Foxe drew his arm back, cane clenched in fist, very high, and struck.
“No!” cried Shaw in the doorway.
But the woman had slipped and fallen aside, gibbering, clawing the floor. Foxe stood over her with a look of positive disbelief on his face. He looked at his arm and his wrist and his hand and his fingers, each in turn, through a great invisible glaring hot wall of crystal that enclosed him. He looked at the cane as if it was an easily seen and incredible exclamation point come out of nowhere to the center of the room. His mouth stayed open, the dust fell in silent embers, dead. He felt the blood drop from his face as if a small door had banged wide into his stomach. “I–“
She frothed.
Scrabbling about, every part of her seemed a separate animal. Her arms and legs, her hands, her head, each was a lopped-off bit of some creature wild to return to itself, but blind to the proper way of making that return. Her mouth still gushed out her sickness with words and sounds that were not even faintly words. It had been in her a long time, a long long time. Foxe looked upon her, in a state of shock, himself. Before today, she had spat her venom out, here, there, another place. Now he had loosed the flood of a lifetime and he felt in danger of drowning here. He sensed someone pulling him by his coat. He saw the door sills pass on either side. He heard the cane fall and rattle like a thin bone far away from his hand, which seemed to have been stung by some terrible unseen wasp. And then he was out, walking mechanically, down through the burning tenement, between the scorched walls. Her voice crashed like a guillotine down the stair. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Fading like the wail of a person dropped down an open well into darkness.
At the bottom of the last flight, near the street door, Foxe turned himself loose from this other man here, and for a long moment leaned against the wall, his eyes wet, able to do nothing but moan. His hands, while he did this, moved in the air to find the lost cane, moved on his head, touched at his moist eyelids, amazed, and fluttered away. They sat on the bottom hall step for ten minutes in silence, drawing sanity into their lungs with every shuddering breath. Finally Mr. Foxe looked over at Mr. Shaw, who had been staring at him in wonder and fright for the full ten minutes.
“Did you see what I did? Oh, oh, that was close. Close. Close.” He shook his head. “I’m a fool. That poor, poor woman. She was right.”
“There’s nothing to be done.”
“I see that now. It had to fall on me.”
“Here, wipe your face. That’s better.”
“Do you think she’ll tell Mr. Shrike about us?”
“No, no.”
“Do you think we could–“
“Talk to him?”
They considered this and shook their heads. They opened the front door to a gush of furnace heat and were almost knocked down by a huge man who strode between them.
“Look where you’re going!” he cried.
They turned and watched the man move ponderously, in fiery darkness, one step at a time, up into the tenement house, a creature with the ribs of a mastodon and the head of an unshorn lion, with great beefed arms, irritably hairy, painfully sunburnt. The face they had seen briefly as he shouldered past was a sweating, raw, sunblistered pork face, salt droplets under the red eyes, dripping from the chin; great smears of perspiration stained the man’s armpits, coloring his tee-shirt to the waist.
They shut the tenement door gently.
“That’s him,” said Mr. Foxe. “That’s the husband.”
They stood in the little store across from the tenement. It was five-thirty, the sun tilting down the sky, the shadows the color of hot summer grapes under the rare few trees and in the alleys.
“What was it, hanging out of the husband’s back pocket?”
“Longshoreman’s hook. Steel. Sharp, heavy-looking. Like those claws one-armed men used to wear on the end of their stumps, years ago.”
Mr. Foxe did not speak.
“What’s the temperature?” asked Mr. Foxe, a minute later, as if he were too tired to turn his head to look.
“Store thermometer still reads ninety-two. Ninety-two right on the nose.”
Foxe sat on a packing crate, making the least motion to hold an orange soda bottle in his fingers. “Cool off,” he said. “Yes, I need an orange pop very much, right now.”
They sat there in the furnace, looking up at one special tenement window for a long time, waiting, waiting . . .
The Small Assassin
Just when the idea occurred to her that she was being murdered she could not tell. There had been little subtle signs, little suspicions for the past month; things as deep as sea tides in her, like looking at a perfectly calm stretch of tropic water, wanting to bathe in it and finding, just as the tide takes your body, that monsters dwell just under the surface, things unseen, bloated, many-armed, sharp-finned, malignant and inescapable.
A room floated around her in an effiuvium of hysteria. Sharp instruments hovered and there were voices, and people in sterile white masks.
My name, she thought, what is it?
Alice Leiber. It came to her. David Leiber’s wife. But it gave her no comfort. She was alone with these silent, whispering white people and there was great pain and nausea and death-fear in her.
I am being murdered before their eyes. These doctors, these nurses don’t realize what hidden thing has happened to me. David doesn’t know. Nobody knows except me and–the killer, the little murderer, the small assassin.
I am dying and I can’t tell them now. They’d laugh and call me one in delirium. They’ll see the murderer and hold him and never think him responsible for my death. But here I am, in front of God and man, dying, no one to believe my story, everyone to doubt me, comfort me with lies, bury me in ignorance, mourn me and salvage my destroyer.
Where is David? she wondered. In the waiting room, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to the long tickings of the very slow clock?
Sweat exploded from all of her body at once, and with it an agonized cry. Now. Now! Try and kill me, she screamed. Try, try, but I won’t die! I won’t!
There was a hollowness. A vacuum. Suddenly the pain fell away. Exhaustion, and dusk came around. It was over. Oh, God! She plummeted down and struck a black nothingness which gave way to nothingness and nothingness and another and still another. . . .
Footsteps. Gentle, approaching footsteps.
Far away, a voice said, “She’s asleep. Don’t disturb her.”
An odor of tweeds, a pipe, a certain shaving lotion. David was standing over her. And beyond him the immaculate smell of Dr. J effers.
She did not open her eyes. “I’m awake,” she said, quietly. It was a surprise, a relief to be able to speak, to not be dead.
“Alice,” someone said, and it was David beyond her closed eyes, holding her tired hands.
Would you like to meet the murderer, David? she thought. I hear your voice asking to see him, so there’s nothing but for me to point him out to you.
David stood over her. She opened her eyes. The room came into focus. Moving a weak hand, she pulled aside a coverlet.
The murderer looked up at David Leiber with a small, redfaced, blue-eyed calm. Its eyes were deep and sparkling.
“Why!” cried David Leiber, smiling. “He’s a fine baby!”
Dr. Jeffers was waiting for David Leiber the day he came to take his wife and new child home. He motioned Leiber to a chair in his office, gave him a cigar, lit one for himself, sat on the edge of his desk, puffing solemnly for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat, looked David Leiber straight on and said, “Your wife doesn’t like her child, Dave.”
“What!”
“It’s been a hard thing for her. She’ll need a lot of love this next year. I didn’t say much at the time, but she was hysterical in the delivery room. The strange things she said–I won’t repeat them. All I’ll say is that she feels alien to the child. Now, this may simply be a thing we can clear up with one or two questions.” He sucked on his cigar another moment, then said, “Is this child a ‘wanted’ child, Dave?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s vital.”
“Yes. Yes, it is a ‘wanted’ child. We planned it together. Alice was so happy, a year ago, when–“
“Mmmm–that makes it more difficult. Because if the child was unplanned, it would be a simple case of a woman hating the idea of motherhood. That doesn’t fit Alice.” Dr. Jeffers took his cigar from his lips, rubbed his hand across his jaw. “It must be something else, then. Perhaps something buried in her childhood that’s coming out now. Or it might be the simple temporary doubt and distrust of any mother who’s gone through the unusual pain and near-death that Alice has. If so, then a little time should heal that. I thought I’d tell you, though, Dave. It’ll help you
