Change of Plan

Peter Rand came to the top of the subway stairs and narrowed his eyes against the light of the sun, lowering now toward three o'clock, but still bright in the clear sky. Under his feet the sidewalk trembled as a train boomed through the station, threading the black, pipe-strung hole in the ground to dive beneath the sluggish river boundary into the city.

He walked briskly. Since noon, when he had learned that this October Tuesday would probably be the feared and hoped-for day, he had waited, vainly, for excitement to rise in him. He was not calm, but he was not frightened. He was euphoric, he breathed deeply and he felt the blood buzz in his brain, but he was not excited. When he crossed the tarry black leaf-drifted street that brought him to his own block, all 15-and 20-year-old apartment buildings five stories high of thick glazed brick, he slowed, thinking back to that other October, four Octobers gone, when he and Nora had walked hand in hand into the house for the first time, but the small pain the recollection brought soon passed. He turned into the garden that ran the whole block behind the houses. At the far end a fat-legged three-year-old staggered over the lawn in hopeful pursuit of a sparrow. A small wind, caged in the enclosed space, rustled the wax-leaf ivy on the walls, and faintly across the court he heard a radio: "Sur le pont..." He looked up at the windows, blank, masked, secret. He walked quickly along the path. Three steps down and he was in the basement. The elevator was down. He closed the door and punched the button.

The car began its slow climb to the fifth floor, whining softly, lurching a little on its greased slides. Nora's scent still drifted in the little car, although 45 minutes, he estimated, must have passed since she had left it. He reached out to touch the wall in the corner where she always stood, where he remembered her being, the hundreds of times they had ridden up four flights, down four flights together. He left the elevator on the fifth floor and walked quietly down the stairs to his own door.

The key soundlessly lifted the pins in the tumblers, black with graphite, and the door turned on the heavy oil in its hinges. The chain lock was fastened. He reached to hold the anchor plate, extended the chain to its full length and pushed gently on the door. The four screws of the plate, held only by the putty in the oversize holes he had bored long ago, pulled out easily and he was in the hallway. He reached into the closet shelf for the little camera. He checked the settings: f:ll, 1/100th. He slipped the flashbulb from its socket, touched the end with his tongue, replaced it. At the head of the hall he stood for a moment, listening, drawing breath, gathering himself. There was little sound from the bedroom, the sibilance of a whispered word or two, nothing more. Peter Rand touched the thing in his pocket once again; he stared down the hallway, remembering the carefully learned pattern of the boards that did not squeak: left, left, right, left, right, right. Like a diver, he leaned forward, he stepped out, and four seconds later he opened the door.

"Hello," he said.

They stared as the bulb blew, and in the afterimage, floating ghostily across the room, he could see again their white faces, eyes wide. It would be, of its revolting kind, a perfect picture. He tossed the camera carefully to the big chair in the corner. They had not spoken.

"All right, dear friend," he said. "The party's over. You may get up now."

"You pig," Tony said. "You would make a picture. I'll get up, all right. I'll get (concluded on page 142) Change of Plan (continued from page 59) up and kick your face in."

"Please do," Peter said. "Disentangle yourself, as it were, and come here, and chastise me."

He was a big man, Tony Diskin, heavily muscled, hairy. He rose from Nora's body, red with fury and embarrassment, and at his second step away from the bed Peter dropped his left hand to the bookshelf, without looking, and threw the glass at Tony's bare feet, a big tumbler of thin crystal. It shattered and Tony knew then what he faced, and he set his teeth and came on, braced for the pain; but he couldn't help himself, instinct doubled him, and in a single, sweeping long-practiced motion Peter had the flat heavy blackjack out of his left inside jacket pocket, up and down. He caught Diskin high on the back of his head and the blow drove him to the floor. The muscles of his back rippled spasmodically. A rivulet of blood, a little red finger, ran out from under him.

Nora had not moved. She lay flat, one leg still bent at the knee. Her eyes were slitted, and two small red patches stood on her cheeks.

"Listen to me carefully," Peter said, "and I'll tell you what happened. I came home early, walked in and found you in bed with old Tony. He got up and tried to kill me with this sap of his. I got it away from him and hit him -- once, only. In the fuss, the glass was broken. Neither of us said anything. No word was spoken by anyone. That's the story. Please repeat it."

Nora wet her lips. "It was your blackjack." Her voice was a whisper.

"No, my dear," Peter said. "It was Tony's and the whole idea, my whole idea, came from it. If you think, you'll recall that three or four months ago when he was here one night, half tight, he showed it to us, and told us where he'd bought it, a little store in Dallas. I found it in one of the living-room chairs next morning. I remembered the name of the store, too. It's no problem. It was Tony's."

"You needn't have killed him," Nora said. "You caught us, that's enough, you didn't have to kill the poor man."

"I don't know yet that I have killed him," Peter said. "And I'm not concerned, at this moment. But I tried to kill him, all right. There he is. Not two minutes ago, he was in your arms, and in your body, warm, happy, full of life, and there he is now, bleeding on a pile of broken glass. He had no chance whatever. Think about that. Something very like this can happen to you. And will, if you say a wrong word, just one wrong word."

She didn't speak. She stared in terror.

"Tell me what happened, Nora," Peter said.

"You came home and found us in bed," she said. "Tony tried to hit you with his blackjack and you took it away from him and hit him with it. You didn't say anything and neither did he. The glass was broken while you were fighting over the blackjack."

"Very good," Peter said. "And that's all you will say." He picked up the phone. "I'm going to call the police now. You can cover yourself if you want to, if you're cold, but don't get up. I want the tableau exactly as it is."

She pulled the sheet to her chin, took the pillow from the floor. Her amber hair was loose, and her little face looked like a schoolgirl's. She might have been 14, dear and good. Peter had the phone in his hand, he dialed the memorized number of the nearest station house, and then he began to tremble. He looked about the room wildly. It was strange to him. For a sliver of time it seemed to him that the walls canted inward, the ceiling tipped, the floor lifted itself under his feet. He could not understand. He was a calm and rational man, but he was frightened. This well-known, well-loved room was suddenly foreign to him. Here was his wife, disgraced -- but by whom, by whom? -- still warm from her lover, waiting helplessly to be exhibited to gross strangers; here was this man, a pleasant enough man he had always seemed, humiliated and taunted in what he had foreseen, poor bastard, as ecstasy, and then struck down like a steer under the bloody-aproned killer's hammer; here he stood, planner, counterplotter, defender of the honor of the home, so-called; winner, murderer, whistling for the police, calling them to witness, to mark down the guilty...

The room swung again. "My God," he thought, "who are they coming for? What guilty? Who guilty?"

The phone clicked in his ear. "Thirty-fourth precinct," it said. "Patrolman McGranery."