The Outsider (65 page)

“I don't know for sure,” Sarah sighed. “But I didn't keep wondering about things like this…I believed in God…I went to Mass…Everything was simple…”

“And you want it to be simple again,” he said. “I know…Well, do what you were doing when you were a child and see if it makes life simple again. Now, what do you really want to do? Look at me and tell me…”

“I want to find a man…”

“Can you? Be honest.”

“I'm pretty old for that,” she sighed, bit her lips. “I'm fat now. And I've no confidence in myself anymore,” she let her voice die in her throat and tears began to well into her eyes. She bent forward and cried: “I'm going to Confession…”

Well, why not? All the church had to do was predict that life was terrible, that man would become overwhelmed with contradictory experiences. They could
drill this simple, elementary truth of life into the hearts of impressionable children. Then the Fathers of the church could sit back and watch the generations of the sons and daughters of men grow up and go forth on their little voyages of proud, vain desire, could watch them with soft, ironic smiles, for they knew that sooner or later they would come crawling back to the faith of their childhood, seeking solace, whimpering for mercy, for forgiveness. Cross rose and paced the room, looking at Sarah now and then, smiling compassionately at her. Sarah leaped to her feet, her face wet with tears and her eyes hard with outrage.

“Are you laughing at me?” she demanded. “Then you
must
be crazy, like Menti said…”

“So, Menti said that, hunh?”

“And, by God, now I'm beginning to believe he's right!”

Cross went to her and placed his hand tenderly on top of her head.

“It might be better for you if you did believe that,” he said.

She stopped crying and stared at him, not understanding. “Why do you say that?”

“You need rest, Sarah,” he said. “Take your burden to God and lay it down…Remember, He said: ‘
Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest
…'?”

“But you don't
believe
that,” she protested, baffled, half-scared. “I know you don't.
Do
you?”

“No,” he could not resist telling her the truth.

“Then why do you tell
me
that?”

“Perhaps God uses the Devil to guide people home,” he told her impishly.

Sarah blinked, then she ran to him, her lips curling
with hate and scorn; she began hitting him with her doubled fists. Cross ducked his head and burst into prolonged laughter.

“Don't, Sarah,” he protested good-naturedly.

“You
bastard
! You're making
fun
of me! I could kill you, kill you…I swear, I could! You hear, I could kill you…” She paused, thinking, blinked her eyes. “Maybe you
did
kill them like Menti said…”

“It's you who're talking about killing me,” he reminded her. “When did I ever say I wanted to kill somebody?”

“You're laughing, but you can't fool me,” she said, her eyes lit with intuition. “I saw something crazy in you the first time…”

“Oh, no!” Cross protested, chuckling. “You laughed at me. Remember how you laughed?”

“I didn't know you then—”

“My dear, you don't know me now,” Cross told her. “But look, in all seriousness, I tell you that you ought to go back to your church. You
need
it.”

She did not know what to think. She saw that Cross was both serious and amused. The expression on her face told him that thoughts were clashing violently in her mind. Her mouth hung open, then her lips became compressed.

“You are a
devil
!” she burst out bitterly. “You're making fun of me and it ain't
right
! It ain't
good
to laugh at people for things like
that…
You like to see suffering…”

“I do not,” he said.

“You do; I see it in you—”

“Sarah, what I feel does not concern you; forget it,” he told her. “You asked my advice; I say you ought to go back to God.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” he said simply, quietly, looking at her with eyes that twinkled for the first time in many weeks.

She gazed at him, then looked away. She went to the door, pivoted; her mind was made up.

“
I don't like you!
” she shouted in a sudden rage and went out, slamming the door.

Yes, Sarah was going back to the church. What did it matter that the church had no answer for the ills of this earth? The priests could at least tell her to stop hoping for anything in this life, to curb and deny her desires, to forget her humiliating color consciousness, her poverty, that all of that was as nothing in the eyes of an eternal God. And for those who were weak, was that not right, fitting, necessary? Was it such a bad world, after all? The only trouble was that he and his kind were restlessly envious of the priests, the churches, the Communists, the Fascists, the men of power…That was it. He would have to live without that green foam of jealousy welling into his eyes and blinding him to how weak he was in relation to their organized strength. Render unto church that which is the church's, and render unto the Party that which is the Party's…But where would
he
stand? Was there no neutral ground?

He sat on the bed, looking at his suitcase. He ought to pack his things. Yes…He moved about listlessly, absent-minded, slowly filling the suitcase without conviction that he would ever have the right to move about again in freedom. Oh, yes; there was something he really wanted to do; he would take Eva's diaries with him, keep them as a memento…He pulled out the dresser drawer and saw that they were not there. He looked through all the drawers, under the bed, in the clothes closet. Now, where had he put them? Maybe Eva had taken them back when she had heard the Party's suspicions? But he did not believe that she would have done
that without first telling him; it was not like Eva's transparent honesty. Then where
were
they?
The Party!
He would bet his life that Menti had taken them…Goddamn him! He had wanted those diaries…Well, if Menti had stolen them, they were gone. To argue with the Party about them was useless.

Through the closed door of his room came the faint tinkling of the front doorbell. He stood still, waiting, wondering whom it could be. Was it Menti again with his everlasting Hank? He placed his ear to the door panel and listened.

“Is Lane or Damon in?”

It was Houston's voice. Had he dug up any new evidence against him? Was he coming finally to arrest him?

Sarah's voice sounded cold and clipped: “He's in his room…There…”

Houston's footsteps echoed down the hallway and died in front of his door. Cross sank upon the bed. He would let Houston take the initiative. Eva was dead and there was no fight in him. A series of sharp knocks sounded on the door.

“Come in,” he called.

The door swung open and there was Houston and behind him loomed a tall, blue-coated officer. Under Houston's arm was a bulky package wrapped in brown paper. Houston turned to the officer and said: “Wait down the hall.”

“Yes, sir.”

The officer left and Houston came in and closed the door softly behind him. He approached Cross, smiling vaguely. Houston had a relaxed, confident air and Cross felt that his time had come. He
knows
now…All right; if this was the end, then he did not care…Houston looked around, found a chair, dragged it to the bed and eased his deformed body on to it, some two
feet from Cross. Cross felt sweat breaking out over his chest and he cursed himself for being unable to control his physical reactions. Well, why didn't the hunchback sonofabitch speak? Why did he sit there with that goddamn gloating smirk on his face? He longed for his gun; if he had it in his hands he would shoot the hell out of that little triumphant god even if he burned for it…All right; he had lost, but Houston would see that he could take his defeat without flinching.

“Damon, I've solved it. You're guilty. You killed Blount, Herndon, and Hilton…”

Houston's voice rang with finality. Cross waited; his role was to say nothing. Let Houston carry the ball. Slowly Houston unwrapped the brown package and there lay the set of thin angular notebooks: the diaries of Eva…

“You're a lucky, blundering fool,” Houston spat at him. “The only witness I could have put in the box against you was Eva Blount, and she's dead. If she hadn't leaped from that window, you'd be on your way to the electric chair…If she had lived, she would have told me what you told her, and what you
told
her made her kill herself. I've found out that much, Damon.” Houston rubbed his hands nervously across his eyes. “Goddammit, I was your unwitting accomplice for seventy-two hours! I just couldn't bring myself to admit what I knew in my heart to be true! And no doubt you were banking on just that. What made that girl kill herself was what made me unable to admit that you were guilty. I wonder if you planned it like that? No; I don't think you did. It was too perfect to be planned. You depended upon the human heart rejecting a horror of that magnitude and you were almost right, almost successful…”

“How did you get those diaries?” Cross asked him. “From the Party?”

“No. An officer took them from this room when you and the others were in the police station,” Houston said. “I've read them and I understand it
all
now.”

“Did she mention me in there?” he asked, feeling that he had to know at once.

“Only a little, toward the end—What she said did not matter. It was what she
was
that mattered,” Houston told him. “She said that she loved you, but that was all. But what a victim was that Eva Blount!”

Houston carelessly tossed the notebooks upon the bed, at Cross's side. Cross was surprised, wondering why Houston was returning the books to him.

“It was all very simple when at last I'd found the key,” Houston began in a slow, measured tone. “And the key was this deceived woman, Eva Blount…Look Damon, I'm an honest man; I'm not going to brag or lie to you. Right off I want to confess that I was haywire in the beginning. That damned Communist Party pushed me off on the wrong track. That paranoiac Blimin was at my office day and night, demanding action, yelling that you had killed Blount and Herndon because of Eva…The Party claimed at first that you were a Trotskyite, then they swore that you were a government spy. In the end they screamed that you saw an opportunity to kill Blount and take his wife and you took it…Funny, isn't it, how they misread things? Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires. The Party shouted at me: ‘He sold out to get the girl!' Their own slogans blinded them. They argued that you had to kill Herndon because Herndon had seen you kill Blount; further, they claimed that Hilton had found out somehow and that you then had to kill him…Despite the fact that they could not offer any evidence
in support of this, I, at first, felt that it did sound rather plausible. But deep down I was worried; it was
too
pat; it did not suit your character, did not fit what you told me that morning on the train. Remember? ‘Man's nothing in particular…'

“What a baffling chase you gave us! In the first place, you seemed so innocent,
too
innocent; we made only the most perfunctory investigations…When we began to feel that you
must
know something, we checked your draft card and, lo and behold, a fire had destroyed the records! I wonder if you could have had anything to do with that? You won't answer? All right; it isn't important…Then, for twenty-four hours, we made no new moves against you. But Hilton's death told us that we were up against something sinister. We decided to track down every lead, no matter how trivial…

“It was not until we, almost as an afterthought, tried to verify your birth certificate that we began to think of you seriously as a possible murderer. What a joke that certificate was! In Newark the clerks in the Bureau of Vital Statistics remembered you, but we thought that we were surely on the wrong track when we heard their description of you! Boy, what an actor you are! You should have been on the stage…When at last we were certain that you were Lionel Lane and that Lionel Lane was dead, we were back where we started from. It was decided that you had assumed this man's name, and we swung then toward thinking that you were in some Communist opposition group. But that fizzled. No political group in America had ever heard of you…

“Then we began checking your fingerprints and we ran into another stone wall. For the second time we discovered that you were dead…Cross Damon, Negro postal clerk of Chicago:
dead…
Killed in a subway accident. The FBI flew to Chicago to make sure. They
reported to me that you were no more…They even exhumed the other Negro's body, but that didn't tell us anything. Then the police started checking with the Missing Persons Bureau. We found that a man of your height and description had been reported missing the day after you were
supposed
to have been killed…Who was this man? He was a cleaner and dresser of chickens in a meat market…

“Finally we had to rely on comparing descriptions of you that we got from Chicago with what we could observe of you here in New York, then we knew that we had the right man. We knew you were Cross Damon, no matter how many dead men you were hiding behind…

“But was it possible that Cross Damon was doing all of this killing. But why? That was the most baffling aspect of all. You'll never know how I struggled against accepting your guilt.
I didn't want to believe it
. After having isolated you, identified you, we faced a riddle. Nothing in your entire background had touched politics. Then I had a brainstorm. I wired Chicago to send me a list of the titles of the books you'd left behind in your room and when they wired back a long list I was delighted…That was the first real clue. Your Nietzsche, your Hegel, your Jaspers, your Heidegger, your Husserl, your Kierkegaard, and your Dostoevsky were the clues…I said to myself that we are dealing with a man who has wallowed in guilty thought. But the more I pondered this thing, the sorrier I felt for you. I began to feel as though I'd killed Blount, Herndon, and Hilton myself…