Materially there was a floor full of phonographs and radios. Two record players
were going full blast as though in competition. One was playing Beethoven's
Ninth... and the other? The young man scowled as he tried to get the beat of it.
What was it? "Get out of Town"... That was too apt. It was like a corny
clue in a bad play.
If only he could get out of town. If he could vanish off the face of the
earth for a while it would help. If he could... his brain stopped working.
Coming up the escalator, face set, eyes incurious, was the face of his fate.
The man had been trailing him for... it seemed like forever. Really it was
only two days. Forty-eight hours. Two days in which he had neither slept, nor
barely eaten.
The harsh-faced man seemed not even to notice his quarry. He looked
around. He made a small grimace at the warring sounds that came from the rival
phonographs. To the naked eye he could have been a shopper.
The young man, looking around desperately for some kind of exit, caught a
distorted reflection of his own face in a highly polished piano top. Could that
be his face? That gaunt, lined thing?
He was young, barely twenty-eight, but the face that leered at him looked
like a middle-aged, haggard man with the worries of the world on his shoulders.
It was time for a showdown. The whole thing would not be half as
nerve-wracking if he could be sure that his trailer was a detective. But would
a detective have given him so much leeway? Why had he not been arrested two
days back? Why was the man just following him?
His face lightened. He looked younger. He'd call the bluff of the other
man! He darted forward right past the tall thin man. He jumped on to the
handrail of the escalator.
All his life he had wanted to slide down a long banister. Here was his
opportunity. He smiled a gay, devil-may-care grin and slid out of view of his
nemesis.
It caused quite a sensation. He came rocketing down the banister from the
radio phonograph floor down to the floor which was devoted to baby things.
Young mothers and old looked up as the kiting figure came crashing into view.
He landed on his feet and darted for a closing elevator door.
Ah, he thought, this was the way to do it. He was having some fun for his
money. He ran into the elevator and smiled as the doors came together. Let his
trailer top that!
But a sudden thought wiped the smile off his face. He had gambled with the
fates. Gambled to see if the man would call for help, blow a police whistle,
show in one way or another whether or not he was a detective.
The slide for life had not brought a whistle or a command to stop. The man
was not a detective, then! That made it worse! When the elevator stopped at the
ground floor, a badly frightened young man, all gaiety gone, eeled his way
through the maddening crush of shoppers.
He wanted to get out into the air, out where there was some elbow room. As
he walked as fast as he could without looking as if he were running, he kept
looking behind him. His head turned for a glance backward so often that it
looked as if he had a nervous tic.
Here on the street, the sunlight bathing everything with a hard brassy
glare, he felt a bit better. After all, he thought, with all this melodrama it
should either be a dark black night, or there should be a bitter storm brewing.
