A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Black Bargain

Three women came first. One was a blonde, one a redhead, one a brunette. As though exemplifying the differing tastes of that many unseen men. They all had one thing in common: They were all extremely tall. As though that, too, had been a determining factor in their present status. Among others. They were dressed as the mode of the moment dictated: shorn hair (in the case of one, it was even shingled at the back of the neck like a man’s); cocoon-like wraps, held closed by being interfolded across the body, with the arms kept on the inside; and pencil-straight skirts that fell almost to the tops of their shoes.[2]

Behind them walked a man. Very close behind them. Almost giving the impression of a watchful sheep dog, guiding his charges in his master’s absence. Although his arms weren’t extended out from his body, that was the feeling one had: that if these girls should stray a little too far over, either to one side or the other, he would corral them back to dead-center again.

Unlike women walking together as a rule, no matter how short the distance, they moved in prudent silence. As if having learned that the slightest word, no matter how harmlessly said, might be misconstrued and turned against the speaker at some later summing-up or betrayal, and it was safer therefore not to speak at all.

Close together and yet in this lonely sort of silence, they entered the elevator with their guard and were carried up from sight. It came down again presently, but the girls were no longer on it, only the man was. He was dancing a key up and down in his hand. The sheep were in the fold, and the shepherd’s loyal helper had them safely locked in. He went out to the entrance and stood there on the topmost step, as if watching for someone’s arrival.

Within moments after, the arrival had occurred. It was the looked-for event. The way the man blocking the entrance quickly took his hand from the doorway, stepped back to give clearance, showed that. It was both multiple and yet strangely compact. It was that of a phalanx of men. One man in the center, one at each side of him, one at his back. Their bodies all swung to the same walking-rhythm: brisk, staccato, purposeful.

The one in the center was rather short. The rest were all a half-head taller. Perhaps because of his shorter height, he gave an impression of plumpness that was not justified by his actual girth. Padding in the shoulders of his coat, almost as oblique as epaulettes, did its part as well.

He was surprisingly young-looking, thirty-three or — four at most. But even here there were qualifying factors. It was not the youthfulness of pre-maturity, when character lines have not yet become deeply enough indented to be permanent attributes of the countenance; it was rather a reverse process, an erasure, of lines and traces that had already been there. The face was becoming vapid, a cipher, and tricked the eye at first into mistaking this for juvenility. It wasn’t; it was decay, an immeasurably hastened senility. It was erosion, leading toward an ultimate idiocy.

The group compressed itself into the elevator. The man who had been waiting at the doorway entered last and took over the controls, motioning the regular operator out. The latter, taken by surprise, just stood there with his mouth open as the car went up. The impromptu operator overshot the correct floor. He had to check the car jarringly, reverse it with a jerk, and then again he overshot the mark slightly in the opposite direction. He finally adjusted the car-level to the correct height.

When they stepped off, one of them dropped behind long enough to warn the recent operator in an undertone: “What’s the matter, you nervous? He didn’t like that; I saw him look at you!”

“I never drove one of them before,” protested the unhappy amateur.

“Well, you shoulda practiced. He likes everything to run smooth. Now take it down back where it come from.”

Meanwhile, ghostly music that had been whispering along the corridor suddenly blared out as a door opened to admit them, and the blonde one of the three girls stood by it waiting to receive them. The hindmost one chucked her under the chin as they entered, and an incandescent smile immediately flashed on, as though he’d turned a switch just below her jaw.

The door was closed, but one of them remained by it, immovable. “Augie’s still coming up,” he explained. “I sent him down with the car.”

Within a few moments a low-pitched voice said, “Augie,” just outside; it was reopened briefly, and then it was closed and locked with a finality that meant all further ingress was at an end.

Nobody said anything for several minutes, although there were now eight people in the room. The short man who had been in the center of all of them spoke first. It was as though they had all been waiting to take their cue from him.

A baleful expression flickered across his face. “Who would’ve ever thought that Abbazzia would find himself holed up in a fleabag hotel like this with the last few of his guys?” he said, as though speaking about some third person of great consequence.

“It’ll blow over,” the one they called Carmine said.

Abbazzia went over and sank into an easy chair. “My mistake was waiting too long,” he said. “I got careless. Now he’s taken the town away from me.”

“He won’t have it long,” Sal promised.

Abbazzia looked at him bleakly. “He’s got it now, Salvatore, and it’s the now that counts, in this deal. There ain’t no more than now. There ain’t no next time. Every speak from Tenth Avenue over to Third is paying its protection to him now, not us anymore. Every truck that comes down from the border—” He put his hand to his eyes, shading them for a minute.

The redhead began sidling over on a careful diagonal, like someone who watches where she puts her foot at every step, her object evidently consolatory.

Augie caught sight of her and tactfully motioned her back. “He’ll call you over when he wants you.”

Abbazzia continued to direct his remarks to the men in the room, ignoring the girls. He showed them his open hand, to show them that it was empty. “Seven,” he whined in lamentation. “Seven all at one time. Who’ve I got left? Where’m I gonna get that kind again? They don’t come like them anymore. Guys that started out with me in the old days.”

“Did you read the papers, about how they found Ruffo?” Sal asked him, with a peculiar glitter in his coffee-bean eyes that might have been latent sadism as much as vengeful group-loyalty.

“How’m I gonna read the papers?” Abbazzia answered impatiently. “I come away from there so fast, when the word come the heat was up—”

Sal moistened his lips. “He was on the top floor of this garage, when they found him. Him, he was the only one didn’t have no shoes or socks on. So first they couldn’t figure it. Then they noticed these razor blades lying there. The skin on the bottom of his feet was peeled off, real thin, like when you buy ham in a delicatessen. And then on the sea-ment floor was this big burnt place; you know, like when you pour a big puddle of crankcase oil and put a match to it. And then bloody footprints that kept going back and forth, back and forth, over it. I guess they held onto him tight and made him keep walking across it, over and over — maybe with a couple of car engines turning over downstairs, to drown out his screams.”

Abbazzia’s expression didn’t falter, his contemplative eyes never once left the speaker’s face as he listened. “That’s one I never thought of myself,” he mused wistfully when it was over. “I wonder who got it up?”

“I wonder how long he lasted?” Carmine remarked idly.

Sal turned toward him scornfully. “What’s the difference how long? He didn’t make it, did he?”

“A lot of difference to him, I bet,” Carmine pointed out, “if it was long or short.” A chuckle clucked in his throat.

Abbazzia yawned, hitched his elbows back, straddled his legs still further apart. “I’m tired,” he droned languidly. “Getting out of there in such a hurry, like that. My feet cramp me.”

At once, as though an esoteric signal had been given her, the redhead sluiced forward from her position in the background, dropped deftly to her knees directly before his chair, began to pick busily at the lace of his shoe with her long magenta-lacquered nails. In a moment she had eased the shoe off. He lordily crossed one leg over the other, so that she could more easily reach the second one. Having taken off the second shoe, she steadied his foot by placing her hand under the arch, lowered her head, and pressed her lips warmly to his instep.

“That’s what I think of my Jakie!” she proclaimed, rearing her head again.

Abbazzia reached out and roughed her hair slightly, as one would playfully disarrange a dog’s coat. “You stay with me tonight,” he vouchsafed indulgently.

The two remaining girls exchanged a quick look of chagrin and frustration.

Whether due to the preceding little by-play or not, Abbazzia had now mellowed into a better humor. “Come on!” he ordered. “What’re you guys standing around looking so glum about? There ain’t nobody dead here. And when there is, it ain’t going to be any of us. Let’s liven it up a little!” He turned to Augie. “Got anything on you?”

“Sure, never travel without it.” Augie produced a bottle.

“That ain’t our own, is it?” Abbazzia cautioned mistrustfully.

“Naw. This is the regular stuff, uncut,” was the answer.

The blonde was busily cranking the handle of a little flat-topped portable phonograph. She put a record on the mildly stirring turntable, lowered the needle-arm, and after a brief series of thin, piping discords, a tinny smothered voice began to whine:

“Dance with Augie,” Abbazzia commanded, giving the nestling redhead a slight push to dislodge her from the chair-arm.

The redhead pouted. “I’d rather dance with you.”

“Who’re you that he should dance with you?” one of the men reminded her.

Abbazzia’s eyelids lowered a trifle, dangerously. “I said dance with Augie. And you know how I mean. I get a kick just watching the two of you.”

At the repetition of the order, the redhead rose to her feet with a swift immediacy that left no doubt of her intention to fully obey, gave her dress a downward pull, and opened her arms statically toward her enjoined partner.

He remained fixed where he was. “Well, come over where I am, if you want to danst with me,” he said churlishly. “I ain’t going to you.”

She had to cross the better part of the room, until she was standing right up against him. Only then did he exert himself enough to put an arm about her waist.

They began to move together with tiny, almost minuscule steps that barely took them anywhere.

Abbazzia watched for a moment with eye-bulging intentness. Then, with querulous dissatisfaction, “That ain’t hotsy enough. Do it like you did it up in my place the other night.”

“It takes ’em a minute or two, they gotta get warmed up.” Sal chuckled obscenely.

“The music’s too slow,” the redhead protested defensively, her voice smothered against her partner’s shoulder. “You can’t do anything with it.”

“Here’s a better one,” the self-appointed custodian of the small phonograph announced, having shuffled a number of records hastily through her hands.

She interrupted the bleats coming from it, and after a brief hiatus, it resumed at a quicker tempo, with a sound like twigs being snapped coursing rhythmically through it.

The redhead’s convolutions became almost serpentine. Her partner remained more rigid, though only by a matter of degrees. She was like a wind-walloping pennant flickering and buffeting back against its flagstaff. Neither moved their feet, except to shift weight upon them. Now Sal, crouching on his haunches, beat his hands together in accompaniment low above the floor, as if fanning the music underneath their feet. The blonde snapped her fingers in time, throwing her hand out first to one side of her, then to the other. She called out, “Hey-hey! Hey-hey!” while she did so.

Abbazzia picked up a shaded reading lamp standing on a small table near him, held it aloft, and tipped the shade, so that all the light flooded out at one side, none at the other. He aimed it so that it fell upon the girl’s frenzied figure, making a luminous oval across the mid-section, striking her directly in the posterior.

Apprised of this, perhaps from former occasions, the girl accommodatingly hiked her skirt up to a point at which it revealed the undersides of her thighs.

“Back up more,” Abbazzia instructed the pair. “You’re getting out of range.” He adjusted the lamp meticulously as they did so, like a surveyor correcting his sights.

The girl, who had been snapping her fingers in time during the earlier stages, changed her jargon-calls now that a climax was being reached. She called out at intervals: “Charles-burg! Charles-burg!”

“Where’d you get that one?” the brunette squealed delightedly.

“There was an out-of-town guy at the club the other night,” the other explained. “Every time he got up, he wanted to say ‘Charleston!’ and he couldn’t get it straight, it wouldn’t come out right.”

“I like that,” her companion proclaimed zestfully. “It’s good.”

“Help yourself,” the first invited drily, “It’s free.”

They both chimed in together, parroting “Charles-burg! Charles-burg!” Then doubled over in risible appreciation of this newly coined bon mot.

The male participant in the exhibition, meanwhile, had suddenly begun to flag; moisture bedewed his pale face. His partner’s gyrations continued without inhibition.

“Hold it a minute,” he panted in an urgent, suppressed voice. “Get back from me, will ya?” He wrenched his companion’s clutching hands off and thrust her back away from him, so that there was clearance between them for the first time.

He stood as though unable or unwilling to move for a moment, exactly as the last paroxysm of the dance had left him.

The other four men watching gave vent to a roar of spontaneous delight that had something as unclean about it as a geyser of mud.

The brunette commented in an undertone: “Get that. He wore out before she did.”

The blonde said something to her in explanation behind the back of her hand.

“Oh,” said the first one knowingly, now that she was enlightened. “I forgot to think about that.”

“You what?” was the tart rebuttal. “How old are you anyway?”

The dancers separated and went their ways. Each in his own manner. She, to throw herself down in a chair, with head lolling back and fanning herself with one hand held limply, but otherwise composed, unconcerned. But he, slinking off with a suggestion of crouched maladroitness in his carriage, as though he were undergoing a private imbalance that she could not by nature be subject to. To seek a corner by himself, hook his fingers into his shirt collar, as if to ease an intolerable constriction, and sit there, head bowed, in a sort of male loneliness.

“That was good,” Abbazzia summed it up. “That was the best yet. He ain’t got no sense of humor, though,” he regretted, dismissing the whole episode.

He yawned cavemously. “I’m beat,” he said.

There were immediate preparations for departure by everyone in the room except the redhead. The brunette knuckled the closed bath-door glancingly in passing. “Come on,” she said possessively over her shoulder. “Jake’s getting sleepy.”

Carmine turned and asked Sal, “Which side of him you taking?”

“I’ll go over here,” Sal decided with a pitch of his thumb at the blank wall behind him. “You get in there. Augie can go downstairs and stick by the switchboard, Nick can go out in the hall and keep the elevator covered.”

“Go in there next door first and see if you can hear me,” Abbazzia ordered, eyes glittering alertly with the instinct for self-preservation. “We don’t want no slips. Both of you. Then come back and let me know.”

They nodded, opened the door, went out into the hall, and closed it after them.

Abbazzia got up from the chair, rammed one fist deep down into his pocket, arm held stiffly at his side in tension. “They gotta get in here fast, in case I need them,” he explained to the respectfully watching girls. He went over toward the wall on the left-hand side first, coiled his free hand, drew it back, and thumped loudly three times, at spaced intervals.

Within a matter of seconds, not minutes but seconds, the room-door burst backward and Carmine strode in, a snub-nosed revolver held springily down beside his hip-joint.

“Heard je,” he said triumphantly. “How was that for speed?”

Abbazzia narrowed his eyes mistrustfully. “How many knocks ’dl give it?” he catechized.

“Three,” Carmine answered. He reinserted his gun under his left armpit.

Abbazzia nodded approvingly. “You heard me,” he admitted.

He turned to face the other way. “Now we’ll try Sal’s side.” He pummeled the wall heavily. Then a second time. Then a third. “I’ll give it four this time,” he said, jaw clenched with effort. The impact of the blow coincided with the flaring-open of the door, with the latter just preceding it by some instants.

Sal’s revolver was bedded within the side pocket of his coat, but reared perpendicularly so that the whole coat hem rose with it to a squat-nosed projection. “Clear as a bell!” he reported sanguinely.

Again Abbazzia’s eyes squinted. “How many times ’dl sound off?” he growled truculently.

Sal looked slightly taken back. “I only caught two,” he admitted.

Abbazzia’s face twisted into a violent blob of rage, like unbaked dough squeezed between the hands of a pastry cook. “You lyin’—!” he exploded virulently. “I done it four times! You’re going to tell me it’s twice, haa?”

He coiled a forearm far back of his own shoulder, swung rabidly with it, caught the bodyguard flat-handed on the side of the face with a sound like wet linen being pounded on a clothesline. Then again on a pendulum-like reverse swing. The third slap only missed contact because Sal veered his head acutely aside, without however moving his body back.

Hand poulticing his stricken cheek, his attitude was one of rueful, misunderstood loyalty. “Hold it, boss,” he protested virtuously. “Hold it a minute.”

“I don’t like for nobody to lie to me, see?” Abbazzia shrilled.

“I caught the first one sitting in the chair, waiting for it to come. By the time the second one come, I was halfway through the door already. Naturally, I missed the last two because I wasn’t in the room no more by that time. What should I do, sit there counting ’em off on my fingers? If them things was wrong-way bullets, four would be too many to wait for. While I’m waiting to count, you’re—” He left it eloquently unfinished.

Abbazzia took a moment to consider this, crinkling his eyes speculatively first, then widening them in elated appreciation. “Yeah!” he concurred with enthusiasm. “That was the smart thing to do! It’s the speed what counts when I’m sending for you, not the arithmetic.” He turned his head a moment in oblique disparagement. “Whyd’n’t you think of that, Carmine?” And to the rest of them, as though he had been the one taking Sal’s part all along and they had been in opposite judgment: “See what a smart boy I got here? What’re you trying to tell me, he ain’t smart?” Again his hand went out toward Sal, but this time to clap him on the shoulder rewardingly, to squeeze his biceps affectionately. Even to pinch the point of his chin and wag it playfully to and fro.

He reached into his pocket, took out a billfold, took something out of that, prodded it down into Sal’s breast pocket like a handkerchief. “Blow your nose on that,” he instructed jovially.

“Now clear out and lemme get some sleep.” He crossed his forearms, fanned them apart, in general room-wide dismissal. They went in pairs for the most part, Carmine with the blonde, Sal with the brunette, the other two to do night-long sentinel duty, one downstairs, one in the hall. No good nights were said. Perhaps good-nights were for people who lived less dangerously; just to survive the night itself, that alone was sufficient well-being.

“Take good care of him for us,” the blonde warned, with an undertone of jealousy.

“And I’m the girl that can do it,” was the pert answer.

The door closed.

“Lock it up on the inside,” Abbazzia ordered.

He looked at her from where he lay sprawled out in the chair. His look was lethargic, even somnolent. Not the somnolence caused by sleep, but the somnolence caused by the dregs of a spent passion that can no longer stir or vivify. His arms and legs seemed to fall away from him of their own accord, so that his sprawl became even looser.

“Undress me,” he commanded in a monotone.

The girl quickly advanced, a smile starched on her face. She slid downward onto her knees before him, reached gingerly forward toward the topmost button of his jacket, as quiveringly as though she were afraid of getting an electric shock.

He allowed the lids to close over his eyes, the better to retain whatever distorted images this was about to bring him.

Just as her fingertips touched the button, and almost as though it were an effect generated by her touching of it, there was a single, low knock on the outside of the door.

Her hands scampered back to her own person, like two ashamed things seeking refuge. They all but tried to burrow inside her clothing and hide themselves.

His eyelids went up, furrowed with annoyance. “Go see what they want now,” he told her. “One of ’em must have forgot something.”

She unlocked the door, but her arm held out across it still blocked the way. A hand flung the arm contemptuously aside.

An old, old woman all in black was standing there. Short and stocky, like he was. Her face long-dead; only the eyes still alive. Bitterly alive.

This black wasn’t the black of fashion, the black of Rome and New York, trim and just-so. This was the black the women of Catania wore, in the after-years of their lives, after they had lost their men. Homespun and shapeless, and with no intent to please. To show life was through, and that the wearer was through with life.

“Get out!” she commanded the girl stonily.

Stunned into alertness, his back reared from its supine position against the chair. “How’d you get here?” he breathed in amazement.

He became aware of the girl, still cringing there to one side of the two of them. “You heard her. Get out,” he repeated. “Wait outside. I’ll let you know when I want you back.”

She slipped around one side of the door-frame and was gone from sight, as furtively as though she were afraid to come into line with those terrible eyes staring so fixedly into the room at him, like messengers of denunciation.

“Rifiuto!” the old woman said balefully. Garbage.

He demanded: “Whaddya doin’ here like this? Don’tcha know it’s risky to come here?”

She pitched her head interrogatively. “Che significa, ‘risky’?”

“Pericoloso,” he translated unwillingly, as though averse to following her into the language of his former days, the one learned at her lips.

“Pericoloso per chi?” She gave a snort of scorn-curdled laughter.

Risky for whom? Risky for you, maybe. Not for me. I have killed no one. I have robbed no one. I go unafraid.

“Now that you’re here, whaddya want? Whadja come for? To say good-bye to me?”

She tossed her head impatiently, as when one is bored by having to return to an old subject that was closed long ago. “Ti dissi addio...”

I said good-bye to you ten long years ago, night after night in the dark, on my knees before the blessed image of Our Lady, drops of water falling from my eyes, drops of blood falling from my heart. She did not smile on me. It was too late then already for anything except good-bye. Then, it was finished. That was my good-bye.

“You’re talkin’ crazy,” he said uncomfortably. He got up from the chair. “Then whaddya here for, to preach to me?”

She grappled beneath the seedy black garb that encased her. A sheaf of banded currency was in her hand when she brought it out again.

“A ridarti...”

To give back this...

She showed it to him first, lying in her palm. Then she spat violently into the middle of it, and flung it away from her. It landed anywhere, she did not look to see, she did not want to know.

“Danaro insanguinato...”

Money with blood on it! The dead cry out from this kind of money. Their voices are within it.

“You’re a fool,” he sneered. “You could have had everything in the world, and you live like a rat in a hole—”

“No, sei tu l’idiota...”

No, you are the fool, not I! She struck her hand sharply against her chest.

“Io sono onesta...”

I am honest. I am a poor woman, but I am honest, clean. My husband worked hard all his life until he died worn-out, but he too was clean. We were not like you.

He strode toward her furiously, backed his arm in threat.

She didn’t flinch. “Colpiscimi...” Hit me. It will not be the first time.

“You lying old bat!” This time his arm completed the threat, he struck her across the face.

She tottered, regained her balance, only smiled sleepily. The eyes that looked at him held no pity, no softness, not any kind of feeling at all. They were eyes of glass, of agate in a statue.

“Questo e’ il momenta...”

This is the hour I knew would come. I have waited for it many years. Now it is here. In my village there was a saying when I was a young girl. “God punishes without having to use hands or feet.” I see the punishment before me now. I feel no pity for you. My heart is as dead as a stone. For I am one of those you have killed. The first, perhaps. More slowly than some of the others, but just as completely. I walk around in the grave you have put me in. And in the grave there are not mothers, only corpses.

She turned away abruptly, in leave-taking without farewell.

“It will be finished soon, anyway,” he heard her say stonily.

“They’ll never get me!” he shouted toward her. “D’ye hear what I’m saying? They’ll never—”

She looked back briefly, nearer the door now. “They do not have to. You will go just as surely, without them. Your years are already days, your days are minutes. You have the Bad Sickness in you. The sickness that creeps like a worm, and once it is in, cannot be got out again. No man’s hand needs to be raised against you...”

He stared at her in almost superstitious fright. “Even that you know—” he breathed in awe. “Who told you? Nobody knows that about me!” Mechanically, as if from some long-forgotten habit interred for years and now brought to the surface again by sudden instinctive fear, he made a sneaking, furtive sign of the cross. “What are you, a witch or something?”

She slitted her eyes at him in contempt. “Non v’era bisogno di dirlo...”

One does not have to be told. One knows. One sees the signs. This is nothing new. I saw it in my village, small as it was, when I was young. Even there it was not new. One crossed to the other side of the road in passing it by, that was all. I knew it had come into my house already when you were still only a boy of sixteen.

His breath hissed in stunned intake.

“La tazza, la forchetta...”

The cup you drank from, the fork you ate with, kept apart, hidden from the rest. They were always missing when I washed the things. Those were the signs that told me. You did not come to me for help. You went to the streets for help, instead. The streets where you already robbed the storekeepers, and roamed at night the leader of a pack, marauding with knives. And the streets gave you back what you had given to them. Now the mark is on you, and it is too late for help anymore.

The arms and the legs die, and you cannot move anymore. Then the tongue dies, and there are no more words, only sounds like the animals make. Childhood comes back, but going the other way, rushing toward you from the grave.

“Shut up!” he squalled, and cupped the heels of his hands tight against his ears.

She turned away with a flick of disgust. The door opened at her grip. He was watching her now with a mixture of disbelief and defiant bravado.

“You walking out on me this way? You too? My own mother? All right, go ahead! Who needs you? Vecchia. Just an old woman. You shut up all these years, though, didn’t you, when things were going good?” he railed. “And now cuz you think they’re going bad, you turn on me like all the rest.”

She released a scoffing breath.

He changed suddenly, softened for a moment. “Close the door,” he coaxed. “Come on back in. Stay with me awhile. I’m lonely. I ain’t got nobody of my own. These others— D’you remember when I was a kid, and you used to make lasagne for Vito and me, and bring ’em hot to the table—?”

“Quella non ero io...”

That was not I, that was another woman, long gone now. A woman whose prayers were not answered.

“You’re my mother, you can’t change that,” he told her, between a snicker and a derisive grin, like one who is certain he holds the upper hand.

“Io non sono piu’ tua madre...” she whispered smolderingly.

Mother, no. Just a woman who bore a devil. The woman who once bore you says good-bye to you.

The door clapped closed and she was gone.

His mouth opened in a gape of disbelief, a disbelief such as one might feel if one stood back and watched one’s own self betray one.

Then it clicked shut, and defiance spread over his face once more. He swept his arm out and around before him in contemptuous dismissal. “All right, let ’em all go!” he bellowed. “All of ’em! I don’t need nobody! I’ll make it alone! I come up by myself, and I’ll stay up by myself!”

He went over and looked into the mirror, and straightened the hug of the padding that sloped upon his shoulders.

“It’s me for me, all by myself, just like it’s always been,” he said aloud to the scowling reflection facing him. “If God ain’t going to forgive you, if God ain’t going to give you a break, then what good is God? They can have God. I’ll take Abbazzia. What good is being good? You stay poor all your life, like her and eighty million others. You get run over by a car like my brother Vito did, and they let you lie there in the rain, newspapers from a trash-can spread over you. Then ’cause a priest comes and mumbles over you, that means you’re going to heaven. Who wants to go to heaven in the rain, on an empty stomach, soaking newspapers thrown over you, without a dime in your pocket? The hell with heaven. He worked hard, he never stole, he never scrapped, he never pulled a knife on no one. He was good, and look what he got. I was smart, and look what I got—”

He flourished his own hand toward his reflection’s hand, so that his reflection’s eyes could see the explosively brilliant diamond on the little finger.

He picked up the money she had flung on the floor. “There ain’t no good or bad, anyway,” he grunted. “They just tell you that in the church when you’re a kid, to keep you from getting wise that everyone else has something, and you ain’t got nothing. There’s only dumb and smart. And if you don’t want to be the one, then you gotta be the other.”

He riffled the money back into orderly shape, tucked it into his billfold, put it away.

He summed up his life, content with it, proud of it.

“Abbazzia picked smart for his.”

Then he went over to the door, and opened it. He gave a curt summons, without looking. “Hey, you! You can come in now. Whaddya waiting for? Didn’t you see her go?”

He turned away without waiting, and took out a cigarette and a pocket lighter. Then before he had brought the two of them together, he stopped again and glanced back at the door in angered disbelief. It was still open just as he had left it. No one had come in through it.

He flung the cigarette down, went over to it a second time, and looked out.

There was no one in sight. The hall was empty.

He stalked across the room to the telephone, wrenched the earpiece off the crotch that held it, and shouted harshly, “Hey, down there! Is that bi— Is that girl around? Tell her to get back up here, and make it snappy, or I’ll—”

A man’s voice, subdued, almost faint by comparison to the violence in his own, intercepted: “Yes, sir?”

“That girl—” he fairly shrieked. “I want her up here! I don’t let nobody make me wait like this!”

“A — a red-headed young lady?” the man at the other end finally hazarded.

“Who remembers what they look like!” thundered Abbazzia. “Yeah! Red-headed.”

“I’m sorry, sir. She left the building.”

There was a moment of sudden stunned silence. “She what? What’d you just say?”

“She’s not in the building any longer,” the voice repeated. “I saw her leave by the front entrance.”

A sudden blue bead of flame winked up from the incessantly manipulated pocket lighter in his free hand, and noticing for the first time what he had been doing with it, he flung it violently away from him, as though it, somehow, were to blame for this unprecedented affront, this laceration to his dignity, offered to boot not even by a subordinate but by a lower form of life altogether.

He picked up at long last the remaining part of the phone, the stem part. His voice was less raucous now, more bated. “That man I left down there. Put him on. Tell him I want to talk to him a minute.”

“The man that was posted here by the switchboard?” the voice inquired, to make sure of correct identification.

“Him! Get a move on!”

“I’m sorry. He left with her.”

The stunning impact of the news made Abbazzia take a step back on one leg, as though the telephone had suddenly pushed him away.

He was having trouble with his breathing now; it came too full one moment, too scant the next. He didn’t answer; he closed off the connection almost furtively. As though afraid to leave even that small orifice leading into his room: an electrical impulse within a sheathed wire.

The pupils of his eyes moved too far over into one corner, then too far back into the opposite corner, then all the way back to the first again, never remaining at calm center. Like pools of quicksilver clinging to a ledge.

He darted a look at the lateral wall. “Wait’ll I get Sal in here! Gotta get Sal in here—!”

He scurried toward it on the bias, giving a heedless shove to a chair that nearly overturned it, to get it out of the way rather than go around it, so intent was he on getting over there fast.

He struck at the wall, and it gave back a loud but flat-sounding throbbing, that raced around the room and died again into silence. Then he struck once more, and then once more. Silence came back again each time. He even turned around to face the door, waiting to witness Sal’s headlong rush across the threshold, as at the rehearsal. He even took a precautionary step out of the way, to allow him plenty of clearance, so that they wouldn’t collide.

Nothing occurred. The door remained lifeless.

This time his arm moved like a triphammer. Its motions blurred, they could no longer be identified individually, so fast it struck, so incessantly. So frightenedly, so despairingly. He even cried out his name: “Sal!” And then again: “Sal! Why don’t you come in here?”

His arm suddenly dropped, and swung there fallow.

“Gone,” he panted. “Him too.”

Then he laced around with the swiftness of a top when a child whisks the wound-up guide cord out from under it, and flung himself at the opposite wall, across from the first. Both his arms were out, as when one runs forward to embrace someone or something, enclose it, draw it to you. Thus his whole body careened into the wall in that position, arms akimbo, hands overhead, chest pressed flat against it.

For a moment he lay that way, like a cardboard cutout of a man pasted flat against a wall-surface; every inert turn of his body expressing the one word “despair.” Then his hands began to ripple, beating tattoo with their palms, like a drummer using the plaster for his drumhead. Faster and faster they went, frenzied, battering. And his voice-box, partly stopped up by the wall and made hollow-sounding against it, kept calling out in agonized repetition the second one’s name, the one who was supposed to be behind there on this side. And broke and crumbled at last into pleadings and sobbings that could not have carried through to the other side even had somebody been there. “Carmine, come in, I need you! Carmine, you’re there, ain’t you? Carmine, I’ll give you anything you want, only come in! It’s empty all around me, I’m by myself in here!”

No one, nothing; no sign, no sound. The door stayed mute.

His hands fell still at last, couldn’t strike any more. For a moment they stayed in place against the wall, then like five-pronged stains first one and then the other slowly coursed down it and dropped off.

His cheek remained flat against it, nuzzling it, as if he held it in some kind of crazed affection, because it had once meant protection, even if it didn’t anymore.

Then his head turned slowly, and he looked across his shoulder at the door, bulge-eyed, fearful.

Panic. Agoraphobia, with its limitless black horizons and chill, unimpeded death-winds. Nothing at hand to shield, to shelter, to cover one over. His voice whispered its terror. “I’m wide open. They can walk right in off the street and get me! There’s nobody in-between anymore!”

He flung himself against it, as he had the two walls, and the impact of his body tossed it closed with a violent clout. His hands, trembling, groped for and turned the lock. And then a last slap against the center of the panel, to hold that fast.

He turned and looked and saw the door of the clothes closet. He opened it, and backed in, and half-crouched there. And drew the door partly to in front of him. For a moment only the four tight-pressed tips of his fingers studded along its edge could be seen, and the brightness of his recessed eyes, glistening with watery animalistic sparkle. And his breath could be heard, against the cavernous echo-chamber that the closet became for it.

Briefly only, he stayed like this. It brought no palliation. Unreasoning agoraphobia wanted more: a hole in the ground, a burrow. Something tighter, closer overhead.

He came out again. And like a naked man who plunges into icy water, the open room caused him to draw shivering breaths.

He made for the bed, and dropped down against the edge of it, the way children do when they’re about to say their prayers. But he had no gods, he was his own god, and therefore he had nothing to pray to. Then he lowered himself to the floor from there, all but his rump, and padding on the flats of his hands, like some odd, ungainly animal, drew his head and shoulders in under the bed. Then lolled over on his side, and switched his legs in after him, and then drew his knees up close against his stomach. And lay coiled like that, like some unborn foetus pulsing with premature breath.

His dilated eyes were sighted out along a two-dimensional garden patch of scuffed beige carpet-flowers that seemed to climb upward in their symmetrical rows, shutting out the whole rest of the world. Their perfume was dust, and they lay like dead, unstirring. The edge of the bed came down and cut them off short. They had no sedative effect for terror; they were the flowers of delirium, that come back at night in dreams if looked at too closely and too long.

Now swiftly, within the space of breath-choked minutes, his mania blew inside-out, like an umbrella in a gale. Or like a sleight-of-hand performer who draws a length of gauze through his fingers and causes it to change magically from one hue to the next. Confinement, craved just now, suddenly became the form of terror itself. Agoraphobia turned into claustrophobia. Both were still the same terror, with another name.

His hand pounded the floor beside him, “I can’t stay here like a rat in a trap, waiting for ’em to come and get me! I gotta get out of here! Gotta get out of here fast!” He lashed his legs out into the open, then padded backward on the flats of his hands until his head was in the clear.

“Gotta get on the outside!” he kept muttering. “Gotta lose myself on the outside! That’s the only thing’ll save me.”

He ran to where the suitcase was standing, tossed the lid up and over. His ravening fingers disemboweled its contents; neckties of tropical brilliance splashed up, like a neon-geyser, to fall back around him and stay that way, in static ripples. Shirts threw up their empty sleeves like struggling ghosts and expired lifeless on the floor.

He was still talking brokenly to his unseen companion: self-preservation. “Who needs neckties, when it’s your neck itself you gotta save?”

Then a gun, bedded in layers of undergarments. He inserted it underneath his coat somewhere. “The only one you can trust, anyway; the one that’s right on you.” Then more money went into the already sausage-plump billfold.

He stood up and turned to go. “That’s all you need,” he said. “That’s all, in this-here world. Money and a gun. A gun and money. Everything else you can get with one or the other of them two.” And leered with his own wisdom.

He went over to the closed door once more — for the last time, this was to be — and opened it sparingly to look out.

A man was standing down the hall, where the elevator-shaft door was. Not moving, not doing anything. Just standing motionless, head lowered attentively, newspaper spread open just across his breastbone. The brim of his hat kept the light from the upper part of his face, as though he were wearing an eyeshade.

He didn’t turn at the sound of Abbazzia opening his door, though he must have heard it in all that stillness. He didn’t even seem to be breathing, he was so still.

Abbazzia’s fear-sensitized nerves jerked and recoiled throughout the length and width of his body. He knew. These were the lookouts, these who stood like this. He knew the ways of those who stalk to kill, he knew them well, they’d done his own errands for him too many a time. Sometimes he’d even watched them at a distance, from within the safe anonymity of a parked car. That rigor-mortis-immobility, the down-held head so that the eyes could not be seen to move, the sheltering hat-brim, the newspaper that provided the excuse. Then when the quarry had passed, they made the signal that doomed him. In many ways, in many different ways, they made it. They lowered the newspaper, or blew their nose on a handkerchief, or threw a cigarette away, so that it made a momentary red streak across the dark. All these were the messages of death. Who should know them better than he, he had prearranged so many of them himself.

The ribbon’s-width of door-opening had already been effaced, instantly, at first glance. “The window—” came racing down the millway of his thoughts like a bright pebble. “There may be a fire ex-cape — get out through there.” He’d first used the word at seven with an x; he’d used it that way ever since, and never known in all that time that it was wrong; no one had ever told him so. A wrong word used many times throughout a life; a wrong deed done many times throughout a life; wherein lies the difference?

He didn’t draw the shade up, he simply slanted it aside, making a crevice to look through. He saw at once that under the ledge there was nothing, only a sheer drop all the way down to the street.

He was cut off, sealed up in here. The room that had been chosen for a sanctuary because of its inaccessibility, had turned for that very same reason into a tomb.

He lurched with sagging knee-joints back deeper into the room, pushing away an impeding table, propping himself in passing against the top of a chair. Then he stood there a moment, both hands inter-crossed and pressed flat against the center of his forehead. As if there were a pasty-colored star affixed there, with spreading fingers for its many rays.

“I’m finished!” he shuddered deeply. “I’ll never get out of here by myself, alive!”

Silence at first, both of voice and of thought. Then that “by myself” began coming back, like an echo, like an afterthought. Louder, more insistent each time, as though he had shouted it out at the top of his voice just now (and he had barely given it breath).

“By myself—” “By myself—” “BY MYSELF—”

Ricocheting, playing back to him, glancing off the walls themselves in eerie polyphonic impetus.

His hand dropped from his forehead, suddenly tightened, as if it were grasping an idea, holding onto it for dear life.

“By myself, not a chance. But with somebody else I could make it!”

Then his hand opened a little, almost let the idea go. “Where’s the somebody else for me, though? They’ve all run out. And it would have to be somebody that they’re afraid of. Somebody bigger than them. Bigger than them and bigger than me, both—”

His hand tightened again. Far tighter than it had been the time before. The idea was caught fast now, had taken form, had taken body.

“Them!” he breathed, as if in amazement at the idea’s simplicity, its logic; in fact, that it had not occurred any sooner than it had. He drove the clenched hand into its opposite now, like a mallet. “Sure! Them! Why not them? I’ve always laughed at them— They were for the chumps— For the little guys, not the big guys like me— They were for decoration. They turned their backs, when I passed the word. But always with a hand sticking up behind them, like a tail. All I had to do was put something in it, and then they were never around where I didn’t want them to be at a certain time. Now I want them to be around, that’s all. It worked that way, why shouldn’t it work this way just as good?”

He hastened to the phone, caught it up.

“I got no bodyguard left?” he breathed above an hysterical, abortive chuckle. “I’ll make a bodyguard out of them!”

Then he talked into the phone.

“Gimme the police,” he ordered.

It was a commanding knock. A double one first, then a single one after. Urgent, demanding. As if to say: “We are the police, and we don’t like being kept waiting.”

He turned with a grin on his face. “Coming, boys!” he hallelu-jahed. “Ri-i-ight with you!”

The brassware under his fingers was like a caress, as he unfastened it. It was like gold, and he had always loved to touch gold. Just for its own sake alone.

This door that had kept death out all the long night through — he opened it now to let life in.

He saw their faces first. Life had three faces. There were three of them, one on each side of the opening, the third in mid-center. Oh, what beautiful faces they had; oh, what handsome guys they were; never such good-looking faces before. Next his eyes feasted on their uniforms, like moths that gorge themselves on fabric. The blue service-garb of the Police Department of the City of New York. The brass buttons, the visored caps, the pewter-looking badges affixed over the heart.

Their eyes regarded him, and that was all. Eyes that revealed nothing, other than that they saw him. They didn’t speak; he was the one did.

“Gee, am I glad to see you fellows! I never was so glad to see anyone in my life before—!”

“You are?” one said, and that was all.

Beside himself, and scarcely knowing what he was doing, he even tried to press the hand of one of them. The man passively let him do so, without making any move of his own. His hand did not return the pressure, and when Abbazzia let it go, it fell back lifeless, boneless, to where it had been before. Thus, there was no handclasp exchanged, for it takes two to produce one.

Two of them came forward now into the room, one turning to the third as they did so and instructing, quiet-voiced: “You wait outside here by the door. We’ll be right out.”

The door was closed again, locked on the inside, crisply.

Abbazzia had been made almost antic by happiness. He cupped his hands together, leaving an orifice. He blew into it zestfully. He rubbed them together, in anticipation of imminent welcome activity.

“Now I’ll get what I’m taking with me,” he told them. “Won’t take no time at all.”

The second officer had crossed to the window, as if to draw the shade. Then seeing that Abbazzia already had it down, he modified his intention, simply stood there with his back to it, in a waiting attitude, hands behind him.

“You won’t need that,” the other one suggested helpfully to Abbazzia.

“No, I guess you’re right,” Abbazzia conceded. He cast aside the rejected garment, stooped again to his task.

“Y’got a gun?” the man asked him matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Better let us take it,” the patrolman said quietly.

“Okay, if you think it’s better that way,” Abbazzia assented accommodatingly. He drew it out, offered it to him grip-first.

“Take his gun for him, Charlie,” the first one instructed his fellow-patrolman without offering to touch it himself.

The second one uncoupled his hands, came over, accepted it from Abbazzia, and disposed of it somewhere within his uniform jacket, unbuttoning it, rebuttoning it again.

“Thanks a lot,” said Abbazzia absently, bending once more.

“You’re welcome,” answered the first one tonelessly.

Abbazzia straightened again, about to insert something within his own clothing this time.

“You won’t need that,” he was told, as tonelessly as ever.

Abbazzia stopped long enough to give him a blank look. “Oh, this I will,” he contradicted. “This time you’re wrong. This is dough. You need that every place you go.”

“There’s one place you don’t,” the policeman said expressionlessly. “Not where you’re going.”

Abbazzia stopped to look at him more fully, more uncomprehendingly than the first time. His look became a stare. “What d’ya mean? I don’t get you—”

The other one spoke unexpectedly, from behind them. “Let’s get finished, shall we, Mike? This is no fun anymore.”

Abbazzia turned sharply to look at him. He had a gun held in his hand. Not the one Abbazzia had just handed over to him, but one that must have come out of his police-holster. He wasn’t aiming it, it just lay idle in his hand, sidewise, as if he were testing its weight.

Abbazzia turned back in consternation to the first one. “What does he need that for?” he asked with quickening tension.

“I don’t know,” was the dispassionate answer. “Ask him.”

But even as he answered, he was unlimbering one of his own.

Abbazzia’s voice was beginning to throb. “Wait a minute — I don’t get it—”

“You don’t get it?” said the one before him, meticulously repetitive. “He don’t get it,” he said to the one behind.

“Something’s wrong here—”

This time the policeman gave a slight head-shake. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s just the way it should be.”

“No, it isn’t! I feel peculiar. You’re making me feel peculiar — the way you’re looking at me — something about the way you’re looking at me—” He could hardly breathe. Suddenly suspicion, seeping into the overheated crannies of his mind all this while like a combustible gas, ignited, exploded into a ghastly white flash of certainty.

“You ain’t real cops—” His lower jaw dangled loosely, as though the mental detonation just now had unhinged it. He got it to cleave to its upper part long enough for utterance. “Barney — Maxwell — didn’t — send you!”

“What d’ya know?” the one in front of him apprised the one behind him. “Barney Maxwell didn’t send us.”

The voice in back of Abbazzia said, “Who’s Barney Maxwell?”

“Crooked police captain,” the first one explained. “Must’ve been trying to make a deal with him, to get in out of the open.”

At this, Abbazzia’s eyes flickered closed in expiring confirmation.

The patrolman plucked briefly at his own coat sleeve to indicate it. “So the cop suits worked?” he leered at Abbazzia. “It’s new. First time. And when a thing’s still new, you can count on it paying off.”

Abbazzia sank downward onto his knees between the two of them, into the little cranny their bodies made for him.

(“That’s smart,” the rearward one said approvingly, “less distance for you to fall.”)

His face was turned upward. He started to talk for his life. Only, lives can’t be put into words. “Fellas. Fellas—”

“We are fellas,” the face bending over him said.

“Fellas, my money— All my money, fellas— Much more than is in this room—”

“What d’ya think, we came here to rob you?” the face smiled. “We ain’t thieves.”

His voice came straight from his heart now. Every heartbeat swelled it, thinned it, and they were dynamo-quick. “Two minutes. Just give me two minutes. Two minutes, that ain’t long to ask for. Just one minute. Don’t give it to me cold. Just let me pull myself together, just let me get ready.”

“You’re ready now,” the overhanging face said. And it said crisply to the other one, “Get a pillow. Use one of them.”

He put his hand downward onto Abbazzia’s shoulder; not heavily, but lightly, as if just to balance him there in place. As you hold some inanimate thing steady, keep it from toppling over, until you are ready to have to do with it — whatever it is you have to do with it.

Abbazzia made an infantile puking sound, as when a suckling infant regurgitates upon its mother’s milk, and lurched sideward onto his shoulder and hip. Then like a bisected snake that still has reflexes of motion left to it, he tried to writhe in underneath the bed, to gain the shelter of its iron frame.

The man in the police uniform made a wide scooping motion with his foot, as when you sweep something back toward you that has eluded you, whether inert refuse or scurrying vermin it matters not; and Abbazzia had to avert his face from the scraping shoe. Then the man recoiled his foot and drove his shoe into Abbazzia’s lower face, along the floor.

There was dental pain, and bone pain, and a pale-blue flash, like shattered starlight on a disrupted mill-pond. Sluggish warmth backed against the seams of Abbazzia’s mouth, and peered forth, emulsion-thick, a laggard bead at a time.

“Hang onto him a minute, be right with you,” one of the voices recommended belatedly, as though its owner had only then just glanced around at what was taking place.

“Got him,” the other assured.

Abbazzia’s eyes, like circular mosaics embedded in the floor, stared upward, could see only the ceiling now: an edgeless expanse of white. It was like a burial ground suspended upside-down over him, a potter’s field with a fill of white clay.

“A minute— Only a minute—” he whispered.

The sole of a shoe came down across his throat, full stamping-power withheld though, and kept him pinned there. He could not raise his head at the one side of it, he could not raise his trunk at the other. His fingers scratched the empty air, his arms jittered upward and back in opposing directions like someone flat on his back playing the strings of an invisible harp. Once his flexing fingertips caught onto trouser-leg fabric, at sheer random, and pulled it back, revealing gnarled pebble-white shank and a triangular banding of elastic garter.

Someone chuckled.

Now from opposite sides of the white ceiling-expanse their faces curved over toward him. There was a gusty impact, as when someone drives a blow into the plumpness of a pillow.

Abbazzia gave a choking whinny, and striving mortally managed to tilt the back of his head a little bit off the floor. At once the entire length of body under one of the faces came into perspective. The man was holding a pillow before his own mid-section, the curve of one arm supporting it. With the other hand, clenched into a fist, he kept walloping the pillow, driving each successive blow deeper into it. Until he had driven a deep hollow into the inner side of it, opposite his own abdomen.

Then neatly and economically he inserted the gun into the pit he had punched within the pillow. His eyes scanned Abbazzia’s form steadily for a moment, as though he were taking aim sight-unseen, by dint of finger-feeling alone. Without raising them, he remarked to his fellow-killer, “Get your foot outta the way, I don’t want to nick you.”

The waist of the shoe suddenly left Abbazzia’s throat. His windpipe seemed to unfold, like a rubber tube that has been trodden flat and slowly fills out again.

The shots followed immediately afterward, without any further preliminary.

The pain came first, then the throbbing drumbeats of the sound. There were many pains, and many drumbeats, but they all came unvaryingly in that order. The pain, and then the stifled thumping sound, and then the pain again, and then the sound. Twice, thrice, four times, five, six.

The pain, each time, was like a rabid needle going into him, drawing after it a scarlet thread of fire. The withdrawal-stitch that followed each plunge of the needle into the fabric of his life was equally excruciating. And then it would plunge in again in a new place, to depths he’d never known he’d had until now, drawing its flaming, snaking thread after it, in sutures that never were over and done with. For the old place continued to hurt no less, while the new place quickly matched it in height of agony.

He moved very little, just rocked a little from side to side, with an ebbing motion, like something settling to rest. He didn’t cry out. This pain was too deep to be voiced. It lacked the breathing spells in-between, in which to gather voice and eject it.

His eyesight fogged, as when someone breathes too closely on a glass, and then cleared again momentarily, but not to the full expanse it had had before, just a small clear patch in the center, with mist all around its edges.

He saw a feather come wafting sluggishly down, in zigzag graduated volplane glides from side to side, like something suspended on a hidden thread. It looked so enormous, like the lush tail-plume of an ostrich. It landed on his chest someplace, was lost to sight.

High up above he saw a trace of smoke-haze. This went up the other way, as slowly as the feather had come down, erasing itself to nothingness as it went. First it was there, then it was gone.

His eyesight dimmed again, and was no more.

His hearing lingered on, futile, moribund.

An inquiring tap on wood sounded, and a voice answered it, “Yeah, we’re through. We’re coming.”

The hard hub of a shoe pounded against his ribs, like a mallet swung underhand seeking to drive them apart. The pain this time was not of needles, but of splinters. They did not course in and out as the needles had, they remained in his side, crushed, fragmented. As though a huge burr were being held pressed tight up against him.

“Take that with you,” a voice said way off in the distance. “That’s Big Matt’s regards.”

A door-latch clicked, many rooms away it seemed.

And in that other, far-off room, that was the world now, that was life now, men exchanged a brief remark or two in passing one another, as he had once himself when he was still among them.

“How’d it sound?”

“Like a guy snapping his fingers at a crap game, that’s about all.”

And then someone laughed. That was the last time he heard laughter. Only the living can laugh, only the living can hear it. “That was the crap game of death, buster. We cleaned up in there.”

Then momentarily a voice came again. “Close the door,” it jeered. “Let him die in privacy.”

A latch gave a single clocklike tick, and then there was nothing more of other men, their voices nor their stirrings nor the pain they gave. He was alone in a world of his own, a world between two other worlds, a blend of each: one of which he had always known, one of which he was still to know.

It was twilight in this world. A peculiar India-ink sort of twilight, in which long horizontal bands of dark, like brush-strokes on a Japanese print, kept ebbing slowly downward, with alternate bands of light between each one. As though somebody were endlessly unfolding a Venetian blind, a blind which never found bottom.

It was un dormetto, but a particular moment of un dormetto caught and held static, prolonged beyond time-reckoning. The moment just before full sleep comes, the moment just before awakening sets in. An empty echo-chamber of the things that were, or the things that were about to be. In each sleeping-time, passed through at a single moment; but in this death-sleep, stretched out into a lifetime of nothingness, the nothingness of a lifetime.

Because it was twilight, and once long ago she had used to call him at twilight, a memory came back from somewhere, and found its way into the emptiness.

She was calling him, from the high window of a six-story tenement. Patiently calling, over and over. Never answered, never even acknowledged by an upward turn of the head. Until at last the calling faltered, and wore out, and was gone, defeated until the next time, the next twilight, when it would be defeated again.

“Giacopo! Giacoppino! vieni a mangiare...”

Jake. Jakie. Come in and eat.

Over and over again, each twilight. Never answered, never obeyed. Until twilight ended, and it was night, and it was too late. Tired, defeated, the call came no more. Until all the twilights ended, and it was too late. Until boyhood ended, and it was forever night, the long dark night of wayward manhood, and it was too late.

“Giacopo! Giacoppino...!” Fainter and fainter, going away now. Just a memory now, just an echo drifting through eternity.

He stirred restlessly, and his heart answered, muted, twenty years too late. His lips struggled to pronounce the answer, the answer she had waited for so long and never had. His tongue peered forth, drew back. His whole head moved with striving. And then a sighing word stole forth. A single word.

“Vengo...”

One word, that would have changed his life, and changed his death, had it been given then instead of now.

And then the effort to obey set in, coursing slowly through him like some hypodermically introduced plasma. His struggles now were terrible to watch, they were so very small. A finger quirked, a foot twitched, an eyelid flickered as if the light of life still shone too strongly on it. In a moment, or in forty, one knee had switched up toward his body like a piston-rod and then gone down again; switched up, and then at last stayed up. And then his trunk gave a half-turn over, and his hand caught in the bed-stuff above him, and clawed, and stayed.

Then in a little while the other hand was up there with it. But his head hung down between them of its own weight. He’d raise it, but it would go down again. Until a time came, in the blank space that now was time, when it too stayed up.

The night was getting late, and the supper was getting old, but he’d get there if it took him all eternity. For a spark within him said to heed her call.

The tenement stairs were steep and hard to climb — they always had been, even in those days — and he kept slipping back and slipping back, sometimes only a floor or two, sometimes all the way to the bottom, but without hurt, without bruising hardness.

Until at last he breasted them, he reached the top. There only remained the door now, the door to their tenement flat. He could see it over there from where he was, here.

He picked up his coat. He knew where to go for it. Strange, but he knew where to go for it. The sleeves were white-satin lined, but only before his arms had introduced themselves.

He’d been hurt in some kind of a street fight. It must have been a bad fight. It was starting to run down, now that he was perpendicular. He looked down at the floor, and there were dark polka dots all around him. Like splashes of Marsala wine.

Everything was so hard, even to get the buttons through the buttonholes. The buttons turned sticky after a while, and that made it even harder.

He even took the hat by the brim and gropingly settled it on his head. He had always been nattily dressed, impeccably so, these latter times of affluence and power. He still was, this last time of all. He didn’t look in the mirror, though; that was the one thing he didn’t do now.

He had difficulty with the door. Getting it open. His own leaning body kept pushing it back again each time. At last he got it to scrape past him all along one side, and that gave it clearance to swing free.

He saw it no more, knew of it no more; he was out in the hall now, up against the wall in the hall, standing very still, face inward, like a pupil being punished by being made to stand there face to wall. On the threshold where he’d just been lay a moistly glittering star, still pulsing with his life-force. Then the pulsing went out of it. A swirl of ruddy shellac remained, like a brush-stroke left by a careless painter.

He began to inch along the wall now, the flats of his hands patting each new place to see if it was there first, then his feet shifting over with a dragging scrape.

Death, pretending to be alive.

Then after a while he’d reached the point at which he’d have to cross in openness, because the elevator was on the other side. Three times he tried it, and three times he came right back to the wall again, to stay up on his feet. And once he kissed it with his lips, as if pleading with it not to abandon him. It seemed to shed a garnet tear over his predicament, which ran down slowly right where he was standing, and then thickened to a stop.

At last he pushed rudely at it, cast it away from him, and on jumbled, stiffly scissoring legs tottered head-low, to come against the matching wall on the opposite side. Journey’s end; no more groping, no more staggering, no more fears of leaving the wall. Thick satiny glass was there beside him, and a nubby little push-button, easy to find. He pressed it with his thumb. Within moments warm yellow light climbed behind the glass, filled it to its top like a tank. There was a muffled unlatching, and the glass slid away and there was open space before Abbazzia’s penitently down-hanging face.

A man was standing at the back of the car, his face down-turned, too, a newspaper held open just below it as if to catch it should it fall off out of sheer weariness. And midway between the two of them, a youth with a pillbox cap, too somnolent to look closely at Abbazzia.

Three vagrant people, as unaware of each other as a moment before birth, or a moment after death. Or for that matter, a moment in mid-life.

“Going up?” the boy asked sleepily.

“No,” Abbazzia whispered, “going down.”

The panel slid closed, and darkness slowly came up in it, pushing the light up out of it.

And as it did so, Abbazzia in turn slowly went down, his palms trailing the glass, lingeringly, to the last.

Then he rolled over very briefly just once on the floor.

Then the spark went out.

And then there was death, the great know-nothing part of life. Or had life perhaps been only the brief know-something part of an endless all-encompassing death?