Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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