He pushed his way down the landing to the stairs which led to the store. Dolores came after, trying to pull his sleeve, but he shook her loose with one impatient twist. He knocked askew a picture of fishing boats off the island of Serifos. Blue skies, bleached boats.
Dolores said, ‘No, Nicky, please.’
Nicky, halfway down the stairs, turned and looked back at her. The revolver was raised awkwardly in his left hand. From downstairs, there was another splintering crack as the looters broke into his refrigerated display cabinet, and someone shouted, ‘Get that canned food at the back – all that canned stuff!’
Dolores said nothing, but walked quickly back along the landing in her pink baby-doll nightie to where the telephone hung on the wall by the stairs. Nicolas heard her dialling, and knew that she was calling Sergeant Kyprianides. He felt short of breath, and afraid, but there was no point in waiting until the police turned up. They might not turn up at all, what with all the smashing and looting that was going on tonight throughout Milwaukee. They’d be busy taking care of the breweries, and the big department stores. What would they care about one small Greek delicatessen in the grittier part of town?
Nicolas went down the dark stairwell, unbolted the brown-painted door at the bottom, and pulled it cautiously open.
He was dazzled straight away by car headlights, directed right into the smashed-open store from a station wagon that had been pulled up across the sidewalk. There was a sharp smell of burning paint, and the night air was warm and electric with fright. He drew the door open a little further, and he could see the outline of a man in a plaid jacket, leaning over the frozen-food cabinet with a large plastic trash bag in one hand, helping himself to broccoli and asparagus spears and mixed vegetables and TV dinners. He could hear feet crunching on broken glass in back of the store, too, but from where he was standing he couldn’t see anybody.
‘Are you through with that frozen food yet?’ a voice demanded.
The man bent over the freezer cabinet said, ‘Give me a minute, will you?’ as he gathered up boxes of Hungry Man dinners by the armful.
Nicolas cocked his revolver, and stepped out into the store. He said, ‘Put up your hands,’ but at first nobody heard him.
Louder, he said, ‘Put up your hands!’
The man at the freezer cabinet turned around, slowly lifting one arm up, but keeping a tight hold on his plastic bag of frozen food with the other hand. He was young, maybe thirty-two, with a moustache and horn-rim eyeglasses. He looked like an ordinary suburbanite, not at all like a robber.
Nicolas edged his way along the shelves, keeping his back to the serried cans of tuna and eggplant, his revolver held high in both hands. As he moved around, he was able to catch sight of a blonde woman in a fawn tracksuit, standing beside his display of bottled fruits, and another young man, unshaven and dark, a Greek possibly, or an Italian, in army fatigues.
Nicolas said, ‘You lay down the stuff and you get out of here. You understand me? I’m used to dealing with bums.’
The man by the freezer cabinet said, ‘Mister – there’s no way we’re bums.’
‘You’re not bums? What are you doing looting my store, if you’re not bums? Now, get out of here.’
The woman said, ‘We’re sorry. But it’s the food crisis.’
‘Just get out,’ said Nicolas, waving the revolver towards her.
‘You don’t understand,’ the man by the freezer cabinet told him. ‘There’s hardly any food left. This is the last place, just about. How are we going to feed our kids? We’ve got kids.’
Nicolas looked from one face to the other. It wasn’t hard to see that they were as frightened as he was. These weren’t the hard, amused faces of shakedown artists, or street hoodlums. These were just ordinary people caught in a desperate and unfamiliar act. He felt sorry for them, almost. But he felt protective towards Dolores, and himself, too; and, after all, the food in this delicatessen was his, not theirs, no matter how many kids they had.
‘Go,’ he admonished them.
There was an uncomfortable pause, but then the Greek-looking man in the army fatigues reached down behind the bread rack and lifted up a shotgun. It wasn’t the kind of shotgun you saw on the streets, sawed off, with hardly any stock. It was a long-barrelled hunting gun, still shiny with oil.
Nicolas veered the revolver across the store. ‘Drop it,’ he said. ‘Put it down, or I’ll shoot you.’
The Greek-looking man said, ‘This food in here – you think that you’re going to keep it all to yourself? All of it? Just because you’re a storekeeper you think you’ve got some God-given right to survive while everybody else starves?’
Nicolas didn’t even want to think about it. He said, ‘I’m giving you three. You understand me? Three, and then I shoot.’
The Greek-looking man, still holding the shotgun, looked across at the man by the freezer. A question passed between them, unspoken but obvious. Nervously, instantly, Nicolas fired.
The first shot missed. The revolver bucked in his hands, and he heard the bang of broken glass at the back of the store, followed by a sudden rush of green olives from three broken jars. He fired again, before he could allow himself to think, and the Greek’s shoulder burst apart in a spray of gory catsup. The girl shrieked, a silly short shriek that made Nicolas frown at her as if he couldn’t believe anything so ridiculous. And then there was a deep, deafening bavvooom! and Nicolas realised with strange slow horror that the Greek had fired back at him with his shotgun, and that he’d been hit, badly hit, in the belly and the thighs. He was shocked, off-balance, hurt. He felt as if someone had splashed blazing kerosene between his legs, as if he was burning and burning and would never stop.
In perceptual slow-motion, he looked down towards his legs, and saw that his pants were in bloody ribbons, that his thighs were as black and raw as hamburger meat, and that the remains of his penis were dangling from a thin shred of skin. He collapsed, both physically and mentally. His mind folded in on itself like a Chinese conjuring trick, and he pitched to the floor. He was aware of somebody shouting, and bright lights, and the feel of the plastic floor-tiles against his cheek, but that was all.
Dolores came down the stairs and into the store as the three looters were climbing out through the shattered window. She saw Nicolas lying doubled up against the shelves that ran the length of the middle of the store, and the blood that was sprayed all around him. She could hardly make out the looters at all, because she was half-blinded by the car lights, but the looters saw her.
She screamed, ‘Stop! Stop!’ although she didn’t want them to stop at all. One of them hesitated, holding a shotgun one-handed, its stock tucked under his arm. Dolores stared at him for a moment, at his almost invisible silhouette, and then marched formidably across the store towards him, clambering through the shattered window in her baby-doll nightie, her feet slashed by broken glass, until she was out on the sidewalk. The car meanwhile was backing off the sidewalk, bouncing on to the road, and getting ready to take off.
Dolores said to the Greek-looking man with the bloody arm and the army fatigues, ‘You’ve killed my husband.’
The man said tensely, ‘Back off. You hear me? Just back off.’
‘You’ve killed my husband,’ said Dolores, simply. It seemed important to tell the man what he had done. ‘He came from Serifos. There are blue skies there, and blue sea. Now look.’
She turned back towards the darkened store. She couldn’t see Nicolas in the shadows, but she knew he was there. ‘His name was Nicolas Andreas Prokopiou.’