Deadline at Dawn

He said, “Who’s this? Who’ve you got with you?”

She picked herself up, went over to him and kissed him. He gave Bricky a stupidly inquiring look over her shoulder.

She stood aside. “Mary, meet my husband.”

“Mary Coleman,” Bricky said dutifully.

They nodded to one another reservedly. He glanced down at his own coat and trousers, then over at the bed; he was obviously tired. After a strained moment of triple silence, he turned on his heel and went back inside. “I’m going ahead in and eat,” he said inhospitably.

They followed him in there. “Well, I guess I’ll run along, now that your husband’s back.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll go over with you and get that. You know, that pattern.”

He’d sat down. He shoved the paper napkin into the gap between two buttons of his shirt, so that it fanned out from there. “At this hour?” he said. “Clothes at three in the morning,” he grunted under his breath.

“I’ll be back in five minutes. She lives just around the corner from here.”

“Should I wait up for you?” he asked disgruntledly. “I’m tired.”

“You go ahead and get to bed. I’ll be back before you know it. I won’t even take my coat.”

“You’d better take your coat,” Bricky said. “It gets a little chilly at this hour of the morning.”

She went in and got it. Both their faces were a little pale, Bricky’s and hers. Bricky wondered if he noticed it.

He’d gotten up to come to the door with them, chewing on a mouthful of his sandwich. A sandwich that had cost so dear.

She kissed him again.

“And Harry, don’t make a mistake and lock the door on the inside so that I can’t use my key. I don’t want to have to ring and wake you, in case you are asleep already.”

“Don’t stay out too long. I don’t want anything happening to you.”

She kissed him a third time.

“You kissed me already,” he said.

“Can’t I kiss you an extra time if I feel like it?”

“Sure, if you feel like it,” he consented.

His hand was already at the knot of his tie, and his mouth was stretching into a yawn, as he ushered them out.

She started to cry the minute the door was shut behind the two of them. Grimacing without sound. “I thought I’d break down before we got out of there. He was tired, or he would have noticed it in my eyes. I love him so much.”

“Take it easy,” Bricky said brusquely.

They went down the stairs, Bricky in the lead. They went out into the solemn blueness of the street.

Helen Kirsch glanced behind her at the doorway. “I won’t be coming back again, will I?” She bit her lips. “I loved it there — with him. It wasn’t much, but it had him in it.”

“Then why didn’t you stick close to it, while you had it?” Bricky said stonily. “Cut out the hearts and flowers. I carried out my part of the bargain, now see that you carry out yours.” She thought: Life is like a see-saw. Every time one of us goes up, somebody else at the other end of the board goes down.

They walked as far as the corner.

“We’ll take a taxi,” Bricky said. “That’s about the quickest way.”

The figure beside her cowered a little.

She hopes I won’t find one, Bricky said to herself. Any little thing to delay us. She saw one and she shrilled at it, and it came over.

Bricky shovelled her hand invitingly toward her companion, as if to have the destination come from her unprompted, to hear what it would be.

“The exact—?”

“No, the nearest corner is good enough.”

“The corner of Seventieth and Madison,” Helen Kirsch said in a stricken voice.

Bricky nodded to herself in narrow-lidded confirmation, cracked the door to after them.

The cab wheeled about for uptown, the city began to pay off block by block. The street-lights roller-coastered in and out again, in and out again, through the windows at the sides.

Helen Kirsch’s hands formed a bow-knot of despair at her mouth. “Who’ll send his shirts out to the laundry for him? He’ll never remember that; I’ve always had to do it for him.”

Bricky didn’t answer.

The blocks paid off. The street-lights flickered in and out.

“I wonder what he’ll do with himself, without me, on Sundays. That was his only day off. Now he’ll have the whole day on his hands.”

Bricky looked the other way. “Why rub it into yourself?” she said gruffly.

A light stopped them, and in the stillness of the wait, the engine-throb was like somebody’s heart going.

More blocks. More flickering street-lights seeping in. New York’s such a long city, especially when you’re riding lengthwise through it — to the end of all your hopes.

“You’re so fast, you police,” Helen Kirsch said. “I always heard you were, but I never believed it before, until now.”

We police, Bricky thought sadly. We police is good. If she only knew.

She started to cry a little more, Helen Kirsch. “I can’t believe it. He isn’t really— He can’t be—”

“He’s dead,” Bricky said flintily. “Dead as they make them. Dead as they come.”