A gust of wind tried to blast a hole through the back of Matt’s coat as he pushed along, perusing animated displays in the store windows. He was moving the wrong direction; the story of the windows progressed from north to south. But he was nowhere near close enough to see the activity well enough to get a gist of the plot, it didn’t matter.
People were every which where, laughing, kicking, whining, pushing, dawdling, howling, shushing, pushing in and around anyone who paused to swear at a bus or stare at a window. Shoppers darted across the street in the middle of the block, confident that they could beat a bus before it reached them and forgetting that during peak shopping hours, this street was also open to cars. There was much honking, much shouting, and a wholesome air of confusion.
Matt knew that pickpockets, if nothing worse, waited among the crowd. Stories had it that South American pickpockets made annual pilgrimages to this very street to join the shopping crowds. He kept one hand near his wallet and he kept moving.
Ahead of him, two women recognized each other and mashed together in a muffled hug. He eased around them, just failing to be run down by three teenagers trying to catch up with a fourth who had snatched a friend’s hat. When he was about that age, he had dreamed about being one of the lucky ducks who worked in the Loop, and got to come here every day, instead of waiting for Christas or special weekends. He glanced back in the direction of his office and hunched his shoulders.
His progress had brought him up to a hot pretzel wagon. He thought about it, but George and Joe weren’t here to fight with about the proper way to eat a hot pretzel. The vendor had added the usual seasonal offering and Matt did pause long enough to read the sign. A dollar was a lot to spend, at Christmas, on hot chestnuts if you’d never bought any before and didn’t even know how to eat them. He moved on to the corner, shivering as the wind swirled in off aside street and slapped him in the face.
Down the street he could spy the high aqua fence with the big ad for the nifty new building of boutiques and office space to be opening next fall. There had been a semi-decent bookstore there once. Not very classy, to be sure, with its rows of porn paperbacks and little counter of martial arts guides and weapons, but its remainder bins sometimes held good books, not the same as those remaindered at every different chain bookstore in the city.
Not far beyond stood a dingy shop advertising any kind of lingerie except that suited for a day like today. A short dark woman was headed inside. From here it looked like Beth. Matt turned to cross to that side of the street but the light turned yellow just as he decided the woman was too tall to be Beth. Even if it was Beth he had no particular business following her around while she bought lingerie.
The light turned green in front of him and he started forward, thinking less about the ice against the curb than Beth’s underwear. Ge envisioned her in everything from feed sacks to Frederick’s without reaching any convincing conclusion. There would be no such trouble imagining Ada Silberwetter; she presumably wore none at all. Matt decided he would not think about Ada Silberwetter.
A small boy stopped short right in front of him. “Are these all houses?”
“No, dear,” said his mother, giving his arm a yank and glaring at Matt. “Just buildings.”
The sidewalk preachers were out in force despite the weather, to exhort the crowds to stop doing whatever they were doing and do something better. Explosions of “JEE-sus!” cut across the recorded music of the window displays and the jazz carols blasted out by brave street musicians. The nearest right reverend was expounding to everyone and sundry that the answer was to kill all government officials when they hit the age of fifty. Paying those pensions would destroy government budgets, which would in turn cripple the economy, which led everyone down the fruitless path of materialistic moneygrubbing. “The Money Race” could be ended on;y if the unholy civil servants had a mandatory death sentence.
Several people cheered. Matt turned up his collar and walked faster, afraid they might see the brand of the City on his forehead. He worked his way past this audience and joined another mob on the far side.
It hit him that this was the perfect setting to sneak up on a victim. You’d never know they were coming, never be able to tell them from the rest of the crowd that jostled and shoved. They had only to come up behind you and grab your scarf and then….
The El thundered overhead and he jumped. His scarf was tucked inside his coat as always, wasn’t it? He checked the ends to make sure no one could get a hold on them, and tucked them right back where they’d been. Then, in case someone had been watching, he shoved his hands through the pockets opening and rearranged the ends again.
“Ayackatoury!”
Aman with a load of boxes stepped wrong and went down, part sideways and part backward. Matt stepped out of the way of a flying box and kept going. After three steps, he glanced back. Should he be helping? But this might be a decoy, fronting for pickpockets. Or stranglers.
He turned back, but by now four other people were pulling the man to his feet, while three others collected his packages. No need for Matt to shove in with his two cents. Anyway, the man was probably embarrassed by the whole incident. Matt would have felt that way about it.
The sudden violence of the fall and flying packages, though, gave him a feeling the crowded sidewalk was no place for a man who expected to be strangled at the first opportunity. So when he hit a line waiting to get in through a revolving door, he joined it and set to his shopping.
“Joy to the World” came from a quartet of trumpeters on a staircase landing. A spring entered his step; Matt liked Christmas music, from cheap piped-in Bing to this Baroque touch. Sometimes he wondered if he would be doing the world any service if he counted every Christmas song he heard in December, to find out which was played most.
The crush inside was as bad as outside, worsened by congestion where people paused to consider trinkets which defied ordinary wallets and Teddy bears offered as premiums. Matt had no aversion to crowds (if unarmed) and did not suffer from claustrophobia, so nothing marred his sudden peaceful goodwill save on trumpeter who hit a note one octave higher than really necessary. If his progress was thwarted, frustration might set in. But as he had no particular plan or destination, progress was not a part of the equation.
People all around him were shopping as cheerfully as if they had forgotten the existence of tombstones. A little girl not far away kept shrugging her jacket on. Five times her mother bent down to flip it away from one shoulder, in accordance with current fashion.
Matt sheared off as he realized this particular crowd was lining up to wait for the express elevator to take them zooming to the seventh floor where they could line up anew for a traditional cup of nog under the great Christmas tree. People would wait four hours to get a table near the tree; it was tradition. The Benzes had never been that dedicated. Matt had always vowed he’d do it himself one day, but so far he had not indulged. Today might be the right day. Who would come looking for him there? And if they did, how would they get in?
Instead, he wheeled around the line and kept moving. There was the book department, of course. But ever since they’d squeezed it into that tiny cubicle in the basement it wasn’t much fun.
The aisle he found himself in seemed to be devoted to keychain doodaddery and overflow from the candy department. He steered to the right to avoid a furred cluster of shoppers.
“Ted wants one, but there are hardly any good ones left.”
“Oh, I hear those are really big with the upper-ups: Mayor’s office types.”
Matt glanced back toward the pen display but his eye landed instead on what appeared to be a row of ping pong balls with skulls painted on them. There was no room to recoil, so he looked closer and found these were a sort of bon-bon with what was really the head of that premium bear done in chocolate icing.
“Vanilla cream, hey? Coconut, hey?”
”Yes sir. I….”
Matt turned slowly toward the voices.
“Now, my basic position,” Walter Prince informed the clerk confined within the square of counters, “Is that vanilla cream is not chocolate. Nor is coconut. Yet, you sell these things under the heading ‘chocolates’. Can you explain to me any way in which vanilla cream or coconut constitutes ‘a chocolate’?”
Keeping both eyes on his boss, Matt backed away. He might have done better to spare one eye for the display of pens.
“Oh, look out!” cried a despairing clerk.
The display hit the floor and pens with little bears attached to them leapt in all directions. Walter Prince glanced back at the noise, met Matt eye-to-eye, and headed for a escalator.
Matt dove to retrieve bears and pens, his fingers taking their place beneath the crushing heels of grimy boots. Had Walter Prince been at this counter a moment before, replacing the pen lost at the party? Who else wore pens? Did Holly? Matt couldn’t remember now. He recalled, eventually, that he had decided the pen could have been dropped at any time, by anybody and not necessarily Miss Skull. Carleton Nairn wore a pen, didn’t he? Matt hadn’t seen him at the party. Maybe he didn’t go Maybe he did go, but went in a ski mask and long coat. DID Holly wear a pen?
Having collected most of the debris, Matt thrust them and the little display box back onto the counter and turned to consider any handy revolving door. The less-packed exits would be quicker, but also perfect for an ambush. “Shopping City Employee Cut to Ribbons”: the papers would love it. That was the kind of holiday story they lived for.
A very tall man loomed dangerously near. Matt shied away, and so did his reflection. Had that mirror been there all along, or was it Mirror Man, the store detective who wore a box made of two-way mirrors, the better to watch for shoplifters on their way out? Matt checked his hands to make sure he wasn’t inadvertently still carrying any VIP pens with teddy bears, and then waved feebly at the man, or men, in the mirror.
He plunged for the door. Everyone at Down knew he’d be at the party: they’d all offered him rides. Anyone who had been there before and knew about the terrace could have planned a mortal meeting. Had Holly bee there before? She must have, with Marshall Silberwetter as a grandfather. AND a blackmailer for an uncle. Had Jerry Silberwetter ever blackmailed his stepfather? Odd omission, if not.
Two or three people outside were looking up at the El tracks. Matt glanced up, and then hurried on, ashamed at having been caught that way. At the corner he turned east into a slightly less traveled sidewalk, and crossed to the other side of the street. Here the dusty glass of an emptied storefront displayed nothing but a big CLOSED sign and a lonely dummy. Did the mannequin mind, particularly, standing naked in the window, without her arms or hair? She looked as slim and superior as ever, but she mainly had her back to passersby, and her eyes seemed to be closed. But perhaps she was just being coy.
Had Ada killed Jerry Silberwetter? It seemed a reasonable thing for a blackmail victim to do, but Matt felt utterly lost trying to decide what would seem reasonable to Ada Silberwetter. She didn’t at all have the proper attitude toward her traumatic tryst. Why was HE the one who looked at the pictures and felt embarrassed, guilty, persecuted? He wasn’t the one who had gone down on all fours to….
He turned sharply north again. There was real Christmas shopping to be done, important things to concern a mind too full of Ada Silberwetter. Like why did the owner of this shop think any human being needed a life-sized portrait of Tiny Tim on black velvet?
He pressed on. It was getting on to lunchtime according to his stomach. But though he was passing any number of feeding stalls he didn’t stop. Matt ate out so seldom he could never make up his mind where to go. And even if he did choose, he knew he did not have the force of character to push his way into any of the fast food crowds. Besides, any of those people could be one of Them.
Ada and Marshall might be parts of a much larger conspiracy. Marshall, anyhow. Ada might be making trouble for the plan, with her little investigation: one knife thrust could finish off her partner and serve as a wanting. Unless they really wanted to frighten her, in which case something more elaborate would be called for.
Or, if they were in it together, the Silberwetters could have arranged for…. Not even that. They could have given orders to the chauffeur, who could have changed jackets and be mingling with the burger-hunters. Very nice: he had tipped his murderer. Matt-the-writer liked that idea. He drafted a paragraph in which the chauffeur, a man of honor, tucked the money inside the corpse’s coat.
Matt shook himself fiercely, and several people near him made detours or walked faster. “You’re a victim of disorganized thinking,” his father had always told him. “If you’d train your brain to do one thing at a time, you wouldn’t be running from one thing to another and getting all worked up.”
Dad was right. The idea of a citywide conspiracy, in a city where the Council couldn’t even get together on buying new chairs for the Council Chamber, was not a fruiful one. Concentrate on Christmas shopping: that was the thing. There was that little Fanny Mae just this side of the river, where they had a self-serve section with all the prices posted so you didn’t have to ask. Candy was a dependable present.
His stride lengthened, now that he had a specific end in view. He could even buy a box for Ada Silberwetter, he thought, and mail it anonymously. What was she: Truffes or Trinidads? Nah. Pixies. Definitely the Pixie type.
“Hey!”
Matt didn’t particularly notice the voice at first, with all the other voices around him. The person who caught hold of his coat was dragged a foot and a half down the slick sidewalk.
“Hey, Matt! Mr. Benz!”
Matt paused, and looked down into the watery etes of Carleton Nairn. “Had lunch yet.”
“Um, no,” Matt replied. “I, uh….”
“Come on. Let me get you something.” Carleton Nairn, reversing direction, was able to pull Matt back. Matt’s mouth opened but the older man went on, “It’s no problem, hey: just MacDonalds. It’ll give me a chance to cadge something off you some other time. Come on, a Christas present. You like a Big Mac? Wait here.”
By now Matt was actually in the vestibule; looking around he would have bet good money there was no way to get any farther inside, but Carleton Nairn dodged among and around prospective diners util he was out of sight.
All Matt’s previous resolution was gone. Now what? He was standing here waiting to eat with a man who might have tried to kill hi the night before. What would George do in this situation? What would Joe be doing? What would his father have said? Would any of them be standing here wondering what to do?
He was not exactly handcuffed to the door; he could just leave. But that might hurt Carleton Nairn’s feelings, and he did have to work with the man, particularly if Nairn turned out not to be a murderer. In fact, he probably was not: like Linda Szarkowski, he had no connection to the SIlberwetter clan.
“Here you go,” said his benefactor, returning with a laden tray. He was extending this toward Matt when a short golden-hared woman pushed past him, sending one bag of fries a wrapped burger, and a cup flying. Matt decided to concentrate on one thing at a time, and captured the cup, spilling only a little. Fries scattered underfoot and Styrofoam hit the floor, exploded, and sent pickle shrapnel around the vestibule.
“Here, take mine.” Carleton Nairn shoved the tray with the remaining food on it at att. “I can get more.”
Matt pushed it back with one palm. “No. Uh, thanks. I…my mother….” Wait: don’t let any prospective murderers know his mother lived with him. “My mother’s coming into town and we’re meeting at uh, Berghoff’s. Gotta run.”
Hand toward the door, he looked back to see Carleton Nairn’s frown, and added, “Um, some other time. Um thanks.”
Carleton Nairn shrugged. “Sure, sure. Don’t worry about it.” Matt pushed on out. Did the man realize who he was talking to?
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