San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

The collector comes after payday by Fletcher Flora[5]

Lower Market Street

Frankie looked through a lot of bars before he found the old man. He was sitting in a booth in a joint on lower Market Street with a dame Frankie didn’t know. They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, and Frankie could see that their thighs were plastered together like a couple of strips of Scotch tape.

“Come on home, Pop,” Frankie said. “You come on home.”

The woman looked up at him, and her lips twisted in a scarlet sneer. The scarlet was smeared on the lips, as if she’d been doing a lot of kissing, and the lips had a kind of bruised and swollen look, as if the kisses had been pretty enthusiastic.

“Go to hell away, sonny,” she said.

She lifted her martini glass by its thin stem and tilted it against her mouth. Frankie reached across the booth in front of the old man and slapped the glass out of her hand. It shivered with a thin, musical sound against the wall, and gin and vermouth splashed down between the full, alert breasts that were half out of her low-cut dress. The olive bounced on the table and rolled off.

The woman raised up as far as she could in the cramped booth, her eyes hot and smoky with gin and rage.

“You little son of a bitch,” she said softly.

Frankie grabbed her by a wrist and twisted the skin around on the bone.

“Leave Pop alone,” he said. “You quit acting like a tramp and leave him alone.”

Then the old man hacked down on Frankie’s arm with the horny edge of his hand. It was like getting hit with a dull hatchet. Frankie’s fingers went numb, dropping away from the woman’s wrist, and he swung sideways with his left hand at the old man’s face. The old man caught the fist in a big palm and gave Frankie a hard shove backward.

“Blow, sonny,” he said.

For a guy not young at all, he was plenty tough. His eyes were like two yellow agates, and his mouth was a thin, cruel trap under a bold nose. From the way his body behaved, it was obvious that he still had good muscular coordination. He was poised, balanced like a trained fighter.

Frankie saw everything in a kind of pink, billowing mist. He moved back up to the booth with his fists clenched, and in spite of everything he could do, tears of fury and frustration spilled out of his eyes and streaked his cheeks.

“You get the hell out of this,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed, drinking and playing around this way.”

The old man slipped out of the booth, quick as a snake, and chopped Frankie in the mouth with a short right that traveled straight as a piston. Frankie hit the floor and rolled over, spitting a tooth and blood. He was crazy. Getting up, he staggered back at the old man, cursing and sobbing and swinging like a girl. This time the old man set him up with a left jab and threw a bomb. Frankie went over backward like a post, his head smacking with a wet rotten sound.

No one bothered about him. Except to laugh, that is. Lying there on the floor, he could hear the laughter rise and diminish and rise again. It was the final and utter degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with. Rolling over and struggling up to his hands and knees, he was violently sick, his stomach contracting and expanding in harsh spasms. After a long time, he got the rest of the way to his feet in slow, agonizing stages. His chin and shirt front were foul with blood and spittle.

In the booth, ignoring him, the old man and the woman were in a hot clinch, their mouths adhering in mutual suction. The lecherous old man’s right hand was busy, and Frankie saw through his private red fog the quivering reaction of the woman’s straining body. Turning away, Frankie went out. The floor kept tilting up under his feet and then dropping suddenly away. All around him, he could hear the ribald laughter.

It was six blocks to the place where he’d parked his old Plymouth. He walked slowly along the littered, narrow street, hugging the dark buildings, the night air a knife in his lungs. Now and then he stopped to lean against solid brick until the erratic pavement leveled off and held still. Once, at the mouth of an alley, he was sick again, bringing up a thin, bitter fluid into his mouth.

It took him almost an hour to get back to the shabby walkup apartment that was the best a guy with no luck could manage. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, gasping with pain. The smoky mirror above the lavatory distorted his face, exaggerating the ugliness of smashed, swollen lips drawn back from bloody gums. He patted his face dry with a towel and poured himself a double shot in the living room. He tossed the whiskey far back into his mouth beyond his raw lips, gagging and choking from the sudden fiery wash in his throat.

Dropping into a chair, he began to think. Not with any conscious direction. His mind functioned, with everything coming now to a bad end, in a kind of numb and lucid detachment. Suddenly, he was strangely indifferent. Nothing had happened, after all, that couldn’t have been anticipated by a guy with no luck whatever.

It was funny, the way he was no longer very concerned about anything. Sitting there in the drab living room in the dull immunity to shame that comes from the ultimate humiliation, he found his mind working itself back at random to the early days at home with the old man. Back to the days when his mother, a beaten nonentity, had been alive. Not a lovable character, the old man. Not easy on wife or kid. A harsh meter of stern discipline for all delinquencies but his own. A master of the deferred payment technique. In the old days, when Frankie was a kid at home, wrongdoing had never been met with swift and unconsidered punishment that would have been as quickly forgotten. The old man had remarked and remembered. Later, often after Frankie had completely forgotten the adolescent evil he’d committed, there was sure to be something that he wanted very much to do. Then the old man would look at him with skimmed milk eyes and say, “No. Have you forgotten the offense for which you haven’t paid? For that, you cannot do this thing.”

Wait till it really hurts. That had been the old man’s way.

Remembering, Frankie laughed softly, air hissing with no inflection of humor through the hole where his lost tooth had been. No luck. Never any luck. He’d even been a loser in drawing an old man — a bastard with a memory like an elephant and a perverted set of values.

The laughter hurt Frankie’s mangled lips, and he cut it off, sitting slumped in the chair with his eyes in a dead focus on the floor. It was really very strange, the way he felt. Not tired. Not sleepy. Not much of anything. Just sort of released and out of it, like a religious queer staring at his belly button.

He was still sitting there at three o’clock in the morning when the old man came in. He was sloppy drunk, and the lines of his face had blurred, letting his features run together in a kind of soft smear. His eyes were rheumy infections in the smear, and his mouth still wore enough of the cheap lipstick to give him the appearance of wearing a grotesque clown’s mask. He stood, swaying, almost helpless, with his legs spread wide and his hands on his hips in a posture of defiance, and Frankie looked back at him from his chair. It made him sick to see the old man so ugly, satiety in his flaccid face and the nauseous perfume of juniper berries like a fog around him.

The old man spit and laughed hoarsely. The saliva landed on the toe of Frankie’s shoe, a milky blob. Without moving, Frankie watched the old man weave into the bedroom with erratic manipulation of legs and hips.

Frankie kept on sitting in the chair for perhaps five minutes longer, then he sighed and got up and walked into the bedroom after the old man. The old man was standing in the middle of the room in his underwear. His legs were corded with swollen blue veins that bulged the fish-belly skin. On the right thigh there was an angry red spot that would probably blacken. When he saw Frankie watching him, his rheumy eyes went hot with scorn.

“My son,” he said. “My precious son, Frankie.”

Frankie didn’t answer. As he moved toward the old man slowly, smiling faintly, the pain of the smile on his mangled lips was a pale reflection of the dull pain in his heart. He had almost closed the distance between them before the old man’s gin-soaked brain understood that Frankie was going to kill him. And he was too drunk now to defend himself, even against Frankie. The scorn faded from his eyes and terror flooded in, cold and incredulous.

“No, Frankie,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, no.”

Frankie still didn’t say anything, and the old man tried to back away, but by that time it was too late, and Frankie’s thumbs were buried in his throat. His tongue came out, his legs beat in a hellish threshing, and his fists battered wildly at Frankie’s face. But it did no good, for Frankie was feeling very strong. He was feeling stronger than he had ever felt in his life before. And good, too. A powerful, surging sense of well-being. A wild, singing exhilaration that increased in ratio to the pressure of his grip.

The old man had been dead for minutes when Frankie finally let him go. He slipped down to the floor in a limp huddle of old flesh and fabric, and Frankie stood looking down at him, the narcotic-like pleasure draining out of him and leaving him again with that odd, incongruous feeling of detachment.

He realized, of course, that the end was his as much as the old man’s. It was the end for both of them. Recalling the .38 revolver on a shelf in the closet, he considered for a moment the idea of suicide, but not very seriously. Not that he was repelled by the thought of death. It was just that he didn’t quite have the guts.

He supposed that he should call the police, and he went so far as to turn away toward the living room and the telephone. Then he stopped, struck by an idea that captured his fancy. He saw himself walking into the precinct station with the old man’s dead body in his arms. He heard himself saying quietly, “This is my father. I’ve just killed him.” Drab little Frankie, no-luck Frankie, having in the end his moment of dramatic ascendancy. It was a prospect that fed an old and functional hunger of his soul, and he turned back, looking at the body on the floor. Smiling dreamily with his thick lips, he felt within himself a rebirth of that singing exhilaration.

At the last moment, he found in himself a sick horror that made it impossible for him to bear excessive contact with the dead flesh, so he dressed the body, struggling with uncooperative arms and legs. After that, it was so easy. It was so crazy easy. If he’d given a damn, if he’d really been trying to get away with it, he could never have pulled it off in a million years.

With the old man dead in his arms, he walked out of the apartment and down the stairs and across the walk to the Plymouth at the curb. He opened the front door and put him in the seat and closed the door again. Then, standing there beside the car, he looked around and saw that there was no one in sight. So far as he knew, not a soul had seen him.

It was then that the enormity of the thing struck him, and he began to laugh softly, hysteria threading the laughter. No-luck Frankie doing a thing like that. No-luck Frankie himself just walking out of an apartment house with a corpse in his arms and not a damned soul the wiser. You couldn’t get life any crazier than that. He kept on laughing, clutching the handle of the car door with one hand, his body shaking and his lips cracking open again to let a thin red line trace its way down his chin.

After a while, he choked off the laughter on a series of throaty little gasps that tore painfully at his throat. Lighting a cigarette, he went around the car and got in beside the old man on the driver’s side.

He drove at a moderate rate of speed, savoring morbidly the approach to his big scene. Now, in the process of execution, the drama of it gained even more in its appeal to him. It gave him a kind of satisfaction he had never known.

He was driving east on Mason Street. The side streets on the south descended to their intersections on forty-five-degree grades. Possessing the right-of-way, he crossed the intersections without looking, absorbed in his thoughts. For that reason, he neither saw nor heard the transport van until it was too late. At the last instant, he heard the shrill screaming of rubber on concrete and looked up and right to see the tremendous steel monster roaring down upon him.

His own scream cut across the complaint of giant tires, and he hurled himself away reflexively, striking the door with a shoulder and clawing at the handle. The door burst open at the precise instant of impact, and he was catapulted through the air like a flapping doll. Striking the pavement, he rolled over and over, protecting his head with his arms instinctively. The overwhelming crash of the Plymouth crumpling under the van was modified in his ears by the fading of consciousness.

On his back, he lay quietly and was aware of smaller sounds — distant screams, pounding feet, horrified voices, and, after a bit, the far away whine of sirens growing steadily nearer and louder.

Someone knelt beside him, felt his pulse, said in manifest incredulity, “This guy’s hardly scratched. It’s a God-damned miracle.”

A voice, more distant, rising on the threat of hysteria, “Christ! This one’s hamburger. Nothing but hamburger.”

And he continued to lie there in the screaming night with the laughter coming back and the wild wonder growing. What was it? What in God’s name was it? A guy who’d started and ended with a sour bastard of an old man and never any luck between. A guy who’d had it all, and most of it bad. A guy like that getting, all of a sudden, two fantastic breaks you wouldn’t have believed could happen. Walking out of a house with a body in his arms, scot-free and away. Surviving with no more than a few bruises a smash-up that should have smeared him for keeps. Maybe it was because he’d quit caring. Maybe the tide turns when you no longer give a damn.

Then, in a sudden comprehensive flash, the full significance of the situation struck him. Hamburger, someone had said. Nothing but hamburger. Thanks to the cock-eyed collaboration of the gods and a truck driver, he had disposed of the old man in a manner above suspicion. He lay on the pavement with the wonder of it still growing and growing, and his insides shook with delirious internal laughter.

In time, he rode a litter to an ambulance, and the ambulance to a hospital. He slept like a child in antiseptic cleanliness between cool sheets, and in the morning he had pictures taken of his head. Twenty-four hours later he was told that there was no concussion, and released. With the most sympathetic cooperation of officials, he collected the old man at the morgue and transferred him to a crematory.

When he left the crematory, he took the old man with him in an urn. In the apartment, he set the urn on a table in the living room and stood looking at it. He had developed for the old man, since the smash-up, a feeling of warm affection. In his heart there was no hard feeling, no lingering animosity. He found his parent in his present state, a handful of ashes, considerably more lovable than he had ever found him before. Besides, he had brought Frankie luck. In the end, in shame and violence and blood, he had brought him the luck he had never had.

Putting the old man away on a shelf in the closet, Frankie checked his finances and found that he could assemble forty dollars. He fingered the green stuff and considered possibilities. Eagerness to ride his luck had assumed the force of compulsion. In the saddle, he left the apartment and went over to Nick Loemke’s bar on Market Street.

He found Nick in a lull, polishing glass behind the mahogany. Nick examined him sleepily and made a swipe at the bar with his towel.

“What’s on your mind, Frankie?”

“Double shot of rye,” Frankie said.

His lips and gums were still a little raw, so he took it easy with the rye, tossing it in short swallows on the back of his tongue.

“Where’s Joe Tonty anchored this week?” he asked.

“What the hell do you care, Frankie? You can’t afford to operate in that class.”

“You never know. You never know until you try.”

Frankie finished his rye and spun the glass off his fingertips across the bar. It hit the trough on the inside edge and hopped up into the air. Nick had to grab it in a hurry to keep it from going off onto the floor. He glared at Frankie and doused the glass in the antiseptic solution under the bar.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Frankie? You lost your marbles?”

“Okay, okay,” Frankie said. “I ask for information and you give me lip. You going to tell me where Tonty’s anchored, or aren’t you?”

Nick shrugged. “All right, sucker. It’s your lettuce. Over on Third Street. Upstairs over the old Bonfile garage.”

Frankie dropped a skin on the bar and went out. Between Third and Fourth, he navigated a narrow, cluttered alley to the rear of the Bonfile garage and climbed a flight of iron, exterior stairs to a plank door that was locked. He pounded on the door with the meaty heel of his fist and got the response of a crack with an eye and a voice behind it.

The voice said, “Hello, Frankie. What the hell you doing here?”

“This where Tonty’s anchored?”

“That’s right.”

“Then what the hell you think I’m doing here? You want me to spell it out for you?”

The crack widened to reveal a flat face split in a grin between thick ears. “My, my. We’re riding high tonight, ain’t we?”

“You want my money or not?”

The crack spread still wider, and the grinning gorilla shuffled back out of it. “Sure, Frankie, sure. Every little bit helps.”

Frankie went in past the gorilla and down the long cement-floored room to the craps table. It was still early, and the big stuff wasn’t moving yet. Just right for forty bucks. Or thirty-nine, deducting a double shot.

Frankie got his belly against the edge of the table and laid a fast side bet that the point would come.

It came.

He laid three more in a hurry, betting the accumulation and mixing them pro and con without thinking much about it.

The points came or not, just as Frankie bet them.

When the dice came around to him, he was fat, and he laid the bundle. He tossed a seven, made his point twice, and tossed another seven, letting the bundle grow. Then, playing a hunch without benefit of thought, he drew most of the bundle off the table.

He crapped out and passed the dice.

Across the table, Joe Tonty’s face was a slab of gray rock. His eyes flicked over Frankie, and his shoulders twitched in a shrug.

“Your luck’s running, Frankie. You better ride it.”

“Sure,” Frankie said. “I’ll ride.”

It kept running for two hours, and Frankie rode it all the way. When he finally had a sudden flat feeling, a kind of interior collapse, he pulled out. Not that he felt his luck had quit running for keeps. Just resting. Just taking a breather. He descended the iron steps into the alley and crossed over to Market for a nightcap at Nick’s. A little later, in the living room of the apartment, he counted eight grand. It was hard to believe, little Frankie with eight big grand all at once and all his own. Not even any withholding tax.

He was shaken again by the silent delirium that was becoming an integral element of his chronic mood, and he went over to the closet and opened the door, looking up at the old man in his urn.

“Thanks, Pop,” he said. “Thanks.”

He slept soundly and got up about noon. After a hearty lunch, he went to the track with the eight grand in his pocket. He was in time for the second race, and he checked the entries. But he didn’t feel anything, so he let it go.

Checking the entries in the third, he still didn’t get any nudge. Something seemed to be getting in the way, coming between him and his luck. Maybe, he realized suddenly, it was the warm pressure of a long flank against his.

He turned, looking into brown eyes that were as warm and the touch of flank. Under the eyes there was a flash of white in a margin of red, and above them, a heavy sheen of pale yellow with streaks of off-white running through it. At first, Frankie thought she’d just been sloppy with a dye job, but then he saw that the two-toned effect was natural.

“Crowded, isn’t it?” she said.

Frankie grinned. “I like crowds.”

He was trying to think of what the hair reminded him of when he got the nudge. His eyes popped down to the program in his hands and back up to the dame. Inside, he’d gone breathless and tense, the way a guy does when he’s on the verge of something big.

“What’s your name, baby?”

The red and white smile flashed again. “Call me Taffy. Because of my hair, you see.”

He saw, all right. He saw a hell of a lot more than she thought he did. He saw number four in the third, and the name was Taffy Candy. One would bring ten if Taffy won, and even Frankie, who was no mental giant, could add another cipher to eight thousand and read the result.

Don’t give yourself time to think, that was the trick. If you start thinking, you start figuring odds and consequences, and you’re a dead duck. He stood up and slapped the program against his leg.

“Hold a spot for me, baby. If I’m on the beam, it’ll be a big day for you and me and a horse.”

He hit the window just before closing time and laid the eight grand on Taffy’s nose. At the rail of the track, he watched the horses run, and he wasn’t surprised, not even excited, when Taffy came in by the nose that had his eight grand on it. It was astonishing how quickly he was becoming accustomed to good fortune. He was already anticipating the breaks as if he’d had them forever. As if they were a natural right.

Like that girl in the stands, for instance. The girl who called herself Taffy. Standing there by the rail, he thought with glandular stirrings of the warm pressure of flank, the strangely alluring two-toned pastel hair, the brown eyes and scarlet smile. A few days ago, he wouldn’t have given himself a chance with a dame like that. He’d have taken it out in thinking. But now it was different. Luck and a few grand made a hell of a difference. The difference between thinking and acting.

With eight times ten in his pocket, he went back to the stands. Climbing up to her level with his eyes full of nylon, he grinned and said, “We all came in, baby, you and me and the horse. Let’s move out of here.”

She strained a mocking look through incredible lashes. “I’ve already got a date, honey. I’m supposed to meet a guy here.”

“To hell with him.”

Her eyebrows arched their plucked backs, and a practiced tease showed through the lashes. “What makes you think I’d just walk off with you, mister?”

Frankie dug into his pocket for enough green to make an impression. The bills were crisp. They made small ticking sounds when he flipped them with a thumb nail.

“This, maybe,” he said.

She eyed the persuasion and stood up. “That’s good thinking, honey,” she said.

A long time and a lot of places later, Frankie awoke to the gray light that filtered into his shabby apartment. It was depressing, he thought, to awake in a dump like this. It was something that had to be changed.

“Look, baby,” he said. “Today we shop for another place. A big place uptown. Carpets up to your knees, foam rubber stuff, the works. How about it, baby?”

Beside him, Taffy pressed closer, her lips moving against his naked shoulder with a sleepy animal purr of contentment.

So that day they rented the uptown place, and moved in, and a couple months later Frankie bought the Circle Club.

The club was a nice little spot tucked into a so-so block just outside the perimeter of the big-time glitter area. It was a good location for a brisk trade with the right guy handling it. The current owner was being pressed for the payment of debts by parties who didn’t like waiting, and Frankie bought him out for a song.

It was a swell break. Just one more in a long line. Frankie shot a wad on fancy trimmings, and booked a combination that could really jump. With the combo there was a sleek canary who had something for the eyes as well as the ears. The food and the liquor were fair, which is all anyone expects in a night spot, and up to the time of Linda Lee, business was good.

After Linda Lee, business was more than good. It was booming. The word always goes out on a gal like Linda. The guys come in with their dames, and after they’ve had the quota of looking that the tariff buys, they go someplace and turn off the lights and pretend that the dames are Linda.

Linda Lee wasn’t her real name, of course, but it suited her looks and her business. Ostensibly, the business was dancing. Actually, it was taking off her clothes. In Linda’s case, that was sufficient. As for the looks, they were Linda’s, and they were something. Dusky skin and eyes on the slant. Black hair with blue highlights, soft and shining, brushing her shoulders and slashing across her forehead in bangs above perfect unplucked brows. A lithe, vibrant body with an upswept effect that a guy couldn’t believe from seeing and so had to keep coming back for another look to convince himself.

She sent Frankie. At first, the day she came into his office at the Circle Club looking for a job, he didn’t see anything but a looker in a town that was littered with them. That was when she still had her clothes on.

He rocked back in his swivel and stared across his desk at her through the thin, lifting smoke from his cigarette.

“You a dancer, you say?”

“Yes.”

“A good one.”

“Not very.”

That surprised Frankie. He took his cigarette out of his mouth and let his eyes make a brief tour of her points of interest.

“No? What else you got that a guy would pay to see?”

She showed him what she had. Frankie sat there watching her emerge slowly from her clothes, and the small office got steadily smaller, so hot that it was almost suffocating. Frankie’s knitted tie was hemp instead of silk, and the knot was a hangman’s knot, cutting deeply into his throat until he was breathing in labored gasps. The palms of his hands dripped salty water. His whole body was wet with sweat.

When he was able to speak, he said, “Who the hell’s going to care about the dancing? Can you start tonight?”

She could and did. And so did Frankie. For a guy with a temperature as high as his, he played it pretty cool. He kept the pressure on her, all right, but he didn’t force it. Not that he was too good for it. It just wasn’t practical. The threat of being fired doesn’t mean much to a gal with a dozen other places to go. By the time Frankie was desperate enough for threats, he was having to raise her pay every second week to hang on to her.

She liked him, though. He knew damned well she liked him. He could tell by the way the heat came up in her slanted eyes when she looked at him. He could tell by the way her hands sometimes reached out for him, touching him lightly, straying with brief abandon. But she was like mercury. He couldn’t hold her when he reached back.

The night he decided to try mink, he came into the club late, just as Linda was moving onto the small circular floor in a blue spot. He stood for a minute against the wall, holding the long cardboard box under his arm, watching the emerging dusky body, his pulse matching the tropical tempo of drums in the darkness. Before the act was over, he moved on around the edge of the floor and back to the door of Linda’s room.

Inside, he lay the box on the dressing table and sat down. Waiting, he could hear faintly the crescendo of drums and muted brass that indicated Linda’s exit. The sound of her footsteps in the hall was lost in the surge of applause that continued long after she had left the floor.

She closed the door behind her and stood leaning against it, head back and eyes shining, her breasts rising and falling in deep, rhythmic breathing. Light and shadow stressed the convexities and hollows of her body.

“Hello, Frankie,” she said. “Nice surprise.”

He stood up, pulses hammering. “Nicer than you think, baby. I’ve brought you something.”

She saw the box behind him on the dressing table and moved toward it, flat muscles rippling with silken smoothness beneath dusky skin. Her exclamation was like a delighted child’s.

“Tell me what it is.”

“Open it, baby.”

Her fingers worked deftly at the knot of the cord, lifted the top of the box away. Without speaking, she shook out the luxurious fur coat, slipped into it and hugged it around her body. She stood entranced, her back to Frankie, looking at her reflection in the dim depths of the mirror.

Closing in behind her, he took her shoulders in his hands. Capturing the hands in hers, she pulled them around her body and under the coat. Her head fell back onto his shoulder. Her breath sighed through parted lips. He could feel in his hands the vibrations of her shivering flesh.

She said sleepily, “You’re a sweet guy, Frankie. A lucky guy, too. You’re going places. Too bad I can’t go along.”

“Why not, baby? Why not go along?”

Her head rolled on his shoulder, her lips burning his neck. “Look, Frankie. When I go for a ride, I go first-class. No cheap tourist accommodations for Linda.”

“I don’t get you, baby. You call mink cheap?”

“It’s not the mink. It’s being second. It’s the idea of taking what’s left over.”

“You mean Taffy?”

She closed her eyes and said nothing, and Frankie laughed softly. “Taffy’s expendable, baby. Strictly expendable.”

“Just like that? Maybe she won’t let go.”

“How the hell can she help it?”

“She’s legal. That always helps.”

“Married? You think Taffy and I are married?” He laughed again, his shoulders shaking with it. “Taffy and I are temporary, baby. I never figure it any other way. Nothing on paper. All off the record. We last just as long as I want us to.”

She twisted against him, her arms coming up around his neck. Her breath was in his mouth.

“How long, Frankie? How long do you want?”

His hand moved down the soft curve of her spine, drawing her in. He said hoarsely, “As far as Taffy’s concerned, I quit wanting when I saw you. Tonight I’ll make it official.”

She put her mouth over his, and he felt the hot flicking of her tongue. Then she pushed away violently, staggering back against the dressing table. The mink hung open from her shoulders.

“Afterward, Frankie,” she whispered. “Afterward.”

He stood there blind, everything dissolved in shimmering waves of heat. At last, sight returning, he laughed shakily and moved to the door. Hand on the knob, he looked back at her.

“Like you say, baby — afterward.”

He went out into the hall and through the rear door into the alley. There was a small area back there in which he kept his convertible Caddy tucked away. Long, sleek, ice-blue and glittering chrome. A long way from the old Plymouth.

Behind the wheel, sending the big machine singing through the streets, he felt the tremendous uplift that comes to a man who approaches a crisis with assurance of triumph. His emotional drive was in harmony with the leashed power of the Caddy’s throbbing engine. Wearing his new personality, he could hardly remember the old Frankie. It was impossible to believe that he had once, not long ago, been driven by shame to a longing for death. Life was good. All it required was luck and guts. With luck and guts, a guy could do anything. A guy could live forever.

At the uptown apartment house, he ascended in the swift, whispering elevator and let himself into his living room with the key he carried. The living room itself was dark, but light sliced into the darkness from the partially open door of the bedroom. Silently, he crossed the carpet that wasn’t actually quite up to his knees and pushed the bedroom door all the way open.

Taffy was reading in bed. Her sheer nylon gown kept nothing hidden, but what it showed was nothing Frankie hadn’t seen before, and he was tired of it. He stood for a moment looking at her, wondering what would be the best way to do it. The direct way, he decided. The tough way. Get it over with, and to hell with it.

From the bed, Taffy said, “Hi, honey. You’re early tonight.”

Without answering, Frankie walked over to the closet and slammed back one of the sliding panels. He dragged a cowhide overnight bag off a shelf and carried it to the bed. Snapping the locks, he spread the bag open.

Taffy sat up straighter against her silk pillows, two small spots of color burning suddenly over her cheek bones. “What’s up, Frankie? You going someplace?”

He went to a chest of drawers, returned with pajamas and a clean shirt. “That ought to be obvious. As a matter of fact, I’m going to a hotel.”

“Why, Frankie? What’s the idea?”

He looked down at her, feeling the strong emotional drive. “The idea is that we’re through, baby. Finished. I’m moving out.”

Her breath whistled in a sharp sucking inhalation, and she swung out of bed in a fragile nylon mist. Her hands clutched at him.

“No, Frankie! Not like this. Not after all the luck I’ve brought you.”

He laughed brutally, remembering the old man. “It wasn’t you who brought me luck, baby. It was someone else. That’s something you’ll never know anything about.”

He turned, heading for the chest again, and she grabbed his arm, jerking. He spun with the force of the jerk, smashing his backhand across her mouth. She staggered off until the underside of her knees caught on the bed and held her steady. A bright drop of blood formed on her lower lip and dropped onto her chin. A whimper of pain crawled out of her throat.

“Why, Frankie? Just tell me why.”

He shrugged. “A guy grows. A guy goes on to something better. That’s just the way it is, baby.”

“It’s more than that. It’s a lot bigger than that. You think I’ve been two-timing you, Frankie?”

He repeated his brutal laugh. “Two-timing me? I’ll tell you something, baby. I wouldn’t give a damn if you were sleeping with every punk in town. That’s how much I care.” He paused, savoring sadism, finding it pleasant. “You want it straight, baby? It’s just that I’m sick of you. I’m sick to my guts with the sight of you. That clear enough?”

She came back to him, slowly, lifting her arms like a supplicant. He waited until she was close enough, then he hit her across the mouth again.

Turning his back, he returned to the chest and got the rest of the articles he needed. Just a few things. Enough for the night and tomorrow. In the morning he’d send someone around to clean things out.

At the bed, he tossed the stuff into the overnight bag and snapped it shut.

Over his shoulder, he said, “The rent’s paid to the end of the month. After that, you better look for another place to live.”

She didn’t respond, and remembering his tooth brush, he went into the bathroom for it. When he came out, she was standing there with a .38 in her hand. It was the same .38 he’d once considered killing himself with. That had been the old Frankie, of course.

Not the new Frankie. Death was no consideration in the life of the new Frankie.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” she said.

He laughed aloud and started for her, and he just couldn’t believe it when the slug slammed into his shoulder.

He looked down in amazement at the place where the crimson began to seep, and his incredulous eyes raised just in time to receive the second slug squarely between them.

And, like the night the old man died, it was funny. In the last split second of sight, it wasn’t Taffy standing there with the gun at all. It was the old man again.

The old man with a memory like an elephant.

The old man who always waited until it really hurt.

Souls burning by Bill Pronzini[6]

Civic Center

Hotel Majestic, Sixth Street, downtown San Francisco. A hell of an address — a hell of a place for an ex-con not long out of Folsom to set up housekeeping. Sixth Street, south of Market — South of the Slot, it used to be called — is the heart of the city’s Skid Road and has been for more than half a century.

Eddie Quinlan. A name and a voice out of the past, neither of which I’d recognized when he called that morning. Close to seven years since I had seen or spoken to him, six years since I’d even thought of him. Eddie Quinlan. Edgewalker, shadow-man with no real substance or purpose, drifting along the narrow catwalk that separates conventional society from the underworld. Information seller, gofer, smalltime bagman, doer of any insignificant job, legitimate or otherwise, that would help keep him in food and shelter, liquor and cigarettes. The kind of man you looked at but never really saw: a modern-day Yehudi, the little man who wasn’t there. Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser — fall guy. Drug bust in the Tenderloin one night six and a half years ago; one dealer setting up another, and Eddie Quinlan, smalltime bagman, caught in the middle; hard-assed judge, five years in Folsom, goodbye Eddie Quinlan. And the drug dealers? They walked, of course. Both of them.

And now Eddie was out, had been out for six months. And after six months of freedom, he’d called me. Would I come to his room at the Hotel Majestic tonight around eight? He’d tell me why when he saw me. It was real important — would I come? All right, Eddie. But I couldn’t figure it. I had bought information from him in the old days, bits and pieces for five or ten dollars; maybe he had something to sell now. Only I wasn’t looking for anything and I hadn’t put the word out, so why pick me to call?

If you’re smart you don’t park your car on the street at night, South of the Slot. I put mine in the Fifth and Mission Garage at 7:45 and walked over to Sixth. It had rained most of the day and the streets were still wet, but now the sky was cold and clear. The kind of night that is as hard as black glass, so that light seems to bounce off the dark instead of shining through it; lights and their colors so bright and sharp reflecting off the night and the wet surfaces that the glare is like splinters against your eyes.

Friday night, and Sixth Street was teeming. Sidewalks jammed — old men, young men, bag ladies, painted ladies, blacks, whites, Asians, addicts, pushers, muttering mental cases, drunks leaning against walls in tight little clusters while they shared paper-bagged bottles of sweet wine and cans of malt liquor; men and women in filthy rags, in smart new outfits topped off with sunglasses, carrying ghetto blasters and red-and-white canes, some of the canes in the hands of individuals who could see as well as I could, and a hidden array of guns and knives and other lethal instruments. Cheap hotels, greasy spoons, seedy taverns, and liquor stores complete with barred windows and cynical proprietors that stayed open well past midnight. Laughter, shouts, curses, threats; bickering and dickering. The stenches of urine and vomit and unwashed bodies and rotgut liquor, and over those like an umbrella, the subtle effluvium of despair. Predators and prey, half hidden in shadow, half revealed in the bright, sharp dazzle of fluorescent lights and bloody neon.

It was a mean street, Sixth, one of the meanest, and I walked it warily. I may be fifty-eight but I’m a big man and I walk hard too; and I look like what I am. Two winos tried to panhandle me and a fat hooker in an orange wig tried to sell me a piece of her tired body, but no one gave me any trouble.

The Majestic was five stories of old wood and plaster and dirty brick, just off Howard Street. In front of its narrow entrance, a crack dealer and one of his customers were haggling over the price of a baggie of rock cocaine; neither of them paid any attention to me as I moved past them. Drug deals go down in the open here, day and night. It’s not that the cops don’t care, or that they don’t patrol Sixth regularly; it’s just that the dealers outnumber them ten to one. On Skid Road any crime less severe than aggravated assault is strictly low priority.

Small, barren lobby: no furniture of any kind. The smell of ammonia hung in the air like swamp gas. Behind the cubbyhole desk was an old man with dead eyes that would never see anything they didn’t want to see. I said, “Eddie Quinlan,” and he said, “Two-oh-two,” without moving his lips. There was an elevator but it had an OUT OF ORDER sign on it; dust speckled the sign. I went up the adjacent stairs.

The disinfectant smell permeated the second floor hallway as well. Room 202 was just off the stairs, fronting on Sixth; one of the metal 2s on the door had lost a screw and was hanging upside down. I used my knuckles just below it. Scraping noise inside, and a voice said, “Yeah?” I identified myself. A lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door wobbled open, and for the first time in nearly seven years I was looking at Eddie Quinlan.

He hadn’t changed much. Little guy, about five-eight, and past forty now. Thin, nondescript features, pale eyes, hair the color of sand. The hair was thinner and the lines in his face were longer and deeper, almost like incisions where they bracketed his nose. Otherwise he was the same Eddie Quinlan.

“Hey,” he said, “thanks for coming. I mean it, thanks.”

“Sure, Eddie.”

“Come on in.”

The room made me think of a box — the inside of a huge rotting packing crate. Four bare walls with the scaly remnants of paper on them like psoriatic skin, bare uncarpeted floor, unshaded bulb hanging from the center of a bare ceiling. The bulb was dark; what light there was came from a low-wattage reading lamp and a wash of red-and-green neon from the hotel’s sign that spilled in through a single window. Old iron-framed bed, unpainted nightstand, scarred dresser, straight-backed chair next to the bed and in front of the window, alcove with a sink and toilet and no door, closet that wouldn’t be much larger than a coffin.

“Not much, is it,” Eddie said.

I didn’t say anything.

He shut the hall door, locked it. “Only place to sit is that chair there. Unless you want to sit on the bed? Sheets are clean. I try to keep things clean as I can.”

“Chair’s fine.”

I went across to it; Eddie put himself on the bed. A room with a view, he’d said on the phone. Some view. Sitting here you could look down past Howard and up across Mission — almost two full blocks of the worst street in the city. It was so close you could hear the beat of its pulse, the ugly sounds of its living and its dying.

“So why did you ask me here, Eddie? If it’s information for sale, I’m not buying right now.”

“No, no, nothing like that. I ain’t in the business any more.”

“Is that right?”

“Prison taught me a lesson. I got rehabilitated.” There was no sarcasm or irony in the words; he said them matter-of-factly.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“I been a good citizen ever since I got out. No lie. I haven’t had a drink, ain’t even been in a bar.”

“What are you doing for money?”

“I got a job,” he said. “Shipping department at a wholesale sporting goods outfit on Brannan. It don’t pay much but it’s honest work.”

I nodded. “What is it you want, Eddie?”

“Somebody I can talk to, somebody who’ll understand — that’s all I want. You always treated me decent. Most of ’em, no matter who they were, they treated me like I wasn’t even human. Like I was a turd or something.”

“Understand what?”

“About what’s happening down there.”

“Where? Sixth Street?”

“Look at it,” he said. He reached over and tapped the window; stared through it. “Look at the people... there, you see that guy in the wheelchair and the one pushing him? Across the street there?”

I leaned closer to the glass. The man in the wheelchair wore a military camouflage jacket, had a heavy wool blanket across his lap; the black man manipulating him along the crowded sidewalk was thick-bodied, with a shiny bald head. “I see them.”

“White guy’s name is Baxter,” Eddie said. “Grenade blew up under him in ’Nam and now he’s a paraplegic. Lives right here in the Majestic, on this floor down at the end. Deals crack and smack out of his room. Elroy, the black dude, is his bodyguard and roommate. Mean, both of ’em. Couple of months ago, Elroy killed a guy over on Minna that tried to stiff them. Busted his head with a brick. You believe it?”

“I believe it.”

“And they ain’t the worst on the street. Not the worst.”

“I believe that too.”

“Before I went to prison I lived and worked with people like that and I never saw what they were. I mean I just never saw it. Now I do, I see it clear — every day walking back and forth to work, every night from up here. It makes you sick after a while, the things you see when you see ’em clear.”

“Why don’t you move?”

“Where to? I can’t afford no place better than this.”

“No better room, maybe, but why not another neighborhood? You don’t have to live on Sixth Street.”

“Wouldn’t be much better, any other neighborhood I could buy into. They’re all over the city now, the ones like Baxter and Elroy. Used to be it was just Skid Road and the Tenderloin and the ghettos. Now they’re everywhere, more and more every day. You know?”

“I know.”

“Why? It don’t have to be this way, does it?”

Hard times, bad times: alienation, poverty, corruption, too much government, not enough government, lack of social services, lack of caring, drugs like a cancer destroying society. Simplistic explanations that were no explanations at all and as dehumanizing as the ills they described. I was tired of hearing them and I didn’t want to repeat them, to Eddie Quinlan or anybody else. So I said nothing.

He shook his head. “Souls burning everywhere you go,” he said, and it was as if the words hurt his mouth coming out.

Souls burning. “You find religion at Folsom, Eddie?”

“Religion? I don’t know, maybe a little. Chaplain we had there, I talked to him sometimes. He used to say that about the hard-timers, that their souls were burning and there wasn’t nothing he could do to put out the fire. They were doomed, he said, and they’d doom others to burn with ’em.”

I had nothing to say to that either. In the small silence a voice from outside said distinctly, “Dirty bastard, what you doin’ with my pipe?” It was cold in there, with the hard bright night pressing against the window. Next to the door was a rusty steam radiator but it was cold too; the heat would not be on more than a few hours a day, even in the dead of winter, in the Hotel Majestic.

“That’s the way it is in the city,” Eddie said. “Souls burning. All day long, all night long, souls on fire.”

“Don’t let it get to you.”

“Don’t it get to you?”

“...Yes. Sometimes.”

He bobbed his head up and down. “You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way.”

“I can’t tell you what it is,” I said.

He said, “If we all just did something. It ain’t too late. You don’t think it’s too late?”

“No.”

“Me neither. There’s still hope.”

“Hope, faith, blind optimism — sure.”

“You got to believe,” he said, nodding. “That’s all, you just got to believe.”

Angry voices rose suddenly from outside; a woman screamed, thin and brittle. Eddie came off the bed, hauled up the window sash. Chill damp air and street noises came pouring in: shouts, cries, horns honking, cars whispering on the wet pavement, a Muni bus clattering along Mission; more shrieks. He leaned out, peering downward.

“Look,” he said, “look.”

I stretched forward and looked. On the sidewalk below, a hooker in a leopard-skin coat was running wildly toward Howard; she was the one doing the yelling. Chasing behind her, tight black skirt hiked up over the tops of net stockings and hairy thighs, was a hideously rouged transvestite waving a pocket knife. A group of winos began laughing and chanting “Rape! Rape!” as the hooker and the transvestite ran zig-zagging out of sight on Howard.

Eddie pulled his head back in. The flickery neon wash made his face seem surreal, like a hallucinogenic vision. “That’s the way it is,” he said sadly. “Night after night, day after day.”

With the window open, the cold was intense; it penetrated my clothing and crawled on my skin. I’d had enough of it, and of this room and Eddie Quinlan and Sixth Street.

“Eddie, just what is it you want from me?”

“I already told you. Talk to somebody who understands how it is down there.”

“Is that the only reason you asked me here?”

“Ain’t it enough?”

“For you, maybe.” I got to my feet. “I’ll be going now.”

He didn’t argue. “Sure, you go ahead.”

“Nothing else you want to say?”

“Nothing else.” He walked to the door with me, unlocked it, and then put out his hand. “Thanks for coming. I appreciate it, I really do.”

“Yeah. Good luck, Eddie.”

“You too,” he said. “Keep the faith.”

I went out into the hall, and the door shut gently and the lock clicked behind me.

Downstairs, out of the Majestic, along the mean street and back to the garage where I’d left my car. And all the way I kept thinking: There’s something else, something more he wanted from me... and I gave it to him by going there and listening to him. But what? What did he really want?

I found out later that night. It was all over the TV — special bulletins and then the eleven o’clock news.

Twenty minutes after I left him, Eddie Quinlan stood at the window of his room-with-a-view, and in less than a minute, using a high-powered semiautomatic rifle he’d taken from the sporting goods outfit where he worked, he shot down fourteen people on the street below. Nine dead, five wounded, one of the wounded in critical condition and not expected to live. Six of the victims were known drug dealers; all of the others also had arrest records, for crimes ranging from prostitution to burglary. Two of the dead were Baxter, the paraplegic ex — Vietnam vet, and his bodyguard, Elroy.

By the time the cops showed up, Sixth Street was empty except for the dead and the dying. No more targets. And up in his room, Eddie Quinlan had sat on the bed and put the rifle’s muzzle in his mouth and used his big toe to pull the trigger.

My first reaction was to blame myself. But how could I have known or even guessed? Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser, shadow-man without substance or purpose. How could anyone have figured him for a thing like that?

Somebody I can talk to, somebody who’ll understand — that’s all I want.

No. What he’d wanted was somebody to help him justify to himself what he was about to do. Somebody to record his verbal suicide note. Somebody he could trust to pass it on afterward, tell it right and true to the world.

You want to do something, you know? You want to try to fix it somehow, put out the fires. There has to be a way.

Nine dead, five wounded, one of the wounded in critical condition and not expected to live. Not that way.

Souls burning. All day long, all night long, souls on fire.

The soul that had burned tonight was Eddie Quinlan’s.

The second coming by Joe Gores[7]

San Quentin

I’ve thought about it a lot, man; like why Victor and I made that terrible scene out there at San Quentin, putting ourselves on that it was just for kicks. Victor was hung up on kicks; they were a thing with him. He was a sharp dark-haired cat with bright eyes, built lean and hard like a French skin-diver. His old man dug only money, so he’d always had plenty of bread. We got this idea out at his pad on Potrero Hill — a penthouse, of course — one afternoon when we were lying around on the sun-porch in swim trunks and drinking gin.

“You know, man,” he said, “I have made about every scene in the world. I have balled all the chicks, red and yellow and black and white, and I have gotten high on muggles, bluejays, redbirds, and mescaline. I have even tried the white stuff a time or two. But—”

“You’re a goddam tiger, dad.”

“—but there is one kick I’ve never had, man.”

When he didn’t go on I rolled my head off the quart gin bottle I was using for a pillow and looked at him. He was giving me a shot with those hot, wild eyes of his.

“So like what is it?”

“I’ve never watched an execution.”

I thought about it a minute, drowsily. The sun was so hot it was like nailing me right to the air mattress. Watching an execution. Seeing a man go through the wall. A groovy idea for an artist.

“Too much,” I murmured. “I’m with you, dad.”

The next day, of course, I was back at work on some abstracts for my first one-man show and had forgotten all about it; but that night Victor called me up.

“Did you write to the warden up at San Quentin today, man? He has to contact the San Francisco police chief and make sure you don’t have a record and aren’t a psycho and are useful to the community.”

So I went ahead and wrote the letter, because even sober it still seemed a cool idea for some kicks; I knew they always need twelve witnesses to make sure that the accused isn’t sneaked out the back door or something at the last minute like an old Jimmy Cagney movie. Even so, I lay dead for two months before the letter came. The star of our show would be a stud who’d broken into a house trailer near Fort Ord to rape this Army lieutenant’s wife, only right in the middle of it she’d started screaming so he’d put a pillow over her face to keep her quiet until he could finish. But she’d quit breathing. There were eight chicks on the jury and I think like three of them got broken ankles in the rush to send him to the gas chamber. Not that I cared. Kicks, man.

Victor picked me up at seven-thirty in the morning, an hour before we were supposed to report to San Quentin. He was wearing this really hip Italian import, and fifty-dollar shoes, and a narrow-brim hat with a little feather in it, so all he needed was a briefcase to be Chairman of the Board. The top was down on the Mercedes, cold as it was, and when he saw my black suit and hand-knit tie he flashed this crazy white-toothed grin you’d never see in any Director’s meeting.

“Too much, killer! If you’d like comb your hair you could pass for an undertaker coming after the body.”

Since I am a very long, thin cat with black hair always hanging in my eyes, who fully dressed weighs as much as a medium-size collie, I guess he wasn’t too far off. I put a pint of Jose Cuervo in the side pocket of the car and we split. We were both really turned on: I mean this senseless, breathless hilarity as if we’d just heard the world’s funniest joke. Or were just going to.

It was one of those chilly California brights with blue sky and cold sunshine and here and there a cloud like Mr. Big was popping Himself a cap down beyond the horizon. I dug it all: the sail of a lone early yacht out in the Bay like a tossed-away paper cup; the whitecaps flipping around out by Angel Island like they were stoned out of their minds; the top down on the 300-SL so we could smell salt and feel the icy bite of the wind. But beyond the tunnel on U.S. 101, coming down towards Marin City, I felt a sudden sharp chill as if a cloud had passed between me and the sun, but none had; and then I dug for the first time what I was actually doing.

Victor felt it, too, for he turned to me and said, “Must maintain cool, dad.”

“I’m with it.”

San Quentin Prison, out on the end of its peninsula, looked like a sprawled ugly dragon sunning itself on a rock; we pulled up near the East Gate and there were not even any birds singing. Just a bunch of quiet cats in black, Quakers or Mennonites or something, protesting capital punishment by their silent presence as they’d done ever since Chessman had gotten his out there. I felt dark frightened things move around inside me when I saw them.

“Let’s fall out right here, dad,” I said in a momentary sort of panic, “and catch the matinee next week.”

But Victor was in kicksville, like desperate to put on all those squares in the black suits. When they looked over at us he jumped up on the back of the bucket seat and spread his arms wide like the Sermon on the Mount. With his tortoiseshell shades and his flashing teeth and that suit which had cost three yards, he looked like Christ on his way to Hollywood.

“Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do unto me,” he cried in this ringing apocalyptic voice.

I grabbed his arm and dragged him back down off the seat. “For Christ sake, man, cool it!”

But he went into high laughter and punched my arm with feverish exuberance, and then jerked a tiny American flag from his inside jacket pocket and began waving it around above the windshield. I could see the sweat on his forehead.

“It’s worth it to live in this country!” he yelled at them.

He put the car in gear and we went on. I looked back and saw one of those cats crossing himself. It put things back in perspective: they were from nowhere. The Middle Ages. Not that I judged them: that was their scene, man. Unto every cat what he digs the most.

The guard on the gate directed us to a small wooden building set against the outside wall, where we found five other witnesses. Three of them were reporters, one was a fat cat smoking a .45-calibre stogy like a politician from Sacramento, and the last was an Army type in lieutenant’s bars, his belt buckle and insignia looking as if he’d been up all night with a can of Brasso.

A guard came in and told us to surrender everything in our pockets and get a receipt for it. We had to remove our shoes, too; they were too heavy for the fluoroscope. Then they put us through this groovy little room one-by-one to x-ray us for cameras and so on; they don’t want anyone making the Kodak scene while they’re busy dropping the pellets. We ended up inside the prison with our shoes back on and with our noses full of that old prison detergent-disinfectant stink.

The politician type, who had these cold slitted eyes like a Sherman tank, started coming on with rank jokes: but everyone put him down, hard, even the reporters. I guess nobody but fuzz ever gets used to executions. The Army stud was at parade rest with a face so pale his freckles looked like a charge of shot. He had reddish hair.

After a while five guards came in to make up the twelve required witnesses. They looked rank, as fuzz always do, and got off in a corner in a little huddle, laughing and gassing together like a bunch of kids kicking a dog. Victor and I sidled over to hear what they were saying.

“Who’s sniffing the eggs this morning?” asked one.

“I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the papers.” He yawned when he answered.

“Don’t you remember?” urged another, “it’s the guy who smothered the woman in the house trailer. Down in the Valley by Salinas.”

“Yeah. Soldier’s wife; he was raping her and...”

Like dogs hearing the plate rattle, they turned in unison toward the Army lieutenant; but just then more fuzz came in to march us to the observation room. We went in a column of twos with a guard beside each one, everyone unconsciously in step as if following a cadence call. I caught myself listening for measured mournful drum rolls.

The observation room was built right around the gas chamber, with rising tiers of benches for extras in case business was brisk. The chamber itself was hexagonal; the three walls in our room were of plate glass with a waist-high brass rail around the outside like the rail in an old-time saloon. The other three walls were steel plate, with a heavy door, rivet-studded, in the center one, and a small observation window in each of the others.

Inside the chamber were just these two massive chairs, probably oak, facing the rear walls side-by-side; their backs were high enough to come to the nape of the neck of anyone sitting in them. Under each was like a bucket that I knew contained hydrochloric acid. At a signal the executioner would drop sodium cyanide pellets into a chute; the pellets would roll down into the bucket; hydrocyanic acid gas would form; and the cat in the chair would be wasted.

The politician type, who had this rich fruity baritone like Burl Ives, asked why they had two chairs.

“That’s in case there’s a double-header, dad,” I said.

“You’re kidding.” But by his voice the idea pleased him. Then he wheezed plaintively: “I don’t see why they turn the chairs away — we can’t even watch his face while it’s happening to him.”

He was a true rank genuine creep, right out from under a rock with the slime barely dry on his scales; but I wouldn’t have wanted his dreams. I think he was one of those guys who tastes the big draught many times before he swallows it.

We milled around like cattle around the chute, when they smell the blood from inside and know they’re somehow involved; then we heard sounds and saw the door in the back of the chamber swing open. A uniformed guard appeared to stand at attention, followed by a priest dressed all in black like Zorro, with his face hanging down to his belly button. He must have been a new man, because he had trouble maintaining his cool: just standing there beside the guard he dropped his little black book on the floor like three times in a row.

The Army cat said to me, as if he’d wig out unless he broke the silence: “They... have it arranged like a stage play, don’t they?”

“But no encores,” said Victor hollowly.

Another guard showed up in the doorway and they walked in the condemned man. He was like sort of a shock. You expect a stud to act like a murderer: I mean, cringe at the sight of the chair because he knows this is it, there’s finally no place to go, no appeal to make, or else bound in there full of cheap bravado and go-to-hell. But he just seemed mildly interested, nothing more.

He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, suntans that looked Army issue, and no tie. Under thirty, brown crewcut hair — the terrible thing is that I cannot even remember the features on his face, man. The closest I could come to a description would be that he resembled the Army cat right there beside me with his nose to the glass.

The one thing I’ll never forget is that stud’s hands. He’d been on Death Row all these months, and here his hands were still red and chapped and knobby, as if he’d still been out picking turnips in the San Joaquin Valley. Then I realized: I was thinking of him in the past tense.

Two fuzz began strapping him down in the chair. A broad leather strap across the chest, narrower belts on the arms and legs. God they were careful about strapping him in. I mean they wanted to make sure he was comfortable. And all the time he was talking with them. Not that we could hear it, but I suppose it went that’s fine, fellows, no, that strap isn’t too tight, gee, I hope I’m not making you late for lunch.

That’s what bugged me, he was so damned apologetic! While they were fastening him down over that little bucket of oblivion, that poor dead lonely son of a bitch twisted around to look over his shoulder at us, and he smiled. I mean if he’d had an arm free he might have waved! One of the fuzz, who had white hair and these sad gentle eyes like he was wearing a hair shirt, patted him on the head on the way out. No personal animosity, son, just doing my job.

After that the tempo increased, like your heart beat when you’re on a black street at three a.m. and the echo of your own footsteps begins to sound like someone following you. The warden was at one observation window, the priest and the doctor at the other. The blackrobe made the sign of the cross, having a last go at the condemned, but he was digging only Ben Casey. Here was this M.D. cat who’d taken the Hippocratean Oath to preserve life, waving his arms around like a tv director to show that stud the easiest way to die.

Hold your breath, then breathe deeply: you won’t feel a thing. Of course hydrocyanic acid gas melts your guts into a red-hot soup and burns out every fibre in the lining of your lungs, but you won’t be really feeling it as you jerk around: that’ll just be raw nerve endings.

Like they should have called his the Hypocritical Oath.

So there we were, three yards and half an inch of plate glass apart, with us staring at him and him by just turning his head able to stare right back: but there were a million light years between the two sides of the glass. He didn’t turn. He was shrived and strapped in and briefed on how to die, and he was ready for the fumes. I found out afterwards that he had even willed his body to medical research.

I did a quick take around.

Victor was sweating profusely, his eyes glued to the window.

The politician was pop-eyed, nose pressed flat and belly indented by the brass rail, pudgy fingers like plump garlic sausages smearing the glass on either side of his head. A look on his face, already, like that of a stud making it with a chick.

The reporters seemed ashamed, as if someone had caught them peeking over the transom into the ladies’ john.

The Army cat just looked sick.

Only the fuzz were unchanged, expending no more emotion on this than on their targets after rapid-fire exercises at the range.

On no face was there hatred.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was part of it. I wanted to yell out STOP! We were about to gas this stud and none of us wanted him to die! We’ve created this society and we’re all responsible for what it does, but none of us as individuals is willing to take that responsibility. We’re like that Nazi cat at Nuremberg who said that everything would have been all right if they’d only given him more ovens.

The warden signalled. I heard gas whoosh up around the chair.

The condemned man didn’t move. He was following doctor’s orders. Then he took the huge gulping breath the M.D. had pantomimed. All of a sudden he threw this tremendous convulsion, his body straining up against the straps, his head slewed around so I could see his eyes were tight shut and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. Then he started panting like a baby in an oxygen tent, swiftly and shallowly. Only it wasn’t oxygen his lungs were trying to work on.

The lieutenant stepped back smartly from the window, blinked, and puked on the glass. His vomit hung there for an instant like a phosphorus bomb burst in a bunker; then two fuzz were supporting him from the room and we were all jerking back from the mess. All except the politician. He hadn’t even noticed: he was in Henry Millerville, getting his sex kicks the easy way.

I guess the stud in there had never dug that he was supposed to be gone in two seconds without pain, because his body was still arched up in that terrible bow, and his hands were still claws. I could see the muscles standing out along the sides of his jaws like marbles. Finally he flopped back and just hung there in his straps like a machine-gunned paratrooper.

But that wasn’t the end. He took another huge gasp, so I could see his ribs pressing out against his white shirt. After that one, twenty seconds. We decided that he had cut out.

Then another gasp. Then nothing. Half a minute nothing.

Another of those final terrible shuddering racking gasps. At last: all through. All used up. Making it with the angels.

But then he did it again. Every fibre of that dead wasted comic thrown-away body strained for air on this one. No air: only hydrocyanic acid gas. Just nerves, like the fish twitching after you whack it on the skull with the back edge of the skinning knife. Except that it wasn’t a fish we were seeing die.

His head flopped sideways and his tongue came out slyly like the tongue of a dead deer. Then this gunk ran out of his mouth. It was just saliva — they said it couldn’t be anything else — but it reminded me of the residue after light-line resistors have been melted in an electrical fire. That kind of black. That kind of scorched.

Very softly, almost to himself, Victor murmured: “Later, dad.”

That was it. Dig you in the hereafter, dad. Ten little minutes and you’re through the wall. Mistah Kurtz, he dead. Mistah Kurtz, he very very god-damn dead.

I believed it. Looking at what was left of that cat was like looking at a chick who’s gotten herself bombed on the heavy, so when you hold a match in front of her eyes the pupils don’t react and there’s no one home, man. No one. Nowhere. End of the lineville.

We split.

But on the way out I kept thinking of that Army stud, and wondering what had made him sick. Was it because the cat in the chair had been the last to enter, no matter how violently, the body of his beloved, and now even that febrile connection had been severed? Whatever the reason, his body had known what perhaps his mind had refused to accept: this ending was no new beginning, this death would not restore his dead chick to him. This death, no matter how just in his eyes, had generated only nausea.

Victor and I sat in the Mercedes for a long time with the top down, looking out over that bright beautiful empty peninsula, not named, as you might think, after a saint, but after some poor dumb Indian they had hanged there a hundred years or so before. Trees and clouds and blue water, and still no birds making the scene. Even the cats in the black suits had vanished, but now I understood why they’d been there. In their silent censure, they had been sounding the right gong, man. We were the ones from the Middle Ages.

Victor took a deep shuddering breath as if he could never get enough air. Then he said in a barely audible voice: “How did you dig that action, man?”

I gave a little shrug and, being myself, said the only thing I could say. “It was a gas, dad.”

“I dig, man. I’m hip. A gas.”

Something was wrong with the way he said it, but I broke the seal on the tequila and we killed it in fifteen minutes, without even a lime to suck in between. Then he started the car and we cut out, and I realized what was wrong. Watching that cat in the gas chamber, Victor had realized for the very first time that life is far, far more than just kicks. We were both partially responsible for what had happened in there, and we had been ineluctably diminished by it.

On U.S. 101 he coked the Mercedes up to 104 m.p.h. through the traffic, and held it there. It was wild: it was the end: but I didn’t sound. I was alone without my Guide by the boiling river of blood. When the Highway Patrol finally got us stopped, Victor was coming on so strong and I was coming on so mild that they surrounded us with their holsters flaps unbuckled, and checked our veins for needle marks.

I didn’t say a word to them, man, not one. Not even my name. Like they had to look in my wallet to see who I was. And while they were doing that, Victor blew his cool entirely. You know, biting, foaming at the mouth, the whole bit — he gave a very good show until they hit him on the back of the head with a gun butt. I just watched.

They lifted his license for a year, nothing else, because his old man spent a lot of bread on a shrinker who testified that Victor had temporarily wigged out, and who had him put away in the zoo for a time. He’s back now, but he still sees that wig picker, three times a week at forty clams a shot.

He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a grey raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a t-shirt and jeans — and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.

“Ah... how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”

He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”

“Why no strollers, dad?”

“I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”

Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teen-agers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.

Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.

Knives in the dark by Don Herron[8]