“I better get to my typewriter.”
He watched her go—the magnificence of her hair—the absurdity of her make-up—the splendor of her bosom and hips—the fantastic smallness of her high-heeled shoes. His blood stirred and he half rose.
“Old ass,” he said of himself, aloud.
Just before daybreak, remembering he’d had no dinner, he went down to Court Avenue and Fenwick and had pumpkin pie and coffee at the Baltimore Lunch. Some raggedy women, charwomen from the tall buildings, were sliding trays along the vast cafeteria’s silver rails. A man—perhaps a once-respectable man—a bum now. One of his own reporters. A young girl in a yellow evening dress, a too-young girl, for the hour, with a disheveled college boy, slightly drunk. The white-dressed people behind the glass counters and steam tables looked sleepy.
He went back up in the lonely elevator and watched dawn invest the cities.
Life returned to the great building, where it had not quite perished in the long night. The presses, underground, shook it a little. Doors slammed. Elevators hummed at intervals. It didn’t sleep, quite. And as the light increased, the tower became a tympanum that vibrated in tempo with the increasing traffic down below.
When the sun cut deep into the man-made canyons, throwing aside the rectilinear shadows of the buildings, shining on windshields, bus tops, palisades of glass windows, he knew Minerva would be awake. She would be ringing for her maid. Getting coffee and a folded copy of the morning paper which she owned. Making phone calls to executives who would try, by alert rejoinders, to pretend they, also, greeted every daybreak with all snoring put aside, eyes open and a message to Garcia avidity for the new day’s commands. Coley knew.
His phone rang. “Lo?”
“This is Minerva Sloan.”
“’Morning, Minerva. How—”