The Early Ayn Rand

The living room had two windows and a soft blue carpet. A desk stood between the windows, a tempestuous ocean of papers with a typewriter as an island in it. The blue davenport had a few cushions on it, also a newspaper, a safety razor, and one shoe. The only big, low armchair was occupied by a pile of victrola records with an alarm clock on top of them; and a portable victrola stood next to it on a soap box covered with an old striped sweater. A big box marked "Puffed Wheat Cereal" served as a bookcase. A graceful glass bowl on a tall stand, intended for goldfish, contained no water, but cigarette ashes and a telephone, instead. The rest of the room was occupied by old newspapers, magazines without covers, covers without magazines, a tennis racket, a bath towel, a bunch of dry, shriveled flowers, a big dictionary, and a ukulele.

Jinx looked the room over slowly, carefully. Laury threw his coat and cap on a chair, took off the mask, wiped his forehead with a sigh of relief, and ran his fingers through his hair. Jinx looked at him, looked again, then took out her compact, powdered her face quickly, and passed the lipstick over her lips with unusual care.

"What's your name?" she asked in a somewhat changed voice.

"It doesn't matter, for the present," he answered.

She settled herself comfortably on the edge of his desk. He looked at her now, in the light. She had a lovely figure, as her tight silk sweater showed in detail, he thought. She had inscrutable eyes, and he could not decide whether their glance, fixed on him, was openly mocking or sweetly innocent.

"Well, you showed good judgment in choosing me for kidnapping," she said. "I don't know who else would be as good a bet. If you had less discrimination you might have chosen Louise Chatterton, perhaps, but, you know, her old man is so tight he never gets off a trolley before the end of the line, to get all his money's worth!"

She glanced over the room.

"You're a beginner, aren't you?" she asked. "Your place doesn't look like the lair of a very sinister criminal."

He looked at the room and blushed. "I'm sorry the room looks like this," he muttered. "I'll straighten it out. I'll do my best to make you comfortable. I hope your stay here will be as pleasant as possible."

"There's no doubt about that, I'm beginning to think. But then, where's your sweetheart's picture? Haven't you got a 'moll'?"

"Are you hungry?" Laury asked briskly. "If you want something to eat, I can..."

"No, I do not. Have you got a gang? Or are you a lonely mastermind?"

"If there's anything you want..."

"No, thanks. Have you ever been in jail yet? And how does it feel?"

"It's getting late," Laury said abruptly. "Do you want to sleep?"

"Well, you don't expect me to stay up all night, do you?"

Laury arranged the davenport for her. For himself he had fixed something like a bed out of a few chairs and an old mattress, in the kitchen.

"Tomorrow," he said before leaving her, "I'll have to go out for a while. You'll find food in the icebox. Don't make any attempts to run away. Don't make any noise — no one will hear you. You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you will promise me not to try to escape."

"I promise," she said, and added with a strange look straight into his sunny gray eyes: "In fact, I'll do my best not to escape!"...

Laury's heart was beating louder than the alarm clock at his side when he stretched himself on his uncomfortable couch in the dark kitchen. The couch felt like a mountainous landscape under his body and there was an odor of canned chili floating from the sink above his head. But he felt an ecstasy of triumph beating rapturously, like victorious drums, over all his body, to his very fingertips. He had done it! There had been no one in that dump of a town bright enough to commit a good crime. He had committed it; a crime worthy of his pen; a crime that would make good copy. Tomorrow, when the Dawn's headlines would thunder like wild beasts...

"Mr. Gunman!" a sweet voice called from the living room.

"What's the matter?" he cried.

"Is it an RCA victrola you have there in the corner?"

"Yes!"

"That's fine...Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

------III------

The headlines on the Dicksville Dawn were three inches high and blazed on the front pages like huge, black mouths screaming to an astounded world:

SOCIETY GIRL KIDNAPPED

And an army of newsboys rolled over Dicksville like a tidal wave, with swift currents branching into every street and an alarming, tempestuous roar of hoarse voices: "Extray! Extra-a-ay!"