Warren Murphy: Power Play

"Fine. Send your bill to Theodosia. She'll pay you right away."

That night, there was a full moon over Furlong County. Theodosia was downstairs in the country club's suite of offices, working on Pruiss's personal profit and loss statements.

Pruiss looked out his bedroom window and the top of the three-story building across the street was bathed in a soft white moonglow. He put a light sweater over his T-shirt and walked across the street.

As he stepped inside the door of the replicated tenement, his palms began to sweat.

He looked up the steps. There was a bare bulb burning at the top of the second-floor landing. It cast long shadows down along the wooden steps, each stair meticulously swaybacked in the center, duplicating tenement steps curved and bowed from years of being walked on in the center. Pruiss stepped on the first stair. It squeaked, as it always had when he was a boy. The smell of urine in the hall was strong and bitter.

Sweat broke out on Pruiss's forehead.

He was frightened, just as he had always been frightened, every time he walked up the stairs of that building, the bare wooden steps that led to hallways lined with green linoleum, worn through in spots, installed in a desperate and futile attempt to make the building cheery.

For all his talk of being a child of the streets, the streets had terrified Pruiss. He was smaller than other boys his age and they didn't like him, and whereas they seemed not to mind living in dangerous, dirty slums, Pruiss was frightened for his life every moment of his childhood. It was as if he alone, of all the boys, knew how impermanent life was and that his life was precious, something to be guarded. He had taken to spending more and more time in the family's apartment with his hardworking mother and rarely-seen father, dreaming of what life would be like when he was grown and powerful and rich.

Both mother and father were gone now. He wished they had been around to see him make it.

The farther he walked up the steps, the more he perspired. The light over the third floor landing was out, as it always had been when he was a boy. He forced himself to go upstairs, knowing even as he did it that it was a mistake, something he should not do, something he should never do. The perspiration rolled off his head. There were crumpled-up newspapers and a crushed brown paper bag in one corner of the hallway. That was where Mr. Bailey, who lived one flight down, always disposed of the evidence of the bottle of wine he brought home and hid in his apartment. Outside one of the apartment doors, a stack of newspapers was piled neatly and tied. Those were Mrs. Acalara's papers. She was a widow and Wesley would carry her papers to the junkyard down the block on the back of his wagon. He always went very early on Saturday morning when the big lads weren't out yet. A three-foot high pile of papers would sell for twenty cents. Mrs. Acalara always gave him a nickel to keep for himself.

Pruiss stood in the darkness of the third floor landing and listened to the stillness of the building. There was no sound except for his breathing and his heartbeat thumping in his ears.

He had never been so frightened in his life. It was as if he had walked through a time warp into the past. He put his hand on the doorknob to the Pruiss family's flat. He told himself that he was rich and powerful now and this was no longer a rundown building in a strange tough city where he had been just another potential victim. This was his building in his town, his county, his piece of the world. And he was king.

He swallowed hard, took a deep breath and opened the door and stepped inside. He reached for the overhead light string just inside the door and pulled it but there was no answer of lights. In his childhood, there had hardly ever been, for old man Pruiss was not among the world's most consistent or productive workers and the electric bill had rarely been paid.

Wesley Pruiss had been brought up in the dim light and the bitter smoky smell of kerosene lamps.

He reached in his pants for a Butane lighter. In the dim moonlight through a kitchen window, he could see the kerosene lamp on top of the red and white oilcloth covering the kitchen table. The table underneath, he knew, was porcelain topped metal, with chips in the porcelain at the corners where the bare metal showed through.

The kitchen was redolent with the enduring smell of poverty, of cabbage, of kidney and liver. He looked toward the sink. There was a gauzy bag of white stuff hanging from the old fashioned faucet. That would be a bag of curdled milk, dripping away its juices, being turned into pot cheese by the necessarily-frugal Mrs. Pruiss.

He struck the lighter and reached for the kerosene lamp.

A voice behind him said, "I've been waiting for you."

Pruiss dropped the lighter. It went out, hit the table and fell onto the floor.

He whirled and looked into the darkness of the passageway leading to the apartment's living room.

"Who's there?"

There was no answer. Pruiss was still, but all he could hear was his breathing and the thumping of his pulse.

"I said who's there?"

His answer was silence, and Pruiss wheeled back and dropped to the floor, wiping it with his hand, looking for the cigarette lighter.

He heard a whirring sound behind him. Then he felt something bite into his back and although it was something outside his experience, he knew as he felt it force its way into his flesh that it was the blade of a knife that had been thrown at him.

Then the feeling left his legs and Wesley Pruiss sank slowly forward onto his face on the floor and he knew that something bad had happened to his body, something very bad, and the pain of the knife in his back was like a heated spear, but then the spear seemed to cool and Wesley Pruiss found that he could close his eyes and sleep.

But as he lapsed into unconsciousness, a thought came into his mind with bright, searing clarity. The thought was that even if he had done some bad things, he did not deserve a knife in the back. That was unjust, and if there was such a thing as justice, there should be justice even for those who do bad. His last thought as he closed his eyes was, Is there no one who can give me justice?

His name was Remo and he knew what justice was. Justice was time-and-a-half for overtime. Justice was not being given more jobs in a night than you could reasonably handle. Justice was being appreciated for what you did better than anyone else.

All those things were justice and Remo knew there was no justice.

So he knew the man he wanted would not be where Upstairs said he would be, and he resigned himself to having to trail him all over New York, finally winding up in some strobe-lighted disco whose sound level would turn sand to glass.

Remo slid into the empty seat at the small round-topped table and Kenroth Winstler looked up at him with a bemused smile on his face. The man sitting across from Winstler was certainly dressed strangely for a discotheque, even in an age of wrinkled cottons and baggy jumpsuits. The man wore black chinos and a black T-shirt. He had dark hair and deep-set eyes that were like pools of night and he seemed slim, except for thick wrists that he rested on the table. He looked at Winstler for a long time as if making sure of something.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Winstler said, nodding toward Remo and the chair he occupied. "But I'm expecting a lady."

"That's all right," Remo said. "I'll be gone and you'll be dead before she gets here. My name's Remo, by the way."

Winstler smiled. The din from the disco records was deafening. If he hadn't known better, he would have sworn that the man opposite him was saying that Kenroth Winstler was going to die.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you," Winstler said.