“LET‘S GET OUT OF HERE.” I TURNED AND WALKED RAPIDLY, no, ran toward the steps to the lower lobby.
“What?” Packy trailed behind me, Sancho dragging the unwanted lance.
“I don’t want her to see me.” I ran down the steps, jumped in front of an elderly man, and plunked our checks and a dollar bill—a massive tip in those days—in front of the hat-check girl.
“I don’t think she will rush out of the Drake, to tell you the truth.” Sancho was decidedly in no hurry.
“I’m taking no chances.” I tossed him his coat and slung mine over my shoulders. “Let’s hurry.”
Outside, the wind howling at our backs, I searched for the question that had been hammering at my brain and found it again.
“How did you find out her name?”
“That was easy.” Sancho/Sherlock was rushing to keep up with me. “I spotted her as soon as I entered the room. You could hardly miss her. She seemed to be working the tables by the window, overlooking Michigan Avenue—that’s where you put your best waitress—and so I saw a family leaving a table and I asked if I could have it because I liked to watch people walking against the wind and the hostess thought I was kind of funny and so I got the table.”
“And?” We were already at the parking lot.
“And this lovely young thing smiled at me and said good morning and asked what I wanted. I said orange juice, pancakes with maple syrup and bacon—two helpings—and tea.”
“While I’m starving.”
“But Watson,” he protested as he jumped into the car. “Quick, turn on the heat. As I was saying, Watson, the game was not only afoot. She was right there. So she brings me my tea and I smile politely, not flirtatiously, mind you, and thank her and she smiles again.”
“I bet not flirtatiously.” I used too much choke on Roxy who, in protest, refused to start.
“So she does an excellent job of feeding me my breakfast and I smile again and ask her if her name is Patricia Anne. She blushes a little—boy, her skin is pale, isn’t it? But she’s luminous when she blushes. And she says I’m miles away. I say that I like to try to link up Irish-American names with Irish-American faces and would I win a bet with Mary Louise.”
“Saints preserve us, as Mom would say.”
“Well, they may have to from that young woman. She blushes even more and says maybe I’m getting a little closer. I have one of the two names right. So I try Mary Anne and am rewarded with a laugh, a happy-enough laugh, though her eyes looked tired. Okay, says I, what about Mary Margaret?”
“Is she being taken in by this?”
“Mostly. When she comes up to the table for the first time, she looks at me kind of dubiously like she has seen me before. But by the time we’re playing the name game, she’s convinced I’m far too handsome and charming to be any relation to this drip Jerry Keenan … try the car again.”
Roxy, as cold as we were, decided it was time to get out of the lake winds. We chugged dubiously down Michigan Avenue and turned right onto Chicago Avenue.
“She tells me I’m doing pretty well but I have the names in the wrong order. I leap in and say, right, Margaret Mary, Peggy for short. She is horrified. She hates the name Peggy, it is so common. No, she’s Maggie. I observed that it’s a very pretty name and certainly not common in Chicago as far as I know save in the Herald Examiner comics, but I thought it was a common name in Brooklyn. Now she pretends to be really hurt. Brooklyn, she insists, is a VERY common place. Boston, I guess. Not at all. Nose slightly up in the air—we’re enjoying the fun now—Philadelphia!”
“Brilliant, Holmes.”
“Elementary, Watson. Now would you please turn on the heater?”
“All right, all right.” I wasn’t at all cold. “How did she seem?”
Packy considered carefully. “When she was serving me she was, how to put it, ‘professional’ I guess is the word—friendly, hiding behind a mask. Then, when we began to joke, she became very animated, the kind of woman you’d want to pick up and carry out with you.”
“You would.” I skidded to a stop in front of a red light at Halsted.
“Nope. Anyone would. Then, when I said good-bye and left, I stole a fast look at her eyes. Sad, lonely, haunted. God knows with reason. But …” He hesitated, drummed his fingers on the ice-coated window on his side of the front seat, and spoke very slowly, “But, Jerry, she’s no ghost. She’s alive and she wants to live.”
“She said that to me at the Arizona Inn.”
“Why the quick getaway?”
“I have to figure out what I should do.”
“Bring her home for Christmas. I bet she has nowhere to spend the day.”
Wasn’t that what I planned to do?
“I don’t want to make any mistakes.”
“It’s not my game, but I thought mistakes were inevitable.”
“I’ve fouled up before with her. I have to figure out what comes next.”
“Sancho only carries the lances, his is not to reason why. But you’ve been searching for this glorious dame since August; you find her, and then you run.”
“Damn it, Pack, I said I have to plan my tactics.”
“It’s hesitant tactics like that which almost lost the war for us, Commander. What has happened to those good old navy instincts?”
I had to admit it was a fair question.
Loyola was closed for Christmas vacation. I should have been studying for exams. Instead I thought about Maggie all day Monday, December 23, carefully, shrewdly, dispassionately. What had happened to my instincts was an inexcusable misinterpretation of Father Donniger. Maggie was still in pain. I must be careful not to hurt her more.
What I finally did that evening was what I should have done the day before, but it was more carefully planned out and hence inadequate.
About seven-thirty, I looked into Packy’s room. He was reading Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.
“I’ll see you later, Pack.”
He glanced up. “No spear-bearer tonight?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good luck.”
“I may need it.”
“I doubt it. If you don’t brighten up this house with her on Christmas Day, I may never forgive you.”
“I sure as hell intend to try.”
I waited in the lobby of the Drake till the restaurant closed, collected my Wehrmacht coat, which, over my pinstripe suit, made me a different person and hung around near the door the help at the Drake used to exit. I pulled my stocking cap down over my ears, partly for disguise, but mostly to keep warm. I waited for several millennia, though my watch said it was only a half hour. Several other young women left the hotel, but I was restrained this time—no staring into astonished faces. I would know Maggie’s walk.
And I did. She walked briskly, as the cold demanded, but also as if she were carrying a heavy burden in addition to the small purse and paper shopping bag.
She crossed Michigan on Walton, walked by the 900 North Michigan apartment building and, scarf pulled tightly around her head and thin cloth coat buttoned to the top, hurried through the cold and lonely darkness across Rush and State and Dearborn, around the top of Bughouse (actually Union) Square in the shadow of the Newberry Library to the Clark Street car stop.
I walked twenty or thirty yards behind her, trying to silence the hobnaillike thump of my combat boots on the snow. But Maggie didn’t seem to be listening, either because she was too tired or because she had made her peace with the dangers and refused to worry.
It was a long wait for one of the new, streamlined Clark Street cars, which had already been named, not inappropriately, Green Hornets. I huddled in the door of the library, noted that we were again under the light of a full moon, and tried to keep my fingers from falling off.
Maggie reached in her shopping bag, produced a book, and under the streetlight on Clark Street on December 23, no, it was already Christmas Eve, 1946, calmly read while waiting for a Green Hornet.
When the car finally came, she closed the book around her finger, paid the conductor the required seven cents, walked halfway up the almost empty car, sank wearily into a seat.
I followed her, again noisily and clumsily, sat a couple of seats behind her, and strained my perfectly good aviator’s eyes to see what she was reading.
Carlo Levi. Christ Stopped at Eboli.
Unquestionably an intellectual. Now if she only proved to be a Democrat.
We got off at North Avenue, crossed the street, and boarded the ancient red streetcar that would branch off from Clark and go up Lincoln. It was much colder inside the car than in the toastywarm Green Hornet.
Maggie was too absorbed in her book to notice the highly suspicious young man who was following her.
There were only two other people in the car—aged cleaning women returning from their jobs in Loop office buildings. I felt sad for them too. But, unlike my Maggie, they probably had families with whom to celebrate Christmas, not merely painful memories.
The car moved rapidly through the winter night. We crossed Halsted, then Fullerton, and chugged by the grounds of McCormick Theological Seminary. Maggie returned Carlo Levi to her shopping bag, walked, a little less briskly, to the front of the car, and spoke to the driver. He stopped at the next corner, Sheffield, just north of Wrightwood. I moved to the center door. Maggie got off and turned automatically up Sheffield. I followed behind her as an Evanston El train roared by on tracks behind the two apartment buildings on our right.
Now the neighborhood is at the heart of near-northwest-side yuppiedom. Then it was a German and Swedish ethnic community, not quite yet picturesque, fading off into the edges of poverty, but still stable and safe, though perhaps not perfectly safe for an eighteen-year-old girl in the early hours of the morning. The northernmost finger of the Chicago fire had reached into the neighborhood, eliminating all but a few of the wooden buildings. The sidewalks were raised later as part of the city’s struggle out of the swamp of mud on which it was built, but first floors below ground level and second-floor entrances remained as relics of the swampy days at the turn of the century. Even many of the post-fire stone three-flats with pointed roofs, evidence of the German influence, had second-story entrances.
Then it was an ugly neighborhood, now we think it has character.
Halfway up the block, Maggie turned into a wooden pre-fire three-flat. She climbed up the stairs, opened the second-floor entrance, and went in. That meant she lived on either the second or the third floor. First-floor residents would walk down to the entrance on the old ground level below the sidewalk.
My brain roaring with a noise louder than a thousand El trains, I walked by the house, turned short of the corner of Shubert Avenue by a church which, I noted, was Saint George’s Greek Orthodox, returned quickly to her three-flat, and climbed the slippery wooden steps. There were four apartments on the third floor, small, small flats. Next to one of the doorbells, neatly printed, was the name for which I had been searching since August—”M. M. Ward.”
I must have hesitated five minutes, shuddering with the cold, before I worked up enough nerve to push the buzzer.
“Yes?” she replied promptly, still wide awake.
“Andrea King?”
Total silence.
“Or should I say Margaret Koenig?”
More silence.
“Would Maggie Ward do?”
“Go away.”
“I will not, even if I freeze to death.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“You don’t have to talk to me. I must return some money to you.”
“Money?”
“I don’t take loan-shark rates. You only owe me a dollar and a half interest. I figure I’m entitled to a fifty-cent service charge. So I have eight dollars to return to you. I don’t want it on my conscience when I receive Communion at midnight Mass tomorrow. No, tonight.”
The buzzer rang.