last identified his apartment house.
He was wholly engrossed in his task.
Yes, there was the slot, by God! and there was his own window, the second from the top, very tiny but distinct in the sunlight. Lucky he’d spotted it now—the shadow traveling across the wall would soon obscure it.
And then his hands were suddenly shaking so that he’d dropped his binoculars. Only his strap kept them from crashing on the rocks.
A pale brown shape had leaned out of his window and waved at him.
What was going through his head was a couple of lines from that bit of silly folk doggerel which begins:
But it was the ending that was repeating itself in his head:
Now for God’s sake don’t get so excited, he told himself, taking hold of the dangling binoculars and raising them again. And stop breathing so hard—you haven’t been running.
He was some time locating his building and the slot again—damn the dark sea of roofs!—but when he did, there was the shape again in his window. Pale brown, like old bones—now don’t get morbid! It could be the drapes, he told himself, half blown out of his window by the wind—he’d left it open. There were freakish winds among high buildings. His drapes were green, of course, but their lining was a nondescript hue like this. And the figure wasn’t waving to him now—its dancing was that of the binoculars—but rather regarding him thoughtfully as if saying, “You chose to visit my place, Mr. Westen, so I decided to make use of that opportunity to have a quiet look at yours.” Quit it! he told himself. The last thing we need now is a writer’s imagination.
He lowered his binoculars to give his heartbeat a chance to settle down and to work his cramped fingers. Suddenly anger filled him. In his fantasizing he’d lost sight of the plain fact that someone was mucking about in his room! But who? Dorotea Luque had a master key, of course, but she was never a bit sneaky, nor her grave brother Fernando, who did the janitor work and had hardly any English at all but played a remarkably strong game of chess. Franz had given his own duplicate key to Gun a week ago—a matter of a parcel to be delivered when he was out— and hadn’t got it back. Which meant that either Gun or Saul—or Cal, for that matter—might have it now. Cal had a big old faded bathrobe she sometimes mucked around in—.
But no, it was ridiculous to suspect any of them. But what about what he’d overheard from Saul on the stairs?—the ‘e-stealer’ Dorotea Luque had been worried about. That made more sense. Face up to it, he told himself: while he was gadding about out here, satisfying obscure aesthetic curiosities, some sneak-thief, probably on hard drugs, had somehow got into his apartment and was ripping him off.
He took up the binoculars again in a hard fury and found his apartment at once, but this time he was too late. While he’d been steadying his nerves and wildly speculating, the sun had moved on, the slot had filled with shadow, so that he could no longer make out his window, let alone any figure in it.
His anger faded. He realized it had been mostly reaction to his little shock at what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen… no, he’d seen something, but as to exactly what, who could be sure?
He stood up on his rocky seat, rather slowly, for his legs were a bit numb from sitting and his back was stiff, and he stepped carefully up into the wind again. He felt depressed—and no wonder, for streamers of fog were blowing in from the west, around the TV tower and half masking it; there were shadows everywhere. Corona Heights had lost its magic for him; he just wanted to get off it as soon as possible (and back to check his room), so after a quick look at his map, he headed straight down the far side, as the hikers had. Really, he couldn’t get home too soon.
7
The far side of Corona Heights, which faced Buena Vista Park and turned its back on the central city, was steeper than it looked. Several times Franz had to restrain his impulse to hurry and make himself move carefully. Then, halfway down, a couple of big dogs came to circle and snarl at him, not Saint Bernards but those black Dobermans that always made one think of the SS. Their owner down below took his time calling them off, too. Franz almost ran across the green field at the hill’s base and through the small door in the high wire fence.
He thought of phoning Mrs. Luque or even Cal, and asking them to check out his room, but hesitated to expose them to possible danger—or upset Cal while she was practicing—while as for Gun and Saul, they’d be out.
Besides, he was no longer certain what he most suspected and in any case liked to handle things alone.
Soon—but not too soon for him, by any means—he was hurrying along Buena Vista Drive East. The park it closely skirted—another elevation, but a wooded one—mounted up from beside him dark green and full of shadows. In his present mood it looked anything but a “good view” to him, rather an ideal spot for heroin intrigues and sordid murders. The sun was altogether gone by now, and ragged arms of fog came curving after him. When he got to Duboce, he wanted to rush down, but the sidewalks were too steep—as steep as any he’d seen on any of San Francisco’s more than seven hills—and once again he had to grit his teeth and place his feet with care and take his time. The neighborhood seemed quite as safe as Beaver Street, but there were few people out in the chilly change of weather, and once more he stuffed his binoculars back in his pocket.
He caught the N-Judah car where it comes out of the tunnel under Buena Vista Park (Frisco’s hills were honeycombed with ’em, he thought) and rode it down Market to the Civic Center. Among the crowders boarding a 19-Polk there, a hulking drab shape lurching up behind him gave him a start, but it was only a blank-eyed workman powdered with pale dust from some demolition job.
He got off the 19 at Geary. In the lobby of 811 Geary there was only Fernando vacuuming, a sound as gray and hollow as the day had grown outside. He would have liked to chat, but the short man, blocky and somber as a Peruvian idol, had less English than his sister and was additionally rather deaf. They bowed gravely to each other, exchanged a “Senyor Lookay” and a “Meestair Jueston,” Fernando’s rendering of “Westen.”
He rode the creaking elevator up to six. He had the impulse to stop at Cal’s or the boys’ first, but it was a matter of—well, courage—not to. The hall was dark (a ceiling globe was out) and the shaft-window and knobless closet door next to his room darker. As he approached his own door, he realized his heart was thumping. Feeling both foolish and apprehensive, he slipped his key into the lock, and clutching his binoculars in his other hand as an impromptu weapon, he thrust the door swiftly open and quickly switched on the ceiling light inside.
The 200-watt glare showed his room empty and undisturbed. From the inside of the still-tousled bed, his colorful “scholar’s mistress” seemed to wink at him humorously. Nevertheless, he didn’t feel secure until he’d rather shamefacedly peered in the bathroom and then opened the closet and the tall clothes cabinet and glanced inside.
He switched off the top light then and went to the open window. The green drapes were lined with a sun- faded tan, all right, but if they’d been blown halfway out the window at some point, a change of wind had blown them neatly back into place afterward. The serrated hump of Corona Heights showed up dimly through the advancing high fog. The TV tower was wholly veiled. He looked down and saw that the windowsill and his narrow desk abutting it and the carpet at his feet were all strewn with crumbles of brownish paper that reminded him of Gun’s paper-shredding machine. He recalled that he’d been handling some old pulp magazines here yesterday, tearing out pages he wanted to save. Had he thrown the magazines away afterward? He couldn’t remember, but probably—they weren’t lying around anywhere nearby, at any rate, only a neat little stack of ones he hadn’t looted
