Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (34 page)

I ran over and pulled open the glass door into her apartment. There was other gunfire now, and I was aware of glass shattering around my ankles. I charged through the first room and, finding myself in a small corridor, ran the length of it, hoping for a door to the street. The passage ended in a locked door. Damn. They would be here any moment. Jenkins and his men. I turned back frantically and raced up a staircase to the parlor floor. There I found myself in an entrance hall, where I pulled open first one and then another door and charged out onto a stoop. In front of me was a short flight of brownstone steps leading down to the sidewalk. A man I had never seen before was coming straight toward me up the stairs. His face had a look of grim urgency, which was turning to consternation at the sight of the house door mysteriously swinging open, pausing for a moment, and then swinging shut again. As long as Jenkins was unwilling to tell his men exactly what they were looking for, they were going to have a difficult time catching me. Then I saw that Clellan had arrived and was starting up the stairs behind the other man. He knew exactly what he was looking for. As he came he held his arms outstretched to either side so that I would not be able to pass him undetected.

Beyond the metal railings that ran down both sides of the stair was a fenced-in area, which would have made a good cage. The railings were too narrow to balance on, but I clambered up onto one of them anyway and charged down it for all I was worth, so that by the time I tipped off to one side or the other, my momentum would have carried me out to the sidewalk. I hit the pavement with a loud clap and stumbled into a heap almost at the curb.

Clellan knew at once what had happened. Despite his deplorable taste for cowboy hats and brightly colored shirts, he is not a stupid man. He spun around and charged back down the stairs, looking desperately along the sidewalk for some movement or clue to my location. I scrambled to my feet, quickly retreated several steps down the street, and turned back to see what he would do. At the bottom of the stairs, Clellan went into an odd crouch and began dancing around in little circles on the pavement, exploring with his feet for what he hoped would be my injured body. The other man, watching quizzically from the stoop, was plainly wondering whether Clellan had gone mad.

Clellan stopped abruptly. He saw that it was too late: I had gotten clear. He waited for a minute, listening and watching for some sign of me, and then, with his back to the other man, he said quite softly, “You there, Halloway?”

“Yes,” I said finally, saving him the trouble of scuttling around anymore looking for me. I spoke softly too, so that the man on the stoop would not hear me. He was watching Clellan with increasing curiosity.

“You all right?” Clellan asked.

They are always so solicitous of my well-being.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Is there anything we can do for you?” Clellan asked.

“You could leave me alone. In particular, I wish you would stop trying to kill me. What’s the point of that?”

“No one wants to kill you. You don’t understand.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t kill bystanders when I’m close by, then. Like that woman in the garden.”

“That woman’ll be fine, probably. That wasn’t a regular bullet. You weren’t hit by anything, were you?”

I thought there was a tone of hopefulness in his voice.

“No. It’s a difficult shot. I can see why your people went for the woman instead. She’s a much better target.”

“Mr. Halloway, why are you doing this? What’s the good of it? Why don’t you save yourself and us a lot of trouble and come along with me now? It’d be much better for you.”

Two more men had just rounded the corner from Madison Avenue and were walking fast toward Clellan.

“I don’t think so. Not just now,” I said.

I turned and saw that there were more men coming down the sidewalk from the other end of the block.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

I did not answer. A black sedan had turned into the block from Fifth Avenue and was rolling down the street towards us.

“Just talk to me,” Clellan was saying with his pleasant country accent. “Tell me what it is you want. Whatever you want, we can get it for you surer than anybody.”

The men approaching from Fifth Avenue were almost on top of me now. I stepped out between two parked cars into the street to avoid them.

“Halloway, you have nowhere to go. Halloway? You’re making a mistake,” Clellan was saying. He was talking louder now. “We’re just going to have to come get you anyway. We’re going to get you anyway. Halloway?”

You can try. But it won’t be so easy as you think.

Clellan stood there looking blankly around, talking to the void. The man on the stoop stood staring at Clellan, baffled by his bizarre behavior. The two groups of men approaching from either end of the block stared in confusion at both of them.

I turned and started up the street toward Fifth Avenue. Halfway up the block I had to step aside between two parked cars, to let the black sedan pass, and inside, gliding slowly toward me, I saw the face of Colonel David Jenkins, staring impassively out the left rear window. I felt a flash of hatred and defiance. This man had driven me out of my apartment. And cut me off from everyone I knew.

As he drew even with me, I pulled out my gun, grasping it like a hammer, and slammed it as hard as I could against the window that separated me from Jenkins. The entire pane of glass crazed instantly into thousands of little segments but did not break apart. Stupid. I think I expected the driver to accelerate away in terror, the occupants cringing inside. Instead, the brake lights lit up bright red and the car slammed to a stop. All four doors of the car swung open simultaneously as if it were a jack-in-the-box, and suddenly there were four people standing in the street. One of them was Gomez, holding his odd-looking gun loosely, as his eyes searched the surface of the street for some sign of me. Another was Jenkins. He spoke.

“Halloway, we’re here to help you.”

I was backing carefully away, watching to make sure that I did not make a noise or create some visible movement.

“Halloway?”

When I was ten yards off, I turned and walked quickly to the end of the block. I took a last look. They were still standing there, gazing hopelessly about, except for the Colonel, who had understood the situation and was walking away from me toward Clellan. I crossed Fifth Avenue and walked south along the edge of the park.

M
y heart was still pounding, and I realized that I was trembling. I would walk for a while, put some distance between me and my pursuers and let myself calm down. Then I could figure out what to do next. But I found that weaving my way between loitering adolescents, bag ladies, and joggers was a precarious and exhausting task, and I was again startled at how utterly remote these other human beings now seemed, staring right through me, completely unaware of my existence. I had spent the last five days by myself, hidden inside my apartment behind drawn shades, and now that I was suddenly thrust out into the glare of the sunlight, everything seemed too bright and too large. I moved as if in a dream among people and objects that whirled past in dangerous, unpredictable paths.

Approaching Eighty-fifth Street, I looked back just in time to stumble out of the way of a boy on a bicycle, who came hurtling out of the park and across the sidewalk straight at me. It was no longer enough to look only ahead: I would have to train myself to keep watching all around. Moments later a small, erratically moving dog suddenly swept across the width of the pavement, threatening to snare me with the leash that connected it to its owner. This existence requires constant vigilance. I particularly have to watch the people on roller skates, with Walkman earphones plugged into their heads, who glide obliquely across streets and sidewalks and then abruptly wheel out in broad swooping arcs or little toplike spins with an arm or leg extended to cut me down. Worse yet are the runners who, in their silent shoes, continually threaten to pile into me from behind. But the most dangerous thing of all is a crowd of even a small cluster of people standing or moving together. Even now, when I have learned to move confidently through the streets, I will still turn and retreat from even the smallest gathering of people.

By the time I reached Seventy-second Street I had figured out that I was safest walking along the curb, between the parked cars and the trees, where there was less traffic and where I could always escape into the street or even up onto an automobile. I wondered what Jenkins would be doing now. Going through my apartment. I had been lucky to escape. Recalling my terrified flight out of the building and through the gardens, I felt my heart begin to race again. They would be examining everything I owned, dismantling my home. It came to me that I no longer had a home, that it was unlikely, furthermore, that I would ever have a home again, and, suddenly demoralized, I sat down on one of the benches that line the edge of the park.

I sat there for quite a while. An hour perhaps. I pictured Jenkins and his men handling my clothes, sorting through my desk, and I wished that I could have burned more of it. What would they do next? What would I do next? Jenkins had been absolutely right: it would be very difficult to survive on my own. The afternoon was passing. There were more children now: the schools must be out. More people in running suits. More people moving up and down. I was no longer one of them. Hopeless.

An old man in stained clothes stinking of urine shuffled up and stopped in front of where I was sitting. He turned his head slowly and looked down just as if he were inspecting me, and I looked to see if something visible had attached itself to me. No, he must be looking at the bench. With another sequence of little shuffling movements he got himself turned around with his back to me and began very deliberately to sit down on top of me. I scrambled to one side and stood up as he lowered himself into my place on the bench. He was panting a little from his exertion. A good thing he had come. It got me moving again. The important thing is to keep moving.

As I walked toward midtown it became perfectly obvious to me where I would go. I would go where people traditionally had gone when they found it inconvenient or impossible to go home: I would go to my club. If I had not seen that immediately, it was because that is not the way people tend to think of clubs nowadays; but it was certainly the way the people who built the clubs had thought of them, and it was a point of view that suddenly suited me perfectly. The midtown men’s clubs were ideally appointed for someone in my situation. They offered large kitchens and bars, cavernous lounges, libraries, billiards rooms, showers, pools, and private bedrooms. There were enough people wandering in and out of them so that I would always be able to slip through their entrance doors unnoticed, in the wake of a visible member; but their admissions procedures, house rules, and initiation fees guaranteed that a majority of the people who would join would be too old or live too far away to bother coming in much. And the fact that those members who did come in came mainly for lunches or a quick game of squash only made things better for me.

Midtown Manhattan is full of these clubs, and in my situation the issue of membership was no longer of much relevance: I could go to whichever of them happened best to suit my new and rather special needs. Still, I decided on the Academy Club, of which I was a member— partly because of my familiarity with it but also because of its reassuring vastness. It is a large, handsome, six-story building on Madison Avenue, designed seventy-five years ago by McKim, Mead and White, with cavernous public rooms that have not been full in generations. In those rooms I would never be caught in a crowd.

You enter up a short flight of stairs sheltered by an awning. Just inside the entrance and to one side is a desk, behind which Bill sits watching the door, and on the wall behind him is a large board with the names of all the current members. When you enter, he greets you by name and then turns to slide a small peg next to your name from left to right, indicating that you are in the clubhouse. He prides himself on knowing every member on sight, and although half of them seem to live in Palm Beach or London — so that he must get only very infrequent opportunities to fix their faces in his memory — in fact I have never seen him fail. On that day I had to stand waiting for several minutes outside the closed entrance door until another member, someone I had seen often but whose name I did not know, came up the stairs, pulled open the door, and strode through. I slipped in behind him, trying not to crowd on top of him and barely managing to get through before the closer pulled the door shut again. (This is a maneuver at which I have since become quite adept.) Bill looked up and said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Ellis” to the man ahead of me and slid the appropriate peg over. As I slunk by the desk, Bill’s gaze drifted back to the door, and I realized that I had taken pleasure in the courtesy of his greeting all these years and that I felt cut off without it now. As if I had been suddenly but discreetly dropped from the membership. No one would say anything unpleasant: my presence would simply be ignored.

I crossed the hall. On my right were passageways to private dining rooms. On my left was a vast, high-ceilinged lounge with high-backed chairs upholstered in leather and long tables arrayed with periodicals. The marble floor was covered with enormous oriental carpets, and lining the opposite wall were tall windows which looked down onto the street. The Club was filling up. Tea had just been put out, and the beneficiaries of trust funds, who had spent their afternoon on the squash courts, were taking small, civilized bites from English muffins. They would be leaving soon, in time to avoid the savage wave of stockbrokers — the first occupational group to leave their offices — who would sweep in and wolf down entire muffins in a single bite on their way to the bar or the courts. The lawyers and investment bankers, who took pride in working long hours, would arrive later. The large, comfortable room easily swallowed up the conversation around the table. I could see people there I knew well. Melancholy — if I let myself stop to think about it — that I could no longer join them.