The Sinful Ones Read Free Page A

a hand, and the affable-seeming older man. But the small dark man with glasses is your friend.
    Carr frowned grotesquely. “Wall-eyed blonde…”—that must be the woman who had been watching. But as for the other three—“small dark man with glasses is your friend…”—it sounded like a charade.
    “Thanks, I guess I will,” said the dumpy man casually, plucking at something in the air.
    Carr started to turn over the paper to see if she’d scribbled anything on the opposite side, when—
    “No, I got a light,” said the dumpy man.
    Carr looked at him and forgot everything else. The dumpy man had lit a match and was cupping it about three inches from his curiously puckered lips. There was a slight hissing noise and the flame curtsied as he sucked in. He smiled gratefully over this cupped hands at Carr’s empty chair. Then one hand shook out the match and the other moved in toward his lips, paused a moment, then moved out about a foot from his face, first and second fingers extended like a priest giving a blessing. After an interval the hand moved in again, the hissing inhalation was repeated, and the dumpy man threw back his head and exhaled through tightened nostrils.
    Obviously the man was smoking a cigarette.
    Only there was no cigarette.
    Carr wanted to laugh, there was something so droll about the realism of the movements. He remembered the pantomimes in the acting class in college. You pretended to drive an automobile or eat a dinner or write a letter, without any props, just going through the motions. In that class the dumpy man would have rated an A-plus.
    “Yeah, that’s right,” the dumpy man said to Carr’s empty chair, wagging his extended fingers over the brown-gummed ashtray.
    Suddenly Car didn’t want to laugh at all. Obviously, as obviously as any such things can be, this man wasn’t an actor.
    “Yeah, I did it about eight months. Came into it from weld assembly,” continued the dumpy man between imaginary puffs. “I was coming up from my second test when me and the wife decided to move here to get away from her mother.”
    Carr felt a qualm of uneasiness. He hesitated, then slowly bent forward from where he was standing, until his face was hardly a foot from that of the dumpy man and almost squarely in front of it.
    The dumpy man didn’t react, didn’t seem to see him at all, kept talking through him to the chair.
    “Oh, it’s dirty work all right. I had my share of skin trouble. But I can take it.”
    “Stop it,” said Carr.
    “No, I passed it after I’d been there three months.” The dumpy man was amiably emphatic. “It was my full inspector’s I was coming up for. I was due to get my stamps.”
    Carr shivered. “Stop it,” he said very distinctly. “Stop it.”
    “Sure, all sorts of stuff. Circular and longitudinal magnetism. Machine parts, forging, welds, tie-beams…”
    “Stop it,” Carr repeated and grabbed him firmly by the shoulder.
    What happened made Carr wish he hadn’t. The dumpy man’s face grew strained and red, like an enraged baby’s. An intense throbbing was transmitted to Carr’s hand. And from the lips came a mounting, meaningless mutter.
    Carr jerked back. He felt craven and weak, as helpless as a child. He edged away until he was standing behind Tom Elvested, who was engrossed with a client.
    He could hardly bring his voice up to a whisper.
    “Tom, I’ve got a man who’s acting funny. Would you help me?”
    Tom didn’t look up, apparently didn’t hear.
    Across the room Carr saw a gray-mustached man walking briskly. He hurried over to him, looking back apprehensively at the dumpy man, who was still sitting there red-faced.
    “Dr. Wexler,” he blurted, “I’ve got a lunatic on my hands and I think he’s about to throw a fit. Would you—?”
    But Dr. Wexler walked on without slackening his pace and disappeared through the black curtains of the eye-testing cubicle.
    At that instant, as Car watched the black curtains swing together, a