Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

catch the words, but the cadence of Babs’s voice was unmistakable as she hurriedly directed the driver where to go.

Norma suffered a bad moment as the taxi went into gear and pulled on by. She had but a flash of the girl as the gleam of a near-by street light passed like a bright shadow across Babs’s golden hair. It stayed with Norma for years—that one brief glimpse of Barbara with her face buried in her slim white hands.

There was retributive rage in her heart when she ascended the brownstone steps and rang Paul Gerente’s bell.

The automatic opener on the door buzzed loudly, twice, startling her with its vibrant sound. She pushed open the door and stepped inside of the once-familiar hall. It was little changed except that during the years it had been done over in blue. She had ascended four stairs when a voice called down from the second floor: —

“Did you want Cameron?”

“No,” said Norma weakly.

“Sorry,” said the voice, and she heard the closing of a door.

She went on up, tiring in the middle of the third flight as she’d done so many times before. On the top landing, she stopped to regain her breath. A line of light showed along the edge of Paul’s slightly open door. She walked hesitantly toward it, and with something approaching an effort raised the face of the tiny brass gargoyle which served as a knocker and let it fall.

From inside the apartment, the same detestable clock which had startled her years before wound itself up with a whir and cuckooed eight times lustily.

She pushed the door open and forced herself to laugh. “What’s the matter, Paul? Aren’t you receiving visitors tonight?”

A man in a cherry-red dressing gown was stretched out face down in front of the fireplace. Burning logs crackled as though the fire might have been freshly tended. The light from the flames jumped erratically, endowing with unnatural life the polished-brass poker lying close to the man on the floor.

The scene held her with the powerful magic of horror. From loudly ticking clock to embroidered Chinese robe, which covered the grand piano, nothing had changed in the room. She absorbed all that unconsciously, vaguely sensing that the familiar objects, books, pictures, and furniture, were keeping her from screaming. She fought a mad impulse to seat herself at the piano and play. The wild whirl of Tausig’s gypsy dances might do what humans could never do—bring the corpse with the battered head to life; force him to rise in a dance macabre. Anything was preferable to stillness. Madness lay in such finality. Already she was feeling it freeze her, press her back against the wall. She must move before she grew as rigid as the man before the fire; before she toppled down beside him, stretched inertly in that darkened place on the carpet where his blood had ebbed away.

She began to play a frightful game. The man with the battered head was dead, but she had to pretend not to know. It was a game of deceptions and the stake was life, with an opponent she couldn’t see. She must keep her eyes away from the curtained doors which led to another room; must give no sign that her mind was strong, that she knew when she had rung downstairs—someone had answered Paul Gerente’s bell!

Beyond the curtains to Paul’s bedroom, soft as the fall of a playing card, something fluttered to the floor. The sound brought Norma to life again, gave her the strength to flee. She never knew how she got away, or what stopped her flight downstairs long enough for her to pick up Babs’s fur-topped galoshes, which were dripping water in the hall outside Paul’s door.

Once outside she wandered blindly down street after winding street, holding the galoshes in her hand, bucking against the storm. Deep in the maze of Greenwich Village she became aware that people were watching her. She was standing laughing hysterically into the plate-glass window of an Italian pâtisserie.

CHAPTER III

THERE WAS menace in the voice of the news commentator. It lurked behind his vivid descriptions of marching feet and rolling caissons, made doubly strong by words he couldn’t say. Subtly, with sharp, clean-cutting phrases, he pictured the forces of a nation on the move; told of women and children waiting for death in huddled groups; hinted at the terror which gripped the world when a country was wiped from the map of Europe in a day.

Captain Duncan Maclain pressed the control button at the side of his desk. The voice from the Capehart radio stopped abruptly. The Captain touched sensitive fingers to his sightless eyes and sat very still. At his feet under the desk, Schnucke, his Seeing-Eye dog, was caught by the darkness of the usually bright penthouse office and the solemnity of her master’s mood. She whimpered slightly and comforted herself by resting her warm chin on the toe of the Captain’s shoe.

“War, Schnucke!” said Duncan Maclain. “You’re lucky to be a dog in days like these. You’re living in a world gone mad with senseless slaughter—a world that’s blind. Blind, as the last war blinded me!”

Schnucke answered the sound of her name by moving her head companionably. Maclain’s fine mobile mouth smiled into the gloom. It was satisfying to philosophize with Schnucke. She lived a life of such delightful fundamentals with never a word to say. He reached down and felt the wetness of her nose against his palm. Affectionately her tongue touched the back of his hand as he drew it away.

The room seemed uncomfortably warm. Maclain left the chair, back of his wide, flat-topped desk, and walked with quick sure steps to the terrace door. He moved with ease in the familiar surroundings, confident that each piece of furniture was in its accustomed place, firmly fixed to the floor.

For an instant after he opened the latch, he stood holding the French door ajar against the push of the late December storm. Twenty-six stories above