After a few exhausting minutes, he arrived at the top and stepped out into a room he recognized as the vestibule of the country mansion with the dome on the roof. To his left was the front door, through which morning sunlight was streaming. Straight ahead was a broad, handsome staircase leading to the upper floors of the house. He heard someone giggle: plainer now, on the floor just above.
He turned off the flashlight and headed for the stairs. At the top he found himself facing a wide hallway. Glass-handled doors to the right and left were closed, but at the far end an open doorway glowed mysteriously, as if the room beyond were the home of a radiant treasure. Approaching hesitantly, he heard a brief whispered exchange from within, then another soft giggle. He stepped into the doorway and saw an elegant pedestal bed that seemed to be framed in sunlight, floating in sunlight. Dazzled, he was at first unable to make out the features of the two figures lying in the bed. They seemed to exchange a glance, then sat up to stare at him with amused curiosity. Both were naked. One was an old man: old but strikingly handsome, with a matinee idol’s profile and an abundance of white hair.
The other was Ginny.
As if suddenly self-conscious, she rolled over onto the man’s chest, and he put a protective arm around her shoulders. Without looking up, Ginny said, “I told you, Greg. Everyone told you. We told you and told you and told you. We sent you letters and you wouldn’t read them. We sent you messages and you ignored them. You just wouldn’t listen.”
Heartsick, Greg stared at her.
Finally she looked up and said, “There’s only one way out for you, Greg. You’ll have to use your flashlight.”
Dumbly, Greg looked down at it, but it was no longer a flashlight: it was a long-barreled pistol. He lifted it up for a closer examination. It was a handsome object, though it lacked the wicked sleekness of a Luger: blued steel, with hard-rubber stocks. Bringing it closer he saw a design pressed into the stock: the head of a snarling bear in profile.
Without hesitation, he put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
And woke up trembling, with the worst hangover of his life.
Groaning, he stumbled into the bathroom for a handful of vitamin B and aspirin, neither of which helped much, even after another three hours of sleep.
He forced himself to his desk and worked till mid-afternoon. Then he took the phone off the hook and went back to bed.
When he awoke at six, his hangover was gone.
XII
TUESDAY MORNING brought a cold front to Chicago, with leaden skies, a steady drizzle, and high winds that whipped the lake into a fury. It was an ugly day that matched Greg’s mood.
He was beginning to resent Ted Owen’s project. Ordinarily he didn’t mind working hard to meet a deadline, but then ordinarily his life wasn’t falling to pieces around him. He urgently needed—or at least wanted— a few days to sort things out, lick wounds, and try to find his emotional feet again, and Ted’s project made that impossible. For the next four days, he had to chain himself to his desk and produce bright and witty copy.
By two o’clock Greg had made up the time he’d lost struggling with his hangover and was back on schedule, with a little more than half the writing done. He decided he’d earned half an hour’s brooding time and was on his way into the kitchen for a drink when the phone rang. He answered it, hoping it wasn’t Ted Owens.
“Mr. Donner?”
“Yes?”
“Hi. This is Phil Dobson. I think I’ve got a line on that piece you’re looking for. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on, but—”
“Hold on,” Greg said. “You’ve got the wrong party,”
“Oh. Isn’t this Mr. Donner? 984-2754?”
“Yes.”
“Well. . . I don’t see how I could have the wrong party. Have I caught you at a bad time to talk or something?”
“No.” Greg said with a sigh. “Go ahead.”
“Well, as I say, I think I’ve located that piece you’re interested in. Actually, it’s quite a rarity, a Reising Target Automatic, made in the early twenties. I wouldn’t have been able to spot it at all, but—”
“You know,” Greg interrupted, “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
A pause. “Jesus. You called me yesterday afternoon and described a pistol you’re interested in: blued steel, long barrel, hard-rubber stocks, with a bear’s head in profile .
Greg’s face went cold. “You’re crazy.”
A longer pause. “Oh,” he said finally. “I get it. You found someone who already had it in stock. Shit, man, that’s not nice. I spent an hour with the books and an hour on the phone tracking down that piece for yon. If you’d told me you were—”
“What did you say your name is?”
“Christ. Phil Dobson. Dobson Firearms.”
“I’ll call you back,” Greg said, and hung up. He stood blinking for a moment, then reached for the phone directory. Phil Dobson didn’t have a display ad, but under his name in the regular listing was printed: Specializing in Unusual & Collectible Weapons. Greg dialed the number and the same voice answered, “Dobson Firearms.”
Greg’s lips and tongue felt anesthetized. He mumbled, “This is Greg Donner again. I’m sorry. I, uh, forgot all about our conversation yesterday.”
“You kidding?”
“What exactly did I ask you for?”
“Aw, c’mon, man. Gimme a break.”
Greg paused, thinking. “Do you have the gun there?”
“No, but I can have it here in an hour. If you’re serious.”
“This is a pistol?”
“Christ, man, what do you think it is, a musket?”
Greg considered asking him to describe it but decided no description would be good enough anyway. “How much would it cost me to have a look at it?”
“What do you mean, look at it?”
“I mean I want to look at it and I’m willing to pay you to show it to me.”
Dobson paused long enough for Greg to imagine him scratching his head in frustration. “Look,” he said in a strangled voice, “if you’re a serious buyer, looking costs nothing. If you’re wondering what condition it’s in, the guy I’m getting it from says—”
“I’m not interested in its condition,” Greg snapped. “I just want to see it.”
“Jesus . . . You mean you want me to close up shop and go get this piece just so you can look at it?”
“Yes. How much would that cost?”
“Christ. Twenty dollars. Cash money.”
“It’ll be there in an hour?”
Dobson said it would.
Dobson’s Firearms was a dismal little hole off south Wabash, its windows stained as though permanently blackened by the shadow of the el overhead. When Greg went in, the slender man behind the glass-topped counter squinted at him tensely, like a creature disturbed in its burrow. He said nothing.
“I’m Greg Donner.” Dobson didn’t move. Facing him across the counter, Greg saw that he was an ancient-looking kid in his mid-twenties, his face crisscrossed with black lines of suspicion and cunning.
“Do you have the gun?”
“I have it.” Dobson’s eyes held a surly challenge, as if they were discussing the Maltese Falcon.
Greg handed over the twenty dollars, and the little man reached into the case for an object shrouded in black. He set it gently on the counter between them, flipped the corners of the wrapping aside, and there, in a nest of black velvet, lay the gun of Greg’s dream. He didn’t have to pick it up to recognize it, but he did anyway. Resting in his hand exactly as it had in the dream, it fascinated him, and he lifted it up for a closer inspection, just as he’d done then. After a few moments he realized Dobson was saying something.
“. . . not an antique in the strict sense, but highly collectible. If it was in perfect condition—that means the way you would’ve found it in a dealer’s case in 1922—”
“What time did I call you about this?”
“Huh?”
His concentration broken, Dobson blinked at him without comprehension. Greg repeated the question.
“What time?” He looked astounded, as if time had ceased to exist. “Jesus, I don’t know. Two, three o’clock.”
“What did I sound like?” Dobson gawked at him, and Greg went on with a sigh. “Look, I know I called you, but I have no memory of it at all. Do you understand? That’s why I paid you twenty dollars. I want to hear about it.”
“Jesus.” Bafflement had smoothed his face and he suddenly looked very young indeed. “I don’t know. You sounded . . . ordinary. You said you were looking for an unusual gun, and I said I had plenty of ‘em. And you said you had a particular gun in mind, and you described it. In detail. I said I didn’t recognize it offhand but would look it up and see what I could do.”
“Anything else?”
He gazed into space for a moment. “Well, you said you were in a hurry. You said you needed it in a hurry.”
“I said I needed it?”
“Well, yeah. I think so.”
“Did I sound . . . excited?”
Dobson shrugged. “You sounded ordinary. Matter of fact. Just like now. You wanted a gun and could I get it for you. Nothing special, except you needed it in a hurry.”
Greg turned the gun over in his hands. “What are you asking for it?”
“Ah.” Dobson’s face creased in a meager smile. “Well, I was just saying, if it was in perfect condition, the right collector would pay three-fifty, four hundred for it. As it is—and I’d say it was in excellent to very good condition—two fifty’ll take it.”
Greg looked down at the gun again as if imprinting it on his memory, then set it down carefully in the center of its velvet nest. “Thanks,” he said blankly and turned toward the door.
“Hey, man, make me an offer, for Christ’s sake!” Dobson called after him, but Greg didn’t hear it. After walking blindly for two blocks, he stopped at a pay phone and dialed Agnes’s number. He told her, “I’ve gotta talk to you.”
“Sure, honey. What’s wrong?”
“I’ve gotta talk to you right now.”
“Okay. You want to come up to my place?”
“Yes.”
“If you need a drink, I don’t keep anything here.”
“I need a drink,” Greg said.
They agreed to meet at Freddie’s in forty minutes.
“Greg, honey,” she said after hearing the story, “you’ve got to realize this is out of my depth.”
“You can explain it, Agnes. The way you did the other thing. I need to have someone explain it to me.”
She patted his hand, looking a little scared. “Look, you were exhausted and hung over and depressed.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“And you made a phone call. Then you fell into bed and forgot about it.”
“I made a phone call about a gun I’d used the night before to blow out my brains.”
“I know, honey,” Agnes bleated.
“How could I dream a gun I’ve never seen, never heard of—an actual gun that exists in the real world?”
“You saw it somewhere, Greg. You had to.”
“I didn’t. I’ve never been interested in guns—and this is a rarity. Even the gun dealer didn’t recognize it.”
Agnes shook her head helplessly.
“For Christ’s sake, what does it mean?”
“I don’t know, Greg. I think it means you were exhausted and hung over and depressed.”
“And suicidal maybe. Right?”
“Greg, I don’t know.”
He stared at her bleakly. “For God’s sake, say something useful, Agnes.”
She looked down at her glass. “I can give you the name of a friend, a psychologist. She’s old as the hills, but she’s the very best. She’s—”
“I don’t want the name of a friend,” Greg snapped. He closed his eyes for a moment. “Look, I’m panicked. I can’t think about this thing. I need you to think about it for me, but you’re panicked too. Stop being panicked and think. Please, Agnes.”
She looked again at her empty glass and said, “I need another drink.” She got up, and when she returned ten minutes later she set a fresh drink in front of each of them, and Greg realized she’d had another at the bar.
“You’re right,” she said. “I was panicked.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“First, call up this guy you’re doing the book for and tell him you’re going to be a week late. Take off a week and go fishing or whatever you do to relax. Don’t stay in your apartment. Go somewhere. Get out of Chicago.”
He was shaking his head. “I can’t do that.”
“For God’s sake, tell him you’re sick!”
“This man doesn’t know sick, Agnes. He doesn’t know sympathy. If I had a heart attack, he’d shrug and write me off as unreliable. I’m not kidding.”
She sat chewing her lower lip for a few minutes. “All right. If you won’t talk to my friend and you won’t take a week off, then this is the best advice I’ve got left, and it may be the wrong advice entirely. You understand?”
He nodded.
“You’re under a lot of stress in your work and you’re in the midst of an emotional crisis as well. Plus, to repeat, you were exhausted, hung over, and depressed. So you did something weird and then blocked it out of your memory. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Don’t blow it up into a nervous breakdown. It was a five or ten minute glitch. Don’t brood about it. Let it go and get on with your life.”
Greg sighed and sagged back into his seat. “Yeah. I guess that’s what I wanted to hear. I guess the advice I was ready to give to myself was to go back, buy the gun, and get it over with.”
“Oh, gee, baby.” Agnes leaned across the table and grabbed one of his hands. “Don’t even think of that. You’ve got a wonder-ful life ahead of you. Everything’s going to work out, you’ll see.”
“Yeah. Someday I’ll look back at all this and laugh. Ha, ha, ha.” And he almost managed a smile.
On the bus back to his apartment, Greg reflected that Agnes had helped him more than he’d hoped for and more than she’d known. He found that, after all, a glitch was acceptable. It wasn’t a nervous breakdown or even a psychotic episode. It was just five minutes a bit off the rails. He wondered what he’d been thinking about while he looked through the gun dealers’ ads in the yellow pages. Was he seriously considering finding and buying that pistol? That seemed impossible. Even at his lowest, he’d never contemplated suicide. More probably, he’d been motivated by curiosity. Did the gun he’d seen in his dream actually exist? It seemed a point well worth settling—and he had in fact settled it.
But why, exhausted, hung over, and depressed, had he chosen that moment to settle it? And why had he obliterated the call to Dobson from his memory? He shook his head and told himself to knock it off. He’d already lost four hours out of the middle of the day and couldn’t afford to lose any more.
He worked until midnight, then took himself, a large drink, and a paperback to bed. Later, as he was drifting off to sleep, he thought, Please, God, no dreams tonight. Then he smiled. I’m safe tonight. In my dreams, I’m already dead.
XIII
WEDNESDAY WENT LIKE CLOCKWORK. Working from Greg’s handwritten manuscript, the typist produced thirty-three pages, while he wrote enough for another five or six. That night he revised what she’d typed up, and on Thursday she retyped it in final form and then went on to the new material. By day’s end he had thirty-three pages ready to go and another five ready to be finally typed. With luck—or rather without any bad luck—he was going to make it.
At eight in the evening, Mitzi called and asked if she could come down for a drink.
“Not tonight, sweetie,” he told her. “I’ve got four hours of work to do yet. Come tomorrow and you can help me celebrate meeting a deadline.”
“Okay. What time?”
Greg thought for a moment. The last mail pickup at the corner was at 5:
40. “Make it six o’clock,” he said.
“All right.” She Hesitated. “I had another dream about you last night.”
“Tomorrow, Mitzi. If at all.”
“Okay,” she said meekly.
Friday morning the typist finished off the seven pages he’d revised and rough typed another three pages he’d written before going to bed. At two o’clock he hit a bad patch where nothing seemed to work. He swallowed his panic and went through his story file again, while the typist sat yawning, waiting for something to do. At four o’clock he realized he wasn’t going to make the 5:40 pickup. This meant a trip to the Clark Street post office. No big deal.
At five o’clock the typist put her cigarettes in her purse and stood up to go. Greg said, “It’s worth another twenty dollars an hour to me if you stick around till we’re finished. We should be done by seven.”
Without much interest she said she was sorry, but she had a train to catch and a date to go to the movies. He offered her thirty dollars an hour and she didn’t even hear him. Her interest in money apparently vanished at the stroke of five on Friday. At the door she said brightly, “I’d be glad to come in tomorrow morning at thirty dollars an hour.” Greg said he’d think about it and shut the door in her face while she was giving him her phone number.
He considered the situation. Forty-three pages were ready to send. Fifty by tonight was out of the question. He decided forty-seven would do. Or as much as he could get done by nine o’clock. Either way, that was it.
He headed back to his desk, then remembered Mitzi. He dialed her number and told her their six o’clock date was off. “If you still feel like it at nine-thirty, I’ll be glad of the company.”
“Shit,” Mitzi said. “By nine-thirty I’ll be half asleep. Let me come down at six or seven. I won’t be in the way, I promise.”