Read Online The Black Angel by Cornell Woolrich - Free Book Online Page A

of course, particular to him as an individual.
    The assistant manager had come out to me again. He had something jotted on a card that someone had evidently transcribed from the register at his behest.
    â€œI wonder if you could mean either one of these?” he said. “I had them go back three full seasons. Unfortunately—or perhaps I should say fortunately—we seem to have had a scarcity of guests with the given name of Martin during recent years. Now there’s a Martin Ebling who was with us some time ago. He left as his forwarding address Cleveland; that was at that time. Whether it’s still valid, of course, I don’t know. Then the other is Martin Blair. He left as his forwarding address another hotel here in the city.” His lip curled in a sort of professional disdain. “The Senator. I think you’ll find that farther downtown.” He sounded as though it were some sort of blemish that was liable to erasure from one day to the next.
    I took them both down and I thanked him and left.
    It was only when I’d reached there and gone in that I fully understood that lift of his lip.
    â€œI wonder what happened to him?” I thought. “From the St. Albans to the Senator.” It was more than a step down; it was a vertical drop.
    They didn’t look you over here; they practically disrobed you optically. With them the process of not making money was all that had carried over from the twenties, continuing all the earlier stresses and hazards. In partial compensation they had retained youth’s slimness of waist and, on the average, their hair was thicker. Why this last should be, I don’t know, unless it was because they couldn’t afford to have it cut and singed and treated preventively as often, and therefore lost less of it. Or perhaps only with peace and perfect security comes the beginning of decay. They stalked around sucking cheap cigarettes, and there was something lean, avid, wolflike about their movements.
    Not that they were all carbon copies of one another, you understand; it’s just that that was the general atmosphere of the place. They were even more self-assertive than the other group, but with this difference: no one listened.
    The clerk had a badly decayed front tooth and eyes that had looked on everything vicious there was under the electric lights.
    â€œMarty Blair,” he said. “Yeah, I remember him.” The memory was unwelcome. His eyes creased at the corners, and his mouth did too.
    â€œIs he still here?” I asked.
    â€œHe was put out a long time ago. We got tired of carrying him.” He chuckled scornfully. “Once wasn’t enough. We had to keep putting him out over and over. He kept trying to sneak back in again each time, even after the door was locked. Finally we wore him out.” He gestured with his hand in dismissal. No pity there, no mercy.
    I wondered what he’d been trying to hang onto so desperately, to keep coming back like that each time. Respectability, I guess; even the tattered shreds of it that were still to be found in this place.
    â€œThen you don’t know where he went?”
    He eyed me bleakly. “Wherever they go,” he said, “when they’re down and out for the tenth count. The Bowery, I guess.”
    â€œThe Bowery?” I said helplessly. “How do you look for them along the Bowery?”
    â€œOnce they hit that,” he said, “they’re usually not worth trying to look for any more. Nobody bothers. That’s a living graveyard.”
    It was just the words of a song to me; I had so much to learn about everything. “I’ll never go there any more,” something like that.
    â€œBut suppose he still was worth trying to look for, then what would I do?”
    â€œJust go in one smokehouse after the other until you see him in one of them—if you can recognize him any more.”
    I didn’t even know what he’d looked like