The Sinful Ones

Chapter One The Frightened Girl

When Carr Mackay first caught sight of the frightened girl, he was feeling exceptionally bored. The offices of General Employment seemed a jail, time an unclimbable wall, life a straitjacket, the very air a slow-setting invisible cement. Even thoughts of Marcia failed to put any color in his gray mood.

He had just finished up with an applicant. The empty wire basket on his desk meant that he had nothing to do for a while.

The other interviewers were still busy with their share of the horde of job-seekers who trickled into Chicago’s Loop, converged on General Employment, and then went their ways again, as aimlessly as ants trailing into and out of a hole, and as defenseless in the long run against the turn of a giant heel.

Anything was more interesting than people, Carr felt. Yet a glance at the big clock told him it was only three-thirty, and the prospect of an empty hour-and-a-half seemed almost worse than one filled with people, no matter how stupid and lifeless.

It was just then that the frightened girl came into the waiting room. Without looking around she sat down on one of the benches, wooden and high-backed, rather like church pews.

Carr watched her through the huge glass panel that made everything in the waiting room silent and slightly unreal. Just a girl in a cardigan. College type, a bug affected, dark hair falling untidily to her shoulders. And nervous—in fact, frightened. Still, just an ordinary girl. Nothing tremendously intriguing or pretty about her.

And yet….it was as if Carr had been sitting for hours in front of a curtain that he had become quite certain would never rise, when suddenly something (who knows what?—a scrape of feet in the orchestra pit, a slight dimming of the light, the sense of an actor peering through one of the eyeholes in the ponderous cloth) made him feel that it might not be to painful to wait a little longer.

“Ow, my feet!”

Carr looked around. Miss Zabel’s features were contorted into a simulation of intense pain as she picked up the record cards on his desk.

“Shoes hurt?” he inquired sympathetically.

She nodded. Her topknot of unruly hair bobbed decisively. “You’re lucky,” she told him. “You can sit at a desk.”

“That can be painful too.”

She looked at him skeptically and teetered off.

Carr’s gaze flipped back to the frightened girl. There had been a change. Whatever she’d been doing—biting her lip, twisting her fingers—she wasn’t any longer. She sat quite still, looking straight ahead, arms close to her sides.

Another woman had come into the waiting room. A big blonde, rather handsome in a poster-ish way, with a stunningly perfect hairdo. Yet her tailored suit gave her a mannish look, she had a cruel mouth, and there was something queer about her eyes. Several job-categories jumped into Carr’s mind: receptionist, model (a shade heavy for that), buyer, private detective. She stood inside the door, looking around. She saw the frightened girl. She started toward her.

The phone on Carr’s desk buzzed.

As he picked it up, he noticed the big blonde had stopped in front of the frightened girl and was looking down at her. The frightened girl seemed rather pathetically trying to ignore her.

“That you, Carr?” came over the phone.

He felt a rush of pleasure. Odd, what the mere sound of a desired woman’s voice will do to you, when all your thoughts about her have left you cold.

“Oh, hello, Marcia dear,” he said quickly.

“Darling, Keaton’s given me some more details on the new business he’s planning. I think it’s a really sharp idea. And he’s all set to go ahead.”

“It did sound rather clever from the bit you told me,” Carr said cautiously, his first bit of warmth a bit dashed. As he searched his mind for the best way to put Marcia off, his gaze went idly back to the little drama beyond the glass wall. The big blonde had sat herself down beside the frightened girl and had taken her hand, seemed to be stroking it. The frightened girl was still staring straight ahead—desperately, Carr thought.

“And so of course I told Keaton about you. Darling, he’s very interested. He definitely wants to see you some time this week. It means a real job for you, Carr.”

Carr felt a not unfamiliar sag of dismay. “But Marcia…”

The fast, confident voice cut him off. “We’ll talk it over tonight. It’s really a marvelous chance. Goodbye, darling.”

He heard a click. He put back the phone and prepared to feel depressed as well as bored—God, if Marcia would only stop trying to make a success of him—a job for the job-purveyor, what a laugh!—when a flurry of footsteps made him look up.

The frightened girl was approaching his desk.

The big blonde had followed her as far as the door in the glass wall and was watching her from it.

The frightened girl sat down in the applicant’s chair. She half turned to Carr, but she didn’t look him in the eye. She gathered her wool jacket at the throat in a way that struck Carr as almost comically melodramatic, as I she were about to say, “I’m half frozen,” or “They wouldn’t hang me…would they?” or “Darling, your hands—I’m afraid of them,” or just “My God! Gas!”

Right there Carr got the feeling, “It’s started.” Though he hadn’t the faintest idea what had started. The big curtain hadn’t lifted an inch, but someone had darted out in front of it.

Another part of his mind was thinking that this was merely a rather odd applicant—as how many of them weren’t?—and he’d better get busy with her.

He twitched her a smile. “I don’t believe I have your application blank yet, Miss…?”

The frightened girl did not answer.

To put her at east, Carr rattled on, “Not that it matters. We can talk things over while we wait for the clerk to bring it.”

Still she didn’t look at him.

“I suppose you did fill out an application blank and that you were sent to me?” he added, a bit sharply.

Then he saw that she was trembling and he became aware of a hush that had nothing whatever to do with ordinary noises. There still came the rat-ta-ta-tat of typing, the murmur of conversation from the applicant-interviewer pairs at the other desks, the click of slides from the curtained cubicle where someone was getting an eye-test—all the usual small sounds of General Employment. And behind them Chicago’s unceasing mutter, rising and falling with the passing El trains.

But the other silence continued. Even the resounding click of the big minute clock on the wall, that sometimes caught Carr up with a jerk, did not break it.

It was if those sounds—the whole office—Chicago—everything—had become mere lifeless background for a chalk-faced girl in a sloppy cardigan, arms huddled tight around her, hands gripping her thin elbows, staring at him horror-struck.

For some incredible reason, she seemed to be frightened of him.

She shrank down in the chair, her white-circled eyes fixed on his. As his gaze followed her movements, another shudder went through her. The tip of her tongue licked her upper lip. Then she said in a small, terrified voice, “All right, you’ve got me. But don’t draw it out. Don’t play with me. Get it over with.”

Carr checked the impulse to grimace incredulously. He chuckled and said, “I know how you feel. Coming into a big employment office does seem an awful plunge. But we won’t chain you to a rivet gun,” he went on, with a wild attempt at humor, “or send you to Buenos Aires. It’s still a free country.”

She did not react. Carr looked away uneasily. The queer hush was eating at his nerves—a dizzy, tight-skinned feeling, as if he were coming down with a chill. He groped for the change in his mood. He knew there had been one, but it was so all-embracing that he couldn’t put his finger on it. The big names on the maps are always the hardest to find.

The blonde was still watching from the doorway, her manner implying that she owned the place, or any other she might stalk into. Her eyes looked whiter than they should be and they didn’t seem quite to focus, although that didn’t diminish, but rather intensified, the impression of hungry, hostile peering.

He looked back at the frightened girl. Her hands still gripped her elbows, but she was leaning forward now and studying his face, as if everything in the world depended on what she saw there.

“You’re not one of them?”

He frowned puzzledly. “Them? Who?”

“You’re not?” she repeated, still watching his face.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t you know what you are?” she asked with a sudden fierceness. “Don’t you know whether you’re one of them or not?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” he assured her, “and I haven’t the faintest idea of whom you mean by ‘them.’”

Slowly her hands loosened their hold on her elbows and trailed into her lap. “No,” she said, “I guess you’re not. You haven’t their filthy look. But then…” her lips twitched, “…I must have been fated to come here at this exact moment. And say just these words. Oh, what a crazy, crazy joke.” She was trembling again. “Or else you really are…?” and there came into her eyes an important, but quite incomprehensible question.

“Look,” Carr said gently, “you’d better explain things from the beginning. Just what…”

“Please, not now,” she said evenly.

Carr realized suddenly that her shaking was that of repressed hysteria and that she was asking for time to get herself under control.

He looked away, trying to fathom his reactions. By all rights he should type this girl as belonging to the lunatic fringe of the unemployables that clutter up every employment office. Probably her application blank, if she’d filled one out, was being held up because Miss Zabel or one of the other girls had noticed some weird discrepancies in it. He should be thinking of a smooth way to terminate the interview and ease her out.

But instead his mind was searching for a more logical pattern than psychosis underlying her actions, as if convinced that such a pattern existed and he must discover it.

All at once the smudge on her left hand, the intellectual pursing of her features, the uneasy hunch of her shoulders, and the long, irregular curves in which her brown hair fell to them, seemed to suggest a thousand things.

Somehow he had become involved.

Love? That might do in a romantic novel. Here some vastly more plausible explanation was required.

A sense of lifelessness in his surroundings continued to oppress him, had even deepened. Somewhere in the past few minutes he had crossed the boundary that separated the ordinary from the extraordinary. But how could he know, when there was not one iota of concrete evidence and he had only intuition to back him up?

“Who’s that woman following you?” he asked her quietly. “Is she one of ‘them?’”

The terror returned to her face. “I can’t tell you that. Please don’t ask me. And please don’t look at her. It’s terribly important that she doesn’t think I’ve seen her.”

“But how could she possibly think otherwise after the way she planked herself down beside you?”

“Please, oh please!” She was almost whimpering. “I can’t tell you why. It’s just terribly important that we act naturally, that we seem to be doing whatever it is that we’re supposed to be doing. Can we?”

Carr studied her. She was obviously close to actual hysteria. “Sure,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, smiled at her, and raised his voice a trifle. “Just what sort of job do you feel would make the best use of your abilities, Miss…?”

“Job? Oh yes, that’s why I’d have come here, isn’t it?” For a moment she stared at him helplessly. Then, hurriedly, the words tumbling over each other, she began to talk. “Let’s see, I can play the piano. Not very well. Mostly classical. I’ve studied it a lot, though. I once wanted to become a concert pianist. And I’ve done some amateur acting. And I can read books very fast. Fiction, that is. I know my way around libraries pretty well. And I used to play a mediocre game of tennis—” Her grotesquely animated expression froze. “But that isn’t at all the sort of thing you want to know, is it?”

Carr shrugged. “Helps give me a picture. Did some amateur acting once, in college.” He kept his voice casual. “Have you had any regular jobs?”

“I once read books for a publisher. Just fiction, though. And for a little while I worked in an architect’s office.”

“Did you learn to read blueprints?” he asked.

“Blueprints?” The girl shivered. “Not much, I’m afraid. I hate patterns of all sorts, unless they’re so mixed up that no one but myself knows they’re patterns. Patterns are traps. Once you start living according to a pattern, other people know how to get control of you.” She leaned forward confidently, her fingers hooking onto the edge of the desk. “Oh, and I’m a good judge of people. I have to be. I suppose you have to be too.” The incomprehensible question came back into her eyes. “Don’t you know what you are?” she asked softly. “Haven’t you found out yet? Why, you must be almost forty. Surely in that time…Oh, you must know.”

“I still haven’t the ghost of an idea what you’re talking about,” said Carr. “What am I?”

The girl hesitated.

“Tell me,” he said.

She shook her head. “If you honestly don’t know, I’m not sure I should tell you. As long as you don’t know, you’re safe. Relatively safe, that is. If I had had the opportunity of not knowing, I know how I would have chosen. At least I know how I’d choose now. Oh God, yes.”

Carr began to feel like the anecdotal man to whom a beautiful woman hands a note written in French which no one will translate for him. “Please stop being mysterious,” he said. “Just what is it about me that’s so important? Something I don’t know about my background? Or about my race? My political leanings? My psychological type? My love life?”

“But if you don’t know,” she went on, disregarding his questions, “and if I don’t tell you, then I’m letting you run a blind risk. Not a big one, but very terrible. And with them so close and perhaps suspecting…Oh, it’s so hard to decide.”

“They’re killing me!”

Carr jerked around. Miss Zabel squinted at him in agony, dropped an application folder in the wire basket, and hobbled off. Carr looked at the folder. It wasn’t for a girl at all. It started, “Jimmie Kozacs, Male. Age 43.”

He became aware that the frightened girl was studying his face again, as if she saw something there that she had missed the first time. It seemed to cause her dismay.

“Maybe you never were, until today,” she said, more to herself than him. “That would explain your not knowing. Maybe my bursting in here was what did it. Maybe I was the one who awakened you.”

She clenched her hands, torturing the palms with the long, untapered fingers, and Carr’s sardonic remark about having been awakened quite early in life died before it was born. “To think that I would ever do that to anyone!” she continued. “To think that I would ever cause anyone the agony that /he/ caused me! Oh, if only there were someone I could talk to, someone who could tell me what to do.’

The black misery in her voice caught at Car. “What is the matter?” he pleaded. “Please tell me.”

The girl looked shocked. “Now?” Her glance half-circled the room, strayed toward the glass wall. “No, not here. I can’t.” The fingers of her right hand rippled as if they were playing a frantic arpeggio. Suddenly they dived into the pocket of her cardigan and came out with a stubby, chewed pencil. She ripped a sheet from Carr’s scratch pad and began to scribble hurriedly.

As Carr watched her doubtfully, a big area of gray cloth swam into view. It was Tom Elvested, come ambling over from the next desk. The girl gave Tome a quick, queer look, then went on scribbling. Tom ignored her.

“Say, Carr,” he began amiably, “Midge and I are going on a date tonight. She’s got a girl-friend I think you’d like. A swell kid, lot of brains, but sort of shy and retiring. We’d like you to come along with us.”

“Sorry, I can’t, I’ve got a date,” Carr told him irritably. It annoyed him that Tom should discuss personal matters in front of an applicant.

“Now, don’t get the idea I’m asking you to do social service work,” Tom went on, a little huffily. “This girl’s darn good-looking and a lot more your type than—” he broke off.

“Than Marcia, you were going to say?” Carr asked him. “At any rate it’s Marcia I’ve got a date with.”

Tom looked at Carr for a moment. Then, “Okay,” he said, fading back. “Sorry you can’t come.”

The frightened girl was still scribbling. The scratch of her pencil seemed to Carr the only real sound in the whole office. He glanced guardedly down the aisle. The big blonde with the queer eyes was still at the door, but she had moved ungraciously aside to make way for a dumpy man in blue jeans, who was looking around uncertainly.

The dumpy man veered toward Miss Zabel. Her top-knot bobbed up from her typewriter and she said something. His uncertainty vanished. He gave her an “I getcha, pal” not and headed for Carr’s desk.

The frightened girl noticed him coming, shoved aside paper and pencil in a flurry of haste, and stood up.

“Sit down,” said Carr. “That fellow can wait. Incidentally, do you know Tom Elvested?” She disregarded the question and quickly moved into the aisle.

Carr followed her. “I really want to talk with you,” he said.

“No,” she breathed, edging away from him.

“But we haven’t got anywhere yet,” he objected.

Suddenly she smiled like a toothpaste ad. “Thank you for being so helpful,” she said in a loud voice. “I’ll think over what you’ve told me, though I don’t think the job is one which would appeal to me.” She poked out her hand. Automatically he told it. It was icy.

“Don’t follow me,” she whispered. “And if you care the least bit for me or my safety, don’t do anything, whatever happens.”

“But I don’t even know your name…” His voice trailed off. She was striding rapidly down the aisle. The big blonde was standing squarely in her path. The girl did not swerve an inch. Then, just as they were about to collide, the other woman lifted her hand and gave the girl a stinging slap across the cheek.

Carr started, winced, took a forward step, froze.

The other woman stepped aside, smiling sardonically.

The girl rocked, wavered for a step or two, then walked on without turning her head.

No one said anything, no one did anything, no one jumped up, no one even looked up, at least not conspicuously, although everyone in the office must have heard the slap if they hadn’t seen it. But with the universal middle-class reluctance, Carr thought, to get mixed up in any trouble unless they were forced to, they pretended not to notice.

The big blonde flicked into place a shellacked curl, glancing around her as if as so much dirt. Leisurely she turned and stalked out.

Carr walked back to his desk. His face felt hot, his mind was turbulent. The office around him seemed out of key, turbidly sinister, a little like the scenery of a nightmare—the downtown gloom pressing on the tall, faintly grimed windows, the hazy highlights on the polished desks, the meaningless phrases hanging in the air.

The dumpy man in blue jeans had already taken the girl’s place, but for the moment Carr ignored him. He didn’t down. The scrap of paper on which the girl had scribbled caught his eye. He picked it up.

Carr frowned grotesquely. “Wall-eyed blonde…”—that must be the woman who had been watching. But as for the other three—“small dark man with glasses is your friend…”—it sounded like a charade.

“Thanks, I guess I will,” said the dumpy man casually, plucking at something in the air.

Carr started to turn over the paper to see if she’d scribbled anything on the opposite side, when—

“No, I got a light,” said the dumpy man.

Carr looked at him and forgot everything else. The dumpy man had lit a match and was cupping it about three inches from his curiously puckered lips. There was a slight hissing noise and the flame curtsied as he sucked in. He smiled gratefully over this cupped hands at Carr’s empty chair. Then one hand shook out the match and the other moved in toward his lips, paused a moment, then moved out about a foot from his face, first and second fingers extended like a priest giving a blessing. After an interval the hand moved in again, the hissing inhalation was repeated, and the dumpy man threw back his head and exhaled through tightened nostrils.

Obviously the man was smoking a cigarette.

Only there was no cigarette.

Carr wanted to laugh, there was something so droll about the realism of the movements. He remembered the pantomimes in the acting class in college. You pretended to drive an automobile or eat a dinner or write a letter, without any props, just going through the motions. In that class the dumpy man would have rated an A-plus.

“Yeah, that’s right,” the dumpy man said to Carr’s empty chair, wagging his extended fingers over the brown-gummed ashtray.

Suddenly Car didn’t want to laugh at all. Obviously, as obviously as any such things can be, this man wasn’t an actor.

“Yeah, I did it about eight months. Came into it from weld assembly,” continued the dumpy man between imaginary puffs. “I was coming up from my second test when me and the wife decided to move here to get away from her mother.”

Carr felt a qualm of uneasiness. He hesitated, then slowly bent forward from where he was standing, until his face was hardly a foot from that of the dumpy man and almost squarely in front of it.

The dumpy man didn’t react, didn’t seem to see him at all, kept talking through him to the chair.

“Oh, it’s dirty work all right. I had my share of skin trouble. But I can take it.”

“Stop it,” said Carr.

“No, I passed it after I’d been there three months.” The dumpy man was amiably emphatic. “It was my full inspector’s I was coming up for. I was due to get my stamps.”

Carr shivered. “Stop it,” he said very distinctly. “Stop it.”

“Sure, all sorts of stuff. Circular and longitudinal magnetism. Machine parts, forging, welds, tie-beams…”

“Stop it,” Carr repeated and grabbed him firmly by the shoulder.

What happened made Carr wish he hadn’t. The dumpy man’s face grew strained and red, like an enraged baby’s. An intense throbbing was transmitted to Carr’s hand. And from the lips came a mounting, meaningless mutter.

Carr jerked back. He felt craven and weak, as helpless as a child. He edged away until he was standing behind Tom Elvested, who was engrossed with a client.

He could hardly bring his voice up to a whisper.

“Tom, I’ve got a man who’s acting funny. Would you help me?”

Tom didn’t look up, apparently didn’t hear.

Across the room Carr saw a gray-mustached man walking briskly. He hurried over to him, looking back apprehensively at the dumpy man, who was still sitting there red-faced.

“Dr. Wexler,” he blurted, “I’ve got a lunatic on my hands and I think he’s about to throw a fit. Would you—?”

But Dr. Wexler walked on without slackening his pace and disappeared through the black curtains of the eye-testing cubicle.

At that instant, as Car watched the black curtains swing together, a sudden spasm of extreme terror seized him. As if something huge and hostile were poised behind him, he dared not lift his head, look up, make a move.

It was like the momentary chill he had felt hen no one had reacted to the slap. Only much more intense.

His feelings were a little like those of a man in a waxworks museum, who speaks to a guide only to find that he has addressed one of the wax figures.

His paralyzed thoughts, suddenly working like lightning, snatched at the analogy and worried it morbidly.

What if the whole world were like a waxworks museum? In motion, of course, like clockworks, but utterly mindless, purposeless, mechanical. What if he, a wax figure like the others, had suddenly come alive and stepped out of his place, and the whole show was going on without him, because it was just a machine and didn’t care or know whether he was there or not?

That would explain the dumpy man going through the motions of an interview—one mechanical toy-figure carrying on just as well without its partner. It would explain why Tom and Dr. Wexler had disregarded him

What if it really were true?

What if the ends of the earth were nearer to you than the mind you thought lay behind the face you spoke to?

What if the things people said, the things that seemed to mean so much, were something recorded on a kind of phonograph record a million years ago?

What if you were all alone?

For an instant longer his thought-train—it had taken only a few moments—held him paralyzed. Then he came to himself with a start.

Life flooded back into the office. People moved and spoke. He almost laughed out loud at his ridiculous spasm of terror.

Why, what an idiot he’d been to get alarmed because Tom, who doubtless felt huffy toward him because of their last conversation, had momentarily ignored a mumbled, perhaps unheard, question? Or because the same thing had happened with Dr. Wexler, whose deafness and preoccupation were both notorious!

And how silly of him to lose his nerve just because he had got an applicant who was something of a psychotic!

He straightened himself and walked back to his desk, warily, but with self-confidence.

The dumpy man was still muttering at the air, but his face had assumed its original color. He didn’t look violent. Carr disregarded him and glanced at the application blank Miss Zabel had brought a few minutes earlier: “Jimmie Kozacs. Age 43.”

The dumpy man looked about that age.

A little farther down on the blank, his eye caught the words, “Magnetic Inspector.” If he remembered rightly the duties of the job in question, they fitted with the things the dumpy man had been saying.

The dumpy man got up. Again he plucked something from the air. “So all I got to do is show ’em this at the gate?” he remarked gravely. “Thank’s a lot, er…” He glanced at the nameplate on Carr’s desk. “…Mr. Mackay. Aw, don’t get up. Well, thanks a lot.”

Heartily the dumpy man shook hands with nothing, turned and walked off. Carr watched him go. A smile that was half nervous amusement, half relief, flickered around his lips.

Miss Zabel came limping by with a stack of file-folders.

“I swear I’m going to cut them off and donate them to medical research,” she moaned to Carr.

Carr chortled. His sense of normalcy was restored.