There Are Doors

The Land in Winter

Leaving the haberdashery he walked past Dr. Applewood’s office, though it was on the upper level and he on the lower. No light showed through the pebbled glass door; he wondered whether the doctor had gone home or been arrested. It seemed quite possible that Applewood had been an informer—that Applewood had summoned Klamm and Klamm’s agents, that the wound received in the theater had been an accident or a trick, and that Applewood had returned to the hotel that morning in response to instructions from Klamm or the police.

He considered trying the door, entering the doctor’s office if he could, and searching the desk; but decided against it. It was conceivable—though only, he felt, barely conceivable—that they did not know about Dr. Applewood. If so, they would surely learn if he were seen going into the doctor’s office or so much as touching the doorknob. It was conceivable that they had not known where he was—as now they clearly did—before he had gone into the coffee shop; but he doubted it.

In any event, he was already much too warm, bundled as he was into sweater-vest, overcoat and muffler. He wanted to get outside as soon as he could. Some distance beyond the doctor’s office he discovered a short stair labeled PARKING; he climbed it and let himself out through a rusty steel door.

The wind the blonde had mentioned met him at once; it was not strong, but persistent and very cold. He felt that it was not a sea wind but a land wind; it lacked the flavor of the sea, seeming instead to have blown across lonely miles of featureless snow.

Nor could he see the sea from the place to which the rusty door had admitted him. A small lot, plowed clean of snow, lay before him. In it were four cars, all parked as near the door as possible. None was the hunched brown Mink whose keys were in his pocket, though two were very much like it. The third was a bright red convertible, hardly larger. The fourth was a black limousine with jump seats in the back, a car capable of carrying eight in some comfort. Beyond doubt, that was the car in which Klamm’s agents had come—Fanny, the blonde to whom she reported, the new “guest” in the coffee shop, and perhaps Dr. Applewood as well. He found himself wondering who had driven. The blonde—she was the type who would always want to drive, who would never allow anyone else to drive if she could help it; she would be a fast driver, he thought, constantly burning rubber or slamming on the brakes, the kind of driver North would be if he drove.

He tried to open the limousine’s door with the keys of the hunched car. Neither would work, or even enter the lock. To his surprise, the trunk was not locked. He opened it and found a litter of paper; someone had tossed a file folder into it, and the motion of the limousine had emptied it. The wind caught two sheets of paper and sent them flapping across the frozen asphalt like terrified chickens. He seized another before it could make good its escape and glanced at it, then read it with fascination.

There was a picture of North (looking slightly younger than he remembered) and a set of fingerprints. He put the paper back into the folder and poked among the rest, wondering if he would find a similar report on Dr. Applewood or himself. He did not, but he discovered a sheet headed Daniel Paul Perlitz and stamped DECEASED. Dr. Applewood had called the man in uniform Daniel.

Suddenly afraid he was being watched, he closed the trunk. His uncomfortable warmth had vanished; he was chilled now as he returned to the rusted door, and eager to regain the warmth of the hotel and shelter from the wind. To reassure himself, he put his hand inside his overcoat and made certain his room key was still in the pocket.

The steel door was locked, and neither his room key nor the keys to the hunched brown car would open it. After a moment, he decided that the lot was probably reserved for employees and the concessionaires who leased the shops and offices of the arcade. No doubt they received keys to this door. He would have to walk around to the front of the hotel, and it appeared he might have to do it through the drifted snow.

Turning up his overcoat collar and adjusting the muffler (silently he blessed the woman who had persuaded him to buy it) over the lower half of his face, he circled the lot looking for a path cleared of snow. There was none, only the drive through which the four cars had come (now drifted half full wherever it ran at right angles to the wind) which appeared to wind away in the direction of a few scattered structures nearly at the limit of vision and almost lost in the white erasure of the snow.

The hotel spread long wings to either side. Not so long, perhaps, to someone strolling at ease down their corridors; and yet very long indeed for him, since he would have to walk twice their length through snow that in places rose higher than his waist. He tried it for a few steps, then abandoned the attempt. Sooner or later, the drive would surely join the highway that ran beside the sea.

As he crossed the lot, he considered the shortcomings of his equipment. The coat, the sweater, and the muffler had all been wise investments; but he should have chosen a cap in place of his hat, a fur cap with ear flaps that tied under the chin, or perhaps one of the woolen hoods the haberdashery had called balaclavas—he had seen a display of them and paid no attention to it.

He needed gloves as well. It seemed incredible to him that he had not thought of gloves; his fingers were freezing, though he had buried his hands in the pockets of the overcoat. Most of all, he needed boots in place of his shoes; his brief attempt to walk through the snow had filled his shoes with snow, and despite the exercise they were getting his feet were freezing. Worst of all, they slipped again and again, the smooth soles of his shoes refusing to hold the nearly invisible ice that coated the asphalt in random patches, refusing to grip the packed snow.

He had left the parking lot and entered the drive when he saw Fanny’s picture; he picked it up and discovered that he was holding just such a paper as had described North.

Shaking his head, he crumpled the paper and tossed it away. He had been wrong, completely wrong, about Fanny. He corrected himself—about Frances. Like Dr. Applewood, Frances had been an associate of North’s. No doubt it had been because several such people worked here that North had chosen to come here, to this God-forsaken resort hotel in winter, this huge old hotel so many miles from the city.

The blonde in the beauty shop had been someone from North’s organization too, then, since Fanny had been ordered (by whom?) to report to her.

Or Fanny was—what did they call it? Somebody who worked for both sides. Somebody who pretended to work for one while passing information to the other. For if Fanny had not come in the limousine, how had she come? And if the limousine were not Klamm’s, why did it have those papers in the trunk, papers from the FBI or the Secret Service—the Secret Police, whatever they might be called?

The drive was barely wide enough for one car, and the plow had thrown up snowbanks on each side higher than his head. He walked in a world of black and white, and it seemed to him after a time that he was no more than a bit player in an old movie, an old black-and-white movie. There was no color anyplace because the print had not been colorized yet and there was only the gray sky above, the blacktop beneath, and snow to either side. His shoes were black too, and the dark gray of his new coat looked almost black. Was it the beginning of the late movie? Or was it the end, when he (back in his apartment dully watching this old movie) would get up, yawn, and take his glass and the bottle off the coffee table, knowing how soon the lovers would embrace, the woman dressed as Liberty hold up her torch.

As he walked he looked from side to side, and after a time he realized he was hoping to find the other sheet that had blown out of the trunk, because it would have a picture of Lara. Two sheets had gotten away, one he had caught. The one he had caught had been North’s; one of those he had not caught had been Fanny’s—Frances’s. Surely then, the third sheet, which he had neither caught nor found, had been Lara’s, Lara last seen dancing across the asphalt, over the snow, dancing in the wind.

Its thunder behind him warned him just in time, and he dove into the snowbank on his left. The big, black limousine roared past, so close he felt its suction try to draw the shoe from one foot.

He climbed out. Not swearing, he was too happy to be alive—still alive!—to curse anything. A thin layer of ice had cut his left forefinger, and he sucked it as he dusted the snow from his coat with his bandaged hand. When he took the finger out of his mouth to examine it, blood welled from the cut and dribbled onto the blacktop and onto the white snow.

He had put the packet of handkerchiefs in the side pocket of his jacket with the map. He took it out and opened it, and wrapped his finger in one of the handkerchiefs.

If he had not been afraid of falling on the ice, he would have skipped. This (he thought) was why Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, William Powell and Myrna Loy radiated so much happiness—so much delight in those creaking late-night movies, shone so brightly even in black and gray when they should have been dead. How happy they were to be still alive, there in the flickering celluloid, there on the cramped screens that had been tacked to the radios they had known, how joyful!

Just like him. He might be dead now at home, dead and rotting as he sat before the television in the chair he had bought so cheaply; but he was alive here, his crimson blood proved it, even if this was the last reel.

The drive mounted a hill and bent to the right. He heard a truck roar past—not only heard it, but saw it, saw at least its orange-and-green top above the crests of the snowbanks. Another hundred steps or so brought him to the point at which the drive left a two-lane road, also of black asphalt, that might or might not have been one he had driven along with North. He tried to guess in which direction the ocean lay, and guessed wrong; but after a walk of half a mile reached a point from which he could see both the hotel and his mistake.

He was about to retrace his steps when an old red pickup with chains came rattling down the road, driven by a middle-aged farmer. He flagged it down and explained how he had been locked out as briefly as he could.

The farmer chuckled and opened the door. “Guess you won’t be goin’ out that way no more.”

He grinned. “Hell, no!” He felt he ought to be angry, but he was completely incapable of it. The old pickup had a heater that worked, and its hot breath on his feet was the promise of heaven.

“Don’t many people stay in the winter,” the farmer said. “My Junie works there sometimes, but come fall they lay her off. Didn’t even know it was open.”

He nodded and said, “It’s pretty empty. I hope you’re not going out of your way for me.”

“Goin’ right by anyhow. I’m goin’ into town. Hotel ain’t far, ’bout two, three miles from my place.”

The road ended with a stop-sign at a somewhat wider road; and after they had turned onto that, he heard the waves. Soon he saw them as well, cold and green—and yet alive, the scales of a watery snake coiled around the world, he thought, and not so much malevolent as inhuman.

“Here ’tis.” The pickup jolted to a stop. “Name’s Grudy, by the way.”

“Green,” he said, and they shook hands. “If I could pay you something for this, Mr. Grudy … ?”

The farmer snorted. “Don’t you even suggest it, Mr. Green. I’d do it any time—so’d you for me, I’m sure.”

He thanked the farmer again and climbed out, shutting the truck’s door carefully and waving while the farmer drove away. As he crossed the terrace toward the brightly lit glass wall of the hotel, he looked at his watch. It was eleven thirty-four; the coffee shop would be serving lunch, now or soon. He would find some way to speak to Fanny, who, even if she were a double agent, might lead him to those who were not. Fanny could learn no more by seeing him again than she already knew; but he might learn a lot, including how to think and act like a conspirator, which seemed to be the thing he needed most to know.

There was no bellboy at the entrance this morning. A sign that stretched across both glass doors announced: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON. A single bespectacled clerk fussed with papers at the desk. He pounded on the doors, but the clerk soon vanished into the office behind the desk, never to reappear; and after a time the lights in the lobby winked out.