Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 52, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007
- Автор: Baldwin Barry, Campbell Melodie
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN:0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 52, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007». Краткое содержание книги:
German thought he felt his heart stop. His mouth was dry. He could feel the flesh peeling from his bones just like the pictures in Life magazine.
They both heard a soft thump. A closing door, perhaps, disrupted the stillness.
Waxman looked toward the stairway and backed into the shadows.
“Get behind me,” he whispered.
“The light!” German exclaimed.
“Don’t worry about that,” Waxman replied.
The four men were halfway down the steps when the man in the lead stopped. He said something to the others in a foreign language before taking another cautious step downward. He looked around the poorly illuminated room suspiciously.
German gripped his pistol tightly. He could feel his heart pounding with anticipation. The man had remembered that the light should have been off.
Suddenly Waxman made a move, and German’s anxiety accelerated.
Waxman stepped out of the shadows and fired point blank into the first man’s chest from no more than five feet away. As the first man fell, the others stumbled over each other in their panicked attempt to escape, but Waxman kept firing.
German bounded out of the shadows. Three men lay bleeding on the stairway. The fourth one — the balding man with the penetrating eyes — stood with his back plastered against the wall, but he wasn’t moving. His eyes appeared glazed, and bubbles of blood emanated from his trembling lips.
“Shoot him!” Waxman yelled.
German just stared at the man. His hands were sweating and trembling as he walked closer to him.
Waxman was frantically trying to reload his revolver.
“Shoot him, dammit! He killed your wife!”
German took another step toward the man. The expression on the man’s face was not one of fear or anger. It was surprise.
“I don’t know your wife,” he gurgled.
The sound of his voice prompted a rage in German. He shot him without hesitation — once, twice, and a third time after he fell.
German couldn’t stop trembling. It wasn’t as he had imagined. There was no feeling of satisfaction. There was no fulfillment. He felt ugly inside.
“The first one is always the most difficult,” Waxman said, but it was no consolation.
There was more noise upstairs. With amazing speed, German’s gun was suddenly pointing toward the top of the stairs.
Waxman quickly moved in front of him and pushed his arm aside.
“It’s all right,” he said.
To German’s amazement, several men wearing coveralls moved past them down the stairs and began gathering the papers. They hovered over the crates with equipment German had never seen.
“Geiger counters,” Waxman explained.
German sat on the floor and cried for the first time since Angelina’s funeral.
German watched several minutes of hushed discussions between Waxman and the men in coveralls before Waxman approached him and informed him that they had to leave.
“What about all of this?” he asked.
“They will take care of it,” Waxman replied.
“What’s in the crates?”
“Nothing. Tobacco. Cigars.”
They went up the stairs into the store.
“But you said...”
“Look, we didn’t find what we were looking for,” Waxman interjected impatiently. “There was no evidence of radioactivity down here. That’s good. That means that perhaps nothing has been imported into your country yet.”
German stood stiffly. For a moment he was frozen by his thoughts.
Waxman looked at him with a curious expression.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They weren’t armed,” German said. “We killed four men, and they weren’t armed. I mean, if they were dangerous spies, wouldn’t they have been armed?”
“Their papers indicated they were interested in explosives. You know their history. You think we should have waited?”
“They had no guns.”
“They killed your wife.”
“He said he didn’t know my wife.”
“You believe him?”
They left it there. They walked together for a time but said very little to each other, then Waxman shook German’s hand and walked down a side street and was never seen again.
Six months later, German was beginning to live again. He had found work, and the pain in his heart was finally beginning to diminish. He saw Irella Hardy as he entered his apartment building and transiently thought that he might linger at the entrance in hopes of avoiding her. She wasn’t really so bad, just an elderly busybody who rarely ventured outside her apartment but still managed to keep up with everyone’s business.
She spotted him and smiled pleasantly as she waited for him to approach.
“Mr. Johnson, I never got a chance to express my sympathy. I was so sorry to hear about your loss.”
“Thank you,” he replied, hoping his terse response would be a sufficient end to the conversation.
“They ever arrest that man who was over here that night?”
“What man?” German asked, suddenly interested in Irella Hardy’s words.
“I told the police all about him. I don’t appreciate strangers hanging around here.”
“A stranger? Did you see him go near my apartment?”
“I don’t know, son. I was scared, so I closed my door. He was so big he looked like a big black giant with them gold teeth shining like they was headlights.”
German’s mouth dropped open. It couldn’t have been. It was impossible. German mumbled something unintelligible and walked away.
His pain returned in an instant. All of his memories and the agony of Angelina’s death came back as if it had happened yesterday. The drawer of his dresser had the only answer he was willing to accept, the gun that Waxman had given him. He stared at it for several seconds before shoving it into his pocket and hurrying out of the door.
The street was dark, but he moved along the familiar route without hesitation. Although lost in thought, his feet moved deftly around a corner and down Lenox, past the tobacco store where the light faded from the eyes of the man he had feared. He hadn’t been on this street since the killings. He looked up at the building, almost stunned by what he saw. The building was boarded up and plastered with warning signs. A uniformed police officer stood on the corner warning people to keep moving.
“What happened here?” German asked the officer.
“Don’t know. Government business. They condemned this building four months ago. Some kind of contamination on the upper floors. They don’t tell us what’s what. They got us here round the clock to make sure nobody goes inside. They come down here every day inspecting and testing. I tell you, I’m getting pretty damn tired of this. Hell, it’s cold out here.”
German nodded and moved away. So it wasn’t in the basement, he mused. Somehow that didn’t make him feel much better. He had killed a man. Maybe he was a bad man, but looking the man in the eye while pulling a trigger stole something from him he could never regain. He had consoled himself with the knowledge that the man was a killer who had taken the only person he had ever loved. Now, he wouldn’t even have that to help him to rationalize his deeds.
The Royce was busy. The waiters who knew him were clearly surprised at his presence.
“Where’s Leonard?” German asked one of them.
“Haven’t you heard? Leonard’s in the hospital, man. He’s pretty bad. They don’t expect him to make it.”