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

Abbazzia got up from the chair, rammed one fist deep down into his pocket, arm held stiffly at his side in tension. “They gotta get in here fast, in case I need them,” he explained to the respectfully watching girls. He went over toward the wall on the left-hand side first, coiled his free hand, drew it back, and thumped loudly three times, at spaced intervals.

Within a matter of seconds, not minutes but seconds, the room-door burst backward and Carmine strode in, a snub-nosed revolver held springily down beside his hip-joint.

“Heard je,” he said triumphantly. “How was that for speed?”

Abbazzia narrowed his eyes mistrustfully. “How many knocks ’dl give it?” he catechized.

“Three,” Carmine answered. He reinserted his gun under his left armpit.

Abbazzia nodded approvingly. “You heard me,” he admitted.

He turned to face the other way. “Now we’ll try Sal’s side.” He pummeled the wall heavily. Then a second time. Then a third. “I’ll give it four this time,” he said, jaw clenched with effort. The impact of the blow coincided with the flaring-open of the door, with the latter just preceding it by some instants.

Sal’s revolver was bedded within the side pocket of his coat, but reared perpendicularly so that the whole coat hem rose with it to a squat-nosed projection. “Clear as a bell!” he reported sanguinely.

Again Abbazzia’s eyes squinted. “How many times ’dl sound off?” he growled truculently.

Sal looked slightly taken back. “I only caught two,” he admitted.

Abbazzia’s face twisted into a violent blob of rage, like unbaked dough squeezed between the hands of a pastry cook. “You lyin’—!” he exploded virulently. “I done it four times! You’re going to tell me it’s twice, haa?”

He coiled a forearm far back of his own shoulder, swung rabidly with it, caught the bodyguard flat-handed on the side of the face with a sound like wet linen being pounded on a clothesline. Then again on a pendulum-like reverse swing. The third slap only missed contact because Sal veered his head acutely aside, without however moving his body back.

Hand poulticing his stricken cheek, his attitude was one of rueful, misunderstood loyalty. “Hold it, boss,” he protested virtuously. “Hold it a minute.”

“I don’t like for nobody to lie to me, see?” Abbazzia shrilled.

“I caught the first one sitting in the chair, waiting for it to come. By the time the second one come, I was halfway through the door already. Naturally, I missed the last two because I wasn’t in the room no more by that time. What should I do, sit there counting ’em off on my fingers? If them things was wrong-way bullets, four would be too many to wait for. While I’m waiting to count, you’re—” He left it eloquently unfinished.

Abbazzia took a moment to consider this, crinkling his eyes speculatively first, then widening them in elated appreciation. “Yeah!” he concurred with enthusiasm. “That was the smart thing to do! It’s the speed what counts when I’m sending for you, not the arithmetic.” He turned his head a moment in oblique disparagement. “Whyd’n’t you think of that, Carmine?” And to the rest of them, as though he had been the one taking Sal’s part all along and they had been in opposite judgment: “See what a smart boy I got here? What’re you trying to tell me, he ain’t smart?” Again his hand went out toward Sal, but this time to clap him on the shoulder rewardingly, to squeeze his biceps affectionately. Even to pinch the point of his chin and wag it playfully to and fro.

He reached into his pocket, took out a billfold, took something out of that, prodded it down into Sal’s breast pocket like a handkerchief. “Blow your nose on that,” he instructed jovially.

“Now clear out and lemme get some sleep.” He crossed his forearms, fanned them apart, in general room-wide dismissal. They went in pairs for the most part, Carmine with the blonde, Sal with the brunette, the other two to do night-long sentinel duty, one downstairs, one in the hall. No good nights were said. Perhaps good-nights were for people who lived less dangerously; just to survive the night itself, that alone was sufficient well-being.

“Take good care of him for us,” the blonde warned, with an undertone of jealousy.

“And I’m the girl that can do it,” was the pert answer.

The door closed.

“Lock it up on the inside,” Abbazzia ordered.

He looked at her from where he lay sprawled out in the chair. His look was lethargic, even somnolent. Not the somnolence caused by sleep, but the somnolence caused by the dregs of a spent passion that can no longer stir or vivify. His arms and legs seemed to fall away from him of their own accord, so that his sprawl became even looser.

“Undress me,” he commanded in a monotone.

The girl quickly advanced, a smile starched on her face. She slid downward onto her knees before him, reached gingerly forward toward the topmost button of his jacket, as quiveringly as though she were afraid of getting an electric shock.

He allowed the lids to close over his eyes, the better to retain whatever distorted images this was about to bring him.

Just as her fingertips touched the button, and almost as though it were an effect generated by her touching of it, there was a single, low knock on the outside of the door.

Her hands scampered back to her own person, like two ashamed things seeking refuge. They all but tried to burrow inside her clothing and hide themselves.

His eyelids went up, furrowed with annoyance. “Go see what they want now,” he told her. “One of ’em must have forgot something.”

She unlocked the door, but her arm held out across it still blocked the way. A hand flung the arm contemptuously aside.

An old, old woman all in black was standing there. Short and stocky, like he was. Her face long-dead; only the eyes still alive. Bitterly alive.

This black wasn’t the black of fashion, the black of Rome and New York, trim and just-so. This was the black the women of Catania wore, in the after-years of their lives, after they had lost their men. Homespun and shapeless, and with no intent to please. To show life was through, and that the wearer was through with life.

“Get out!” she commanded the girl stonily.

Stunned into alertness, his back reared from its supine position against the chair. “How’d you get here?” he breathed in amazement.

He became aware of the girl, still cringing there to one side of the two of them. “You heard her. Get out,” he repeated. “Wait outside. I’ll let you know when I want you back.”

She slipped around one side of the door-frame and was gone from sight, as furtively as though she were afraid to come into line with those terrible eyes staring so fixedly into the room at him, like messengers of denunciation.

“Rifiuto!” the old woman said balefully. Garbage.

He demanded: “Whaddya doin’ here like this? Don’tcha know it’s risky to come here?”

She pitched her head interrogatively. “Che significa, ‘risky’?”

“Pericoloso,” he translated unwillingly, as though averse to following her into the language of his former days, the one learned at her lips.

“Pericoloso per chi?” She gave a snort of scorn-curdled laughter.

Risky for whom? Risky for you, maybe. Not for me. I have killed no one. I have robbed no one. I go unafraid.

“Now that you’re here, whaddya want? Whadja come for? To say good-bye to me?”

She tossed her head impatiently, as when one is bored by having to return to an old subject that was closed long ago. “Ti dissi addio...”

I said good-bye to you ten long years ago, night after night in the dark, on my knees before the blessed image of Our Lady, drops of water falling from my eyes, drops of blood falling from my heart. She did not smile on me. It was too late then already for anything except good-bye. Then, it was finished. That was my good-bye.