A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I swung from the shoulder and flung the gun with all the force that I had in me, against the wall over to the side and back of me. It struck with such violence the impact alone should have been enough to detonate it. I don’t know why it didn’t. The guard must have still been on. It fell down there in the corner, black and bulky and boding ill, its ugly intention inhibited.

She walked slowly and spent toward a small table there was against the wall, and first leaned over it pressing her hands down on it as though she weighed more than she could hold up. Then sank down upon a chair beside it and let her head roll on the table and clutched her arms around it.

She didn’t make much sound. Only the shaking told what it was. But how she shook. As if every hope and every happiness were coming loose.

I looked at her. What was there to say? What do you say, what can you say?

“Cry,” I said with sad accord. “Cry for you, for me, for the two of us.”

“Cry,” she agreed in a smothered voice, “for the whole world, and everyone that’s in it.”

“Cry and good-bye.” I turned slowly and went to the door. There wasn’t hate in my heart anymore, there wasn’t wanting to get even, there wasn’t will to kill.

“Good-bye,” she echoed faintly after me. And she said my name, and put that with it. My private name, my given name, my first name. Never mind what it was. It was still her right to use it, only she and no one else.

I opened the door with a strange sort of care, as when you don’t want to disturb someone, and let myself out. Then I closed it and looked at it from there.

Once I’d said, this is the door that love has come away from. Once I’d said, just a little while ago, this is the door I’m bringing death into. Now death had been there and had come away again without striking. A door that doesn’t hold love, and doesn’t hold death either. Oh what an aching empty barren place lies behind there.

The elevator was somewhere else, so I went down the safety-stairs. It was quicker than waiting for it to come. Down and around, then down and around again, five times, from the sixth floor down, at a jogging trot that sounded a little bit like a tap-dancer’s time-step, because the steps had steel rims that clicked under me. Then gave the springed end-door at the bottom a sweep aside that opened up the lobby. And as it did so, there was a sudden flare-up of excitement. It had been there all the while but the soundproof door had kept it muffled.

Outside the building-entrance were two, not one but two, police patrol-cars, sometimes called Mickey Mouses in the vernacular, their red roof-reflectors swinging away and spattering all the walls opposite with blood — or red paint or mercurochrome, as your fancy sees and calls it. A cop was posted just inside the street-door, obviously to keep anyone from leaving the building. He’d already kept two people, a man and a woman; I could tell that by the way they were standing awkwardly to one side. Whether they were together or not I couldn’t make out. There was a second cop acting as a sort of liaison between the lobby and the cars outside, going back and forth all the time. In the lobby were several more nonuniformed men who were very much of the police, it stood out all over them. The doorman, on the house-phone, was saying to someone: “Keep your door locked, please. Don’t open it.” Then he was saying it to someone else. Then to still a third.

They pounced as soon as I appeared, one of them on each side of me like magic. I never knew people could move so fast. I couldn’t use my arms anymore, before I’d even felt anything.

“Where’d you just come from? Identify yourself.”

“From 6-B. I was up there to see someone.”

“How’d you happen to use the stairs?”

“Thought I’d save time. I didn’t know there was an ordinance against it.”

I started skittishly. One of them had had his hands going up and down me without my being aware of it until it was over.

They interrupted the doorman’s relay of warning calls to ask: “He live in the house?”

“No, I never saw him before.”

He hadn’t, and I hadn’t either.

“What’s it about? I asked, not indignant — because you don’t get indignant when they mean business like they did, not if you’re sensible — as much as uncomprehending. And let’s say, resolutely clear both of eye and inner knowledge and determined to show it. “What’s up?”

They didn’t answer. The attitude: You don’t ask us questions. We do it.

When I turned to the doorman in an unvoiced repetition, he didn’t, either. Apparently unsure he had their approval and not wanting to risk disfavor.

But the man over by the door whom I have said it was my impression was being kept in on a stand-by basis, being a civilian answered as one civilian sometimes will to another, police or no police. And notably when they’re being inconvenienced.

“There’s been an armed hold-up, and the man’s still at large somewhere upstairs, he never got out. They’re combing the building for him floor by floor.”