Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Or if he smite him with a hand weapon of wood, and he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.

The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him, he shall slay him.

Mr. Siegel closes his book. Outside there is a flash of heat lightning and a distant rumble of thunder. “Rain,” he murmurs quietly.

“Looks like it,” Flynn agrees. “Tell me something. Of all your customers here in the neighborhood, you don’t by chance happen to have a Salvation Army officer?”

“Salvation Army officer?” Mr. Siegel’s eyes narrow and he ponders a bit. “Those fellows in the black uniform with the red collar, the peaked hat?”

“That’s right.”

Mr, Siegel smiles brightly. “I got one of them.”

Flynn’s heart leaps in his chest. “You do?”

“Sure—that’d be the colonel.”

“The colonel?” There’s a moment of silence. “Colonel who?”

The old man stares up at the ceiling trying to recall. “Let me see—takes a Post weekdays, Daily News Sunday mornings. Has it delivered.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“Hold on a minute.” Mr. Siegel goes to the back of the store, disappearing into a back room, only to reappear the next moment bearing a small, gray ledger book. It is one of those cheap paperbound ledgers, full of pink-ruled lines and smudgy inked entries. The old man thumbs through hectically, licking a finger every now and then to make the pages fly more swiftly.

“Ah, here,” he says, halting finally at a page and adjusting his glasses, which keep slipping down his nose. “Colonel Divine,” he announces triumphantly. “Colonel Joseph Divine. That’s the fellow—610 West 49th. Just a few doors down the block here.”

Flynn feels something like butterflies flutter in his stomach, a slow but inexorably mounting sense of excitement. “Can I see that a minute?”

“Sure.” Mr. Siegel hands the detective the ledger book. Flynn scribbles the name and address from it onto his pad. “Just down the block you say?”

“Sure. Old brownstone near the corner. He do something wrong?”

“Who knows?” Flynn shrugs, his face a little flushed. “Can I use your phone?”

“Sure. It’s in the back. Help yourself.”

At the rear of the store Flynn dials the precinct house, arranging to have a squad car meet him at the brownstone on 49th Street. Then he is out front again with Mr. Siegel.

“How much I owe you?”

“For what?”

“The lemon-lime.”

Mr. Siegel, looking more patriarchal than ever, shakes his hoary, white-maned head and dismisses the offer of money with a broad, regal motion of his arm.

After the glass door has closed behind him, with the, sound of little entry bells tinkling out after him into the street, Flynn glances back to wave farewell to Mr. Siegel. But the old man is already hunched over the counter again, elbows on the bar, cheeks resting in either palm,, back deep in his Bible.

Outside in the street it is now thick dusk. The street lamps have just gone on. Children are playing tag around some trash cans on the pavement and young Puerto Rican couples stroll eastward, arm in arm, toward the great Saturday-evening glow of white lights shimmering above the Times Square area. The old sit in the windows and merely watch.

Another long gash of heat lightning turns the sky momentarily white above the river, and in the close, balmy air there is an imminence of rain.

Six ten West 49th Street is a three-story brownstone near the end of the block, quite close to Eleventh Avenue. It is one of those houses built around the turn of the century, in the gaslight era of the city. Once an elegant town house for a banker or a wealthy merchant, now it has been partitioned into a number of small dwelling units (efficiency apartments, they’re called) and has fallen upon hard times.

In the small tiled vestibule downstairs is a narrow wall into which are set eight badly defaced mailboxes. The dim light flickering above them provides scarcely enough illumination for reading the names: Moody—Grayson—Donnelly—Terhune—Horwitz—two more scarcely legible—then, on a neat, elegantly printed little card, the name Divine, apartment 3B.

There is no buzzer so Flynn cannot ring to announce himself. The glass door between vestibule and hallway stands open, its lock having been removed in toto and never replaced. So the detective merely walks in.

Standing in the hallway, he can hear voices behind doors, footsteps, a hi-fi blaring the Eroica, kitchen sounds, people going about supper and life.

Before starting up the narrow, rickety stairs, Flynn’s hand grazes lightly the area where the pistol in its holster rests snugly just beneath his armpit. Outside he can hear the rain starting to drill heavily on the pavements.

Mounting those stairs now, the steps creaking beneath his shoes, he has a strange sense of exhilaration, like a man who’s been climbing a long time, who can see the summit now just a few feet ahead. And there is that heady buoyancy of the second wind. It all has a kind of inevitability about it. Particularly since the name Divine, which appeared on Stanley Charles’s paper-route list, also appeared on General Pierce’s ten-year-old duty roster, the one from the old South Street Salvation Army shelter.

Number 3B is in the far corner of the hall, looking out, Flynn surmises, over the back of the building. The name plate on the door says “J. Divine.” Before ringing, the detective stands quietly outside the door listening for sounds from within. But there are no sounds. Nor does any light appear from beneath the door. He smiles oddly there in the shadows, shaking his head. Then he presses the small white buzzer to the side of the door.

He can hear the sound of the buzzer ringing within, and then a cat meows. Then silence. After a moment he rings again. This time he hears—or thinks he hears—the squeal of springs. Possibly a person rising from a couch or sitting up in bed. Then he hears something like the sound of a throat being cleared of phlegm, followed by the words “Just a minute” pouring muffled through the plaster walls. In the next minute he hears footsteps, then a crack of light glares beneath the door.

He is staring up now at a tall, strikingly handsome man with a shock of iron-gray hair. The rimless glasses from out of which gaze two greatly magnified eyes give him a parsonical look—faintly disapproving.

“Colonel Divine?” Flynn hears his voice coming back at him over great distances.

“Yes.”

“Sergeant Flynn—New York Police, Sixth Homicide Division. I wonder if I might have a few words with you.”

Shirt-sleeved, a small, pink dotted-swiss apron tied around his middle, Francis Haggard hovers over a sink full of supper dishes. While the water runs and suds rise about his elbows, he broods on the events of the day. Facts gathered at the Bureau that afternoon shuttle and flash through his head, and he toys with the idea of a quick run up to Boston.

Greatly troubled and perplexed, his chief worry now is that Konig, given any chance, will act alone, without the police. And given the disaster of the day before, he could scarcely blame him if he did.

The shrill whistle of a boiling teakettle jars him from his ruminations. Shortly he’s steeping tea leaves in a small china pot, then pouring that into a rich mixture of cream and honey.

Looking ludicrous in the pink apron, he carries a tray, its contents rattling slightly, out through the living room, down a short hall, and into a bedroom.

Mary Haggard sits in bed there, in a blue silk lounging robe, watching television. She is a small, pretty woman with vivacious eyes and blond hair going prematurely gray. On the bed table beside her is a stack of books, novels and histories, plus a tray of medications. On the big plaid comforter covering the bed are a nearly completed jigsaw puzzle depicting the Botticelli Primavera and a chessboard with a game half completed and waiting there for Frank Haggard to resume.