But I want to hear it from you — or are you still married or moved away or dead?” The reporter did not move; he spoke quietly, apparently into the green lamp-shade as if it was a microphone:
“The cops got him. It happened just about the time Shumann nosed over, and so I…So he’s in the can.
And they will need some jack too until Shumann gets his money to-morrow night.”
“So,” Hagood said. He looked up at the still face above him which for the time had that calm sightless contemplation of a statue. “Why don’t you let these people alone?” he said. Now the blank eyes waked; the reporter looked at Hagood for a full minute. His voice was as quiet as Hagood’s.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You can’t?” Hagood said. “Did you ever try to?”
“Yes,” the reporter said in his dead flat voice, looking at the lamp again; that is, Hagood knew that the reporter was not looking at him. “I tried.” After a moment Hagood turned, heavily. His coat hung on the back of his chair. He took his wallet from it and counted fifty dollars on to the desk and pushed it over to the reporter and saw the bony, clawlike hand come into the lamp’s glare and take up the money. “Do you want me to sign anything now?” the reporter said.
“No,” Hagood said without looking up. “Go home and go to bed. That’s all I want.”
“I’ll come in later and clean up the story.”
“It’s already in galley,” Hagood said. “You go home.” The reporter moved away from the desk quietly enough, but as he entered the corridor it was as though the wind which had blown him against Hagood’s desk and left him there had now begun to blow him again.
He was passing the elevator shaft towards the stairs with only a glance at it when the door clashed back and someone got out, whereupon he turned and entered, reaching with one hand into his pocket as with the other he lifted the top paper beneath the sliding face-down watch. But he did not even glance at it now; he thrust it, folded, into his pocket as the cage stopped and the door clashed open.
“Well, I see where another of them tried to make a headline out of himself this afternoon,” the elevator man said.
“Is that so?” the reporter said. “Better close that door; I think you got a draught in there.” He ran into the swinging reflection in the glass doors this time, on his long loose legs, with the long loose body which had had no food since noon and little enough before that but which, weightless anyway, had the less to carry now. Shumann opened the cab door for him. “Bayou Street police station,” the reporter told the driver. “Make it snappy.”
“We could walk,” Shumann said.
“Hell, I got fifty bucks now,” the reporter said. They travelled cross town now; the cab could rush fast down each block of the continuous alley, pausing only at the intersections where, to the right, canyon niched, the rumour of Grandlieu Street swelled and then faded in repetitive and indistinguishable turmoil, flicking on and past as though the cab ran along the rimless periphery of a ghostly wheel spoked with light and sound. “Yair,” the reporter said, “I reckon they took Jiggs to the only quiet place in New Valois for a man to sober up in.
He’ll be sober now.” He was sober; a turnkey fetched him in to where the reporter and Shumann waited at the desk. His eye was closed now and his lip swollen, though the blood had been cleaned away except where it had dried on his shirt.
“Got enough for awhile?” Shumann said.
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Give me a cigarette, for God’s sake.” The reporter gave him the cigarette and held the match while Jiggs tried to bring the cigarette into the flame, jerking and twitching until at last the reporter grasped Jiggs’ hand and steadied it to make the contact.
“We’ll get a piece of steak and put it on your eye,” the reporter said.
“You better put it inside of him,” the desk man said.
“How about that?” the reporter said. “You want to eat?” Jiggs held the cigarette in both shaking hands.
“All right,” Jiggs said.
“What?” the reporter said. “Would you feel better if you ate something?”
“All right,” Jiggs said. “Do we go now or do I go back in there?”
“No, we’re going right now,” the reporter said. He said to Shumann, “You take him on to the cab; I’ll be right out.” He turned to the desk. “What’s it, Mac? Drunk or vag?”
“You springing him, or the paper?”
“I am.”
“Call it vag,” the desk man said. The reporter took out Hagood’s money and laid ten dollars on the desk.
“O.K.,” he said. “Will you give the other five to Leblanc? I borrowed it off of him out at the airport this afternoon.” He went out too. Shumann and Jiggs waited beside the cab. The reporter saw now the once raked and swaggering cap crumpled and thrust into Jiggs’ hip pocket and that the absence of the raked and filthy object from Jiggs’ silhouette was like the dropped flag from the shot buck’s — the body still ran, still retained a similitude of power and even speed, would even run on for yards and even perhaps miles, and then for years in a gnawing burrowing of worms, but that which tasted air and drank the sun was dead.
“The poor bastard,” the reporter thought; he still carried the mass of bills as he had thrust them into and withdrawn them from his pocket. “You’re O.K. now,” he said, loudly, heartily. “Roger can stop somewhere and get you something to eat and then you will be all right. Here.” He nudged his hand at Shumann.
“I won’t need it,” Shumann said. “Jack collected his eighteen-fifty for the jump this afternoon.”
“Yair; I forgot,” the reporter said. Then he said, “But what about to-morrow? We’ll be gone all day, see? Here, take it; you can leave it with her in case….You can just keep it and pay it all back, then.”
“Yair,” Shumann said. “Thanks then.” He took the crumpled wad without looking at it and put it into his pocket and pushed Jiggs into the cab.
“Besides, you can pay the cab, too,” the reporter said. “We forgot about that…. I told him where to go. See you in the morning.” He leaned to the window; beyond Shumann, Jiggs sat in the other corner, smoking the cigarette out of both shaking hands. The reporter spoke in a tone repressed, conspiratorial: “Train leaves at eight-twenty-two. O.K.?”
“O.K.,” Shumann said.
“I’ll have everything fixed up and meet you at the station.”
“O.K.,” Shumann said. The cab moved on. Through the back window Shumann saw the reporter standing at the kerb in the glare of the two unmistakable pariah-green globes on either side of the entrance, still, gaunt, the garments which hung from the skeleton frame seeming to stir faintly and steadily even when and where there was no wind.
As though having chosen that one spot out of the entire sprawled and myriad city he stood there without impatience or design: patron (even if no guardian) saint of all waifs, all the homeless, the desperate and the starved. Now the cab turned its back on Grandlieu Street, though presently it turned parallel to it or to where it must be now, since now there was no rumour, no sound, save the light glare on the sky which held to their right even after the cab turned and now ran towards where the street should be.
Shumann did not know they had crossed it until they plunged suddenly into the region of narrow gashes between balconies, crossing intersections marked by the ghostly one-way arrows. “We must be almost there,” he said. “You want to stop and eat?”
“All right,” Jiggs said.
“Do you or don’t you?”
“Yair,” Jiggs said. “Whatever you want me to do.” Then Shumann looked at him and saw him trying to hold the cigarette to his mouth with both hands, and that the cigarette was dead.
“What do you want?” Shumann said.
“I want a drink,” Jiggs said quietly.
“Do you have to have one?”
“I guess I don’t if I can’t get one.” Shumann watched him holding the dead cigarette to his mouth, drawing at it.
“If I give you a drink, will you eat something?”
“Yair. I’ll do anything.” Shumann leaned forward and tapped on the glass. The driver turned his head.
“Where can I get something to eat?” Shumann said. “A bowl of soup?”
“You’ll have to go back up towards Grandlieu for that.”
“Ain’t there any place close around here?”
“You can get a ham sandwich at these wop stores, if you can find one open.”
“All right. Stop at the next one you see, will you?” It was not far; Shumann recognized the corner, though he asked to be sure as they got out. “Noy-dees Street ain’t far from here, is it?”
“Noyades?” the driver said. “That’s it in the next block there. On the right.”
“We’ll get out here then,” Shumann said. He drew out the crumpled money which the reporter had given him, glancing down at the plump neat figure five in the corner. “That makes eleven-seventy,” he thought, then he discovered a second bill crumpled into the first one; he passed it to the driver, still looking at the compact “5” on the one in his hand. “Damn,” he thought, “that’s seventeen dollars,” as the driver spoke to him:
“It’s just two-fifteen. Ain’t you got anything smaller than this?”
“Smaller?” Shumann said. He looked
