The Pawnbroker (27 page)

And it went on like that all night long. He fought sleep, dozed into those horrid fragments, bolted awake again, over and over and over.

Until suddenly, one time, it was morning. But it was a morning with none of the quality of newness mornings can have. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the light through the trees, wincing every so often, as though his skin had been removed during the night. The bright, pink light of the sun looked like the reflection of some monstrous fire burning a hideous fuel.

The heat was terrific by the time he got to Manhattan. As he walked down 125th Street, he looked upward; the sky was burned to the pallid blue of scorched metal. The heat seemed to soften the very stone and brick of the buildings. All the repulsive faces appeared to melt before his eyes, and Sol imagined them dissolving to dark smudges on the pavement. Metal burned to the touch, and there was a constant density to the air that made him feel he moved through an infinite number of transparent woolen curtains.

The door handle of the store scorched his fingers, and when he went inside there was only the different, older heat of a closed dead place.

When Jesus Ortiz came in, he had nothing to say. The two of them moved silently around the store as though each would deny the other's existence by his own aloofness. When customers came in, they spoke to them; but alone, they maintained their silence.

Sol moved in a leathern chamber, and to him, Ortiz was little more than another shadow in the heat, an oddly haunting movement, like that caused by a breeze whose possible coolness was out of his reach. But Jesus stole glances at Sol from time to time, for
his
isolation was grimmer and more premeditated. And in spite of his rage, which was compounded of dedication and fear and voluntary solitude, he almost gasped in pain at the face of his employer each time he looked at him.

The Pawnbroker's face seemed to have undergone an immense change since the day before. The puffiness appeared reduced, and another face was emerging; a strange, high-cheekboned, Slavic face. And the eyes behind the weird glasses were larger and darker, brooding and full of a melancholy so profound that it almost seemed to emit a sound, a strange alto resonance like that given off by a crystal glass long after it has been struck.

Later, when Jesus had become starved by the silence and would have spoken, he realized there was too much between them for talk. The tremendous heat and the layers of silence built up during the day seemed like a great din which would prevent his being heard.

When the phone rang late in the afternoon, he froze in amazement at the volume as he watched the Pawnbroker move like a sleepwalker to answer it.

"Sol," Tessie said, "please come over. He is very low. The doctor said he can't last the night. Please, please, I am all alone."

"All right, I will come as soon as I can."

"Please, please, please..."

He hung up and went to the ledger to finish what he had been doing. Without looking up, he spoke to Jesus.

"You can go home now. I am closing early."

"What's the celebration—Jewish holiday or something?" Ortiz said as scornfully as he could.

Sol looked up with a cold, heedless expression.

"There are times when you annoy me more than other times," he said.

"You bother my ass almost all the time," Jesus retorted, his body tensed as for a physical encounter.

"You are free to leave my employ any time it becomes unbearable."

"And you can fire me any time you want to."

Sol closed his eyes and removed his glasses. Jesus could see the shape of the Pawnbroker's skull for the first time and he had an urge to scream at the peculiar agony that gave him.

"Just go home now," Sol said gently.

And Jesus swung away with a muffled sound he couldn't identify himself. Then he hurried out of the store and was gone.

When Sol got to Tessie's apartment, his head was light with weakness from the heat. He went inside and sat down for a few minutes while Tessie paced back and forth before him, her slip thinned by the wetness of perspiration so it clung to her body like new pink skin.

"Go in and see him, look at what I have," she said over the raging sound of the old man's breathing, which filled the apartment.

Sol shrugged and did as she asked.

The bedroom was odorous with the decaying life, and the sound of the rattling breath was unbelievably loud. Mendel lay with his mouth open, his eyes bulging as though trying to see up through the floors of the building to the sky. He was made particularly hideous by the black
Yalmalka
on his head and the dark straps of the phylacteries across his brow and arm like a harness on his battered body.

"
Shmai Yisroel ... selotka ... cum tansen mit meir...
dy, dy, dy, diddle dum dum..."

"He is singing," Tessie moaned in horror.

Sol just watched the wretched, dented head, the yawning mouth which amazingly had the strength to speak and sing even while it made those superhuman efforts to breathe.

"A long ... time ago vhen I vas ... a
klayna kinder...
ve had ... volves in duh snow ... la, la, la.... Oy
tata, tata
...God in Heaven!" His eyes stretched wider, and for several seconds the breathing stopped. Sol made a move toward the bed but the sound began again, louder than ever.

"There is no point to staying in here," Sol said tonelessly. "Come in the kitchen. I could have something to drink."

Tessie moved out ahead of him, her hand up to her mouth, her eyes huge and dazed.

In the kitchen, she poured out two glasses of orange juice and then sat down to stare at the doorway in the direction of her father's rattling breath.

"I feel like a monster," she said in a half-whisper. "I find myself wishing for him to be dead already. Sometimes I have all I can do to keep myself from putting a pillow ... Oh my God, but he is my father. When I was a child, I loved him—what, what!"

"Listen to me," Sol said loudly over the harsh rattle that filled the rooms. "Forget all that. Don't think, don't feel. Get through things—it is the only sense. Imagine yourself a cow in a fenced place with a million other cows. Don't suffer, don't fear. Soon enough will come the ax. Meanwhile, eat and rest. Don't pay attention, don't cry!" And suddenly they both realized he was talking with unnecessary loudness. His voice echoed in a silence.

They got up and went into the bedroom and they found Mendel dead, still staring upward. Sol went over and closed the dead eyes. Tessie hunched herself in a corner of the room and began to cry.

For some time he stood there with her, under the obligation to make something significant of a death. Tessie sobbed with a steady grunting sound, which was broken from time to time by her discordant straining for breath. After a while, she settled into a low humming, like someone trying to imitate the sound of a slow-moving bee. Sol looked from her to the grotesque body on the bed and a queer yearning anger came over him. Tessie and even the corpse of Mendel seemed possessed of something vital and living while he himself stood without pain or grief, like a creature imbedded in a plastic block. Finally he could no longer stand his own stillness and he went out of the bedroom, leaving the two of them.

He called the undertaker and told him everything that was required. In a few minutes Tessie came out with her hands groping in the air. Sol shoved her into a chair and handed her a half-dozen checks.

"Here are checks which I have already signed. Fill out whatever amounts you will need. The undertaker will be over very soon. He knows what to do. You must get a grip on yourself. There is no sense to your going on like this. It is over. Both you and the old man are better off. You said so yourself before. There is nothing to cry about."

She looked up at him with an expression of near-horror on her face.

"Sometimes I do not think you are human at all," she said.

"What would you have me say or do?" he asked indifferently.

"I don't know ... cry with me perhaps...."

"To hell with your crying," he snarled savagely. He felt himself trembling with anger and it seemed if he didn't get away from her, he would do something violent. "I am going now. I have a long way to go and I must get some sleep or I will not be able to work tomorrow."

"Won't you even come to the ... the funeral?"

"How can I do that? I cannot leave the store with him."

"The store," she said bitterly. "The important, marvelous store."

"Be still, you fool!" he shouted. "Where do you think those checks come from? They would not put your father's corpse in the ground without the money from the store." He stood over her, swaying, his fists clenched, his breathing hoarse and wild.

She just covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth without a sound. After a few minutes she murmured, "Go then, leave me. I can mourn alone."

When he got out into the dimly lit oven of the street, he saw Goberman standing uncertainly before the doorway, the ever-present brief case hanging from his arm like a curse.

"Is it the old man? Has he..."

"Mendel is dead," Sol cried out with a brutal gaiety. "And the funeral is tomorrow morning. You are another great celebrator of funerals, so go in my place."

"I will go, I will go," Goberman said in an odd, musing voice.

"Good, very good, Goberman. Who knows? Perhaps the rabbi will be willing to offer you a contribution," Sol said. Then he turned away from Goberman and the house and walked with his ponderous speed toward the subway. The horizon flickered menacingly all the time he rode under the street, and as he drove home in his car, he heard the very distant mumbling of thunder. He began to laugh, and stopped only when the sound of his laughter seemed to deafen and blind him.

It was starless and close; the air was filled with humidity. Seated as they were by the river, it was as though they were submerged in its vaporous overflow. Robinson sat very straight, his face illuminated periodically by the glow of his cigarette; a child-scaring figure with deeply carved features. His eyes were so light they were invisible in the darkness, and Jesus felt little reverberations of emptiness each time the cigarette's fire revealed the apparently empty whites. Buck White reclined easily on the narrow wooden curb right over the water and he seemed to be paying no attention to the talk of the two standing figures of Tangee and Jesus.

"Tomorrow night," Jesus said. "That's the time."

Tangee whistled softly. Suddenly it seemed closer than he wanted it.

"Why specially tomorrow night?" he asked.

"Because I say. Tomorrow got to be the time," Jesus said.

"Okay, okay, but jus' why tomorrow? I mean, you got a special reason for tomorrow?"

"Somethin' wrong with tomorrow? You ain't chickenin', are you?"

"Aw
man!
This all my idea originally, you know. I ain't gonna chicken out. You don' have to be so touchy. I jus' thought you have a
particular
reason it got to be
tomorrow.
"

"Yeah, he jus' askin'," Buck said absently, staring at the dim shape of a barge moving past them under the tiny points of its running lights.

"Well, if you guys objectin' to my plans..."

"No one objecting," Robinson said in a voice of command.

"I'll tell you why tomorrow," Jesus said, slightly mollified. "Every Thursday he gets this bundle of cash from his partner. About eight o'clock he take that money and a bundle from the safe and he take it down to the night deposit of the bank. Now he use to have the cop walk him down. But he got sore at this cop Leventhal, so he don't use no cop lately. Still, it no good tryin' to get him in the street, an' if you try it too soon, he gonna have the dough still locked up in the safe. So it got to be
timed,
see. There only one way to do it." He looked from one to another, judging his power over them. He felt himself to be advancing toward a strange and icy outpost, more remote than anything he had experienced before. It seemed to have something to do with the identity of his victim. He was irritated at the haziness of his motives. He wanted to see this as a pure venture for gain, and chafed under the perplexing oppression he felt, an oppression that had nothing to do with the natural nervousness and fear he would have expected in a thing like this.

"How we suppose to know the
exac'
minute?" Tangee asked indignantly.

"From me," Jesus said.

"Well how you gonna tell us if we not there an' you gonna be with us, er if not, how is you gonna know..."

"Shut up, Buck," Tangee said. "Okay, Ortiz, say it."

Robinson lit another cigarette from the stub of the first. Tangee faced him, Buck faced the river, Jesus faced the city, each of them aimed in a different direction and all the directions of equal darkness.

"Usually I go home about seven thirty. He don't tell me, I jus' go. Lately he don't even know when I leave. So I'm gonna stay upstairs in the loft where the clothin' is. They's a spot where I can see down to him. When he go to the safe, I get to the window of the secon' floor and signal. Then you get in fast an' get out fast."

"An' we jus' waitin' over there?"

"It's the dress store, closed for a long time by then. You stand deep in the entrance, no one notice you. You get yourself a bunch of them Halloween masks an' flip them up over you face when you start over."

"Man, you figure everything," Tangee said admiringly. "That a cool plan, right down to the details."

"Hey, but how 'bout one thing! I mean what if, you know, the guy he goin' to act up, the Pawnbroker. I mean, what he goin' to do if, he don't let, I mean make a fuss like," Buck said, struggling with the great complexity of his question.

"He make no fuss," Robinson said. "He make no fuss at all."

Jesus waited for the glow of Robinson's cigarette to reveal his face. "Hear me, Robinson, hear what I say. No shootin', see, no shootin'."

"You worry 'bout the Jew?" Robinson said.

"I'm worryin' 'bout Jesus Ortiz. You burn the man an' we got too much trouble. Now hear me, man, I shit you not; you don't shoot that man; you do what I say." He turned to the dark shrouded faces of the other two. "This
my
plan,
my
plan. We do it
my
way. No one shoot no one, hear! I say it clear to you all, right now. Anyone shoot in that store, and it go bad, it go very bad." His voice was both fierce and plaintive in the muffling night air, and none of them answered him. They stood in just the sound of their breathing while the tiny running lights of the great barges suggested the massive movements on the river, and the time of their silence was punctuated by the little mocking glows of Robinson's cigarette. "No killin', no killin'," he said, his words a sad little condition in the choking blackness surrounding them. "
My
way, you hear,
my
way."