At eleven o’clock that night, Dyson said, “Come on, Algy, we’re doing no good here. The police’ll phone us if they get a lead. We must go and find a bite to eat before my stomach falls apart.”
“It must have been that devil that sent her the flowers,” Timberlane said, by no means for the first time.
“Surely the flower shop could give the police a lead.”
“They got no change from the manager of the flower store. If only you recalled the taxi number.”
“All that I can remember is that it was mauve and yellow, with the words Antelope Taxis across the boot.
Hell, you’re right, Bill – let’s go and get a bite to eat.”
As they left the police station, the superintendent said sympathetically, “Don’t worry, Mr. Timberlane.
We’ll have your fiancée tracked down by morning.”
“What makes the man so confident?” Timberlane asked grumpily, as they climbed into Dyson’s car.
Although both Dyson and Jack Pilbeam, who had been down at the station earlier, had done all they could, he felt unfairly eager to annoy them. He felt so vulnerable in what was, however much he liked it, a strange country. Trying to button down his emotions, he remained silent as he and Dyson went to a nearby all-night stall and wolfed down hamburgers with chillies and mustard; the hamburgers were synthetic but good.
“Thank God for chillies,” Dyson said. “They could put a bit of fire into sawdust. I’ve often wondered if chillies aren’t the things the scientists are really looking for in all their megabuck’s worth of research into a way of restoring our poor old shattered genes.”
“Could be,” Timberlane assented. “Bet you they invent synthetic chillies first.”
He got to bed after a final nightcap and fell asleep at once. When he woke next morning, he phoned the police station straight away, but they had nothing new to offer him. Moodily, he washed and dressed for breakfast, and went down the hall to collect his mail from the mail slot.
A hand-delivered letter awaited him in the rack. He tore it open to find a sheet of paper bearing the words:
“If you want your girl back, take a look in God’s Sufferance Press. Go alone, for her sake. Then call off the cops.”
Suddenly, he wanted no breakfast. He almost ran to the hall phone booth and thumbed through the appropriate volume of the phone directory. There it was, under an old-style non-vision number: God’s Sufferance Press, and its address. Should he ring first or go straight round ? He hated the feeling of indecision that flooded him. He dialled and got the disconnected tone.
Hurrying back to his room, he wrote a hasty note to Pilbeam, giving the address to which he was going, and left it on the pillow of his unmade bunk. He pocketed his revolver.
He walked down to the end of the street, picked up a taxi from the regular rank, and told the driver to take it as fast as he could. Once over the Anacostia bridge, they hit tight traffic, as the capital moved in to do its day’s work. Even swamped as it was by wartime congestion, Washington kept its beauty; as they filtered past the Capitol, the sward about it now peppered with emergency office buildings, and swung westwards along Pennsylvania Avenue, the white stone caught a flush from the clear sky. The permanence and proportion of the buildings gave Timberlane a little reassurance.
Later, as they headed north, the impression of dignity and justice was broken. Here the unsettlement of the times found expression. Name- and sign-altering was in full swing. Property changed hands rapidly, office furniture vans and military lorries delivered or removed furniture. And there were other buildings standing unaccountably silent and empty. Sometimes a whole street seemed deserted, as if its inhabitants had fled from a plague. In one such street, Timberlane noticed, stood the travel offices of overseas airlines and the tourist bureaux of Denmark, Finland, Turkey; the shutters were up; private travel had closed down for the duration, and the big airliners were under United Nations’ charge, flying medical aid to war victims.
Some districts showed evidence of suitcase damage, though an attempt had been made to cover the desolation with large advertisement hoardings. Like all the great cities of the world, this one, behind its smile, revealed the rotting cavities that nobody was able to fill.