Fer-De-Lance

It was just another rooming-house. For some reason or other they're all alike, whether it's a high-hat affair in the Fifties or a brownstone west of Central Park full of honest artist girls or an Italian hangout like this one on Sullivan Street. With, of course, a difference in details like garlic. Maria Maffei took me first to the landlady, a nice fat woman with wet hands and a pushed-in nose and rings on her fingers, and then upstairs to her brother's room. I looked around a little while Maria Maffei went to get the girl who had heard the phone call. It was a good-sized room on the third floor with two windows. The rug was worn and the furniture old and sort of broken, but it was clean and really not a bad room except for the noise from the hoodlums below when I opened the window to see if the roadster was still on its feet. Two large traveling bags were stacked in a corner, one flimsy and old and done for, the other one old too but sturdy and good. Neither was locked. The flimsy one was empty; the good one contained a lot of small tools of different shapes and sizes, some of which had pawnshop tags hanging on them, and some pieces of wood and metal and odds and ends like coil springs. The closet contained an old suit of clothes, two overalls, an overcoat, two pairs of shoes, and a felt hat. In the drawers of the bureau which stood between the windows was an assortment-not scanty for a man who had been living on his sister for a year-of shirts, ties, handkerchiefs, socks, and a lot of miscellaneous junk like shoestrings, lead pencils, snapshots, and empty pipe-tobacco cans. In an upper drawer was a bundle of seventeen letters in envelopes all with Italian postage stamps, fastened with a rubber band. Scattered around in the same drawer were receipts and paid bills, a tablet of writing-paper, a few clippings from newspapers and magazines, and a dog collar. On top of the bureau, along with comb and brush and similar impedimenta as Wolfe would say, were half a dozen books, all in Italian except one that was full of pictures and designs, and a big stack of magazines, different monthly issues for three years back all with the same name, Metal Crafts. In the corner by the right window was a plain rough wood table with its top scarred and cut all over, and on it was a small vise, a grinder and buffer with an electric cord long enough to reach the lamp socket, and some more tools like those in the traveling bag. I was looking over the grinder to see how recently it had been used when Maria Maffei came in with the girl.