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

A pedestrian cross-walk sign facing me bloomed a warning red, but only the WALK part of it came on, in palsied letters. The wiring loose. Then DONT showed up beside it after it was nearly time for the whole thing to go off again. But nobody had mistaken it for a go-ahead anyway. They went by the color and not the capitals. (Parenthetically the thought occurred to me: Acolor-blind person could’ve got knocked down right then, in those few seconds.)

Then it made the switch-back to green, and the whole process repeated itself. But I still didn’t go over to the other side.

It wasn’t because I was undecided; if I was undecided, I wouldn’t have come this far. It wasn’t because I was afraid; if I was afraid, I wouldn’t have come at all. It wasn’t because I wanted to back out; if I wanted to back out, all I had to do was turn around and go away.

It isn’t as easy to kill someone as they tell you it is. It isn’t as easy to kill someone as you think.

People were going by in droves, but none of them looked at me. They wouldn’t have believed it if someone had said: See that man standing where you just went past? He’s on his way right now to kill someone, someone who lives down on the next block.

Here’s what they might have said, various ones of them: How can you report it before he’s done it? You have to wait till he does it first, and then report it. You can’t arrest him just for carrying a thought around in his head.

Or: You report it. I have to meet my wife and pick up my car. I’m late now.

Or: Not me. I have an appointment at the beauty-parlor. If I miss it by even ten minutes, they won’t hold it for me, I might have to wait a whole week before I can get one again.

Or: I have my own troubles. I just got a ticket. Why should I cooperate with those guys? It’s their baby, not mine.

If you looked straight up overhead, the buildings made a picket-fence around the sky that only left a little well of it open in the middle. The rest was all converging lines of aluminum lashed together with gleaming zircons. Like railroad-tracks tilted up into the sky, with tiers and tiers and tiers of twinkling ties spanning them, growing smaller, smaller, smaller as they climbed... Until your eyes got tired and dropped off, and you lost them near that end-of-the-line called heaven. That subway-station in the sky.

This was New York, beautiful but cold.

And not for little men and little women and their grudge-matches.

Billowing life all around, and imminent death standing there, still, in the middle of all of it. Elbowed a little bit over this way, edged a little bit over that, nudged a little bit back the first way again. A bus overshot its yellow-stenciled unloading-slot, came a little too far forward, and opened its steaming door right in front of my face. A woman in rubber jack-boots got down heavily sideways, and one of them landed right on the toes of my left foot. I pulled them out from under, and she glared at me for having my toes there right where her foot was going to come down.

I reached to feel for the gun, not to use it but to see if it had become dislodged, the way you touch your hat to straighten it after a slight collision.

It was all right, it hadn’t been disturbed.

The bus paled into an azure silhouette for a moment behind a parting gush of exhaust-fumes and then went on its way. CINZANO stared back from its rear end, in a diagonal, in big block-capitals. Then they contracted into lower-case. Then they contracted into italics. Then into undecipherable molecules. Then the traffic coming behind blotted them out altogether. But the world had read their message.

The deep-freeze or whatever it was that had held me, thawed and dissolved, and I’d broken stance and was starting to go across at last. I almost wouldn’t have noticed it myself, but the ground seemed to be slowly moving backward under me like some sort of conveyor-belt, or a flattened-out escalator-tread going the other way. And now that I’d started, I didn’t stop anymore after that. That had been the last time.

I moved slowly, but I kept moving. Going down the street, just going down the street. Like I had no reason, had no purpose, had no thought in mind. I touched the gun once, it was still there.

It felt heavier than it had in the old days, but I’d been in the hospital meantime and had lost weight. It was Government Issue, I’d brought it back with me from Saigon. You’re supposed to turn them in when you’re separated, but I hadn’t.

I looked up at an ascending angle and recognized the building where I’d used to live. I even saw the windows which had once been mine. I counted up to them, that’s how I knew them, but I didn’t use my finger, I didn’t want anyone to notice me do that. I just counted with my eyes instead.

I didn’t see the man on door-duty outside, when I turned and went in. Then when I entered, he was in there but he didn’t see me. He had his back to me, he was on the house-phone and he was talking to someone in the building, and he seemed very engrossed. More than engrossed, he seemed very excited. Or they were, which amounted to the same. “Now take it easy,” I heard him say. “Now pull yourself together and try to talk more slowly so I can understand you.”

I went around the turn to the elevator-bank, off-side to the front entrance, and pushed for the car. It came gliding down silent as a pin-drop, all glossy chrome and all empty. I got in and pushed the six-button and it closed and started to take me up.

It had been so easy to get in here unobserved, I almost couldn’t believe it. I’d never been able to pass him like that in the old days when I’d still lived here. But maybe it wasn’t the same guy, I hadn’t seen his face, and they all looked alike in the uniform.

The minute I got out, somebody unseen called it away from me, and it went on further up somewhere else, so it didn’t even leave a trace of which floor I was on.

And then I came to the door, the door that had been our door, but wasn’t anymore.

I remembered how many times I’d come to it before, cold from being outside, overheated from being outside, tired from being outside. Now I was bringing a gun to shoot and kill with, in from being outside.

Once we’d hung a Christmas-wreath on it.

I remembered the last time, how it had slammed. And I’d thought of a line from a song I used to know: “And as the door of love between us closes —”

I got out the key I’d still kept, and opened it, and went in.

I saw the chairs I knew, the lamps I knew, the windows, the walls, the doors I knew. That same water-color in its same white-leather frame, of a Montmartre street-scene signed by someone named either Cobelle or Cubelle (I’d never been able to make sure) was still on the wall up there. A book on the table said: Tom Jones. We’d had that one then. A record on the player said: Once Upon a Time, Never Comes Again. We hadn’t had that one then.

She must have just come in. Her coat was over a chair-seat dribbling downward to the floor. A glass with half a highball in it that she was coming back to in a minute was on a stand beside the chair. She’d never drunk before. Not by herself I mean. At parties, out with friends. Maybe she had something now to drink by herself about.

I knew she was in the bedroom, must be, although I couldn’t hear her making any sound.

I called her name, not loudly, routinely as though we both still lived there in those rooms together, and she came in to me.

She wasn’t frightened. She was surprised but she wasn’t frightened. She must have been changing her clothes: to rest, to be more comfortable, maybe to get ready for a bath. When she came in she had on just a light-blue corduroy wrap-around over her foundation pieces.