I was out on the streets in the morning right after a breakfast I could hardly sit still long enough to eat. Aunt Ada served it, along with the Times, but I didn't even try to read; I couldn't do anything, really, but think over and over, This is the day. Tonight at twelve Pickering and Carmody would meet in City Hall Park. Nothing could keep me from being there too, and I felt I knew intuitively that I was finally going to know what the note in the blue envelope meant. "...the Destruction by Fire of the entire World... " The words were senseless, they didn't mean anything, only—they did: On a day far in the future Andrew Carmody would put a bullet through his head because of them. I don't know how I could have been so stupid—so just plain dumb—but it seemed to me I had nothing to do but fill in the day somehow till it was time to leave for the meeting in the park. I went upstairs and got Felix's camera from his room; he'd said I could, urged me, in fact, and last night at Gabe Case's had repeated the offer. The camera used dry plates which he kept in a box in his closet. He had two dozen of them, so I filled his little varnished-wood carrying case with them. It held ten, and I put another in the camera; there were pictures all over town that I wanted. Manhattan Island is small; you can cover it from one end to the other in a day, so I took the El down to the Battery first. There was a wait for the train, and I got all focused; the camera had a sliding bellows of red leather, very nice to adjust. I stood waiting for a train then, and out of nowhere a sudden stab of worry pricked my mind: Was there something I ought to be doing, of the utmost importance, instead of this? But the platform was trembling minutely, far down the tracks a train had appeared—from downtown, but it didn't matter to my shot—and I had the camera up, holding it steady till the train moved into focus. This is the shot I got, and by the time I had it and had changed plates, the unresolved doubt had drifted from my mind.
Battery Park was pleasant; a lot of snow, but the paths had been cleared. I saw a scattering of newly arrived immigrants there, getting their first look at the country, and I couldn't resist a shot of them. I took the El up to the Brooklyn Bridge then—a real tourist—and climbed the tower by a set of wooden ladders, careful never to look down till I stepped out onto the top of the tower. Without giving myself any chance to think, I started right on across a little temporary wooden suspension bridge strung high over the unfinished permanent roadway. But the thing swayed! The handhold was nothing but thin cable-wire, and there wasn't a thing, if you tripped, to keep you from falling off and down, down, down. It was impossibly high, swinging in a chill winter breeze. With my eyes on the wooden planking along which my feet shuffled, hardly daring to lift, I couldn't help Looking between the cracks—at the lead gray river infinitely far below and the horribly empty spaces of the roadway. Ten steps, and I couldn't go on. I turned around, and two men were walking toward me. There was no room to sidle past them and back to the tower; if I tried I knew I'd fall. Over a period of time that went on and on and on forever, I forced myself through step after step, the thin handhold sliding through my clenched hand till my palm was raw and black with dirt.
Then finally I stepped off onto the top of the Brooklyn tower, wonderfully solid under my feet, beautifully wide; and I stood swallowing, feeling the sweat of imminent disaster drying on my face. This is the shot I got up there and I'm proud of it. The two men who had been walking across the bridge behind me, I saw, had stopped in the middle for the view, one of them actually leaning back against the wire handhold; I could hardly look at him. But isn't it a tremendous view? That's Trinity off in the distance to the far left. I felt great now, very glad that I'd—bravely, I tried to tell myself—made the trip across. But I took the ferry back to Manhattan. And within fifty yards I was deep in the slums and within two blocks had seen far more than I wanted to see; the one photograph I took there will show you why. The sidewalks were clear of snow, but were filled with trash barrels as though there hadn't been a collection in weeks, as I expect there hadn't. And the streets were worse, the gutters piled with snow that was almost completely covered with mounds of garbage and refuse, dirt, and filth of all kinds. Here's the shot I took. We don't care very much about what happens to our poor, but the nineteenth century cared even less, it seems to me.
I suppose it was cowardly, but there was nothing at all I could do about this, and it was too depressing; walking fast, I headed straight across town toward City Hall Park; I wanted out of there. When I reached Park Row, I glanced left, saw the Times Building and directly beside it the building in which Jake had his secret office, and at the sight of it the thought flared up in my mind like a rocket: They won't stay in the park! For a moment I stood motionless on the walk. How could I have missed it? What kind of woolly-headed lack of thought had made picture Pickering and Carmody sitting across the street there in the park—in the dark of midnight!(me) I turned onto Park Row toward the Potter Building. And I knew it was true. Jake wouldn't bring whatever documents he had into the park—to be possibly taken by force by whomever Carmody might have hiding there. And he'd want to count the money besides. As for Carmody, he wouldn't be handing over the money till he'd actually examined Pickering's documents. They'd go to Jake's office for this transaction; they had to. There was no way for me to overhear the meeting. I stopped on the walk and stood staring up at the building; I wasn't thinking of photographs now. The building hadn't changed: The upper stories were four identical rows of narrow arch-topped windows that had nothing to say to me; the storefronts of the street level were dirty-windowed as ever, their summer awnings ripped and torn, folded back to the wall, the grillwork protecting the windows' rusting and flaking paint; they had no hope for themselves, and none to offer. I glanced up at the long narrow signs identifying the offices of the chief tenants, which hung under some of the upper-story windows like those on the faces of most lower-Broadway buildings. They hung tilted outward, to be read from the street, and as I had once before I read them again. TURF, FIELD AND FARM, said the raised gold letters on the long black-painted background hung under a row of fourth-floor windows; THE RETAILER, said another, and THE SCOTTISH AMERICAN, a third. Under a row of third-floor windows hung SCIENTIFIC-AMERICAN, and —with no more interest than I had in the rest—I glanced again at the sign I would never forget: THE NEW-YORK OBSERVER.
For no particular reason except to see the other faces of the building—which looked the same as the first, I found—I walked around the building, along Beekman Street, then turned into Nassau Street, and I entered through the Nassau Street entrance. This time when I stepped into the vestibule there was no sound of sawing or pulling of nails, and when I climbed the stairs to the second floor the doorway of the office I'd seen the carpenters in was closed. Not only closed, but now the doorway was solidly boarded across, floor to ceiling, and painted with warnings; obviously they'd finished removing the floor in there. Climbing to the third floor, I thought they might be working up there now, or about to begin, and that somehow this might give me the chance I needed. But everything looked the same on the third floor. If they'd been working up here since my last visit, they weren't now; the door was padlocked as before, the same red-painted warning across it. Once again I tried the door to Pickering's office, but without hope, and it was locked. Nothing had changed; I squatted down, looked in through the keyhole, and once again I saw the rolltop desk and the chair across the room before the tall thin window; and the connecting boarded-up doorway to the right. Then I straightened, and just stood there in the hall, helplessly. There was simply no way to get in. Yet I had to. I stood trying to think of everything I'd ever heard about breaking into a locked room. Slide a strip of plastic or celluloid into the door jamb and it could push back the lock, said stories I'd read. But that was a kind of lock not in use yet; this was a different kind with no spring to push back. There was no way to get in; I stood in that narrow corridor, lighted by a single open-flame gas jet, staring angrily and stubbornly at that locked door. Someone came up and someone went down the staircase off to my right, and each time I turned— camera at my side, hanging by its strap now—and walked toward the main corridor as though I were leaving. When the footsteps receded I returned. I couldn't leave; I was hypnotized. I thought wildly of such things as coming hand over hand down a rope from the roof to the window of Room 27 or the closed-up room next to it. Or of somehow climbing up into the half-finished elevator shaft to the underside of the third floor, and then ... then what? I didn't know. I heard the preliminary rattle of a door about to be opened in my corridor, and turned swiftly, walking to the stairs ahead of whoever came out of an office behind me. I went up the staircase, he went down, then I turned and came back and once more stood helplessly and stubbornly in the corridor. A minute passed, I suppose; I knew I might as well leave, but couldn't. Soft shuffling footsteps—carpet slippers, so that I didn't hear them before they turned the corner into my corridor—sounded directly behind me, and I whirled around. The old janitor was walking slowly toward me, head ducked as he squinted at a little stack of letters he was shuffling through his hands. He hadn't seen me yet, but the moment he raised his head he would; the corridor was much too narrow for me to sneak past him, and there was no other place I could go. I had time to arrange a pleasant smile, then he looked up, stopped, and stood frowning at me; he'd seen me before, he knew that, but he couldn't place me.
Then suddenly he remembered, and nodded. "Morning, Mr. Pickering; no mail for you," and he walked on past me, sliding envelopes under some of the numbered doors. Nothing happened inside my brain. During the fifteen seconds or so it took him to reach the end of the short corridor, turn, and come back, I just stood looking at him. Again he looked up at me, and now he was irritated. "What's the matter; forget your key?" he said, and before I could reply he was shaking his head in angry refusal. "Got no duplicate, not for that door! Supposed to have, and used to have; yes. But it's gone now. I can't help you! You'll have to go home and get your own. I got no time—" I was grinning, genuinely, when I interrupted him. "Yes, you have," I said softly. "You've got a duplicate, and you know it. But it's a long way off, isn't it? Clear down in the basement." I had my notecase out, and I took out a dollar bill. "But it's not as far as I'd have to go to get my own.'' I handed him the dollar. "Come on," I said, "I'll go down with you, and save you the trip back up again." Two minutes later, climbing the stairs from the basement, I had the key with a dirty paper tag labeled 27 in my hand, but I didn't go upstairs with it. I walked straight through the building, out onto Park Row, and next door in the Times Building I found the locksmith whose sign I remembered, near Nash Crook's Restaurant in the basement floor. He charged me ten cents to cut a duplicate, and I walked back tying the paper tag back onto the original key. Fifteen minutes after he'd given it to me, I handed it back to the janitor whom I found distributing the second-floor mail. Walking up to the third floor, I realized that I should have tested the duplicate first; but it worked fine. It rattled into the keyhole, caught the tumblers smoothly, revolved; then I turned the knob and stepped into Jake Pickering's secret office. It was filled with filing cabinets, thirteen of them—I counted—set side by side around the four walls. They were of yellow oak, three drawers high, each drawer with a vertical metal handle. They were scratched and worn, bought second-or third-hand, it occurred to me. Together with the desk and the chair under the window, they filled two thirds of the little office's floor space. I'd taken the key from the lock and closed the door behind me; now I stood listening for a moment. All quiet, and I locked the door. Then as quietly as possible I began pulling file drawers open at random. Some were very heavy, completely full or nearly so. Most were at least half or a quarter filled; one or two contained only a few inches of papers, and in one of these there was also a pair of rubber overshoes, and in another lay a half-full quart bottle labeled Eagle Whisky. The files were extremely neat, no dog-ears of paper sticking out at the tops or sides, and they were separated by tabbed dividers that were very carefully, almost beautifully, printed in either black or red ink. Mostly these markings were combinations of letters or letters and numbers such as LL4; D; A 6, 7, 8; NN, and so on. There was no consistency I could detect; every drawer held a dozen or more such tabs, and with no understandable relationships in the markings. I also saw a tab marked Repeat, another said Undiv. Both, and another was marked ???. Without lifting any of the papers out, I looked at some of them. Just as Pickering had told Carmody, there were invoices, a lot of them, hundreds and maybe thousands in the thirteen cabinets. And there were receipts andmemoranda. There were occasional letters, some on business letterheads illustrated with blackand-white drawings of home offices, or of factories proudly pouring black smoke from every chimney. And there were what looked to be actual signed contracts, folded and tied with red tape. I couldn't tell how the papers were grouped; every file I looked at, no matter how labeled, contained papers bearing dozens or scores of dissimilar names. The desk's rolltop was up, and I sat down and looked into the pigeon holes and the small upper drawers, touching nothing, just looking. There was a bottle of Daly's Best Bookkeeping Ink, red, and another of black; a little round cardboard box of steel pen nibs; three wooden penholders, all of them chewed at the ends; a scrap of red-and-black-stained rag obviously used as a pen wiper; five unused long blue envelopes; a tan rectangle of chewing tobacco marked with a red metal star; and a folded sheet of paper. This I did touch, taking it out and spreading it flat; the name Jacob Pickering had been written on it in black ink some thirty or forty times, one under the other in a double column. All were clearly in the same handwriting yet greatly varied in style, some much larger and more flowing than others, some very legible, others in a dashing scrawl. He'd been practicing his signature, searching for one he thought most impressive, and I was touched and felt ashamed to be sitting here searching through the man's belongings. I didn't stop, though, or consider it. I looked through the lower drawers on each side of the kneehole, and saw a cardboard box half filled with unused file dividers; a tumbler of very thick glass which I suspected had been stolen from a restaurant; a pair of leather slippers; two folded newspaper pages which I opened to find a couple of grease spots, some crumbs, and a dry peach pit; a paper sack containing some bread crusts, four or five soda crackers, and an apple going bad; and there was a head-and-shoulders sepia photograph mounted on stiff cardboard of Julia. I touched that, too, taking it out to hold up to the light from the window. It was good; it caught the shine and thickness of her hair, and the knowing, faintly mischievous look her eyes often had even in repose. I put it away and sat back, looking around the room. Squares and rectangles slightly cleaner than the rest of the wall marked where framed pictures or documents had once hung, and there was an upside-down banjo shape where a pendulum clock had been. Now the walls were naked except for an advertising calendar, marked JUNIUS ROOS SON, PRINTING INKS, and bearing only the last leaf, for December 1880. From the high ceiling hung an upside-down metal T-shape from the ends of which two gas jets projected. The floor was bare wood; beside my chair stood an extremely battered brass spittoon. And that was the office, with absolutely no place to hide. I walked over to the doorway that led into the next room. It was in the middle of the wall and completely boarded over with half-inch pine boards five or six inches wide and cut fairly neatly to proper length. But they were ordinary pine with plenty of knotholes, and were only roughly spaced with gaps of an inch or more between the boards. The nailheads had been left protruding an eighth of an inch for easy removal. I'd seen a hardware store on Frankfort Street a few doors down from Park Row, and I left now, locking the door. In ten minutes I was back with a hammer, and I slid it through the gap under the bottom board into the empty room, then pushed it just out of sightaround the corner. I knew now how I was going to not only overhear but actually see tonight's meeting—only hours away now—and I left. There was one picture I wanted above all; it was the real reason I'd thought of taking Felix's camera along this morning. And now I took the Sixth Avenue El to Twenty-third Street, walked a block east to the intersection of Broadway and Fifth, and out in the street, protected by a marvelous candelabrumlike streetlamp—Why was it ever removed?—I set my camera on the rim of a large horse-trough, and took this time exposure to eliminate the heavy street traffic. And there it is, in the background at the right, the arm of the Statue of Liberty rising high over the trees of Madison Square. Here is an enlargement Felix made for me that shows the Statue of Liberty's arm more clearly.
It was nearly noon, I was hungry, and I saw a saloon a dozen steps down Twenty-third Street. I went in, and it looked exactly the way I thought it ought to: a long bar and brass rail, an ornate mirrored back bar, and a table at the rear filled with food. There were stacks of bread, sliced meat —including ham, chicken, turkey, wild duck, and roast beef—potato salad, a big glass bowl filled with dozens of hard-boiled eggs, and pickles, relish, horseradish, mustard, and I know I've missed plenty of other things: sliced pickled beets, for one. It was all free with a five-cent stein of beer, which I ordered, and which tasted different from today's beer. There was much more taste to it, of malt or hops, I think, I'm not sure which. Sipping the beer, I stood eating all the lunch I could manage, and I read a big oak-framed sign over the back bar: gilt letters against a black background on a shiny mirrorlike glass surface. It read: It chills my blood to hear the Blest Supreme Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme. Maintain your rank, vulgarity despise; To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise. You would not swear on a bed of death; Reflect! Your Maker now may stop your breath. Apparently I was the only one in the place who read it; no one else, including the bartender, gave a goddam for its sentiment, judging from their speech, and I think it was up there solely for its anti-WCTU propaganda value. There was a New York City Directory lying at the end of the bar, and I pulled it over: Who was alive in New York City just now? Well, for one, I remembered from a college class in American Literature, there was Edith Wharton; she'd be a young girl of nineteen or twenty now, still unmarried, her family name Jones, observing the New York society she'd eventually write about. But there were four pages of Joneses, of course, and if I ever knew her father's first name, which I doubt, I didn't remember it now. Franklin Roosevelt, I knew, was born in 1882, or at least I thought so. But not in January, and not in New York City, but I looked up "Roosevelt" anyway, and found a dozen or so, including an Elliott and a James. Al Smith, an old-time politician my father used to rant about, was a boy somewhere on the lower East Side now, but I didn't bother looking up "Smith." I found Ulysses S. Grant, listed as living at 3 East 66th Street. Walt Whitman wasn't listed; did he live in Brooklyn? I couldn't remember. But General Custer's wife, Elizabeth B., was listed as "widow" and living at 148 East 18th Street—the Stuyvesant apartment building, maybe?
I finished my lunch, and was turning to leave when I remembered one more name, and I looked it up. It was there, all right: "Melville, Herman, inspector, h. 104 E. 26th." I walked on up to Twenty-sixth, and found 104 between Fourth and Lexington, on the south side of the street. It was a house, old and even now old-fashioned-looking. I hung around outside it for a few minutes, walking slowly up and down Twenty-sixth Street. I knew he was undo............