The Pawnbroker

by Edward Lewis Wallant

  "What d'ya say, Solly? How's business?"

  "You could be my first customer of the day. You want to hock the badge, or maybe the gun?"

  "Can't do that, Solly; need them to protect you."

  "Oh yes, to protect me," Sol said sarcastically. Leventhal had been making it increasingly evident that he imagined Sol had something to hide, that he, Leventhal, might be in a position to expect some kind of favors from Sol.

  "Speaking of protection, what the hell time were you here till last night?" Leventhal asked, with an expression of affectionate admonishment on his tough, blue-jawed face.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Why! I'll tell you why. Because you're asking for trouble staying open so late in this neighborhood, all by yourself. All the other Uncles close up at six o'clock. What are you trying to do, get rich fast or what? Maybe you think you're like a doctor, hah? Gotta be on call in case some nigger suddenly runs out of booze money or needs dough for a quick fix. I mean you got to wise up, Solly. You get some kind of trouble here and pretty soon the department starts poking their nose in your business and..." He shrugged suggestively.

  "I appreciate your concern. I know what I am doing. Just do not trouble yourself worrying about me," Sol said coldly, lowering his attention pointedly to the checks again.

  "Aw now, don't take that attitude. That's my business to worry about you. Where would you be without law and order?"

  "Oh yes, law and order."

  "I mean you ought to be more co-operative, Solly. Take my advice in the spirit it's given. Look, we're landsmen, got to stick together against all these crooked goys," Leventhal said with a loose smile.

  "Is that a fact?" He stared at the policeman with an icy, inscrutable expression. "Well thank you then. Now if you will excuse me, I have work to do." A landsman indeed! And where was the heritage of a Jew in a black uniform, carrying a club and a revolver? Sol had no friends, but his enemies were clearly marked for him.

  "Okay, Solly, we'll leave it at that ... for now." Leventhal shrugged, looked slowly around with the pompous, constabulary warning, and walked slowly, insolently out, trailing a toneless whistle behind him.

  And then, at ten o'clock, the traffic began.

  A white man in his early twenties walked stiffly up to the grille. He had wild soft hair that rose up and was in constant motion from the tiniest drafts and crosscurrents of air, so that, with his drowned-looking face, he seemed to float under water. His clothing was threadbare but showed the conservative taste of some sensible, middle-class shopper. He held a paper bag before him under crossed arms, and he stared with cautious intensity at the Pawnbroker before even entrusting his burden to the edge of the counter.

  "How much will you give me?" he asked in a low, breathless voice.

  "For what?" Sol twisted his mouth impatiently.

  "For this," the man answered, his black eyes gleaming above the big blade of nose. There was something histrionic and a little mad in his manner, and he clutched at the bag as though against Sol's attempt to steal it.

  "This, this ... what in hell is this? All I am able to see is a paper bag. What are you selling? I am no mind reader." Sol's voice was harsh but his face was professionally bland behind the round, black-framed glasses.

  "It is an award for oratory," said the wild-haired young man. "I won it in a city-wide oratorical contest nine years ago."

  Sol took the bag, which was greasy-soft and made up of a million shallow wrinkles. He wondered where they got those bags or what they did to ordinary bags to make them feel like thin, aged skin. He opened it with an attitude of distaste. Inside was a bust of shiny yellow metal on a black-lacquered wooden base. A plaque in the same yellow metal was inscribed:

  DANIEL WEBSTER AWARD

  New York Public School Oratorical Contest for 1949

  LEOPOLD S. SCHNEIDER

  "It's gold," Leopold Schneider said.

  "Plate," the Pawnbroker corrected, tapping Daniel Webster's shiny skull. "Look, I'll loan you a dollar on it. The devil what I could do with it if you didn't come back for it."

  "A dollar!" Leopold Schneider pressed his starved face against the bars like a maddened bird. "This is an important award. Why, do you know there were two thousand quarter-finalists out of twenty thousand, only fifty semifinalists. And I won! I recited 'The Raven,' and I won, from twenty thousand. I was the best of twenty thousand."

  "Good, good, you are one in twenty thousand, Leopold, maybe one in a million. That's why I will loan you a dollar ... because I'm so impressed."

  "But one in twenty thousand. You don't think I would part with that glory for a miserable dollar, do you!"

  "There is a very small market for oratory awards with your name engraved on them. One dollar," Sol said, lowering his eyes to the checks again.

  "Look, I'm hungry. I'm busy writing a great, great play. I just need a. few dollars to carry me. I'll redeem it, I swear it. It's worth more than money..."

  "Not to me, Leopold."

  "I'll give you triple interest...."

  "One dollar," the Pawnbroker said without looking up. He had added one column of numbers three times now.

  "What's the matter with you?" Leopold Schneider shrilled suddenly in the quiet store. Upstairs, Ortiz' footsteps stopped for a moment at the sound, as though he might be considering coming down to see what was happening. "Haven't you got a heart?"

  "No," Sol answered. "No heart."

  "What a world this is!"

  Sol ran his finger deliberately down the column of numbers again.

  "Five dollars at least?" Leopold whined, breathing the sour breath of the chronically hungry on the Pawnbroker.

  Sol finally totaled the first column, carried a seven to the second.

  "All right, three dollars, at least three miserable dollars. What is it to you?"

  Sol raised his gray, impervious face. All the clocks ticked around his unrelenting stare. "I am busy. Go away now if you please. I have no use for the damned thing anyhow."

  "All right, all right, give me the dollar," Leopold said in a trembling half-whisper.

  Sol reached into the money drawer and took out a bill as greasy and battered as Leopold's paper bag. He tore off a pawn ticket, wrote up the description of the award, and gave the claim ticket to Leopold Schneider. Then he continued his adding of the numbers. Leopold stood there for a full minute before he turned and went out of the store with the awkward tread of a huge, ungainly bird.

  Only several minutes later did the Pawnbroker look up to stare at the empty doorway. He rubbed his eyes in a little gesture of weariness. Daniel Webster caught a tiny dart of sunlight, and it disturbed Sol's corner vision. He picked the award up and shoved it into a low, dark shelf where the light never reached.

  Mrs. Harmon might have seemed a relief after Leopold Schneider. She was big and brown, and her face had long ago committed her to frequent smiling; even in repose it was a series of benevolently curving lines. Mrs. Harmon was convinced you could either laugh or cry, that there were no other alternatives; she had elected to go with the former.

  "Come on, Mistuh Nazerman, smile! You got some more business comin' at you. Here I is with a load of pure profit for you." She held up two silver candlesticks, the latest of her diminishing, yet never quite depleted, store of heirlooms. Her husband, Willy Harmon, was a janitor in a department store and came home with occasional delights for her in the form of floor samples, remains of old window dressings, and various other fruits of his modest thievery. Still, their needs were greater than his timid supplying. They had constant medical bills for a crippled son and were trying to put their daughter through secretarial school, so Mrs. Harmon was a steady client. "Genuine Duchess pattern, solid silver-plate silver. I'll settle for ten dollars the pair." She had really been fond of the candlesticks; they made a table look like a table. But she was the type of woman who could have cut off her own snake-bitten finger with great equanimity, for she believed mightily in salvaging what you could.

  "I ca
n only give you two dollars," Sol said, flipping over the pages of his ledger, looking for nothing in particular. "You've left an awful lot of things lately, haven't redeemed anything."

  "Aw I know, but Mistuh Nazerman! Why, my goodness, these candlesticks is very high quality, costed twenny-five dollars new." She chuckled indignantly, shook her head at his offer. "Why I could get fifteen dollars easy down to Triboro Pawn."

  "Take them to Triboro, Mrs. Harmon," he said quietly.

  Mrs. Harmon sighed, still shaking her great smiling face as though in reminiscence of an atrocious but funny joke. She clucked through her teeth, shifted heavily from one foot to the other. Her dignity, that much-abused yet resilient thing, suffered behind her rueful smile as the Pawnbroker kept his face of gray Asian stone averted indifferently from her. Like a child forced to choose between two unpleasant alternatives, she stared thoughtfully through the window, furrowed her brow, tried on a few uneasy smiles. Finally she muttered, "Ah well," and leaned her plump brown face close to the barred wicket behind which Sol worked on all the papers.

  "Les jus' say five dollars the pair and forget it, Mistuh Nazerman," she said, breathing hopefully on him.

  "Two dollars," he repeated tonelessly, frowning over a name in the ledger which suddenly intrigued him.

  She laughed her indignation, a bellowing wahh-hh that struck the glass cases like the flat of a hand. "You a merciless man for sure. Now you don't think I is reduce to being insulted by that measly offer. Two dollars! Why, my goodness, Mistuh Nazerman, you cain't even buy a sinful woman for that nowadays." She grabbed up her candlesticks and looked craftily to see what response that drew from the cold, gray face. But there was nothing; the man truly was made of stone. She sighed a sad but good-natured defeat. "All right, I jus' too pooped to haggle." She plunked the candlesticks down and exhaled noisily. "Make it foah dollars."

  Sol took a deep breath and looked up with an expression of mild suprise, as though he hadn't expected her to still be there.

  "The devil, Mrs. Harmon, I'll give you three dollars just to get this over with."

  "Three fifty?" she tried timidly.

  He just looked at her without expression.

  "Sold," she said tiredly. Then she giggled her fat woman's laugh and cocked her head to one side. "You a hard man, Mistuh Nazerman, no two ways about it. Well, God pity you ... he d'ony judge after all." She took the silently proffered money and tucked it delicately into her huge, cracking plastic pocketbook, shaking her head and with a pensive grin on her wide lips. "Ohh my, hard times, always hard times. Well..." She brightened her smile for farewell. "I see you again, Mistuh Nazerman, that for sure. Take care now, hear?"

  "Goodby, Mrs. Harmon," he said, tying a ticket to the candlesticks and sliding them under the counter next to Daniel Webster. After she was gone, he stole a furtive look at the clock nearest him. "Ten forty-five," he murmured in irritated surprise; it disturbed him to be so tired that early in the day.

  Several customers came and went, but they remained anonymous to him because they were disposed of quickly and easily.

  He began studying some of the more recent additions to his stock. There was an old Kodak Autographic, a zither of ancient make, an almost new electric traveling iron. The things people lived by! But it was no use trying to recall the owners by the shapes of the things they had pawned. The objects were dead and characterless, had been unique and part of life only while they were in use. Oh, he was so tired, and it wasn't even eleven o'clock. Forty-five wasn't old ... but he was old.

  The young Negro wore gaudy clothes whose vividness was obscured by the grime and grease that made it look as though he had been wearing them without letup for years. He had the terrified, twitching face of a jackal, with pupils like tiny periods in his ocherous eyes. Under his arm was a small white table radio.

  "Whatta you gimme, Unc, how much? Hey, dis worth plenty rubles. Dis a hot li'l ol' radio, plenty juice. Got short wave, police call, boats from d'sea. Even get outer space on a clear night. Yeah, space, real-far space like from satlites an' all. C'mon, Unc, make a offer. Hey, dis a hundred-dollar radio. How much you gimme? C'mon, dis powaful, clear tone, clear like a ... a mother-f—n ol' bell." The saliva flew from his mouth as from a leaky old steam engine, and he kept snuffling through his nose and making queer jig steps for emphasis.

  Sol took the radio and plugged it into the socket under the counter. He watched the light glow brighter as it warmed up, his face impassive while the young Negro in his filthy Ivy League cap twitched and muttered encouragement, as though the radio could redeem him.

  "C'mon, baby, show d'man you power ...blast him ... Give him dat tone! Man, dat radio ... O, dat mother..."

  There came a few whistles, a loud electrical gibberish, and then the nerve-racking sound as of stiff cellophane being steadily crumpled by many hands. The youth stopped twitching and aimed his pin-point gaze at the radio. His mouth dropped open at the sound of his betrayal.

  "Give you four dollars," Sol said. Ah, our youth, the progenitor of our future. Maybe the earth will be lucky, maybe they will all be sterile.

  "Hey, dat dere radio always play better dan dat," he accused. "It mus' be 'count of d'weather. Make it eight bucks. I mean, man, dat my mother's radio!"

  "Four dollars, take it or leave it."

  "Oh say, you tryin' to bleed me, you suckin' a man's guts. I takin' a awful chance hockin' my mother's radio. She sell me when she fin' out."

  She ought to sell you. Sol massaged the bridge of his nose as he fumbled in his mind for the profit to all this.

  "Six bucks?"

  "Four."

  "C'mon, at least five skins, you bloodsuckin' Sheeny!"

  Sol felt a dangerous blue flicker behind his eyes. He began to move menacingly toward the little gate that led from behind the counter. "All right, animal, get out of here! Come on, out! Go peddle your junk in the street!"

  "Okay, okay, mister, don' go gettin' all hot like. Gimme the four rubles, I take the four," he said, his hands trembling and flying around with his need. "Hurry, hurry up, man, please." His face showed the agony of some inner burning, an unbearable expression that filled the Pawnbroker with rage.

  "Go on now," Sol said, pushing the money at him. "And don't go bothering me with your foul mouth any more. This is a place of business. I don't have to have human rubbish in here."

  "Yes, man, O yes," the youth said, not even hearing the Pawnbroker's words. He took the money and gave it a quick kiss before stuffing it into his pocket. Then he cool-stepped out of the store with a beatific, lost smile on his writhing face. He left the pawn ticket on the floor behind him.

  Sol felt the throbbing start of a bad headache. "It is getting hot," he said aloud, as though to excuse the pain. He began rolling up the sleeves of his shirt for the first time that summer, disturbed at this first concession to the heat.

  Jesus Ortiz came downstairs with a pair of suits on hangers. All morning he had sorted and stacked and labeled. He had looked at the clothing stacked in dusty hundreds to the ceiling of the stifling loft and each suit had seemed a building block for some odd edifice he was erecting without conscious design. Now he had reached a point where he was obsessed with perfection, and two ordinary suits had seemed to mar the aesthetic daze he worked in.

  "These here suits, Sol," he began, and then stared in puzzlement at the crudely tattooed numbers on his employer's thick, hairless arm. "Hey, what kind of tattoo you call that?" he asked.

  "It's a secret society I belong to," Sol answered, with a scythelike curve to his mouth. "You could never belong. You have to be able to walk on the water."

  "Okay, okay, mind my own business, hah," Ortiz said, his eyes still on the strange, codelike markings. How many secrets the big, pallid Jew had! "I mean, like these here suits is like brand new," he went on in an absent voice, no longer concerned with his mission. "They worth thirty-five, forty bucks easy. Got Hickey-Freeman labels inside."

  "I leave it to you, Ortiz. Be creative, use your own
intiative," the Pawnbroker said sardonically.

  Ortiz just looked steadily at him for a minute before turning away with an equally secluded expression. He had secrets, too; secrets gave you a look of vast dignity, a feeling of power.

  Just before twelve, as was his habit, Ortiz went out. He ate his own lunch in the cafeteria diagonally across the street and then bought Sol's never-varying cheese sandwich and coffee, and brought them back to the store. He handled the traffic alone for some fifteen minutes while Sol sat in the little windowed office eating and staring out sightlessly through the glass like some exhibited creature from another clime. And while Ortiz worked, treating the predominantly Negro customers with a show of better-humored hardness than his employer's, he was constantly aware of the odd, blind gaze on his back. He felt tense with a mysterious excitement, for the sense of his apprenticeship assumed an unfathomable importance then, seemed to possess the key to Sol's buried treasure.

  At least half the clocks hovered near one when three men came in pushing a motorized lawn mower. Sol stared at it for a moment, reminded of how incredible and silly his atmosphere was. Then he nodded in mild disgust, as though bowing to some nasty omnipotence. "Oh yes, here's an item, fine, fine."

  He had seen two of the men around the neighborhood; the gaudy little Tangee in a wide-shouldered, checked suit, and Buck White, with his majestic tribesman face of almost pure black, who appeared elemental in his dignity until you noticed the foolish, childish dreaminess of his eyes. But it was the third man who took Sol's attention. He was an oddly plain-clothed Negro in a shapeless, ash-gray suit and with a battered, styleless hat square on his head. With his clean white shirt and drab brown tie, he might have been some poor but discreet civil servant of decent education who was determined to avoid the Negro cliché in dress. Until you looked at his face, which was bony and gaunt and dominated by blue eyes filled with restless, darting menace. And in the presence of that face, the ridiculous transaction suddenly became oppressive out of all proportion.