He stood unmoving, caught. Nothing he ever read gripped him so powerfully as did these scrawled threats. To him they were a kind of mute record that the city automatically inscribed in her sleep; a secret newspaper publishing what the people really thought, undiluted by fears of propriety and selfish interest. It was like finding the elusive eyes of the city and staring into her true mind. The first rumblings of an approaching train roused him.

As to a severed limb he turned again toward the pillar, and stopped when two women smelling of cherry soap halted near him. He glanced over at them. Why, he wondered, must these things always be written by such obviously ignorant hands? These two women, now – they share that slogan-writer’s indignation and yet it is left for the lowest people to step forward and spell out the truth. Air began to whirl and rise around his legs as the train thrust like a piston into the cylindrical station. Mr Newman stepped back a yard and his elbow brushed the dress of one of the women. The cherry smell was strong for an instant, and he was glad she was a well-kept woman. He liked to travel with people who were well kept.

The doors hissed open and the women went in. Mr Newman waited an instant and then followed carefully, remembering how a week before he had started in before the doors had been fully withdrawn and had collided with them. As he reached up and grasped an overhead porcelain handle his face grew pinker at the memory of that moment. His blood began to pump rapidly. He brought his arm down as the train started, and drew his white cuff out under the edge of his jacket sleeve. The train sped toward Manhattan. Relentlessly, mercilessly it carried him toward that island, and he closed his eyes for a moment as though to contain himself and his fear.

His paper was still tucked under his arm. Remembering it, he opened it and pretended to read. There was no banner headline. Everything crawled beneath his eyes. Holding the paper as though engrossed in it, he looked over its edge at the passenger seated in front of him. Ukrainian-Polish, he registered without thinking. He studied the man as well as he could. Worker’s cap. Soiled windbreaker. He could not make out the man’s eyes. Probably small, he supplied. Ukrainian-Polish … taciturn, hardworking, inclined toward strong drink and stupidity.

His eyes moved to the man sitting next to the worker. Negro. His eyes continued to the next, and held there. Contriving to move a step closer, he lost all sense of his surroundings. There sat a man whose type to him was like a rare clock to a collector. The man was staidly reading the Times. His skin was fair, the back of his neck flat and straight, his hair was probably blond beneath the new hat, and on squinting, Mr Newman caught a glimpse of the Hindenburg bags under the subject’s eyes. The mouth he could not see clearly, so he supplied it – broad and full-lipped. He relaxed with a certain satisfaction that always came to him when he played this secret game going to work. Probably he alone on this train knew that this gentleman with the square head and the fair skin was neither Swede, nor German, nor Norwegian, but a Jew.