The Door on Mercer Row

Walter Kessler was a lawyer whose face had never once been described as warm. He was tall and narrow, gray at the temples before his time, sparing with words and slower to smile. At dinner parties he said almost nothing, and yet hosts kept asking him back, because he listened to whoever was speaking as though the account were worth hearing to the end, and people who had that attention for an hour came away feeling they had been weighed and, on the whole, found worth defending. He was hard on himself. He drank rye alone when he could have had the good Burgundy he actually wanted, and though he loved the theater, he had not bought a ticket in twenty years. Toward other people he extended a large and lazy tolerance. "I let my friends go to the devil in their own fashion," he liked to say, and in any trouble he was quicker to help than to scold. For that reason he was often the last respectable name in the lives of men who were going under.

It followed that his friendships were not chosen so much as inherited. His closest companion, in defiance of everyone's expectations, was his cousin Devon Parks, seven years younger, a man about Boston with a reputation for knowing which door to knock on and which to avoid. Nobody could explain what the two men saw in each other. Their Sunday walks were famous among their acquaintances for silence so profound that friends who overtook them on the sidewalk claimed the pair brightened visibly at the interruption. Yet both men guarded those walks like a hoarded treasure, canceling engagements and ignoring telephone calls to keep them intact.

On one of these Sundays their route took them down a short street in East Cambridge called Mercer Row. The street was narrow and officially quiet, though on weekdays it carried a busy trade: a coffee roaster, a print shop that had survived three rent increases, two galleries, a bakery whose line went out the door. The storefronts were painted in confident colors, and even on Sunday, with the shutters down and the crowds gone, the street had a shine that set it off from the grayer blocks around it.

Two doors from the corner, the line of shops was broken. A block of building pushed itself forward there, three stories of brick gone the color of old teeth, with no sign, no bell, and a single service door on the street. The door had been painted once, a long time ago, and the paint had blistered and flaked until the panels showed bare wood beneath. There was no handle to speak of, only a plate. Deliverers of furniture propped their hand trucks against it. Skateboard kids ground the plate's edges smooth. Somebody had tried a knife on the moldings years ago and the scars were still there, and in all that time no one had appeared to chase the visitors off or to repair what they broke.

Kessler and Parks had crossed to the far side of the street. When they drew level with the block, Parks stopped and lifted his chin at the door.

"Did you ever really look at that door?" he asked.

"Many times," said Kessler.

"It's connected in my mind," said Parks, "with the strangest story I know. I've never told it to a living soul. I don't suppose you want it."

"You may as well give it to me now," said Kessler, and there was a slight change in his voice.

"Well, it was this way," Parks began. "I was coming home from a party in Union Square about three o'clock on a black winter morning last January. You know the hour. The streets were empty and lit, one after another, like corridors in a hotel where everybody is asleep, and I had reached the state of mind where a man walks fast and listens and half wishes for a patrol car. And then, at the corner of Mercer Row and Baxter Court, I saw two figures. One was a small man in a long coat, walking east at a tremendous pace, and the other was a girl of eight or nine, a kid on a bicycle, coming down the cross street as fast as her legs would push her. They met at the corner. That would have been nothing, a near miss, a shouted word. But the man did not slow. He went into her. He knocked her machine out from under her and then he walked over her where she lay, one foot and then the other, calm as a man crossing a lobby, and left her screaming on the stones."

Parks paused. A delivery van went by, and neither man looked at it.

"It sounds like nothing to tell," he went on. "It was hellish to see. I shouted, I ran, I caught the man by the collar and hauled him back to the corner, where a crowd had already begun to collect around the child. He offered no resistance at all. He was perfectly cool, and he gave me one look, a single look, that brought the sweat out on my forehead like I had run a mile. The people in the crowd were the girl's own family, it turned out, and pretty soon a doctor arrived, a young ER man somebody had rung from the building opposite. The child, by luck, was more frightened than hurt. Bruises, a sprained wrist, nothing worse. And there you would think the story ends. But there was one circumstance I have never been able to shake. I had taken a loathing to the man from the first second. So had the family, which you would expect. The doctor was the one that got to me. A mild, gray little professional, the sort of face you forget while you are looking at it. Every time that doctor glanced at my prisoner, he went white to the lips, and I saw in his eyes the plain desire to kill him with his hands. I knew what was in his mind because the same thing was in mine. And since killing was out of the question, we did the next thing. We told the man we would make his name stink from one end of this city to the other, that we had the means and the will to do it, and that no friend or fortune would save him. All the while we were pitching it hot, we were holding the women back, because they were out of their minds. I never saw a ring of faces so full of hate. And in the middle of the ring stood the man, sneering softly, frightened too, I could see that, but carrying it off like somebody with a signed contract on all our souls. 'If you choose to make an affair of this,' he said, 'I can hardly prevent you. No gentleman likes a scene. Name your figure.' Well, we screwed him up to a hundred and fifty thousand for the girl and her family. He would have liked to hold out, I think, but there was something in the lot of us that promised mischief, and in the end he gave in. And then came the part I will never explain. Where do you suppose he took us to get the money?"

Kessler said nothing. Parks pointed across the street with one gloved finger.

"That door. He walked straight to it, put a key in the plate, let himself in, and came back in under five minutes with ten thousand dollars in hundreds and a personal check for the balance, signed with a name that is one of the best known in this state. I can't say the name. It's the whole point of the story, but I can't say it. The figure was stiff, the ten thousand, I mean. But the check was good for ten times that, if it was genuine. I took the liberty of telling the man that the whole business smelled wrong, that nobody in real life walks into a cellar at four in the morning and comes out with a check of that size made out to bearer. He was quite easy about it. 'Set your mind at rest,' he said. 'I will walk with you to the bank myself when it opens and stand by while you cash it.' So we all went, the doctor, the girl's father, our gentleman, and me, and we sat out the rest of the night in my apartment. In the morning I presented the check myself and told the teller I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. It was not. The check was genuine."

"Tut-tut," said Kessler.

Kessler came back at him with a question that came out more abruptly than he intended. "And you don't know whether the man who signed lives there?"

"A likely place," said Parks. "But I happen to know his address is somewhere else entirely. Some square or other."

"And you never asked about the place with the door?"

"No, sir, I had a delicacy," Parks said. "I feel very strongly about asking questions. It partakes too much of the day of judgment. You start a question the way you start a stone rolling on a hillside, and it goes from ledge to ledge, starting other stones, and presently some mild old soul you would never have suspected is knocked on the head in his own garden and the family has to change its name. I have a rule. The more a thing looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."

"A very good rule," said Kessler.

"But I confess I have studied the place on my own account," Parks continued. "It hardly seems a building anyone uses. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one except, once in a great while, the gentleman of my adventure. There are three windows on the second floor looking into the little court behind. They are always shut, but they are clean, which is a fact worth having. And there is an extract vent that smokes on cold mornings, so somebody must work there. And yet you can't be sure, because the buildings in that court are packed so close together that you cannot say where one ends and the next begins."

They walked on for a while without speaking. Then Kessler said, "Devon, that is a good rule of yours."

"I think so," said Parks.

"But for all that," Kessler pursued, "there is one point I must have. I must know the name of the man who walked over the child."

Parks considered. "I can't see the harm," he said at last. "He gave the name Marsh. Mr. Marsh."

"Hm," said Kessler. "What sort of man is he to look at?"

"He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance, something displeasing, something outright detestable. I never disliked a man so completely, and I cannot tell you why. He must be deformed somewhere. He gives a strong feeling of deformity, though I could not point to the feature. He is an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I can name nothing out of the way. No, I can make no hand of it. I can't describe him, and it is not a failure of memory. I can see him this instant, every detail, and the details are all ordinary. That is what frightens me."

Kessler walked some distance in silence, plainly carrying a weight. "You are sure he used a key?" he asked finally.

"My dear fellow," Parks began, startled out of his manners.

"Yes, I know how it sounds," said Kessler. "The fact is, if I have not asked you for the other man's name, the name on the check, it is because I already know it. Your story has gone home, Devon. If you have been inexact anywhere, correct it now."

"I think you might have warned me," said the other, with a touch of sullenness. "But I have been exact to the point of pedantry. The fellow had a key, and what is more, he has it still. I saw him use it not a week ago."

Kessler sighed deeply and said not one word more. After a moment Parks resumed. "Here is another lesson in holding my tongue. I am ashamed of my long story. Let us make a bargain never to refer to it again."

"With all my heart," said the lawyer. "I shake hands on that, Devon."