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

to begin with.
    â€œLady, you’ve got yourself a job,” he said when I’d told him this. He was too world-wise and weary to even ask me what I wanted him for, what I was trying to find him about. It was bound to be just a variation of some tale he’d heard before. For him there was nothing new under the electric lights. And I wondered if I’d ever be that way myself someday.
    â€œHe was just an ordinary guy, a dime-a-dozen guy,” he said. “Gee, this is going to be hard. But I helped put him out myself two or three times, so I think I can——Thin and tall, kind of. Light hair, light brown hair. That’s about all I remember.”
    Thin and tall. Light brown hair. He was right; I had a job.
    They were looking at the backs of my legs from all over the place; I could feel them, and I wanted to get out. “Thanks,” I said.
    â€œLots of luck, lady,” he said mournfully.
    Nothing new under the electric lights. It must be terrible, I thought to myself, to know as much as he did about the less appealing aspects of human nature.
    Flophouses, they were, I guess. They called themselves hotels; their signs offered rooms at twenty-five or thirty-five cents a night, and there were scads of them along there. The entrance was always one flight up, never on the street level. And in the background you would see a long bare room with these hopeless figures sitting around, reading papers, or just rocking back and forth, rocking themselves slowly into their graves. Figures that had once been human beings.
    It wasn’t a matter of outward appearance, of the clothes they wore. This was a thing that came from inside. A living man could have been in worse rags than they wore, and he would still be a living man. One of them could have been put into the swankiest apparel to be found and he would have still remained—what he was. A lamp with the wick burned out. A bulb with the filaments worn out. Something still intact but that no longer gives off light.
    There were so many of them along there. End to end they were placed. Because, after all, that is the one thing that must continue, even in this twilight world—sleep. At first, when I’d come back again each time the following night, I was never quite sure of where I’d left off the night before; they all looked so alike. I found myself overlapping a little. So I brought along a little piece of chalk and I marked a little check, a pothook, on the doorway of the last one as I was quitting for the night. And then when I came again the following night I knew where to begin. At the next one after that.
    Over and over and over. Up the dimly lighted stairs to the little niche or cubicle with a slab before it that served as a payment desk. And then the wordless gasp that always followed when they looked up and saw who it was that had been making that toilsome ascent. And then the inevitable blanket dismissal before I was even able to open my mouth. “Sorry, miss, we don’t accommodate ladies.”
    â€œI know, but I’m looking for someone. Marty, his name is Marty. He’s tall and thin, light brown hair. Blair’s his other name, Marty Blair.”
    Yet I found, for one thing, that it was easier along here to ask for him just by his given name. This was a place where the second name dropped away again. Whether it was that they were ashamed and kept it to themselves, or that there was no longer any need for it now that they had all reached this common level, they seemed to be known to one another more by their first names and, more than that even, by nicknames that the Bowery had fastened on them.
    He’d look through the haphazard, pencil-scrawled book of admissions they kept, and sometimes he’d call to someone sitting near by for information: “Is Porky’s real name Martin, any of you know?”
    They’d scratch their heads and finally someone would say: “No—Marvin, I think I once