Still without speaking, she opened her handbag, gave him some money, and opened the door. She shuddered as she got out.
But, upstairs before his door, she put her finger firmly enough on the button. She was now past the point of no return. There would be no more hesitancies, no more backing away.
He came to the door and they greeted one another with casual congeniality, even down to shaking hands.
“Hello, Madeline.”
“Hello, Vick.”
She said the usual things a woman visitor does when she looks over a man’s apartment for the first time. “Very nice. I didn’t realize you had as nice a place as this.”
“It came to me just the way it is, nothing added, nothing taken away. A friend of mine had it, and when he got married he and his girl moved out to the country, so he turned this place over to me. I’m paying the old rent, too. It’s a steal.”
“Have you been here long?”
“Two and a half years.”
Then she’d been here with him. This was where she’d lived.
She asked it, anyway. There was no reason not to.
“Did your wife live here with you?”
“Yes, Starr and I spent our marriage here.” She saw the old pain cross his face again. The pain, the wanting, that wouldn’t die.
He brought out the sherry and sprang the cork and poured it. The wine wasn’t chilled but the empty glasses were. He’d learned that trick, which she knew of herself.
He offered her a cigarette. She had her own but she took one of his, to be agreeable. It turned out they smoked the same brand. They laughed a little about it.
“Would you like some music?” he offered. “Or would you rather not?”
“I would, I think it would be nice.”
“What would you like?”
She considered. “‘One Fine Day,’ from Madame Butterfly; ‘Musetta’s Waltz,’ from La Bohème; ‘The Stars Are Shining,’ from Tosca; maybe ‘Villa,’ from The Merry Widow; the tango ‘Jealousy’; ‘April in Portugal.’ Like that. I like music to follow a melody, I don’t like ricky-tick music.”
“I have them all. I’ll keep it down,” he said. “So that we can talk comfortably.”
He racked records, flicked the lever, and the needle arm swung out, then in, then down, like something with an intelligence of its own. Then he came back and sat down opposite her on the sofa. The sofa that was to be his bier.
They sat half turned toward one another, easily, negligently, and they chatted.
“I like you very much, Madeline,” he said at one point.
She knew exactly how he meant it. It wasn’t a declaration of love. You don’t lean back on an elbow, with your legs crossed, and say I like you very much, and mean it for love. He had his love already. He liked her as a person. She was compatible.
She didn’t know just what to say to that, so she quite simply said the obvious thing: “Thank you. It’s always nice to be told that.”
After the second glass of sherry, he got up and began his preparations.
The food was excellent. He might not have been an all-around cook (as he had told her he wasn’t), but the few dishes he knew how to do, he knew how to do well.
But her concern wasn’t with the food.
The setting was charming. Only it had the wrong people in it. The setting would have been perfect for two lovers. Or even appealing for just two friends. The comfortable, livable, unostentatious yet well-done apartment, the bright-spirited table, the unobtrusive music, the intimacy of a highly attractive woman and a personable man. But they weren’t lovers, they weren’t friends, they were the slayer and the one who was to be slain.
She glanced around once, in the middle of something he was saying, at the handbag lying there on the sofa across the room where she had left it, with the gun in it, then turned back to him again.
No, it was all wrong to do it this way. To come here and take his food and hospitality, and then to shoot him between the eyes. It was abominable, it was cowardly, it was the worst kind of treachery. And yet what other way was there for her to do it? There was no other way. To lie in wait and shoot him from some doorway as he stepped from a taxi to his entrance? To go up and ring his bell and shoot him as he came to the door, unaware and unprepared? That was for sneak assassinations, such as the underworld carried out, or jealous women, or former business associates with an obsessive grudge. She wasn’t an assassin, and this wasn’t that kind of killing; This was a killing in fulfillment of a sacred pledge. There was no other way to do it but this, in the open, to his face, letting him know if possible what it was for before he died.
“I thought you looked a little white, just then,” he said.
She smiled without denying it.
“But now you don’t again.”
He filtered the Hennessy into the coffees, then held them both in his hands.
“Shall we take our coffee over there?” he said, tipping his head toward the sofa. “Starr and I always did, whenever we ate home. Which wasn’t often.”
She got up and went over to it, and they both reseated themselves again where they’d been before, one at each end of it. At a distance of about five feet. There really was no reason for them to be any closer.
But I still don’t know, she thought. I must try to get that out of him. I still don’t know why she left him.
“Doesn’t it hurt you?” she asked him quite bluntly.
“Doesn’t what?”
“Doesn’t it remind you?”
“Oh, the coffee. No, little things like that don’t matter. There’s nothing the same about it. The cups aren’t the same. The girl sharing them with me isn’t the same. The only thing that’s the same is the man.” Then the pain came and went. “The only thing that hurts is the one big thing — that she left me.”
I have him going now. I have him going.
The rack of records finally came to an end. There was a definitive little click, almost like a snub. He turned his head around toward it, then gave her an inquiring look.
“No more,” she said curtly, and sliced her hand at it edgewise almost fiercely. Damn that ill-timed machine, she thought.
“Was it very sudden, her leaving you?” She had been straining forward a little toward him. She became aware of it herself, and forced herself to lean back more.
“Terribly sudden. Awfully sudden.” He killed all the rest of his coffee in one swallow, more for the brandy than for the coffee, she surmised.
“Sometimes that’s kinder, sometimes it’s not.”
“It’s never kind, in love.”
And I’m not being kind, am I, doing this to you? But I’ve got to know. Oh, I’ve got to know — why I’m killing you.
“Take another drink,” she said, with perfidious sympathy — which was only partly perfidious. “When you take a drink, it makes it easier to talk. When you talk, it makes it easier to bear.”
He looked at her in acknowledgment. “I’ve never told it to anybody. You see, there wasn’t anybody to tell.”
“There is now,” she said lullingly.
He poured Hennessy into a snifter, about a quarter of the way up the sides. Then he rolled it back and forth between his hands.
She took a chance. It might not come if she just sat and waited. “Was there a quarrel — just before?”
“There wasn’t time for a quarrel.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It started out as some kind of an attack. I didn’t know it was going to end up by her leaving me. I didn’t know until weeks later.”
“But you said—”
It was coming now. It had started. It had started and nothing could stop it. Like when you turn on a faucet and the handle breaks off. Or start a rock slide down a slope of shale.