His muscles stiffened and he gripped the pipe. He heard sounds of footsteps, steady, continuous. Where were they? When he reached the hole he caught a glimpse of light; he had to be very careful now. Footsteps sounded; bomp . . . bomp . . . bomp . . . bomp. . . . Mouse-like, he crawled out of the hole and peeped through the door of the locker and he was stunned by the guilty familiarity of what he saw. Framed before him at the far end of the basement in a tableau of bright daylight was a vision that made him want to rush forward and perform some deed of expiation. He stared at two men, both of whom he knew at once. Sitting in a chair, naked to his waist, was the night watchman over whose sleeping body he had stood at some time in the recent past. Walking to and fro in front of the watchman was Murphy, in his shirt sleeves, a cigarette jutting obliquely from his mouth, a gun swinging from his hip. The white flesh of the watchman’s body was mottled with crimson welts.

He’s trying to make that man tell something he don’t know, he whispered. Then he was looking not at Murphy torturing the man, but a moving picture. All of this was unreal; someone was depicting this scene for his benefit so that he could react to it and fathom its meaning. The night watchman sat with his hands upon his knees, his head sagging forward, his face swollen and dirty, his eyes half closed; it seemed that at any moment his body would slump to the floor. Murphy paused, turned, just as the three policemen had paused and turned to him time and again when he had sat in the room at the police station.

“Ready to tell me about it, Thompson?” Murphy asked. “Want to talk now? Was it an inside job?”

The night watchman said nothing. Then he lifted his head and spoke in a sing-song voice:

“I’ve told you all I know . . .”

Murphy bent forward and slapped the night watchman across the mouth.

“Come clean, you bastard!”

Like a huge, overgrown child, the watchman repeated mechanically:

“I’ve told you all I know . . .”

Murphy went to the back of the watchman’s chair and jerked it from under him; the dazed watchman pitched forward upon his face. He, too, had been dumped upon the floor, so closely did he identify himself with the watchman; but it was not an identification stemming from pity; no, he felt that this was somehow a good thing; it would awaken the watchman from his long sleep of death, would let him see, through the harsh condemnation of Murphy, more of the hidden landscape than he would ever see in any other way.

“Get up!” Murphy snapped.

The watchman pulled slowly to his feet and sat his limp body unsteadily in the chair.

“Now, are you going to talk?” Murphy asked.