Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

The waiter looked closely at him, decided that he had had too much to drink, and threw him out into the street. Jim fell and bruised his knee, but he couldn’t feel the pain. He picked himself up slowly and walked toward the cab stand.

He felt strong enough now to have it out with Marie. It was only when he was completely drunk that he could talk to her about things that really troubled him.

The cab driver was apprehensive, but took him in without asking him beforehand how much money he had.

He shuddered a little as he went through the front door. The house was dark, except for a light in the upstairs hall. He looked at his watch. Marie would still be up. He tip-toed up the red-carpeted stairway to her room. He hesitated, his heart pounding, opened the door and went in to the room.

It was dark.

“Marie...” he said quietly.

There was a shuffling sound from the bed.

“Don’t say anything, Marie... I’m sorry,” he said as he searched for the fight.

He wondered how he would break it to her. His hand closed around the account card in his pocket.

“I’ve done it, Marie...” he said joyfully. “I’ve made the last payment!”

“Get him out of here, for god’s sake,” a man’s voice said.

Jim’s heart sank. She was at it again, he thought, and turned for the door.

“Come back in an hour, Jimmy,” she was saying as he went out.

Vengeance by Robert Page Jones

Heinrich Fischer glanced into the window of the delicatessen and gasped. There, behind the hanging rows of meat-stuffed intestines and sausage, like prison bars, appeared a face. Bloated, smooth, full-lipped, innocent looking... it was Haller.

* * *

He was a man distinguished only by his plainness, thin almost to emaciation, jostled along by the last-minute stampede of Christmas shoppers. Stringy arms clutched a battered, handleless violin case against his chest. He came up out of the subway in the West Side tenement section. It was snowing. It had been snowing all day and the slush was heaped in dirty mounds on the pavement.

In the middle of a long block he stopped, waited for a break in the traffic, and crossed. He hissed at a growling dog that darted out to snap at his heels. He did not like dogs. They were vile things that ate perfectly good food without so much as a snicker of appreciation.

He stared down at the pounded slush as he walked, chin thrust forward, shoulders stooped from too many years of sleeping in a cramped wooden cubicle. In front of Liebermann’s Delicatessen and Grocery he stopped again. He stood on the patch of wet sidewalk under the awning where the snow hadn’t reached and examined the merchandise in the window. It was a ritual with him. He had stopped in front of Liebermann’s on nearly every week-night for the past fifteen years. Tonight there was a new display; shiny tins of potted meat and Christmas cakes from the Old Country. He thought briefly about buying one of the tins of meat but changed his mind. The price, scribbled on a sign atop the pyramid Liebermann had painstakingly built in the window, was exorbitant. There was no money to spare. It was always this way at Christmas. Nobody wanted music lessons. After the holidays, when the children had new instruments, things would be better.

He stamped the loose snow from his shoes. Perhaps some sausage. He could afford that. His gaze shifted to the rows of meat-stuffed intestines hung from bloody hooks in the ceiling. Something happened. In his mind the sausages suddenly became metal bars, partially obscuring a bloated face, smooth and perspiring with a full-lipped pink mouth, innocent looking, smiling.

He felt a cold twist in his heart. A quick squeeze. He did not understand. The hated image had never come on him in just this way. Never so suddenly. He closed his eyes.

It was Haller’s face.

The image, like a searing knife-blade in the brain, branded there the washed-out blue eyes and mocking smile and sensuous lips. For a moment he stood there, fighting the rising tide of hate that for so long had eaten away at his mind, blotting out everything else. Things would be different if he could forget. But he could not. He swallowed, his mind burning as the familiar features wavered and changed shape before him, becoming a series of jagged slashes inflicted by an imaginary knife until the red gore ran together into one sickly wound that trickled blood down inside his pounding chest.