Levine

The Feel of the Trigger

Abraham Levine, Detective of Brooklyn’s Forty-third Precinct, sat at a desk in the squadroom and worriedly listened to his heart skip every eighth beat. It was two o’clock on Sunday morning, and he had the sports section of the Sunday Times open on the desk, but he wasn’t reading it. He hadn’t been reading it for about ten minutes now. Instead, he’d been listening to his heart.

A few months ago, he’d discovered the way to listen to his heart without anybody knowing he was doing it. He’d put his right elbow on the desk and press the heel of his right hand to his ear, hard enough to cut out all outside sound. At first it would sound like underwater that way, and then gradually he would become aware of a regular clicking sound. It wasn’t a beating or a thumping or anything like that, it was a click-click-click-click — click-click—

There it was again. Nine beats before the skip that time. It fluctuated between every eighth beat and every twelfth beat. The doctor had told him not to worry about that, lots of people had it, but that didn’t exactly reassure him. Lots of people died of heart attacks, too. Lots of people around the age of fifty-three.

“Abe? Don’t you feel good?”

Levine guiltily lowered his hand. He looked over at his shift partner, Jack Crawley, sitting with the Times crossword puzzle at another desk. “No, I’m okay,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“About your heart?”

Levine wanted to say no, but he couldn’t. Jack knew him too well.

Crawley got to his feet, stretching, a big bulky harness bull. “You’re a hypochondriac, Abe,” he said. “You’re a good guy, but you got an obsession.”

“You’re right.” He grinned sheepishly. “I almost wish the phone would ring.”

Crawley mangled a cigarette out of the pack. “You went to the doctor, didn’t you? A couple of months ago. And what did he tell you?”

“He said I had nothing to worry about,” Levine admitted. “My blood pressure is a little high, that’s all.” He didn’t want to talk about the skipping.

“So there you are,” said Crawley reasonably. “You’re still on duty, aren’t you? If you had a bum heart, they’d retire you, right?”

“Right.”

“So relax. And don’t hope for the phone to ring. This is a quiet Saturday night. I’ve been waiting for this one for years.”

The Saturday night graveyard shift — Sunday morning, actually, midnight till eight — was usually the busiest shift in the week. Saturday night was the time when normal people got violent, and violent people got murderous, the time when precinct plainclothesmen were usually on the jump.

Tonight was unusual. Here it was, after two o’clock, and only one call so far, a bar hold-up over on 23rd. Rizzo and McFarlane were still out on that one, leaving Crawley and Levine to mind the store and read the Times.

Crawley now went back to the crossword puzzle, and Levine made an honest effort to read the sports section.

They read in silence for ten minutes, and then the phone rang on Crawley’s desk. Crawley scooped the receiver up to his ear, announced himself, and listened.

The conversation was brief. Crawley’s end of it was limited to yesses and got-its, and Levine waited, watching his wrestler’s face, trying to read there what the call was about.

Then Crawley broke the connection by depressing the cradle buttons, and said, over his shoulder, “Hold-up. Grocery store at Green and Tanahee. Owner shot. That was the beat cop, Wills.”

Levine got heavily to his feet and crossed the squadroom to the coatrack, while Crawley dialed a number and said, “Emergency, please.”

Levine shrugged into his coat, purposely not listening to Crawley’s half of the conversation. It was brief enough, anyway. When Crawley came over to get his own coat, he said, “DOA. Four bullets in him. One of these trigger-happy amateurs.”

“Any witnesses?”

“Wife. The beat man — Wills — says she thinks she recognized the guy.”

“Widow,” said Levine.

Crawley said, “What?”

Widow. Not wife any more, widow. “Nothing,” said Levine.

If you’re a man fifty-three years of age, there’s a statistical chance your heart will stop this year. But there’s no sense getting worried about it. There’s an even better statistical chance that it won’t stop this year. So, if you go to the doctor and he says don’t worry, then you shouldn’t worry. Don’t think morbid thoughts. Don’t think about death all the time, think about life. Think about your work, for instance.

But what if it so happens that your work, as often as not, is death? What if you’re a precinct detective, the one the wife calls when her husband just keeled over at the breakfast table, the one the hotel calls for the guest who never woke up this morning? What if the short end of the statistics is that end you most often see?

Levine sat in the squad car next to Crawley, who was driving, and looked out at the Brooklyn streets, trying to distract his mind. At two A.M.. Brooklyn is dull, with red neon signs and grimy windows in narrow streets. Levine wished he’d taken the wheel.

They reached the intersection of Tanahee and Green, and Crawley parked in a bus-stop zone. They got out of the car.

The store wasn’t exactly on the corner. It was two doors down Green, on the southeast side, occupying the ground floor of a red-brick tenement building. The plate-glass window was filthy, filled with show-boxes of Kellogg’s Pep and Tide and Premium Saltines. Inevitably, the letters SALADA were curved across the glass. The flap of the rolled-up green awning above the window had lettering on it, too: Fine Tailoring.

There were two slate steps up, and then the store. The glass in the door was so covered with cigarette and soft-drink decals it was almost impossible to see inside. On the reverse, they all said, “Thank you — call again.”

The door was closed now, and locked. Levine caught a glimpse of blue uniform through the decals, and rapped softly on the door. The young patrolman, Wills, recognized him and pulled the door open. “Stanton’s with her,” he said. “In back.” He meant the patrolman from the prowl car parked now out front.

Crawley said, “You got any details yet?”

“On what happened,” said Wills, “yes.”

Levine closed and locked the door again, and turned to listen.

“There weren’t any customers,” Wills was saying. “The store stays open till three in the morning, weekends. Midnight during the week. It was just the old couple — Kosofsky, Nathan and Emma — they take turns, and they both work when it’s busy. The husband — Nathan — he was out here, and his wife was in back, making a pot of tea. She heard the bell over the door—”

“Bell?” Levine turned and looked up at the top of the door. There hadn’t been any bell sound when they’d come in just now.

“The guy ripped it off the wall on his way out.”

Levine nodded. He could see the exposed wood where screws had been dragged out. Somebody tall, then, over six foot. Somebody strong, and nervous, too.

“She heard the bell,” said Wills, “and then, a couple minutes later, she heard the shots. So she came running out, and saw this guy at the cash register—”

“She saw him,” said Crawley.

“Yeah, sure. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, he took a shot at her, too, but he missed. And she fell flat on her face, expecting the next bullet to get her, but he didn’t fire again.”

“He thought the first one did it,” said Crawley.

“I don’t know,” said Wills. “He wasted four on the old guy.”

“He hadn’t expected both of them,” said Levine. “She rattled him. Did he clean the register?”

“All the bills and a handful of quarters. She figures about sixty-two bucks.”

“What about identification?” asked Crawley. “She saw him, right?”

“Right. But you know this kind of neighborhood. At first, she said she recognized him. Then she thought it over, and now she says she was mistaken.”

Crawley made a sour sound and said, “Does she know the old man is dead?”

Wills looked surprised. “I didn’t know it myself. He was alive when the ambulance got him.”

“Died on the way to the hospital. Okay, let’s go talk to her.”

Oh, God, thought Levine. We’ve got to be the ones to tell her.

Don’t think morbid thoughts. Think about life. Think about your work.

Wills stayed in front, by the door. Crawley led the way back. It was a typical slum neighborhood grocery. The store area was too narrow to begin with, both sides lined with shelves. A glass-faced enamel-sided cooler, full of cold cuts and potato salad and quarter-pound bricks of butter, ran parallel to the side shelves down the middle of the store. At one end there was a small ragged-wood counter holding the cash register and candy jars and a tilted stack of English Muffin packages. Beyond this counter were the bread and pastry shelves and, at the far end, a small frozen food chest. This row gave enough room on the customer’s side for a man to turn around, if he did so carefully, and just enough room on the owner’s side for a man to sidle along sideways.

Crawley led the way down the length of the store and through the dim doorway at the rear. They went through a tiny dark stock area and another doorway to the smallest and most overcrowded living room Levine had ever seen.

Mohair and tassels and gilt and lion’s legs, that was the living room. Chubby hassocks and overstuffed chairs and amber lampshades and tiny intricate doilies on every flat surface. The carpet-design was twists and corkscrews, in muted dark faded colors. The wallpaper was somber, with a curling ensnarled vine pattern writhing on it. The ceiling was low. This wasn’t a room, it was a warm crowded den, a little hole in the ground for frightened gray mice.

The woman sat deep within one of the overstuffed chairs. She was short and very stout, dressed in dark clothing nearly the same dull hue as the chair, so that only her pale frightened face was at first noticeable, and then the heavy pale hands twisting in her lap.

Stanton, the other uniformed patrolman, rose from the sofa, saying to the woman, “These men are detectives. They’ll want to talk to you a little. Try to remember about the boy, will you? You know we won’t let anything happen to you.”

Crawley asked him, “The lab been here yet?”

“No, sir, not yet.”

“You and Wills stick around up front till they show.”

“Right.” He excused himself as he edged around Levine and left.

Crawley took Stanton’s former place on the sofa, and Levine worked his way among the hassocks and drum tables to the chair most distant from the light, off to the woman’s left.

Crawley said, “Mrs. Kosofsky, we want to get the man who did this. We don’t want to let him do it again, to somebody else.”

The woman didn’t move, didn’t speak. Her gaze remained fixed on Crawley’s lips.

Crawley said, “You told the patrolman you could identify the man who did it.”

After a long second of silence, the woman trembled, shivered as through suddenly cold. She shook her head heavily from side to side, saying, “No. No, I was wrong. It was very fast, too fast. I couldn’t see him good.”

Levine sighed and shifted position. He knew it was useless. She wouldn’t tell them anything, she would only withdraw deeper and deeper into the burrow, wanting no revenge, no return, nothing but to be left alone.

“You saw him,” said Crawley, his voice loud and harsh. “You’re afraid he’ll get you if you talk to us, is that it?”

The woman’s head was shaking again, and she repeated, “No. No. No.”

“He shot a gun at you,” Crawley reminded her. “Don’t you want us to get him for that?”

“No. No.”

“Don’t you want us to get your money back?”

“No. No.” She wasn’t listening to Crawley, she was merely shaking her head and repeating the one word over and over again.

“Don’t you want us to get the man who killed your husband?”

Levine started. He’d known that was what Crawley was leading up to, but it still shocked him. The viciousness of it cut into him, but he knew it was the only way they’d get any information from her, to hit her with the death of her husband just as hard as they could.

The woman continued to shake her head a few seconds longer, and then stopped abruptly, staring full at Crawley for the first time. “What you say?”

“The man who murdered your husband,” said Crawley. “Don’t you want us to get him for murdering your husband?”

“Nathan?”

“He’s dead.”

“No,” she said, more forcefully than before, and half-rose from the chair.

“He died in the ambulance,” said Crawley doggedly, “died before he got to the hospital.”

Then they waited. Levine bit down hard on his lower lip, hard enough to bring blood. He knew Crawley was right, it was the only possible way. But Levine couldn’t have done it. To think of death was terrible enough. To use death — to use the fact of it as a weapon — no, that he could never do.

The woman fell back into the seat, and her face was suddenly stark and clear in every detail. Rounded brow and narrow nose and prominent cheekbones and small chin, all covered by skin as white as candle wax, stretched taut across the skull.

Crawley took a deep breath. “He murdered your husband,” he said. “Do you want him to go free?”

In the silence now they could hear vague distant sounds, people walking, talking to one another, listening to the radio or watching television, far away in another world.

At last, she spoke. “Brodek,” she said. Her voice was flat. She stared at the opposite wall. “Danny Brodek. From the next block down.”

“A boy?”

“Sixteen, seventeen.”

Crawley would have asked more, but Levine got to his feet and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Kosofsky.”

She closed her eyes.

In the phone book in the front of the store they found one Brodek — Harry R — listed with an address on Tanahee. They went out to the car and drove slowly down the next block to the building they wanted. A taxi passed them, its vacancy light lit. Nothing else moved.

This block, like the one before it and the one after it, was lined on both sides with red brick tenements, five stories high. The building they were looking for was two-thirds of the way down the block. They left the car and went inside.

In the hall, there was the smell of food. The hall was amber tile, and the doors were dark green, with metal numbers. The stairs led up abruptly to the left, midway down the hall. Opposite them were the mailboxes, warped from too much rifling.

They found the name, shakily capital-lettered on an odd scrap of paper and stuck into the mailbox marked 4-D.

Above the first floor, the walls were plaster, painted a green slightly darker than the doors. Sounds of television filtered through most of the doors. Crawley waited at the fourth floor landing for Levine to catch up. Levine climbed stairs slowly, afraid of being short of breath. When he was short of breath, the skipped heart beats became more frequent.

Crawley rapped on the door marked 4-d. Television sounds came through this one, too. After a minute, the door opened a crack, as far as it would go with the chain attached. A woman glared out at them. “What you want?”

“Police,” said Crawley. “Open the door.”

“What you want?” she asked again.

“Open up,” said Crawley impatiently.

Levine took out his wallet, flipped it open to show the badge pinned to the ID label. “We want to talk to you for a minute,” he said, trying to make his voice as gentle as possible.

The woman hesitated, then shut the door and they heard the clinking of the chain being removed. She opened the door again, releasing into the hall a smell of beer and vegetable soup. She said, “All right. Come.” Turning away, she waddled down an unlit corridor toward the living room.

This room was furnished much like the den behind the grocery store, but the effect was different. It was a somewhat larger room, dominated by a blue plastic television set with a bulging screen. An automobile chase was careening across the screen, pre-war Fords and Mercuries, accompanied by frantic music.

A short heavy man in T-shirt and work pants and slippers sat on the sofa, holding a can of beer and watching the television set. Beyond him, a taller, younger version of himself, in khaki slacks and flannel shirt with the collar turned up, was watching, with a cold and wary eye, the entrance of the two policemen.

The man turned sourly, and his wife said, “They’re police. They want to talk to us.”

Crawley walked across the room and stood in front of the boy. “You Danny Brodek?”

“So what?”

“Get on your feet.”

“Why should I?”

Before Crawley could answer, Mrs. Brodek stepped between him and her son, saying rapidly, “What you want Danny for? He ain’t done nothing. He’s been right here all night long.”

Levine, who had waited by the corridor doorway, shook his head grimly. This was going to be just as bad as the scene with Mrs. Kosofsky. Maybe worse.

Crawley said, “He told you to say that? Did he tell you why? Did he tell you what he did tonight?”

It was the father who answered. “He didn’t do nothing. You make a Federal case out of everything, you cops. Kids maybe steal a hubcap, knock out a streetlight, what the hell? They’re kids.”

Over Mrs. Brodek’s shoulder, Crawley said to the boy, “Didn’t you tell them, Danny?”

“Tell them what?”

“Do you want me to tell them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

On the television screen, the automobile chase was finished. A snarling character said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Another character said back, “You know what I’m talking about, Kid.”

Crawley turned to Mr. Brodek. “Your boy didn’t steal any hubcap tonight,” he said. “He held up the grocery store in the next block. Kosofsky’s.”

The boy said, “You’re nuts.”

Mrs. Brodek said, “Not Danny. Danny wouldn’t do nothing like that.”

“He shot the old man,” said Crawley heavily. “Shot him four times.”

“Shot him!” cried Brodek. “How? Where’s he going to get a gun? Answer me that, where’s a young kid like that going to get a gun?”

Levine spoke up for the first time. “We don’t know where they get them, Mr. Brodek,” he said. “All we know is they get them. And then they use them.”

“I’ll tell you where when he tells us,” said Crawley.

Mrs. Brodek said again, “Danny wouldn’t do nothing like that. You’ve got it wrong.”

Levine said, “Wait, Jack,” to his partner. To Mrs. Brodek, he said, “Danny did it. There isn’t any question. If there was a question, we wouldn’t arrest him.”

“The hell with that!” cried Brodek. “I know about you cops, you got these arrest quotas. You got to look good, you got to make a lot of arrests.”

“If we make a lot of wrong arrests,” Levine told him, trying to be patient for the sake of what this would do to Brodek when he finally had to admit the truth, “we embarrass the Police Department. If we make a lot of wrong arrests, we don’t stay on the force.”

Crawley said, angrily, “Danny, you aren’t doing yourself any favors. And you aren’t doing your parents any favors either. You want them charged with accessory? The old man died!”

In the silence, Levine said softly, “We have a witness, Mrs. Brodek, Mr. Brodek. The wife, the old man’s wife. She was in the apartment behind the store and heard the shots. She ran out to the front and saw Danny at the cash register. She’ll make a positive identification.”

“Sure she will,” said the boy.

Levine looked at him. “You killed her husband, boy. She’ll identify you.”

“So why didn’t I bump her while I was at it?”

“You tried,” said Crawley. “You fired one shot, saw her fall, and then you ran.”

The boy grinned. “Yeah, that’s a dandy. Think it’ll hold up in court? An excitable old woman, she only saw this guy while he’s shooting at her, and then he ran out. Some positive identification.”

“They teach bad law on television, boy,” said Levine. “It’ll hold up.”

“Not if I was here all night, and I was. Wasn’t I, Mom?”

Defiantly, Mrs. Brodek said, “Danny didn’t leave this room for a minute tonight. Not a minute.”

Levine said, “Mrs. Brodek, he killed. Your son took a man’s life. He was seen.”

“She could have been mistaken. It all happened so fast, I bet she could have been mistaken. She only thought it was Danny.”

“If it happened to your husband, Mrs. Brodek, would you make a mistake?”

Mr. Brodek said, “You don’t make me believe that. I know my son. You got this wrong somewhere.”

Crawley said, “Hidden in his bedroom, or hidden somewhere nearby, there’s sixty-two dollars, most of it in bills, three or four dollars in quarters. And the gun’s probably with it.”

“That’s what he committed murder for, Mr. Brodek,” said Levine. “Sixty-two dollars.”

“I’m going to go get it,” said Crawley, turning toward the door on the other side of the living room.

Brodek jumped up, shouting, “The hell you are! Let’s see your warrant! I got that much law from television, mister, you don’t just come busting in here and make a search. You got to have a warrant.”

Crawley looked at Levine in disgust and frustration, and Levine knew what he was thinking. The simple thing to do would be to go ahead and make the arrest and leave the Brodeks still telling their lie. That would be the simple thing to do, but it would also be the wrong thing to do. If the Brodeks were still maintaining the lie once Crawley and Levine left, they would be stuck with it. They wouldn’t dare admit the truth after that, not even if they could be made to believe it.

They must be wondering already, but could not admit their doubts. If they were left alone now, they would make the search themselves that they had just kept Crawley from making, and they would find the money and the gun. The money and the gun would be somewhere in Danny Brodek’s bedroom. The money stuffed into the toe of a shoe in the closet, maybe. The gun under the mattress or at the bottom of a full wastebasket.

If the Brodeks found the money and the gun, and believed that they didn’t dare change their story, they would get rid of the evidence. The paper money ripped up and flushed down the toilet. The quarters spent, or thrown out the window. The gun dropped down a sewer.

Without the money, without the gun, without breaking Danny Brodek’s alibi, he had a better than even chance of getting away scot-free. In all probability, the grand jury wouldn’t even return an indictment. The unsupported statement of an old woman, who only had a few hectic seconds for identification, against a total lack of evidence and a rock solid alibi by the boy’s parents, and the case was foredoomed.

But Danny Brodek had killed. He had taken life, and he couldn’t get away with it. Nothing else in the world, so far as Levine was concerned, was as heinous, as vicious, as evil, as the untimely taking of life.

Couldn’t the boy himself understand what he’d done? Nathan Kosofsky was dead. He didn’t exist any more. He didn’t breathe, he didn’t see or hear or taste or touch or smell. The pit that yawned so widely in Levine’s fears had been opened for Nathan Kosofsky and he had tumbled in. Never to live, ever again.

If the boy couldn’t understand the enormity of what he’d done, if he was too young, if life to him was still too natural and inevitable a gift, then surely his parents were old enough to understand. Did Mr. Brodek never lie awake in bed and wonder at the frail and transient sound of his own heart pumping the life through his veins? Had Mrs. Brodek not felt the cringing closeness of the fear of death when she was about to give birth to her son? They knew, they had to know, what murder really meant.

He wanted to ask them, or to remind them, but the awful truths swirling in his brain wouldn’t solidify into words and sentences. There is no real way to phrase an emotion.

Crawley, across the room, sighed heavily and said, “Okay. You’ll set your own parents up for the bad one. That’s okay. We’ve got the eye-witness. And there’ll be more; a fingerprint on the cash register, somebody who saw you run out of the store—”

No one had seen Danny Brodek run from the store. Looking at the smug young face, Levine knew there would be no fingerprints on the cash register. It’s just as easy to knuckle the No Sale key to open the cash drawer.

He said, to the boy’s father, “On the way out of the store, Danny was mad and scared and nervous. He pulled the door open, and the bell over it rang. He took out his anger and his nervousness on it, yanking the bell down. We’ll find that somewhere between here and the store, and there may be prints on it. There also may be scratches on his hand, from yanking the bell mechanism off the door frame.”

Quickly, Danny said, “Lots of people got scratches on their hands. I was playing with a cat this afternoon, coming home from school. He gave me a couple scratches. See?” He held out his right hand, with three pink ragged tears across the surface of the palm.

Crawley said, “I’ve played with cats, too, kid. I always got my scratches on the back of my hand.”

The boy shrugged. The statement needed no answer.

Crawley went on, “You played with this cat a long while, huh? Long enough to get three scratches, is that it?”

“That’s it. Prove different.”

“Let’s see the scratches on your left hand.”

The boy allowed tension to show for just an instant, before he said, “I don’t have any on my left hand. Just the right. So what?”

Crawley turned to the father. “Does that sound right to you?”

“Why not?” demanded Brodek defensively. “You play with a cat, maybe you only use one hand. You trying to railroad my son because of some cat scratches?”

This wasn’t the way to do it, and Levine knew it. Little corroborative proofs, they weren’t enough. They could add weight to an already-held conviction, that’s all they could do. They couldn’t change an opposite conviction.

The Brodeks had to be reminded, some way, of the enormity of what their son had done. Levine wished he could open his brain for them like a book, so they could look in and read it there. They must know, they must at their ages have some inkling of the monstrousness of death. But they had to be reminded.

There was one way to do it. Levine knew the way, and shrank from it. It was as necessary as Crawley’s brutality with the old woman in the back of the store. Just as necessary. But more brutal. And he had flinched away from that earlier, lesser brutality, telling himself he could never do such a thing.

He looked over at his partner, hoping Crawley would think of the way, hoping Crawley would take the action from Levine. But Crawley was still parading his little corroborative proofs, before an audience not yet prepared to accept them.

Levine shook his head, and took a deep breath, and stepped forward an additional pace into the room. He said, “May I use your phone?”

They all looked at him, Crawley puzzled, the boy wary, the parents hostile. The father finally shrugged and said, “Why not? On the stand there, by the TV.”

“May I turn the volume down?”

“Turn the damn thing off if you want, who can pay any attention to it?”

“Thank you.”

Levine switched off the television set, then searched in the phone book and found the number of Kosofsky’s Grocery. He dialed, and a male voice answered on the first ring, saying, “Kosofsky’s. Hello?”

“Is this Stanton?”

“No, Wills. Who’s this?”

“Detective Levine. I was down there a little while ago.”

“Oh, sure. What can I do for you, sir?”

“How’s Mrs. Kosofsky now?”

“How is she? I don’t know. I mean, she isn’t hysterical or anything. She’s just sitting there.”

“Is she capable of going for a walk?”

Wills’, “I guess so,” was drowned out by Mr. Brodek’s shouted, “What the hell are you up to?”

Into the phone, Levine said, “Hold on a second.” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece, and looked at the angry father. “I want you to understand,” he told him, “just what it was your son did tonight. I want to make sure you understand. So I’m going to have Mrs. Kosofsky come up here. For her to look at Danny again. And for you to look at her while she’s looking at him.”

Brodek paled slightly, and an uncertain look came into his eyes. He glanced quickly at his son, then even more quickly back at Levine. “The hell with you,” he said defiantly. “Danny was here all night. Do whatever the hell you want.”

Mrs. Brodek started to speak, but cut it off at the outset, making only a tiny sound in her throat. But it was enough to make the rest swivel their heads and look at her. Her eyes were wide. Strain lines had deepened around her mouth, and one hand trembled at the base of her throat. She stared in mute appeal at Levine, her eyes clearly saying. Don’t make me know.

Levine forced himself to turn away, say into the phone, “I’m at the Brodeks. Bring Mrs. Kosofsky up here, will you? It’s the next block down to your right, 1342, apartment 4-D.”

It was a long silent wait. No one spoke at all from the time Levine hung up the telephone till the time Wills arrived with Mrs. Kosofsky. The five of them sat in the drab living room, avoiding one another’s eyes. From another room, deeper in the apartment, a clock that had before been unnoticeable now ticked loudly. The ticks were very fast, but the minutes they clocked off crept slowly by.

When the rapping finally came at the hall door, they all jumped. Mrs. Brodek turned her hopeless eyes toward Levine again, but he looked away, at his partner. Crawley lumbered to his feet and out of the room, down the corridor to the front door. Those in the room heard him open the door, heard the murmur of male voices, and then the clear frightened voice of the old woman: “Who lives here? Who lives in this place?”

Levine looked up and saw that Danny Brodek was watching him, eyes hard and cold, face set in lines of bitter hatred. Levine held his gaze, pitying him, until Danny looked away, mouth twisting in an expression of scorn that didn’t quite come off.

Then Crawley came back into the room, stepping aside for the old woman to follow him in. Beyond her could be seen the pale young face of the patrolman, Wills.

She saw Levine first. Her eyes were frightened and bewildered. Her fingers plucked at a button of the long black coat she now wore over her dress. In the brighter light of this room, she looked older, weaker, more helpless.

She looked second at Mrs. Brodek, whose expression was as terrified as her own, and then she saw Danny.

She cried out, a high-pitched failing whimper, and turned hurriedly away, pushing against Wills, jabbering, “Away! Away! I go away!”

Levine’s voice sounded over her hysteria: “It’s okay, Wills. Help her back to the store.” He couldn’t keep the bitter rage from his voice. The others might have thought it was rage against Danny Brodek, but they would have been wrong. It was rage against himself. What good would it do to convict Danny Brodek, to jail him for twenty or thirty years? Would it undo what he had done? Would it restore her husband to Mrs. Kosofsky? It wouldn’t. But nothing less could excuse the vicious thing he had just done to her.

Faltering, nearly whispering, Mrs. Brodek said, “I want to talk to Danny. I want to talk to my son.”

Her husband glared warningly at her. “Esther, he was here all—”

“I want to talk to my son!”

Levine said, “All right.” Down the corridor, the door snicked shut behind Wills and the old woman.

Mrs. Brodek said, “Alone. In his bedroom.”

Levine looked at Crawley, who shrugged and said, “Three minutes. Then we come in.”

The boy said, “Mom, what’s there to talk about?”

“I want to talk to you,” she told him icily. “Now.”

She led the way from the room, Danny Brodek following her reluctantly, pausing to throw back one poisonous glance at Levine before shutting the connecting door.

Brodek cleared his throat, looking uncertainly at the two detectives. “Well,” he said. “Well. She really... she really thinks it was him, doesn’t she?”

“She sure does,” said Crawley.

Brodek shook his head slowly. “Not Danny,” he said, but he was talking to himself.

Then they heard Mrs. Brodek cry out from the bedroom, and a muffled thump. All three men dashed across the living room, Crawley reaching the door first and throwing it open, leading the way down the short hall to the second door and running inside. Levine followed him, and Brodek, grunting, “My God. Oh, my God,” came in third.

Mrs. Brodek sat hunched on the floor of the tiny bedroom, arms folded on the seat of an unpainted kitchen chair. A bright-colored shirt was hung askew on the back of the chair.

She looked up as they ran in, and her face was a blank, drained of all emotion and all life and all personality. In a voice as toneless and blank as her face, she told him, “He went up the fire escape. He got the gun, from under his mattress. He went up the fire escape.”

Brodek started toward the open window, but Crawley pulled him back, saying, “He might be waiting up there. He’ll fire at the first head he sees.”

Levine had found a comic book and a small gray cap on the dresser-top. He twisted the comic book in a large cylinder, stuck the cap on top of it, held it slowly and cautiously out the window. From above, silhouetted, it would look like a head and neck.

The shot rang loud from above, and the comic book was jerked from Levine’s hand. He pulled his hand back and Crawley said, “The stairs.”

Levine followed his partner back out of the bedroom. The last he saw in there, Mr. Brodek was reaching down, with an awkward shyness, to touch his wife’s cheek.

This was the top floor of the building. After this, the staircase went up one more flight, ending at a metal-faced door which opened onto the roof. Crawley led the way, his small flat pistol now in his hand, and Levine climbed more slowly after him.

He got midway up the flight before Crawley pushed open the door, stepped cautiously out onto the roof, and the single shot snapped out. Crawley doubled suddenly, stepping involuntarily back, and would have fallen backward down the stairs if Levine hadn’t reached him in time and struggled him to a half-sitting position, wedged between the top step and the wall.

Crawley’s face was gray, his mouth strained white. “From the right,” he said, his voice low and bitter. “Down low, I saw the flash.”

“Where?” Levine asked him. “Where did he get you?”

“Leg. Right leg, high up. Just the fat, I think.”

From outside, they could hear a man’s voice braying, “Danny! Danny! For God’s sake, Danny!” It was Mr. Brodek, shouting up from the bedroom window.

“Get the light,” whispered Crawley.

Not until then had Levine realized how rattled he’d been just now. Twenty-four years on the force. When did you become a professional? How?

He straightened up, reaching up to the bare bulb in its socket high on the wall near the door. The bulb burned his fingers, but it took only the one turn to put it out.

Light still filtered up from the floor below, but no longer enough to keep him from making out shapes on the roof. He crouched over Crawley, blinking until his eyes got used to the darkness.

To the right, curving over the top of the knee-high wall around the roof, were the top bars of the fire escape. Black shadow at the base of the wall, all around. The boy was low, lying prone against the wall in the darkness, where he couldn’t be seen.

“I can see the fire escape from here,” muttered Crawley. “I’ve got him boxed. Go on down to the car and call for help.”

“Right,” said Levine.

He had just turned away when Crawley grabbed his arm. “No. Listen!”

He listened. Soft scrapings, outside and to the right. A sudden flurry of footsteps, running, receding.

“Over the roofs!” cried Crawley. “Damn this leg! Go after him!”

“Ambulance,” said Levine.

“Go after him! They can make the call.” He motioned at the foot of the stairs, and Levine, turning, saw down there anxious, frightened, bewildered faces peering up, bodies clothed in robes and slippers.

“Go on!” cried Crawley.

Levine moved, jumping out onto the roof in a half-crouch, ducking away to the right. The revolver was in his hand, his eyes were staring into the darkness.

Three rooftops away, he saw the flash of white, the boy’s shirt. Levine ran after him.

Across the first roof, he ran with mouth open, but his throat dried and constricted, and across the second roof he ran with his mouth shut, trying to swallow. But he couldn’t get enough air in through his nostrils, and after that he alternated, mouth open and mouth closed, looking like a frantic fish, running like a comic fat man, clambering over the intervening knee-high walls with painful slowness.

There were seven rooftops to the corner, and the corner building was only three stories high. The boy hesitated, dashed one way and then the other, and Levine was catching up. Then the boy turned, fired wildly at him, and raced to the fire escape. He was young and lithe, slender. His legs went over the side, his body slid down; the last thing Levine saw of him was the white face.

Two more roofs. Levine stumbled across them, and he no longer needed the heel of his hand to his ear in order to hear his heart. He could hear it plainly, over the rush of his breathing, a brushlike throb — throb — throb — throb — throb—

Every six or seven beats.

He got to the fire escape, winded, and looked over. Five flights down, a long dizzying way, to the blackness of the bottom. He saw a flash of the boy in motion, two flights down. “Stop!” he cried, knowing it was useless.

He climbed over onto the rungs, heavy and cumbersome. His revolver clanged against the top rung as he descended and, as if in answer, the boy’s gun clanged against metal down below.

The first flight down was a metal ladder, and after that narrow steep metal staircases with a landing at every floor. He plummeted down, never quite on balance, the boy always two flights ahead.

At the second floor, he paused, looked over the side, saw the boy drop lightly to the ground, turn back toward the building, heard the grate of door hinges not used to opening.

The basement. And the flashlight was in the glove compartment of the squad car. Crawley had a pencil flash, six buildings and three floors away.

Levine moved again, hurrying as fast as before. At the bottom, there was a jump. He hung by his hands, the revolver digging into his palm, and dropped, feeling it hard in his ankles.

The back of the building was dark, with a darker rectangle in it, and fire flashed in that rectangle. Something tugged at Levine’s sleeve, at the elbow. He ducked to the right, ran forward, and was in the basement.

Ahead of him, something toppled over with a wooden crash, and the boy cursed. Levine used the noise to move deeper into the basement, to the right, so he couldn’t be outlined against the doorway, which was a gray hole now in a world suddenly black. He came up against a wall, rough brick and bits of plaster, and stopped, breathing hard, trying to breathe silently and to listen.

He wanted to listen for sounds of the boy, but the rhythmic pounding of his heart was too loud, too pervasive. He had to hear it out first, to count it, and to know that now it was skipping every sixth beat. His breath burned in his lungs, a metal band was constricted about his chest, his head felt hot and heavy and fuzzy. There were blue sparks at the corners of his vision.

There was another clatter from deeper inside the basement, to the left, and the faint sound of a doorknob being turned, turned back, turned again.

Levine cleared his throat. When he spoke, he expected his voice to be high-pitched, but it wasn’t. It was as deep and as strong as normal, maybe even a little deeper and a little louder. “It’s locked, Danny,” he said. “Give it up. Throw the gun out the doorway.”

The reply was another fire-flash, and an echoing thunderclap, too loud for the small bare-walled room they were in. And, after it, the whining ricochet as the bullet went wide.

That’s the third time, thought Levine. The third time he’s given me a target, and I haven’t shot at him. I could have shot at the flash, this time or the last. I could have shot at him on the roof, when he stood still just before going down the fire escape.

Aloud, he said, “That won’t do you any good, Danny. You can’t hit a voice. Give it up, prowl cars are converging here from all over Brooklyn.”

“I’ll be long gone,” said the sudden voice, and it was surprisingly close, surprisingly loud.

“You can’t get out the door without me seeing you,” Levine told him. “Give it up.”

“I can see you, cop,” said the young voice. “You can’t see me, but I can see you.”

Levine knew it was a lie. Otherwise, the boy would have shot him down before this. He said, “It won’t go so bad for you, Danny, if you give up now. You’re young, you’ll get a lighter sentence. How old are you? Sixteen, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to gun you down, cop,” said the boy’s voice. It seemed to be closer, moving to Levine’s right. The boy was trying to get behind him, get Levine between himself and the doorway, so he’d have a silhouette to aim at.

Levine slid cautiously along the wall, feeling his way. “You aren’t going to gun anybody down,” he said into the darkness. “Not anybody else.”

Another flash, another thunderclap, and the shatter of glass behind him. The voice said, “You don’t even have a gun on you.”

“I don’t shoot at shadows, Danny. Or old men.”

“I do, old man.”

How old is he? wondered Levine. Sixteen, probably. Thirty-seven years younger than me.

“You’re afraid,” taunted the voice, weaving closer. “You ought to run, cop, but you’re afraid.”

I am, thought Levine. I am, but not for the reason you think.

It was true. From the minute he’d ducked into this basement room, Levine had stopped being afraid of his own death at the hands of this boy. He was fifty-three years of age. If anything was going to get him tonight it was going to be that heart of his, skipping now on number five. It wasn’t going to be the boy, except indirectly, because of the heart.

But he was afraid. He was afraid of the revolver in his own hand, the feel of the trigger, and the knowledge that he had let three chances go by. He was afraid of his job, because his job said he was supposed to bring this boy down. Kill him or wound him, but bring him down.

Thirty-seven years. That was what separated them, thirty-seven years of life. Why should it be up to him to steal those thirty-seven years from this boy? Why should he have to be the one?

“You’re a goner, cop,” said the voice. “You’re a dead man. I’m coming in on you.”

It didn’t matter what Danny Brodek had done. It didn’t matter about Nathan Kosofsky, who was dead. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. No! A destroyed life could not be restored by more destruction of life.

I can’t do it, Levine thought. I can’t do it to him.

He said, “Danny, you’re wrong. Listen to me, for God’s sake, you’re wrong.”

“You better run, cop,” crooned the voice. “You better hurry.”

Levine heard the boy, soft slow sounds closer to his left, weaving slowly nearer. “I don’t want to kill you, Danny!” he cried. “Can’t you understand that? I don’t want to kill you!”

“I want to kill you, cop,” whispered the voice.

“Don’t you know what dying is?” pleaded Levine. He had his hand out now in a begging gesture, though the boy couldn’t see him. “Don’t you know what it means to die? To stop, like a watch. Never to see anything any more, never to hear or touch or know anything any more. Never to be any more.”

“That’s the way it’s going to be, cop,” soothed the young voice. Very close now, very close.

He was too young. Levine knew it, knew the boy was too young to feel what death really is. He was too young to know what he wanted to take from Levine, what Levine didn’t want to take from him.

Every fourth beat.

Thirty-seven years.

“You’re a dead man, cop,” breathed the young voice, directly in front of him.

And light dazzled them both.

It all happened so fast. One second, they were doing their dance of death here together, alone, just the two of them in all the world. The next second, the flashlight beam hit them both, the clumsy uniformed patrolman was standing in the doorway, saying, “Hey!” Making himself a target, and the boy, slender, turning like a snake, his eyes glinting in the light, the gun swinging around at the light and the figure behind the light.

Levine’s heart stopped, one beat.

And every muscle, every nerve, every bone in his body tensed and tightened and drew in on itself, squeezing him shut, and the sound of the revolver going off slammed into him, pounding his stomach.

The boy screamed, hurtling down out of the light, the gun clattering away from his fingers.

“Jesus God have mercy!” breathed the patrolman. It was Wills. He came on in, unsteadily, the flashlight trembling in his hand as he pointed its beam at the boy crumpled on the floor.

Levine looked down at himself and saw the thin trail of blue-gray smoke rising up from the barrel of his revolver. Saw his hands still tensed shut into claws, into fists, the first finger of his right hand still squeezing the trigger back against its guard.

He willed his hands open, and the revolver fell to the floor.

Wills went down on one knee beside the boy. After a minute, he straightened, saying, “Dead. Right through the heart, I guess.”

Levine sagged against the wall. His mouth hung open. He couldn’t seem to close it.

Wills said, “What’s the matter? You okay?”

With an effort, Levine nodded his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “Call in. Go on, call in.”

“Well. I’ll be right back.”

Wills left, and Levine looked down at the new young death. His eyes saw the colors of the floor, the walls, the clothing on the corpse. His shoulders felt the weight of his overcoat. His ears heard the receding footsteps of the young patrolman. His nose smelled the sharp tang of recent gunfire. His mouth tasted the briny after-effect of fear.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.