A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

But I wasn’t going to be a back-room laughing-stock for the rest of the year in case I did get there with a launch and find the fat guy had stayed behind to pick dandelions or something. I went ashore again and had it out with one of the agents in the ferry house, and he in turn had to telephone one of the higher muck-a-mucks and put it up to him, and then sign an order for me to show the captain.

Some reporters had gotten wind that something was up, in the mysterious way that only reporters can, and a couple of them were already hanging around outside when I came out. “What’s the excitement?” they wanted to know, licking their chops. “What’s it all about?”

“Wotcha doing with two hats?” one of them cracked suspiciously.

“I always carry a spare,” I said, “in case the wind blows the first one off.”

They looked sort of doubtful, but before they could do anything about it I was back on the ferry and gave orders to keep them off. “Here’s your instructions, admiral,” I told the captain, who was drooling by this time and biting his nails at the thought of being kept overtime. “I’ll buy the first ten rounds,” I assured him, “if this turns out to be a wild-goose chase.”

“Hrrmph!” he growled, and turned around and hollered an order.

Back we plugged.

“How long you gonna be?” he wanted to know as I loped off at the island.

“When I show up again,” I promised, “I’ll be back.” That old fellow could swear.

The thick, chilly-looking, black metal doors that led into the base were shut by this time. I had to get another permit from an officer on the island, and two soldiers were detailed to come with me. The only one who seemed to get any kick out of the proceedings was Suicide Johnny, who was routed out to run us up in the elevator. He was all grins. At last something was happening to break his monotony. “Gee,” he said, throwing the switch in the car, “maybe he committed sewercide by hanging himself up there some place!”

“Nuts,” I growled, “he couldn’t have hoisted himself an inch — not without a derrick. We’ll go up to the top,” I told my two escorts when we got out of the car. “Start in from there and work our way down.” They didn’t say anything, but I could read their minds: “This guy was dropped on his head when he was a kid.”

We climbed all that weary way back again and finally stood there panting. “He never got up this far,” I said when I had my wind back, “because I was up here ahead of him. But I want to take a gander at some of these initials and names scrawled here on the stonework of the windows.”

“Aw, them!” said one of the soldiers contemptuously. “Every chump that ever comes up here since the place was built has a crack at that.”

“That’s just the point,” I said. I had a close look, first of all, at what my chief rooter and admirer Alice Colman had written, at the window next to the one I’d been standing at originally. It didn’t say Alice Colman, it didn’t say any name, but I knew her work. She’d used an eyebrow pencil and the mark it left was dark and greasy, different from the thin, faint pencil marks of the rest of them. It stood out like a headline on a newspaper.

I turned to one of the bored soldiers. “What’s today’s date?”

“The twenty-third,” he said.

That’s what I’d thought it was too. But Alice Colman seemed to have gotten her dates mixed. She had it down as the twenty-fourth.

Well, that could happen to anyone. But she had the hour right, at least. She’d even put that down — 4 o’clock. Some people are like that, though. She’d visited this place at four o’clock and she wanted the world to know.

On top of that, though, came a hitch. She had an address down, and it wasn’t her own. It was just five numbers and a letter, all run together. 254W51. But that wasn’t her own address. She’d given me that on the ferry, and I’d checked on it while I was hanging around in the ferry house waiting for the permit to come back here. Yes, the management of the Van Raalte Apartments had told me long-distance over the phone from Tarrytown, that Mrs. Alice Colman was a tenant of theirs. So she hadn’t lied to me, yet she’d lied to the world at large when she was making her mark on Lady Liberty. There was something that I didn’t get about it.

“Let’s go down,” I told the soldiers, “I want to look at that bench he was sitting on.” By this time they both hated me heartily from the guts outward, I could see, but they turned and led the way.