A Public-Spirited Citizen

The avid reader of whodunits is equal to any emergency. Or so she thinks.

Margaret stopped before launching down the human waterfall of the stairs to the subway to adjust her armful of three books, two brown-paper parcels and her purse. She knew she was going to drop it all at some point, but she would rather not have it happen halfway down the crowded steps. She thought about trying to straighten her hat, sensibly decided against it, and with her arms wrapped protectively around her books and parcels descended into the subway, its marble steps and cement walls echoing and re-echoing to the clop and clatter of a hundred pairs of hurrying shoes. It was a gray, misting, but mild day; the streets sloshed with water beneath automobile tires and the people around her wore raincoats streaked with moisture and hats with the brims pulled low and beaded with fine drops of rain. Margaret could hear the growing rumble of the subway train coming into the station at the bottom of the stairs, and the footsteps all around her picked up speed as everyone pressed downward to be in time to board.

Margaret had just got in among a knot of people taller than herself in the crush at the bottom of the steps when it happened, and so did not actually see it. A chorus of voices rose in a startled cry, with a couple of women’s shrieks rising above it; there was a brief pause of horror, and then a frightful clamor broke out, with dozens of voices shouting and speaking excitedly. Someone had fallen in front of the train. Everybody on the stairs seemed to know that within a few seconds, though only a few disjointed words were passed from person to person. Word got up to the street and more people pressed down the stairs; the flow of the crowd became heavier, though not so fast as people rushing to make a train—everyone was exclaiming, standing on tiptoe with heads stretched forward over their neighbors’ shoulders, straining to see what they did not really want to see.

Only Margaret, with a mind cultivated by years of reading murder-mystery stories, thought to turn around and look where nobody else was looking: up the staircase, to see if there was anyone bent on getting away from the scene while everyone else was moving toward it. And she was right. Only one figure was moving up against the tide, over against the far wall of the staircase, edging his way past people engrossed by the disaster who never looked at him. He was a tall man in a light tan raincoat with the collar turned up, already too far up the stairs for Margaret to see his face.