Small Town

“Arroz con pollo,” the woman said. “Tha’s cheecken an’ rice. Tha’s what you wan’?”

He nodded. The food, when she brought it, was a little spicy for his taste, but it wasn’t bad. He wasn’t hungry, he was rarely hungry, but realized he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. And thirsty. Water was aqua in Latin, and was it agua in Spanish? Or if he just made the gesture, raising an invisible glass to his lips...

While he was considering the matter, she brought him a glass of water.

He had eaten half his meal when he heard sirens. And this wasn’t a single ambulance, this was more than one siren. He tucked ten dollars under his plate and didn’t wait for change. He’d lost his bearings, wasn’t sure which way he’d come from, but all he had to do was walk toward the sirens.

The building was burning after all. He didn’t see flames shooting, but there was a lot of smoke, and a lot of activity on the part of the firefighters. A crowd had gathered to watch, and he joined them, but felt dangerously conspicuous. He managed to find his way to the subway and went home.

It made the papers, because there were two fatalities — a young man who’d evidently been sleeping, or comatose from drugs, and a firefighter, thirty-two years old, the father of three, a resident of Sunnyside, Queens. Both had died of smoke inhalation.

He mourned them, and honored their sacrifice.

A day after the Bronx fire, he set about reorganizing his life. He liquidated his stocks and mutual funds and put everything into a money-market account at his bank. The apartment was his most substantial asset, but it seemed an impossible chore to list it for sale and wait for the co-op board to approve a prospective purchaser. And how much money did he need, anyway? A few dollars for rent, a few dollars for food.

In the end, he’d walked away from the apartment. Rented a storage locker, ferried some possessions there a carton at a time, then packed a small suitcase and left. Sooner or later, he supposed, his failure to pay maintenance charges would lead someone to take some sort of legal action, and he’d eventually lose the apartment, but he’d never even know when it happened, and wouldn’t care if he did.

Since then, he had set a fire in a two-family house in Middle Village, Queens (minimal damage, no loss of life) and sacrificed three people in their homes, most recently Marilyn Fairchild, of Charles Street. Sometimes his actions seemed pointless to him. How could individual sacrifices revitalize the wounded city? As well, he thought, to try easing the water shortage by spilling a bucket of water into the reservoir.

Then he’d spotted Gerald Pankow, and recognized him, and saw a way to establish a pattern.

And now he rose from the body of the girl. He opened the door a few inches and stuck his head out. He said, “Could one of you come here for a moment? Something seems to be wrong with” — what was her name? — “with Clara.”

The older woman came, the madam, and she saw Clara lying on her back, then registered the chisel planted in her chest, and looked up at him, naked, advancing on her, and opened her mouth to scream, to cry out, but before she could make a sound he hit her with the hammer. It was a glancing blow and it drove her to her knees. She held up hands curled into claws, she blinked at the blood flowing down her forehead and into her eyes, and he swung the hammer full force and smashed her skull.

Without checking if she was dead he bolted from the room. Debra was racing for the phone. She tripped over a footstool, righted herself, and had the phone in her hand when he reached her. He wielded the hammer and hit her on the shoulder and she dropped the phone and cried out, and he swung backhand and hit her just above the bridge of the nose. She went sprawling and he rained blows upon her, hammering at her face until her features were unrecognizable.

His own heart was pounding. He steadied himself, got to his feet, and had trouble keeping his balance because the room was spinning. His knees buckled, and the black curtain came down.

Later, when he got around to noting the time, he calculated that he had been out for the better part of a half hour. He had fallen beside Debra, and he had blood all over himself, and he must have left fingerprints all over the place, and she’d cried out between the first and second blows, and someone a floor above could have heard her, could have heard the noise the hammer made, could have heard him when he fell.

He might have awakened to bright lights and sirens. Instead he came to in the midst of silence and death.

He found the bathroom. He showered, used the liquid soap, used the Herbal Essence shampoo. He retrieved the hammer from where it lay beside Debra’s body, the chisel from Clara’s chest, and washed them both in the sink before returning them to the briefcase. He dressed, tied his tie until he got the knot right.