Deadline at Dawn

His assistant chimed in: “I think I know who she means. That fussy one. You know, the one I had to say to her, ‘Lady, don’t scratch lines on the bread with your fingernail to show me how thick you want it sliced, if you ain’t going to buy the whole loaf. Maybe somebody else after you wants to buy it too.’ For ten cents worth of salami and pumpernickel, she takes up the whole loaf like this.” He picked up a loaf to demonstrate, stroked his nail down the soft underside of it, powdered white. “It’s got to be just so.”

“You’re doing it yourself,” his employer pointed out.

“Well all right, but I work here.”

The proprietor remembered now, if vaguely. “Oh her, you mean. Yeah, that’s right.”

Bricky was leaning avidly across the counter at them. “You couldn’t tell me her name, could you?”

“That I don’t know. She comes in here all the time. She lives next door there somewhere.” He negligently speared a thumb toward the wall behind him. Toward a row of catsup-bottles on a shelf, to be more exact.

“Oh,” she said flurriedly. “Oh.” She started to back away. “I’ll look for her, then. I didn’t know — I’ll go there right now and look for her.”

“Just next door,” he repeated.

She went out faster than she’d come in. It had paid off. She’d gained a yard on her this time.

She looped around and plunged into the flat-entrance immediately adjoining.

Six letterboxes in a row, on her left. Six more, on her right. Which was the one? Even if this was the “next door” of the delicatessen-keeper — and he’d carelessly thumbed down this way, instead of up the other — which of the doors within this all-embracing “next door” was it? How was she to know? She didn’t know the name. She didn’t know the face. The taxi-man was gone now. The trail had ended imbedded head-on in a slab of salami between two chunks of pumpernickel. That was the mocking windfall at the end of the treasure-hunt.

Miller, Carroll, Herzog, Ryan, vacant, Battipaglia. She bent low, eyes eight inches from the wall, scanning them. Some were in crooked, had to be read on the bias. One wasn’t in all the way, the “ia” of Battipaglia projected on the outside of the slot-frame. She was blonde, that was the name least likely to be hers of the lot. Still it was not an out-and-out impossibility; by marriage, by the peroxide-bottle—

She turned to the other side, ran her eyes along there at astigmatism-distance. Newmark, Simms, Lopez, Kirsch, Barlow, Stern.

It ought to be one. It couldn’t be all. It mightn’t be any. One chance out of eleven to be right. Ten chances to be wrong. Eleven, considering that it might not even be this building at all. “Next door” was elastic, could mean two houses down, three, any number as far as the first intervening crossing.

Ring one, any one at all; suppose they did scowl or snarl at her, what was that? She might be able to find out from them. No, she didn’t want to do that; she might be giving herself away. The floors, the walls, might have ears. The only way to strike and hope to succeed was suddenly, without giving any warning.

She went over to the inner door, to see if she could get in beyond where she was, even though the eventual flat remain anonymous. The knob was brass and it was kept well-polished. This seemed to be a conscientiously cared-for building, even though in the lower-rental brackets. She just stopped her hand in time, from pressing on it and turning it.

It was such a small thing, such a faint thing, such a nothing really. The contact of her hand, no matter how light, would have surely obliterated it. It was a miniature smudge upon the glossy, satin-surfaced brass, but in white. A sliver, a paring of a fingerprint, the ghost of a crescent scallop. As if someone whose fingertips had lately touched chalk had turned this knob before her.

“My pumpernickel-customer.” The delicatessen-man’s voice. “The machine don’t cut it thick enough to suit her. She takes her finger like this and shows me how wide she wants it cut.” Pumpernickel, a bread dusted with stubbornly-adhesive flour.

“She came in this door,” she said to herself. “She’s somewhere in this house.” The eleven chances to be wrong had shrunk to ten.

Go on in, you fool, go on up, go from door to door; you know now. She shook her head, stayed where she was. Strike suddenly, strike unexpectedly, otherwise you might lose everything.

A tiny piece of paper on the floor. In this entryway that was otherwise so meticulously clean, so it must have fallen only recently. A little fingernail-length tatter, that was all it was actually. It lay under the six letterboxes on the right-hand side as you came in, but under the whole row of them in general, not under any one in particular. For it was too far below, and out a little too far, to be attributed to any one of them individually.