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

“Gee, am I glad to see you fellows! I never was so glad to see anyone in my life before—!”

“You are?” one said, and that was all.

Beside himself, and scarcely knowing what he was doing, he even tried to press the hand of one of them. The man passively let him do so, without making any move of his own. His hand did not return the pressure, and when Abbazzia let it go, it fell back lifeless, boneless, to where it had been before. Thus, there was no handclasp exchanged, for it takes two to produce one.

Two of them came forward now into the room, one turning to the third as they did so and instructing, quiet-voiced: “You wait outside here by the door. We’ll be right out.”

The door was closed again, locked on the inside, crisply.

Abbazzia had been made almost antic by happiness. He cupped his hands together, leaving an orifice. He blew into it zestfully. He rubbed them together, in anticipation of imminent welcome activity.

“Now I’ll get what I’m taking with me,” he told them. “Won’t take no time at all.”

The second officer had crossed to the window, as if to draw the shade. Then seeing that Abbazzia already had it down, he modified his intention, simply stood there with his back to it, in a waiting attitude, hands behind him.

“You won’t need that,” the other one suggested helpfully to Abbazzia.

“No, I guess you’re right,” Abbazzia conceded. He cast aside the rejected garment, stooped again to his task.

“Y’got a gun?” the man asked him matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Better let us take it,” the patrolman said quietly.

“Okay, if you think it’s better that way,” Abbazzia assented accommodatingly. He drew it out, offered it to him grip-first.

“Take his gun for him, Charlie,” the first one instructed his fellow-patrolman without offering to touch it himself.

The second one uncoupled his hands, came over, accepted it from Abbazzia, and disposed of it somewhere within his uniform jacket, unbuttoning it, rebuttoning it again.

“Thanks a lot,” said Abbazzia absently, bending once more.

“You’re welcome,” answered the first one tonelessly.

Abbazzia straightened again, about to insert something within his own clothing this time.

“You won’t need that,” he was told, as tonelessly as ever.

Abbazzia stopped long enough to give him a blank look. “Oh, this I will,” he contradicted. “This time you’re wrong. This is dough. You need that every place you go.”

“There’s one place you don’t,” the policeman said expressionlessly. “Not where you’re going.”

Abbazzia stopped to look at him more fully, more uncomprehendingly than the first time. His look became a stare. “What d’ya mean? I don’t get you—”

The other one spoke unexpectedly, from behind them. “Let’s get finished, shall we, Mike? This is no fun anymore.”

Abbazzia turned sharply to look at him. He had a gun held in his hand. Not the one Abbazzia had just handed over to him, but one that must have come out of his police-holster. He wasn’t aiming it, it just lay idle in his hand, sidewise, as if he were testing its weight.

Abbazzia turned back in consternation to the first one. “What does he need that for?” he asked with quickening tension.

“I don’t know,” was the dispassionate answer. “Ask him.”

But even as he answered, he was unlimbering one of his own.

Abbazzia’s voice was beginning to throb. “Wait a minute — I don’t get it—”

“You don’t get it?” said the one before him, meticulously repetitive. “He don’t get it,” he said to the one behind.

“Something’s wrong here—”

This time the policeman gave a slight head-shake. “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s just the way it should be.”

“No, it isn’t! I feel peculiar. You’re making me feel peculiar — the way you’re looking at me — something about the way you’re looking at me—” He could hardly breathe. Suddenly suspicion, seeping into the overheated crannies of his mind all this while like a combustible gas, ignited, exploded into a ghastly white flash of certainty.

“You ain’t real cops—” His lower jaw dangled loosely, as though the mental detonation just now had unhinged it. He got it to cleave to its upper part long enough for utterance. “Barney — Maxwell — didn’t — send you!”

“What d’ya know?” the one in front of him apprised the one behind him. “Barney Maxwell didn’t send us.”

The voice in back of Abbazzia said, “Who’s Barney Maxwell?”

“Crooked police captain,” the first one explained. “Must’ve been trying to make a deal with him, to get in out of the open.”

At this, Abbazzia’s eyes flickered closed in expiring confirmation.

The patrolman plucked briefly at his own coat sleeve to indicate it. “So the cop suits worked?” he leered at Abbazzia. “It’s new. First time. And when a thing’s still new, you can count on it paying off.”

Abbazzia sank downward onto his knees between the two of them, into the little cranny their bodies made for him.

(“That’s smart,” the rearward one said approvingly, “less distance for you to fall.”)

His face was turned upward. He started to talk for his life. Only, lives can’t be put into words. “Fellas. Fellas—”

“We are fellas,” the face bending over him said.

“Fellas, my money— All my money, fellas— Much more than is in this room—”

“What d’ya think, we came here to rob you?” the face smiled. “We ain’t thieves.”

His voice came straight from his heart now. Every heartbeat swelled it, thinned it, and they were dynamo-quick. “Two minutes. Just give me two minutes. Two minutes, that ain’t long to ask for. Just one minute. Don’t give it to me cold. Just let me pull myself together, just let me get ready.”

“You’re ready now,” the overhanging face said. And it said crisply to the other one, “Get a pillow. Use one of them.”

He put his hand downward onto Abbazzia’s shoulder; not heavily, but lightly, as if just to balance him there in place. As you hold some inanimate thing steady, keep it from toppling over, until you are ready to have to do with it — whatever it is you have to do with it.

Abbazzia made an infantile puking sound, as when a suckling infant regurgitates upon its mother’s milk, and lurched sideward onto his shoulder and hip. Then like a bisected snake that still has reflexes of motion left to it, he tried to writhe in underneath the bed, to gain the shelter of its iron frame.

The man in the police uniform made a wide scooping motion with his foot, as when you sweep something back toward you that has eluded you, whether inert refuse or scurrying vermin it matters not; and Abbazzia had to avert his face from the scraping shoe. Then the man recoiled his foot and drove his shoe into Abbazzia’s lower face, along the floor.

There was dental pain, and bone pain, and a pale-blue flash, like shattered starlight on a disrupted mill-pond. Sluggish warmth backed against the seams of Abbazzia’s mouth, and peered forth, emulsion-thick, a laggard bead at a time.

“Hang onto him a minute, be right with you,” one of the voices recommended belatedly, as though its owner had only then just glanced around at what was taking place.

“Got him,” the other assured.

Abbazzia’s eyes, like circular mosaics embedded in the floor, stared upward, could see only the ceiling now: an edgeless expanse of white. It was like a burial ground suspended upside-down over him, a potter’s field with a fill of white clay.

“A minute— Only a minute—” he whispered.

The sole of a shoe came down across his throat, full stamping-power withheld though, and kept him pinned there. He could not raise his head at the one side of it, he could not raise his trunk at the other. His fingers scratched the empty air, his arms jittered upward and back in opposing directions like someone flat on his back playing the strings of an invisible harp. Once his flexing fingertips caught onto trouser-leg fabric, at sheer random, and pulled it back, revealing gnarled pebble-white shank and a triangular banding of elastic garter.