New York - The Novel

the old fool.
    Donna Clipp was a nice girl. She had thick blonde hair—natural blonde, too—and blue eyes that could laugh or give you a smoldering look, just as she pleased. She’d never walked the streets. Always had respectable jobs. She’d made dresses, and she’d sold them. She had an eye for fashion. She had some talent for acting and had tried to get theatrical jobs, but they usually told her she wasn’t tall enough. Her short, ratherfull figure certainly hadn’t been a problem in encounters of a closer kind, and she’d been kept, more or less, by various men. When she came to New York, she found respectable lodgings in Greenwich Village. Within a month, she’d met Frank Master. But though she’d been seeing him for some time now, she hadn’t much to show for it.
    So she’d been wondering, for the last three weeks, what to do with him.
    There was one other matter that had been weighing on her mind lately. A letter she’d received a couple of weeks ago, from a friend with whom she’d shared lodgings in Philadelphia. The letter had been cautiously worded, but she’d understood very well the message it contained.
    Someone had been round asking questions about her. Her friend didn’t seem to know if it was the police, or possibly some person with a grudge. But it looked as if someone was on the trail of certain missing articles of value. The gold bracelet she was wearing, for instance.
    She might claim that it had been given her as a gift. But was it really likely that a rich man would steal his own wife’s jewelry to give to his mistress? Would a jury believe that? She didn’t think so.
    If he hadn’t brought her on a pretext into the house, and if she hadn’t seen all the lovely things his wife had, it wouldn’t have happened. She blamed him, in a way. But that wasn’t going to do her any good. If they were on to her in Philadelphia, would they find her in New York? They might. Not at once, but one day. She wasn’t sure what to do about that.
    The simplest thing would be to get rid of the offending items—you couldn’t prove anything then. But they were valuable. She really needed Frank Master to come up with something before she did that.
    So when he’d suggested the trip up the Hudson, in all the comfort of the finest steamer too, she’d thought that things might be looking up after all. She’d prepared herself carefully. And she’d been rather disappointed when his note, announcing the change of plan, had come on the very day of their departure. But the only thing to do was go along with it, and see what was on offer.
    She’d put her bags in a cab, therefore, and set off from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn.
    It was a pity that it had been raining. When the Brooklyn Bridge, with its mighty suspended span, had opened five years ago, it was counted as one of the wonders of the New World. Over a mile long, soaring a hundred and forty feet over the entrance to the East River, its two stupendous supporting towers with their pointed arches, and the great, graceful arc ofits steel cables combined to evoke all the power and beauty of this new industrial, Gothic age.
    Down its center went two sets of tracks for railcars. On each side, with views up or downstream, lay roadways for horses and carriages. And over the rail tracks, for pedestrians, stretched a seemingly endless walkway, suspended in the air, in an elegant rising curve, between the firmaments of the river below and heaven above.
    If you took the outside lane in a cab, the view over the river was magnificent.
    But not today. With the rain coming relentlessly down, she could see neither the water below, nor even the tower ahead. Instead, it was as if she’d entered the rain cloud itself, humid, insistent, depressing, sealing her off from every hope.
    As the rest of the afternoon had passed, she’d assumed that Master had just been delayed. Early in the evening, she had wondered if something might have happened to him. By eight she’d concluded that the weather was so bad he’d called the whole thing off; but he might at least have sent a message to her, and a cab to take her home. She’d asked the waiter to bring her a pot of tea, and continued to wait, just in case he turned up. At nine, she’d ordered some hot soup. Now it was after ten, and she’d had enough. She didn’t care what had happened to him, she was going home. She asked the hotel porter to find her a cab.
    But an hour passed, and there was no cab to be