He lit a cigarette and set himself to wait, and wait, and wait some more; and his intellect told him further (methodical, plodding Morgan) that if he let himself go over and over this thing emotionally, he'd be in just the softened-up state the bastard wanted, at the end. So he made himself think about anything, everything else than Sue and Janny. The first thing he seized on to think about was that boy. Using a youngster, for this. That was a conventional thought out of the small neat circle of life he'd always lived in up to now: correction, up to being on the job he held now, for that (even before his own private nightmare) should certainly have taught him about lives lived elsewhere and otherwise, where children weren't automatically screened from the uglier realities because they were children.
It didn't occur to him that the boy was just relaying a message, didn't know what he was mixed into: he'd seen his expression. And there were two things about that, that turned this into something like a real nightmare where ordinary sights and sounds made no sense or a new monstrous kind of sense. That boy hadn't realized, maybe, that there on the rain-swept empty corner, as he swaggered past Morgan, the lights from the store fell unshadowed on him. Oh, yes, the boy had known just what he was doing.
Morgan looked down at his hands on the wet, scarred table, and as he looked they began to shake violently, so he put them in his lap. Quite a handsome boy. Even in that deceiving light, he had seen the regular features, fair skin with the black hair and blue eyes all the more emphasized for it, the thick brows going up in little wings at the end.
He knew that curve by heart, the very angle, Janny's brows winging up at the corners of Janny's blue eyes Not to think about Janny, or Sue. Janny, just about now, being tucked into bed with that ridiculous stuffed tiger Mrs. Gunn had got her, that she was so crazy about. Warm and powdery from her bath, buttoned into the woolly blue pajamas.
That boy had just had on jeans and a leather jacket. That boy who was, who must be For God's sake! said his mind to him savagely.
He glanced sideways at the clock. It was twenty-five minutes to seven. He remembered a while ago, couldn't remember where, reading an article on juvenile delinquents that had interested him. It was funny, there was a clear picture in his mind of himself saying to Sue, 'The man's got something there, you know,' but he couldn't recall now who the author was, some official or a senator or whatever. Anyway. Often the most intelligent children, it said, those with imagination and ability, the nonconforming minds any society needs-but for this and that reason turned in the wrong direction.
All right, yes; up to a point; some of them, the leaders. Most, well Hell, maybe the man was right.
The boy- led to Janny and he mustn't think about Janny. Quick, something else.
Another boy. Barging into him in the street there, dodging past. Didn't know it was a boy-big as a man, as tall as Morgan himself until he heard the sobbing light breath, had a glimpse of him close in the reflected street light. That was the Lindstrom boy, that one; they lived around here, of course. Clumsy big ox of a kid, one of those got all his growth at once, early, and wouldn't quite learn how to handle his size for a while; and still so baby-faced, any roundish, smooth, frecklenosed thirteen-year-old face, that you expected to see half a foot below where this one was. Lindstrom was what, Danish, they grew big men mostly.
Generalizing again, he thought; you couldn't, of course. The archetype Scandinavian wasn't a wife-deserter, but this one was. That report wasn't made up yet either, and he had to have it ready Monday morning for Gunn… Something queer there about the Lindstroms, something that smelled wrong, hard to say what. It could be another case of collusion to get money out of the county, but Morgan didn't think so; he didn't think that, whatever was behind the indefinable tension he'd sensed in that place, it came from dishonesty. Anything so-uncomplicated-as dishonesty. The woman was a type he knew: transplanted countrywoman, sometimes ignorant, frequently stubborn at clinging to obsolete ways and beliefs, always with a curious rigid pride. That type might be dishonest about anything else, but not about money.
Invariably the first thing that kind said to him was, 'I've never asked nor took charity before.' Marion Lindstrom had said that. She hadn't told him much else.
But the report had to be made out, and the hunt started for Eric John Lindstrom.
It was a quarter to seven. Morgan kept himself from watching the door; his mind scrabbled about desperately for something else irrelevant to occupy it. He heard the door open, couldn't stop himself looking up to see: outside he was still uncomfortably warm, but there was an ice-cold weight in his stomach, and it moved a little when he saw the man who'd come in-a stranger, not the one.
And right there something odd happened to him. Suddenly he knew what was behind the queerness he'd sensed in that Lindstrom woman, this morning. The few minutes he'd been there, talked to the woman and the boy. It was fear: secret fear. He knew it now because it was his own feeling: the sure recognition was emotional.
He thought without much interest, I wonder what they're afraid of. At seven o'clock, because of the looks he was getting from the barman, he drank the whiskey and ordered another. It was cheap bar whiskey, raw. At a quarter past seven he ordered a third; he decided the whiskey was just what he'd needed, because his mind had started to work again to some purpose, and suddenly too he was no longer afraid.
That was a hell of a note, come to think, getting in a cold sweat the way he had without ever even considering whether there were ways and means to deal with this, come out safe. What had got into him, anyway? There must be a way, and what he'd told himself this morning still went: to hell with any moral standards. If When at half-past seven someone slid into the booth opposite him, he'd almost finished a fourth whiskey. He looked up almost casually to meet the eyes of the man across the table, and he wondered with selfcontempt that didn't show on his face why he'd ever been afraid of this man.
'You been doin' some thinkin', Morgan?' The man grinned at him insolently. 'Ready to talk business?'
'Yes,' said Morgan, cold and even. 'I've been doing some thinking, but not about the money. I told you before, I haven't got that kind of money.'
The man who called himself Smith laughed, as the barman came up, and he said, 'You'll buy me a drink anyways. Whiskey.'
The barman looked at Morgan, who shook his head; he'd had just the right amount now to balance him where he was. 'Don't give me that,' said Smith when the man was gone. 'You're doin' all right. You got money to throw away once, you got it to throw away twice.'
Money to throw away… But that was perfectly logical reasoning, thought Morgan, if you happened to look at things that way. He looked at Smith there, a couple of feet across the table, and he thought that in any dimension that mattered they were so far away from each other that communication was impossible. He found, surprisingly, that he was intellectually interested in Smith, in what made him tick. He wondered what Smith's real name was: he did not think the name the woman had used two years ago, Robertson, was the real name any more than Smith. Smith's eyes were gray: though his skin was scoffed with the marks of old acne and darkened from lack of soap and water, it was more fair than dark. And his eyebrows curved up in little wings toward the temples. Morgan stared at them, fascinated: Smith had worn a hat puffed low when he'd seen him before, and the eyebrows had been hidden. The eyebrows were, of course, more confirmation of Smith's identity. With detached interest Morgan thought, might be Irish, that coloring.
'You know,' he said, 'you might not be in such a strong position as you think. Your story wouldn't sound so good to a judge-not along with mine.'
'Then what're you doin' here?' asked Smith softly.
And that of course was the point. Because it was a no man's land in law, this particular thing. anyone might look at Smith, listen to what that upright citizen Richard Morgan had to say, and find it incredible that any intelligent human agency could hesitate at making a choice between. But it wasn't a matter of men-it was the way the law read. And in curious juxtaposition to the impersonal letter of the law, there was also the imbecilic sentimentality, the mindless lip service to convention-the convention that there was in the physical facts of parturition some magic to supersede individual human qualities. He could not take the chance, gamble Janny's whole future, Sue's sanity maybe, on the hope that some unknown judge might possess a little common sense. Because there was also the fact that, as the law took a dim view of buying and selling human beings, it didn't confine the guilt to just one end of the transaction.
Smith knew that, without understanding it or needing to understand it; but the one really vital fact Smith knew was that there had never been a legal adoption. They had hesitated, procrastinated, fearing the inevitable questions…
'-A business proposition, that's all,' Smith was saying. 'Strictly legal.' His tone developed a little resentment,
