“So jump, for Christ’s sake!” Carella said angrily, using the tone of a father whose patience has finally been exhausted. “If you’re going to jump, go ahead. Then we can all go home. Go ahead.”
“I will,” she said.
“So go ahead. Either jump, or take my hand. We’re wasting time here.”
Behind him, the phone kept ringing furiously. There was no sound in the apartment, no sound on the face of the building except for the ringing of the telephone and the sighing of the wind.
“I will,” the girl said softly.
“Here,” Carella said. “Here’s my hand. Take it.”
For a speechless, shocking moment, he didn’t realize quite what was happening. And then his eyes opened wide, and he stood stock-still at the window, his hand extended, his hand frozen in space as the girl suddenly shoved herself away from the wall and leaped.
He heard her scream, heard it trailing all the way down the twelve stories to the street below, drowning out the frenzied ringing of the telephone. And then he heard the sound of her body striking the pavement, and he turned blindly from the window and said to no one, “Jesus, she did it.”
* * * *
The salesman was going to be a dead man within the next five minutes.
Some twenty blocks away from where Blanche leaped to her death, he entered a street flirting with Spring, carrying a heavy sample case in one hand, and attributing gender to the vernal equinox. To the salesman, Spring was a woman who had come dancing in over the River Harb, flitting past flotsam and jetsam, those two old-time vaudeville performers, showing her legs to the passing, hooting tugs, winking lewdly at the condoms floating on the river’s edge, flashing fleshy thighs to Silvermine Road and the park, and then airily leaping over the tenement rooftops to land gracefully in the middle of the street. The people had come outdoors to greet her. They wore smiles and flowered house dresses, smiles and open-throat sports shirts, smiles and sneakers and T shirts and shorts. Grinning, they took Spring into their arms and held her close and kissed her throat, where you been all this time, baby?
The salesman didn’t know he was going to be a dead man, of course. If he’d known, he probably wouldn’t have been spending his last few minutes on earth carrying a heavy sample case full of hairbrushes down a city street making love to Spring. If he’d known he was about to die, he might have saluted or something. Or, at the very least, be might have thrown his sample case into the air and gone to Bora Bora. Ever since he’d read Hawaii, he had gone to Bora Bora often. Sometimes, when selling hairbrushes got particularly rough, he went to Bora Bora as often as ten or twelve times a day. Once he got to Bora Bora, he made love to dusky-skinned fifteen-year-old maidens. There were a few dusky-skinned fifteen-year-old maidens on the street today, but not very many. Besides, he didn’t know he was going to die.
He came down the street heavily, feeling like Lee J. Cobb minus one sample case. He wondered whether he’d sell any more brushes today; he needed three more sales before he filled his quota, who the hell wanted to buy hairbrushes when Spring was holding a dance in the street? Sighing, he climbed the stoop of the nearest tenement, passing a pimply-faced sixteen-year-old blond girl wearing dungarees and a white blouse, and wondering whether she knew how to hula. He entered the dim and foul-smelling vestibule, walking past the mail-boxes with their broken locks and hanging front flaps, and then past the open and miraculously intact frosted-glass inner door. Garbage cans were stacked alongside the staircase wall on the ground floor. They were empty, but their stench permeated the hallway. He sniffed in discomfort, and then began climbing the steps toward the natural light coming from the air-shaft window on the first floor.
He had three minutes to live.
The sample case was heavier when you climbed. The more you climbed, the heavier it got. He had noticed that. He was a particularly astute human being, he felt, intelligent and observant, and he had noticed over the years that there was a direct correlation between the physical act of climbing and the steadily increasing weight of his sample case during the ascent. He was pleased when he gained the first-floor landing. He put the sample case down, reached for his handkerchief, and mopped his brow.
He had a minute and a half to live.
He folded the handkerchief carefully and put it back into his pocket. He looked up at the metal numerals on the door ahead of him. Apartment IA. The A was hanging slightly askew. Time was running out.
He located the bell button set into the door jamb.
He reached out with his forefinger.
Three seconds.
He touched the button.
The sudden blinding explosion ripped away the front wall of the apartment, tore the salesman in half, and sent a cascade of hairbrushes and burnt human flesh roaring into the air and down the stairwell.
Spring was really here.
* * * *
2
Detective 2nd/Grade Cotton Hawes had served aboard a P.T boat during the last great war for democracy, and his battle experience had therefore been limited to sea engagements alone. He had, to be fair, once participated in the shore bombardment of a tiny Pacific island, but he had never seen the results of his vessel’s devastating torpedo attack on a Japanese dock installation. Had he been a foot soldier in Italy, the chaos in the tenement hallway would not have surprised him very much. But he had had a clean bed to sleep in, and three squares a day, as the saying goes, and so the ruin confronting him just inside the vestibule door was something of a shock.
The hallway and the staircase were littered with plaster, lath, wallpaper, wooden beams, kitchen utensils, hairbrushes, broken crockery, human flesh, blood, hair, and garbage. A cloud of settling plaster dust hovered in the air, pierced the afternoon sunlight which slanted through the airshaft window. The window itself had been shattered by the explosion, a skeleton of its former self, with broken glass shards covering the first-floor landing. The walls surrounding the window and the staircase were blackened and blistered. Every milk bottle resting in the hallway outside the other two apartments on the landing had been shattered by the blast. Fortunately, the seductress Spring had lured the other first-floor tenants into the street, and so the only loss of human life that April afternoon had been in the hallway and in apartment IA itself.
Following a coughing, choking patrolman up the littered staircase, Hawes covered his face with a handkerchief and tried not to realize he was climbing past the blood-soaked squishy remains of what had once been a human being. He followed a trail of hairbrushes to the shattered wall and demolished doorway of the apartment; it had rained hairbrushes that day, it had rained hairbrushes and blood. He entered the apartment. Smoke still billowed from the kitchen, and there was the unmistakable aroma of gas in the Mr. Hawes had not thought he would need the mask which had been pressed into his hand by the patrolman downstairs, but one whiff of the stench changed his mind. He pulled the face piece over his head, checked the inlet tube connected to the cannister, and followed the patrolman into the kitchen, cursing the fact that the glass eyeholes on the mask were beginning to fog up. A man in overalls was busily working in the kitchen behind the demolished stove, trying to cut off the steady leakage of illuminating gas into the apartment. The explosion had ripped the stove from the wall, severing its connection with the pipes leading to the main, and the now steady flow of gas into the apartment threatened a build-up which could lead to a second explosion. The man in overalls-undoubtedly sent by either the Department of Public Works or the Gas and Electric Company-didn’t even look up when Hawes and the patrolman entered the room. He worked busily and quickly. There had been one explosion, and he damn well didn’t want another, not while he was on the premises. He knew that a mixture of one part carbon monoxide to one-half part of oxygen, or two-and-a-half parts air was enough to cause an explosion in the presence of a flame or a spark. He had opened every window in the joint when he’d arrived-even the one in the bedroom where what was on the bed didn’t particularly appeal to his esthetic sense. He had then gone immediately to work on the bent and twisted pipes, trying to stop the flow of gas. He was a devout Catholic, but even if the Pope himself had walked into that kitchen, he would not have stopped work on the pipes. Hawes and the patrolman didn’t even rate a nod.