the stairs, a big carton in her arms. "Cheese
wafers," she announced. "Somebody open them."
Polly glided to the door, sculptural in her improvised robe, and went
down the stairs.
McCue, with the appetite of youth and an athlete, tore open the
corrugated cardboard and began gobbling wafers from the first carton he
came to.
"Manners, Dickie." Sharon Froman smiled. He swallowed his mouthful
convulsively and eyed her.
"Help yourself," he said coldly. "You're no cripple."
"Why _Dickie_," she purred. "After all we've _been_ to each other!"
Mrs. Goudeket looked up. "What's this?" she snapped.
Sharon looked amused and said nothing.
"I don't know what she's talking about," McCue said. The tone
automatically indicted, tried, convicted and sentenced him for unlawful
cohabitation. "I'll talk to you later," Mrs. Goudeket promised grimly.
Dick McCue found the cheese wafers were ashes in his mouth. He chewed
mechanically and wondered how he had managed to get simultaneously on
all these s.o.b. lists when all he wanted was a little innocent fun for
free--
He glanced at Sharon sullenly and saw she was chatting animatedly with
Chesbro about a publicity campaign enlisting all media, the possibility
of newspaper and magazine space and radio-TV time being donated if they
played their cards right. "Tear their heartstrings out," she urged.
"Get editorials; I've got some contacts in New York. You'd be The Man
Who Saved the Valley, Mr. Chesbro."
"Call me Arthur," he said. "We're going to be working closely together;
I can see that. My prestige and your ideas--"
Polly Chesbro came upstairs in her suit and raincoat; they were
wrinkled and damply steaming out the smell of wool but they were no
longer sopping. She was carrying her blanket; she draped it over the
sighing form of the burgess. His breathing was almost a crow. "He'll
never make it without penicillin fast," she commented, helped herself
to a box of the wafers and began to eat methodically.
Mickey Groff looked around; nobody was making a move for the stairs. He
stepped over the body of Sam Zehedi and went down. First outside into
the drizzle, where water was ankle-deep. He attended to his needs and
went back into the store. A bottle of pop caught his eye and he was
suddenly burning with thirst. He tore off the cap on a wall opener and
gulped it down as fast as the stuff would gurgle from the narrow neck;
after a queasy moment he ran for the door and made it in time. The pop
gushed up again violently. He sat down, swaying, on the wooden step up
to the door and retched a couple of times experimentally. He'd have to
be careful eating and drinking for a while. He had got a stiff dose of
the fumes.
Zehedi's blue-green, well-worn panel truck was just visible down the
road in water to the hubcaps, looking bulky and competent. The goddam
thing. And there stood the two gas pumps, goddam them too, and if
you could only get the pumps to work you could pump gas from their
underground tank into the truck and away they'd buzz, getting somehow
into town where the old man could be pumped full of penicillin and
dosed with oxygen as needed instead of dying like a sick dog in this
kennel.