“What did I tell you?”
That night Morris, alone in the store after Ida had gone up to soak her poor feet, felt an uncontrollable craving for some heavy sweet cream. He remembered the delicious taste of bread dipped in rich milk when he was a boy. He found a half-pint bottle of whipping cream in the refrigerator and took it, guiltily, with a loaf of stale white bread, into the back. Pouring some cream into a saucer, he soaked it up with bread, greedily wolfing the cream-laden bread.
A noise in the store startled him. He hid the cream and bread in the gas range.
At the counter stood a skinny man in an old hat and a dark overcoat down to his ankles. His nose was long, throat gaunt, and he wore a wisp of red beard on his bony chin.
“A gut shabos,” said the scarecrow.
“A gut shabos,” Morris answered, though shabos was a day away.
“It smells here,” said the skinny stranger, his small eyes shrewd, “like a open grave.”
“Business is bad.”
The man wet his lips and whispered, “Insurinks you got —fire insurinks?”
Morris was frightened. “What is your business?”
“How much?”
“How much what?”
“A smart man hears one word but he understand two. How much you got insurinks?”
“Two thousand for the store.”
“Feh.”
“Five thousand for the house.”
“A shame. Should be ten.”
“Who needs ten for this house?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What do you want here?” Morris asked, irritated.
The man rubbed his skinny, red-haired hands. “What does a macher want?”
“What kind of a macher? What do you make?”
He shrugged slyly. “I make a living.” The macher spoke soundlessly. “I make fires.”
Morris drew back.
The macher waited with downcast eyes. “We are poor people,” he murmured.
“What do you want from me?”
“We are poor people,” the macher said, apologetically. “God loves the poor people but he helps the rich. The insurinks companies are rich. They take away your money and what they give you? Nothing. Don’t feel sorry for the insurinks companies.”
He proposed a fire. He would make it swiftly, safely, economically—guaranteed to collect.
From his coat pocket he produced a strip of celluloid. “You know what is this?”
Morris, staring at it, preferred not to say.
“Celluloy,” hissed the macher. He struck a large yellow match and lit the celluloid. It flared instantly. He held it a second then let it fall to the counter, where it quickly burned itself out. With a proof he blew away nothing. Only the stench remained, floating in air.
“Magic,” he hoarsely announced. “No ashes. This is why we use celluloy, not paper, not rags. You push a piece in a crack, and the fire burns in a minute. Then when comes the fire marshal and insurinks investigator, what they find?—nothing. For nothing they pay cash—two thousand for the store, five for the house.” A smile crawled over his face.
Morris shivered. “You want me I should burn down my house and my store to collect the insurance?”
“I want,” said the macher slyly, “tsu you want?”
The grocer fell silent.
“Take,” said the macher persuasively, “your family and go for a ride to Cunyiland. When you come back is the job finished. Cost—five hundred.” He lightly dusted his fingers.
“Upstairs lives two people,” muttered the grocer.
“When they go out?”
“Sometimes to the movies, Friday night.” He spoke dully, not sure why he was revealing secrets to a total stranger.
“So let be Friday night. I am not kosher.”
“But who’s got five hundred dollars?”
The macher’s face fell. He sighed deeply. “I will make for two hundred. I will do a good job. You will get six—seven thousand. After, pay me another three hundred.”
But Morris had decided. “Impossible.”
“You don’t like the price?”
“I don’t like fires. I don’t like monkey business.”
The macher argued another half hour and departed reluctantly.
The next night a car pulled up in front of the door, and the grocer watched Nick and Tessie, dressed for a party, get in and drive off. Twenty minutes later Ida and Helen came down to go to a movie. Helen had asked her mother to go with her, and Ida said yes, seeing how restless her daughter was. When he realized that the house was deserted, Morris felt suddenly agitated.
After ten minutes, he went up the stairs, and searched in a camphor-smelling trunk in the small room for a celluloid collar he had once worn. Ida saved everything, but he couldn’t locate it. He searched in Helen’s bureau drawer and found an envelope full of picture negatives. Discarding several of her as a school girl, Morris took some of boys in bathing suits, nobody he recognized. Hurrying down, he found matches and went into the cellar. He thought that one of the bins would be a good place to start the fire but settled instead on the air shaft. The flames would shoot up in an instant, and through the open toilet window into the store. Gooseflesh crept over him. He figured he could start the fire and wait in the hall. Once the flames had got a good start, he would rush into the street and ring the alarm. He could later say he had fallen asleep on the couch and had been awakened by the smoke. By the time the fire engines came, the house would be badly damaged. The hoses and axes would do the rest.
Morris inserted the celluloid strips into a crack between two boards, on the inside of the dumb-waiter. His hand shook and he whispered to himself as he touched the match to the negatives. Then the flame shot up in a stupefying stench and at once crawled up the wall of the dumb-waiter. Morris watched, hypnotized, then let out a terrible cry. Slapping frantically at the burning negatives, he knocked them to the cellar floor. As he hunted for something with which to beat out the fire in the dumb-waiter, he discovered that the bottom of his apron was burning. He smacked the flames with both hands and then his sweater sleeves began to blaze. He sobbed for God’s mercy, and was at once roughly seized from behind and flung to the ground.
Frank Alpine smothered the grocer’s burning clothes with his overcoat. He banged out the fire in the dumb-waiter with his shoe.
Morris moaned.
“For Christ sake,” Frank pleaded, “take me back here.”
But the grocer ordered him out of the house.
Saturday night, about one A.M., Karp’s store began to burn.
In the early evening, Ward Minogue had knocked on Frank’s door and learned from Tessie that the clerk had moved.
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. Ask Mr. Bober,” Tessie said, anxious to get rid of him.
Downstairs, Ward peered through the grocery window and seeing Morris, hurriedly withdrew. Though alcohol nauseated him lately, his thirst for a drink was killing him. He thought if he could get a couple of swigs past the nausea he would feel better. But all he had in his pocket was a dime, so he went into Karp’s and begged Louis to trust him to a cheap fifth of anything.
“I wouldn’t trust you for a fifth of sewer water,” Louis said.
Ward grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter and flung it at Louis’ head. He ducked but the wine smashed some bottles on the shelf. As Louis, yelling murder, rushed into the street, Ward snatched a bottle of whiskey and ran out of the store and up the block. He had gone past the butcher’s when the bottle slipped from under his arm and broke on the sidewalk. Ward looked back with anguish but kept on running.
By the time the cops came Ward had disappeared. After supper that night, Detective Minogue, roaming the cold streets, saw his son in Earl’s bar, standing over a beer. The detective went in by the side door but Ward saw him in the mirror and bolted out the front. Although short of breath, driven by great fear, he ran toward the coal yard. Hearing his father behind him, Ward leaped across the rus
ted chain stretched in front of the loading platform and sped over the cobblestones toward the back of the yard. He scrambled under one of the trucks in the shed.
The detective, calling him filthy names, hunted him in the dark for fifteen minutes. Then he took out his pistol and fired a shot into the shed. Ward, thinking he would be killed, crawled out from under the truck and ran into his father’s arms.
Though he pleaded with the detective not to hurt him, crying he had diabetes and would surely get gangrene, his father beat him mercilessly with his billy until Ward collapsed.
Bending over him, the detective yelled, “I told you to stay the hell out of this neighborhood. This is my last warning to you. If I ever see you again, I’ll murder you.” He dusted his coat and left the coal yard.
Ward lay on the cobblestones. His nose had been gushing blood but it soon stopped. Getting up, he felt so dizzy he wept. He staggered into the shed and climbed into the cab of one of the coal trucks, thinking he would sleep there. But when he lit a cigarette he was overcome with nausea. Ward threw the butt out and waited for the nausea to leave him. When it did he was thirsty again. If he could climb the coal yard fence, then some of the smaller ones beyond it, he would land up in Karp’s back yard. He knew from having cased the place once that the liquor store had a barred window in the back, but that the rusty iron bars were old and loose. He thought that if he got his strength back he could force them apart.
He dragged himself over the coal yard fence, then more slowly over the others until he stood at last in Karp’s weedy back yard. The liquor store had been closed since midnight and there were no lights burning in the house. Above the dark grocery one of Bober’s windows was lit, so he had to be careful or the Jew might hear him.
Twice, at intervals of ten minutes, he tried to bend the bars but failed. The third time, straining till he shook, he slowly forced the inside two apart. The window was unlocked. Ward got his fingertips under it and lifted it with care because it squeaked. When it was open, he squeezed through the bent bars, squirming into the back of the liquor store. Once in there he laughed a little to himself and moved around freely, knowing Karp was too cheap to have a burglar alarm. From the stock in the rear Ward sampled and spat out three different brands of whiskey. Forcing himself, he gurgled down a third of a bottle of gin. In a couple of minutes he forgot his aches and pains and lost the sorrow he had been feeling for himself. He snickered when he imagined Louis’ comic puss as he found the empty bottles all over the floor in the morning. Remembering the cash register, Ward staggered out front and rang it open. It was empty. He angrily smashed a whiskey bottle on it. A feeling of nausea gagged him and with a croak he threw up over Karp’s counter. Feeling better, he began by the light of the street lamp to smash the whiskey bottles against the cash register.
Mike Papadopolous, whose bedroom was right above the front part of the liquor store, was awakened by the noise. After five minutes he figured something was wrong so he got up and dressed. Ward had, in the meantime, destroyed a whole shelf of bottles, when he felt a hunger to smoke. It took him two minutes to get a match struck and the light touching his butt. He tasted the smoke with pleasure as the flame briefly lit his face, then he shook the match and flipped it over his shoulder. It landed, still burning, in a puddle of alcohol. The fire flew up with with a zoom. Ward, lit like a flaming tree, flailed at himself. Screaming, he ran through the back and tried to get out of the window but was caught between the bars and, exhausted, died.
Smelling smoke, Mike came down in a rush and seeing fire in the store, raced to the drugstore corner to turn in the alarm. As he was running back, the plate glass window of the liquor store exploded and a roaring flame boiled up in the place. After Mike had got his mother and the upstairs tenants out of the house, he ran into Bober’s hall, shouting there was a fire next door. They were all up—Helen, who had been reading when the window crashed, had run up to call Nick and Tessie. They left the house, bundled in sweaters and overcoats, and stood across the street, huddled together with some passers-by, watching the fire destroy Karp’s once prosperous business, then devour the house. Despite the heavy streams of water the firemen poured into the flames, the fire, fed by the blazing alcohol, rose to the roof, and when it was at last smothered, all that was left of Karp’s property was a gutted, dripping shell.
As the firemen began with grappling hooks to tear out the burned fixtures and heave them onto the sidewalk, everybody fell silent. Ida moaned softly, with shut eyes thinking of Morris’s burned sweater that she had found in the cellar, and the singed hair she had noticed on his hands. Sam Pearl, lost without his bifocals, mumbled to himself. Nat, hatless, an overcoat on over pajamas, edged close to Helen until he stood by her side. Morris was fighting a tormenting emotion.
A car drew up and parked beyond the drugstore. Karp got out with Louis and they crossed the hose-filled street to their store. Karp took one unbearable look at his former gesheft, and though it was for the most part insured, tottered forward and collapsed. Louis yelled at him to wake up. Two of the firemen carried the stricken liquor dealer to his car, and Louis frantically drove him home.
Afterward Morris couldn’t sleep. He stood at his bedroom window in his long underwear, looking down at the pile of burned and broken fixtures on the sidewalk. With a frozen hand the grocer clawed at a live pain in his breast. He felt an overwhelming hatred of himself. He had wished it on Karp—just this. His anguish was terrible.
Sunday, the last of March, was overcast at eight A.M., and there were snow flurries in the air. Winter still spits in my face, thought the weary grocer. He watched the fat wet flakes melt as they touched the ground. It’s too warm for snow, he thought, tomorrow will come April. Maybe. He had awakened with a wound, a gap in his side, a hole in the ground he might fall through if he stepped outside where the liquor store had been. But the earth held him up and the odd feeling wore off. It went as he reflected it was no use mourning Karp’s loss; his pocketbook would protect him from too much pain. Pain was for poor people. For Karp’s tenants the fire was a tragedy, and for Ward Minogue, dead young; maybe also for the detective, but not for Julius Karp. Morris could have used the fire, so Karp had got it for free. Everything to him who has.
As the grocer was thinking this, the liquor dealer, apparently the victim of a sleepless night, appeared in the falling snow and entered the grocery. He wore a narrow-brimmed hat with a foolish little feather in the band and a double-breasted overcoat, but despite his stylish appearance, his eyes, with dark bags under them, were filled with gloom, his complexion pasty, lips blue. Where his forehead had smacked the sidewalk last night he wore a plaster patch—an unhappy figure, the loss of his business the worst that could happen to him. He couldn’t stand the vision of dollars he might be taking in, flying daily away. Karp seemed embarrassed, ill. The grocer, his shame awakened, invited him into the back for tea. Ida, also up early, made a fuss over him.
Karp took a hot sip or two of tea, but after setting the cup down, hadn’t the strength to lift it from the saucer. After a fidgety silence he spoke. “Morris, I want to buy your house. Also the store.” He drew a deep, trembly breath.
Ida let out a stifled cry. Morris was stupefied.
“What for? The business is terrible.”
“Not so terrible,” cried Ida.
“Don’t interest me the grocery business,” Karp gloomily replied. “Only the location. Next door,” he said, but couldn’t go on.
They understood.
He explained it would take months to rebuild his house and place of business. But if he took over Morris’s store he could have it refixtured, painted, stocked in a couple of weeks, thus keeping to a minimum his loss of trade.
Morris couldn’t believe his ears. He was filled with excitement and dread that somebody would tell him he had just dreamed a dream, or that Karp, fat fish, would turn into a fat bird and fly away, screeching, “Don’t you believe me,” or in some heartbreaking way change his mind.
So he pu
t his foot on anticipation and kept his mouth shut, but when Karp asked him to name his price the grocer had one ready. “Nine thousand for the house—three down, my equity—and for the store twenty-five hundred cash.” After all, bad as it was, the grocery was a going business, and for the refrigerator alone he had paid nine hundred dollars. With trepidation he figured a fair fifty-five hundred in cash in his hands, enough after he had paid his debts to look for a new business. Seeing Ida’s astonished expression, he was surprised at his nerve and thought Karp would surely laugh him in the face and offer less—which he would grab anyway; but the liquor dealer listlessly nodded. “I will give you twenty-five hundred for the store, less the auction price of stock and fixtures.”
“This is your business,” Morris replied.
Karp could not bear to discuss the terms any further. “My lawyer will draw the contract.”
When he left the grocery, the liquor dealer vanished in the swirling snow. Ida wept joyfully, while Morris, still stunned, reflected that his luck had changed. So had Karp’s, for what Karp had lost he had in a sense gained, as if to make up for the misery the man had caused him in the past. Yesterday he wouldn’t have believed how things would balance out today.
The spring snow moved Morris profoundly. He watched it falling, seeing in it scenes of his childhood, remembering things he thought he had forgotten. All morning he watched the shifting snow. He thought of himself, a boy running in it, whooping at blackbirds as they flew from the snowy trees; he felt an irresistible thirst to be out in the open.
“I think I will shovel the snow,” he told Ida at lunchtime.
“Go better to sleep.”
“It ain’t nice for the customers.”
“What customers—who needs them?”
“People can’t walk in such high snow,” he argued.
“Wait, tomorrow it will be melted.”
“It’s Sunday, it don’t look so nice for the goyim that they go to church.”
Her voice had an edge to it. “You want to catch pneumonia, Morris?”
The Assistant Page 22