How to Find Your Way in the Dark

by Derek B. Miller

  The 78 record played itself out, and pipe in mouth, Sheldon swung himself off the stool and went to flip it over. After he placed the needle down and the band struck up again, he turned to look out the window and saw the one thing that he knew was going to drive him nuts about living here: vagrants.

  There were legs in the window again, and rather than facing away as though the person was waiting for a cab, they were facing his building, which suggested that a zipper was going to be opened and that it was going to be raining piss down Sheldon’s steps.

  Springing to action, Sheldon skidded to the front door, unchained the lock, and whipped the door open.

  “Not here, not now, not ever!” he yelled.

  He looked up hoping not to see a prick.

  Standing there was Lorenzo.

  He was wearing the same suit he’d been wearing at Grossinger’s the night that Sheldon held the police car door open for him. The shoes were the same shoes, and Sheldon suspected that the dust on them was the same dust. Five years had passed, and Lorenzo stood there like a ghost sent up to earth from hell to avenge his own death.

  From his angle at the bottom of four steps, Sheldon looked up into his face like a child watching a parent or else a patron eyeing a statue on a plinth. Lorenzo had lost weight. His face was gaunt and he seemed a decade older—his darkened eyes were set farther back in his skull, and he had a complexion that promised never to wash clean. What captured Sheldon’s attention most was the thick scar that ran across Lorenzo’s throat from ear to ear. How he’d survived having his neck cut open Sheldon couldn’t imagine, but the man before him was a dead man; a man who had known himself dead because he had been killed and was supposed to be dead now but somehow wasn’t—had somehow survived.

  This was the infinite moment between seeing Lorenzo and the one in which Lorenzo reached for Sheldon to kill him.

  * * *

  In the cool of the summer night—miraculously pleasant given how hot the day had been—it made sense to Sheldon that the Mafia had sent someone to kill Lorenzo either in prison or when he got out. Maybe they paid off a judge to commute his sentence so they could kill him afterward. Maybe they tried to kill him inside prison and found, to their astonishment, that Lorenzo wouldn’t rat out the man who had sliced his throat. Is anyone that tough? To have their throat slit open and still follow the code?

  * * *

  Lorenzo’s were the stony eyes of a man who had lost all motivation but revenge. They were cold enough to be instructive.

  The man who had killed Sheldon’s father now towered over him; his hands—as though in slow motion—were reaching down to grasp Sheldon around the throat and squeeze the life out of him as painfully and as intimately as possible.

  Sheldon was standing at a bad angle, an impossible angle. His right hand was on the doorknob and his face and chest were wide open to the night.

  Lorenzo knew this. There was no murderous smile and no sound. No wink or provocation. Only a softening in his face as though he had received the present he had wanted and all that was left was the taking.

  Sheldon lurched back and pulled the door closed with all his weight, but Lorenzo was too fast. He hooked his left elbow into the doorway and reached out to grab Sheldon with his right arm.

  Sheldon released the door and slapped Lorenzo’s hand away. Two steps inside the shop, Sheldon grabbed the back of his office chair and slammed it into Lorenzo’s left knee, which arrested his momentum and gave Sheldon a second to turn and run.

  Sheldon had hunted enough to know that animals freeze when threatened and how paralysis is the first line of defense as most predators’ eyesight is attuned to detect motion. But there was no way he was making that mistake.

  Lorenzo didn’t go down. He grasped his knee and grimaced, but he didn’t limp. Instead, he sprang after Sheldon, who’d run to the back of the long narrow shop looking for something to fight with. There had to be something here. Anything. Where were his guns? He still had guns. He had Henkler’s .45 and Thaleman’s .38. Where the fuck were they?

  He’d been listening to Harry James when he had first seen Lorenzo, and as he whipped around a display case for smaller sale items—earrings, necklaces, war medals, and watches—a gentle jazz guitar set up the entry of Kitty Kallen’s mellifluous voice singing, “I’ve never cared much for moonlit skies . . .”

  It was obvious that Lorenzo’s eyes were adjusting to the dark. He stood for a moment and surveyed the room. Sheldon had been the son of a hunter and a trapper and an occasional cobbler, and he knew a few tricks about killing, but Lorenzo had been a murderer.

  Sheldon, inexperienced, was looking for a weapon but Lorenzo was looking for exits. Finding none other than the door he came in, he chose his line of attack, a line that took him straight toward the back wall.

  Sheldon hopped behind a display case, planning to keep it between him and the killer just like he used to dash away from Lenny around his mom’s kitchen table. He was pretty sure that if Lorenzo got his hands on him he would lose, and right now all Sheldon had going for him was youth, dexterity, and a will to live. This guy in front of him didn’t seem to have any of those things and was being driven by pure hatred, anger, and vengeance.

  Not that Sheldon hadn’t been fueled by these things too, once upon a time, but he’d changed. He hadn’t put himself to sleep with thoughts of murdering this man—not even once—since the police car’s taillights had disappeared down the hill toward Liberty back in ’41. Not even after he had visited his father’s grave and the empty box beside it that belonged to his mother. When he’d laid his father to rest and saw their names side by side, Sheldon had wept. He’d wept at seeing his family together again, their names locked together in eternity, and he now understood—years on and at the edge of adulthood himself—that whatever his mother had done with another man—whatever decisions she had made—had been something private and distant and personal. Mirabelle had been right. It made her no less of a mother, or a wife, or a woman. Maybe that was the wisdom of the cemetery: It was a place to allow conclusions to be reached.

  * * *

  If Sheldon had grown and changed, Lorenzo clearly had not.

  * * *

  Lorenzo grabbed the edge of the display cabinet and overturned it. He pushed aside anything Sheldon might run around, anything that might protect him and keep him alive. A beast, Lorenzo was plowing a path to his prey as if he were darkness itself trying to push back the light.

  Sheldon backed away. Behind him was the bathroom. It had a door but no window—only a fan in the ceiling and a vent only large enough for a gerbil. If he backed in there, there’d be no way out.

  Kitty Kallen was almost done with the song.

  Lorenzo wasn’t advancing on Sheldon yet. For him, there was no rush. He pressed a cabinet to one wall and then overturned a display table by the other. He sent the lamps from an estate sale smashing to the floor and created one and only one path for Sheldon to the outside world.

  * * *

  Could Lenny hear this upstairs? What if he came down? Would he be killed too?

  * * *

  Sheldon looked around one last time for a weapon. This place had been filled with nothing but weapons before he cleaned everything up. Broom handles. Shard of glass he could have wrapped in cloth to make a shiv. Copper pipes. Broken chair legs. It had been endless.

  All that was left now was the Louisville Slugger in the umbrella stand by the front door that was as far away as Las Vegas.

  He continued backing away.

  Sheldon didn’t know how to fist-fight. He’d wrestled with buddies and he’d shot guns. He was five foot seven, 155 pounds, and twenty years old. Lorenzo was in his forties and was a five-foot-ten-inch merchant of death who killed people for a living.

  When Sheldon’s right heel touched the wall behind him, it sent a signal to his brain that it translated as attack.

  This was it. Fight or flight, and there was nowhere to run.

  Like a sprinter at a starting
gun, Sheldon let out a war cry and ran directly at Lorenzo and leapt. His right hand was balled into a mighty fist and the sheer inertia of him—the weight of a youth in flight—was going to crash down on the assassin and knock the daylights out of him, clearing his path to the door and the street and anyplace Sheldon wanted to go next because all the world is not only a stage but an enormous connected network of highways and byways, that could lead Sheldon to any place but here.

  Lorenzo, though, had other ideas.

  With the grace of a dancer, Lorenzo grabbed Sheldon out of the air and body-slammed him down onto the floor like a sack. The air was knocked from Sheldon’s lungs, and as he tried to suck in the missing breath, Lorenzo reached down to strangle him to death.

  Sheldon couldn’t breathe. Lorenzo’s arms were amazingly long. Leaning into it, Lorenzo arched his back to pull himself even farther away from Sheldon’s flailing hands while increasing the pressure.

  He tried to punch him, scratch him, kick him off. He’d seen a cat on its back before; an animal in a trap. It did anything and everything—

  Sheldon made contact for a brief second with Lorenzo’s groin, forcing him to let up for a moment; a moment just long enough for him to suck in a lungful of air and push back the cloud over his eyes.

  But Lorenzo was quick to return; his tolerance for pain impossibly high. He was not a normal man. He was a man who had been left for dead with his throat slashed open. A kick in the nuts was not enough to stop him.

  If there had been a way to flip over, to crawl out, Sheldon would have done it, but Lorenzo’s powerful hands were around his throat again. A vision passed through Sheldon’s head of a pistol in Lorenzo’s belt, or maybe a knife. Did he really come here tonight planning to murder Sheldon with only his hands?

  Sheldon frantically scratched at Lorenzo’s jacket, trying to find purchase on anything hard, anything with a handle.

  There was nothing.

  This man had brought nothing but hate. He didn’t want Sheldon dead. He wanted him to die. Slowly, deliberately, painfully, and at his own pleasure and leisure.

  The pain was unbearable. Sheldon could feel his eyes opening wide and his mouth gaping open as he tried to pull in the slightest breath, and at the moment when Sheldon’s entire body started to writhe in a death throe . . . there was a CRACK and Lorenzo disappeared.

  * * *

  Gone. Not even a puff of smoke. He simply vanished from sight as though snatched from this earth and banished directly to hell.

  * * *

  A sweet lungful of air inflated Sheldon’s body and went straight to his mind. He had no other conscious thought other than I am breathing. When his mind made space for a second notion—after a time immeasurable—he saw in front of him a form, a shape. It looked at first like an angel; the archangel with his flaming sword, though now the flame was extinguished and slung over his shoulder like a batter at a warmup at Fenway Park in Boston where the Red Sox play.

  * * *

  Except they liked the Yankees here.

  The Yankees were an awful group of people.

  * * *

  Maybe the figure above him wasn’t an angel at all. Maybe it was God. Maybe Sheldon was looking up at the blurry face of God. The face one no one had ever seen.

  Not until now. Not until Sheldon.

  “You all right?” said a voice that might have been the One that had spoken to Abraham and Moses and Joshua . . . had it not had such a heavy Irish accent.

  Sheldon wasn’t sure he could talk at all.

  “In your own time. It’ll come back.”

  It wasn’t Gabriel or God but Bill Harmon who, despite having kicked back more than half a bottle of Jameson and fallen asleep almost an hour ago, was now standing up straight and tall with Sheldon’s Louisville Slugger over his shoulder and a hand extended for Sheldon to take.

  Sheldon reached up and grabbed it. Bill brought him to his feet.

  Bill looked him over. Putting down the bat, he took Sheldon’s face in both of his large hands and turned it from side to side and surveyed the damage to his neck. He nodded a few times to himself, convinced that Sheldon would probably live.

  “That’s a boy, come on back,” Bill said.

  “Hey,” Sheldon said.

  Bill looked down at Lorenzo. His line drive through Lorenzo’s skull had been so forceful that Lorenzo had disappeared from Sheldon’s view faster than a baseball leaves a stadium. They both looked down at him. He wasn’t moving.

  “Do we know him?” Bill asked.

  “Yeah,” Sheldon said, his voice a whisper, then a rasp. “He killed my father back in 1938. I set him up to take a felony rap as revenge. I guess he got out.”

  “Came looking for you.”

  “Apparently so.”

  “How’d he find you?”

  Without a word, they both looked at Sheldon’s telephone.

  “You’re in the book, aren’t you? You listed your number,” Bill said disapprovingly.

  “It’s my first phone.”

  Bill shrugged. He’d done stupider things himself.

  “He dead?” Sheldon asked.

  Bill kicked Lorenzo. Then he bent over and checked his pulse. Finally, he turned him over and stared into his dead eyes.

  “Yup.”

  “Well. Good for us. Bad for him.”

  “Should I feel bad about this?” Bill asked. He was still drunk but surprisingly high-functioning. If Sheldon had had a quarter of what Bill had consumed, he wouldn’t have been able to find the door, let alone make a judgment and swing a bat.

  “I feel like I should feel bad about it,” Bill continued. “It’s just that . . . what else could I have done? And it’s been such a great night until now!”

  Sheldon was thinking more practically. They couldn’t just leave Lorenzo here.

  “What do we do with him?” Sheldon asked.

  “I suppose he’s too big to flush down the toilet.”

  “In this shape, yeah,” Sheldon said, still thinking.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Sheldon looked at his tipsy savior. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean . . . I know all the cops in this town and the ones I don’t know I’m probably related to. I’ll explain it, they’ll understand, they’ll haul him away, problem solved. It’s not like this was our idea.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  They both stood there looking at Lorenzo. Dead or not, he had a presence.

  This was the man Sheldon had first seen in a downpour, a confusion in a storm. This was the man with the mustache who had evaded Sheldon’s detective work for years and was later summoned to the elegant glamor of Grossinger’s resort to torture Mirabelle’s boyfriend until gemstones fell from his eyes instead of tears. This was the man even the Mafia couldn’t kill, and who was finally laid out—hard and permanently—by a drunk pawn broker with a mighty personality and a swing to match.

  Sheldon crouched down for a final look. Staring into Lorenzo’s open eyes, Sheldon didn’t feel a damn thing. He had put this all to rest back in the Catskills. If he hadn’t been sure, this was his proof.

  Sheldon stood up and brushed himself off and then looked at Bill. As his mind cleared, the wider context of the night returned to Sheldon, and he asked, “What are you doing here? I left you facedown and mumbling a shanty or something.”

  “I remembered what I wanted to tell you.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Now it was Sheldon’s turn to look disapproving.

  “A lot’s happened since then!” Bill said in his own defense.

  Sheldon’s father’s clock struck two o’clock in the morning. The sound was crisp and light.

  “You really think it’s all going to work out?” Sheldon asked, as Bill picked up the phone to call the precinct.

  “Sure. After what the world’s been through these past years, no one’s gonna give any thought to these little twilight crimes.
”

  After: 1947

  Mabel

  MABEL ZIEGLER HELD THE LEFT hand of Sheldon Horowitz outside the ticket booth of the Rialto on a cold November day in 1947. The marquee was lit up with the title of a new movie, Gentleman’s Agreement, which starred Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, and Celeste Holm, and was directed by Elia Kazan. By next year at this time, it would be nominated for eight Academy Awards and would win for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director. Sheldon was looking at the entrance to the movie theater with trepidation. It would be his first movie since his mother had died a decade earlier.

  “Oh, come on,” Mabel said, giving him a tug.

  She was nineteen and he was twenty-one. She was slender, a little shorter than Sheldon, and had hair blacker than a Nordic night. Mabel’s family had moved to Manhattan from Chicago eight months earlier. She’d met Sheldon three months ago when she and her father stopped into a Gramercy pawn shop to buy a box of tools they’d seen in the window. A rather affable man named Bill Harmon had insisted they meet his landlord next door and promptly introduced Mabel to Sheldon. Bill had backed out of the shop, giving Sheldon a double thumbs-up on the way and nodding like a fool.

  Mabel returned to Sheldon’s shop two weeks later on the pretense of wanting to buy a lamp, and Sheldon asked her out for a walk, which she accepted. The weather in late September had been unusually fine, and Sheldon spoke little, prompting her to tell him stories instead.