The Pawnbroker (31 page)

Sol smiled suddenly, an ancient expression of cerebral amusement.

"You seem to be trying to sell me on life. In any event, you are wasting your valuable time. There is nothing you can do to me. The only punishment you are capable of inflicting is impotent. I could learn nothing from it. And the threat of it is just a trifle. You don't understand, do you? It is a pity. What will you deprive me of? Look around at my kingdom. What is it? Would I miss it, even if I could in death?"

Murillio moved his eyes slowly, trying to see the store with the Pawnbroker's eyes, looking at it for the first time with curiosity, intently, searchingly, speculating on the profusion of gleams and lusters, trying to ascertain what all of it did to a man, what unpredictable strengths it gave, how it could armor a man against what he had always considered to be formidable weapons. The shop was silent around the dark-suited man with his white-lacquered face, and the Pawnbroker with his damp, gray skin, his half-concealed eyes. Old woods and tortured brasses, bits of glass and gold and silver, mother-of-pearl and tortoise shell, gut and steel and ivory surrounded them. Dust lay on everything, and it seemed like some rarely visited museum, a place of esoteric interest whose violences were far behind, whose sounds were only diminishing echoes. Finally Murillio moved his eyes back to Sol. For a moment he studied his face. And then he looked down to the tattooed arm, where he let his gaze rest a while in somber reflection.

Suddenly Murillio smiled, his eyes still on the blue numbers. "You know something, Uncle? I'm not a stupid man. I got instincts; that's how I got where I am. That's why I will go even farther. I don't yell, I don't stamp my feet, I don't kick corpses. And I will tell you this..." He raised his cold, slush-colored eyes to Sol's. "I believe you are right. I believe there is no point to killing you. One way or another I will get most of this investment back. But I see you can't be used for an example. No, I'm writing you off, not that you care. It's a pity, Uncle. You seem to be a interesting man. Most people that I deal with are stupid animals; they bore the life out of me. Too bad we couldn't have shot the shit once in a while. Who knows? Even I might have learned something."

Sol didn't answer him, and Murillio stood there for a few minutes longer, allowing the silence, as though trying to hear whatever peculiar sound it was that had cast the Pawnbroker into his reverie. And then he picked up the envelope of money, waved it once toward the Pawnbroker in a sort of farewell gesture, and walked out of the store.

And Sol said to himself, "So it isn't death that I am afraid of, although it may yet come to me today. Then what is it that makes me tremble and ache? Why does my breast distend and threaten to burst?" He gave a great moan as he pressed his hands to his face, and stood like that until Jesus returned with the food and coffee, whereupon he ate and drank just for something to do while he waited.

And Jesus went back upstairs to wait too.

No one came in. Sol felt an irrelevant petulance. He entertained the insane idea of a boycott, a sudden diverting of everything human. The store was a peculiar and grotesque tomb.

He picked up the feather duster and began twitching around among his merchandise, flicking the birdlike object at the horns and cameras like some devout witch doctor.

The smell of tar and frying entered the store and then was gone. From somewhere distant there came the odor of chocolate. Sol frowned, the feathers on the end of his voodoo-stick duster trembling as on a breathing bird. And then the chocolate smell was gone, too, with inexplicable suddenness. Everything there was existed only in the store.

The store was full of minute sounds that Sol knew were audible only to him. The fan, which gave a little plink at the end of each arc of its turn, pushed a microscopic breath through the bells of the trumpets, strummed with infinite delicacy over the strings of banjo and violin and guitar. His fantastically acute hearing picked up the rustling of his papers, the riffled edges of the ledger, and the various bills and tickets. Above him, the footsteps of his assistant in the loft creaked and thudded as though the slender figure moved under a burden heavier than himself, made sounds of restless, muffled regularity like the tread heard in a nightmare. Thump, thump, thump, dull, distant hammer blows, a counterpoint to the ghostly breath of the horns and the thrumming of the gut strings.

He was at the end of things now; at his back was the heatless press of the grave. His connection to life was the mere thread of light and sound. Only one thing remained to happen. He grew frantic with impatience for it to be over. Now the one tiny contact with living was an unbelievable agony, a white-hot pressure against his heart.

"Why does he stay up there? It's past time for him to leave. What is he up to? Does he think I don't notice he's still here? Oh, what a nightmare this world is! What a cruel joke God is! Oh yes,
kill us, kill us,
but only once, isn't once enough?"

What was he waiting for? He could bring about his own deliverance; his counters were filled with Black Forest daggers and pistols; death was within his reach all around.

Outside, the street gabbled and hooted, illuminated his doorway with a lively evening light. Cars glinted swiftly by, human figures made brief pantomimes in the frame of his vision: children in haunting insect-like bodies, women, varicolored men, each in slightly different costume, each enlivened by his own unique choreography. He tried to remember a time when he had been alive, but failed miserably. The perspective of time had eliminated his boyhood and youth, and all that remained was a diminishing façade of misery, the architecture of his recent years.

He went to the fan and pulled the chain that turned it off. Then he listened for a moment, the duster held like a fluttering weapon in his hand. The fan whirred to a stop, the instruments fell silent.

Thump, thump, thump went the human footfalls over his head. He raised his eyes to the ceiling in despair, the duster hanging uselessly from his fingers.

"Ohhh," he breathed. "Oh God damn this, God damn this," he whispered. Life fell like a shadow on his soul.

Slowly he let his eyes sink from the ceiling, down from the coiled tuba, down past the string instruments, the andque muzzle-loader musket, past the bongo drums on the shelf over the door, past the transom angled open to entice some air in from the street. Down until he was looking through the open doorway at the crazy sight of three figures just beginning to cross the street toward him.

They wore children's Halloween masks; one a doll-like girl's face with Cupid's-bow lips and neat red discs to represent rosy cheeks, one a green devil's face, and the third a clown with darkness showing through the upturned mouth in the midst of chalky whiteness.

And he stood with the feather duster in his hand, watching their approach with all the aplomb and rationality of someone watching a dream unfold.

Sol backed up until he was against the counter where the wire grille was. The festive masks were on the sidewalk, in the corridor between the windows. Then they were crowding the doorway, inhuman faces which stared at him blandly. They came inside slowly, almost shyly. The doll face held back, its powerful body guarding the door. It seemed to be protecting Sol from the harsh outside. The devil face raised an ash-gray sleeve to reveal a shiny gun. It looked like a toy in the presence of the masks. The clown stepped forward with empty hands. Their breathing was loud and compressed behind the masks. Upstairs, there was silence, but the sounds of the outside were vivid and strangely sweet. "Hey, Ginger," called a boy's voice. "Where you goin', gal?" The clocks ticked out of step. Why hadn't he heard the clocks before when he had been able to make out the tiny sounds of the strings in the air of the fan?

"What ... what do you want?" the Pawnbroker said in a dry, leafy voice.

The clown advanced, pointing toward the huge safe behind the counter.

"What, what, I don't understand your pointing," Sol said. He had the sensation of falling and tensed for the one instant of enormous pain that was the threshold of death.

"The money, the money," the clown said furiously. He came up close, and Sol could see the brown neck flexing passionately. "Open the safe, c'mon now. We not playin', open it fast." He cocked his white linen face toward the shiny weapon in the devil's hand.

"You are crazy," Sol said without inflection, dutifully playing out his part in the strange costumed charade. He waved the duster stiffly in imitation of anger. "You will be caught. Get out of here now, before you have real trouble."

The clown looked back toward the devil as though in amazement. The devil's bony brown hand flexed on the grip of the gun and he in turn looked toward the corner of the store where the stairway to the loft was. But there was nothing there. So the devil raised the gun up and then swung its barrel down with a sudden snapping movement, as though it were one of those cardboard guns that emit a "crack" as they display the word bang in paper fire.

"No joke now, white man. Get that money outa that safe. We got no time.
Get it!
" And the devil leaned forward with a tenseness of body that culminated in the brown iron of his gun hand.

The clown seemed to lean backward, raised his arm a little as though against the impending noise. But the doll face near the door pointed suddenly to something behind Sol.

"Hey wait, the thing ... the safe ... it ain't ... it's like ... open. It
open!
" he cried.

Sol turned with them to look at the big safe door, which cast just enough of a shadow to reveal that it was not quite closed. He sighed wearily at the thought of having to provoke them again. And then, just ahead of the clown face, he slipped behind the counter and took up a stand with his back to the iron door. The clown face came behind the counter, too, but seemed cowed by the feather duster that Sol brandished at him. The devil moved up to the counter and put the barrel of the gun between the bars of the little teller's window.

"Step away, white man. Tangee, go get the stuff," the gunman said, gesturing slightly with the gun so that it clanked against the bars.

But Sol didn't move, and Tangee, behind his useless clown's face, looked helplessly at the devil. "He not movin',
Robinson,
" he said.

"What for you want to die?" Robinson asked, with only the mildest curiosity, as he raised the barrel so it pointed toward the round, archaic spectacles. "That money mean so much to you?" He gestured at all the stock of the store, stopped for a moment as his eye caught the beautiful harmonica he had pawned, then went on as though having made a note to himself to get it later. "All this stuff, this junk..."

Sol didn't answer. They all fell into the slow steady slide toward destruction. Tangee stepped back slightly; Robinson made shorter and shorter arcs with the tip of the gun, arcs whose center was somewhere around the Pawnbroker's glasses. Buck White, at the doorway, began swiveling his head from them to the street outside in more and more rapid rotation, until he moved so swiftly trying to cover both views that he could not have been able to see anything; or else, bound by the limitations of aftervision, carried the image of the three figures of mutual doom to his view of the street, so that he could have had no idea, for the while, which way he would run to escape them.

Sol smelled the body sweat of one of them, identified it as the rumored "nigger smell," and then drew a sardonic smile like a painful scratch inside himself as he realized it might be the odor of his own body. There was a creak from the direction of the stairway. It was like the sound of the peculiar silence into which they were cast. Sol raised the feather duster as though he were the commander of his own firing squad. It was all within his reach now. He savored it for a long minute as Robinson slowed the arc of the gun toward the motionless moment when he would fire.

But then Sol felt a sudden outrage. That his whole vast collection of experience should elude him now! He became incensed that his beginning and ending had no more depth and breadth than this shabby, littered shop. Suddenly he yearned for the drowning man's cliché, for some great distillation of everything. A vanity he had never considered made him demand recall, made him insist on even the myriad varieties of pain he had endured, the searing products of his sight and smell and hearing. As he stared at the stiff, linen faces, his heart silently called on the infinite subtleties of temperature, the pressures of all the hands and winds and wetnesses that had crossed the surface of his body. Furiously, in the shallow, death-rattle breathing of the four of them, he invoked at least the microcosmic view of all the faces as he would have glimpsed them through the tiny eyelet of those souvenir penholders so popular when he was a boy. But he could not even muster up the look of the penholder and he knew die faces would have been too small for him to see. And he became filled with the most incredible desolation, because his beginning and ending
would
take place in the narrow confines of this one empty hour, this one stifling and derelict room.

He swung the feather duster and sucked the last of fife.

The explosion was deafening; it was as though a bomb had struck. He was blinded, saw only smoke. The echoes rang the brass bells of the horns. Numbness. Yet he was aware of the numbness ... not death, then. What? Running feet. Reach out to touch ... what was it? A human body, sliding slowly downward. Oh to see, to know! His hand pressed on the clothed, warm figure, tried to keep it from falling. It slid under his hand. Then he saw, in the doorway, Robinson, with the mask under his chin, the gun half raised, his face a horrible mask itself, the personification of that same desolation Sol had experienced. He faced the man with the gun calmly, his hand on the slipping body. And then Robinson wheeled and ran. Sol looked down, recognized from the back the slender form of Jesus Ortiz. A red stain was spreading over the yellow shirt back. He tried to seize him with both hands. Ortiz eluded him, slipped to the floor with a discreet little thump.