He felt strong enough now to have it out with Marie. It was only when he was completely drunk that he could talk to her about things that really troubled him.
The cab driver was apprehensive, but took him in without asking him beforehand how much money he had.
He shuddered a little as he went through the front door. The house was dark, except for a light in the upstairs hall. He looked at his watch. Marie would still be up. He tip-toed up the red-carpeted stairway to her room. He hesitated, his heart pounding, opened the door and went in to the room.
It was dark.
“Marie...” he said quietly.
There was a shuffling sound from the bed.
“Don’t say anything, Marie... I’m sorry,” he said as he searched for the fight.
He wondered how he would break it to her. His hand closed around the account card in his pocket.
“I’ve done it, Marie...” he said joyfully. “I’ve made the last payment!”
“Get him out of here, for god’s sake,” a man’s voice said.
Jim’s heart sank. She was at it again, he thought, and turned for the door.
“Come back in an hour, Jimmy,” she was saying as he went out.
Vengeance
by Robert Page Jones
Heinrich Fischer glanced into the window of the delicatessen and gasped. There, behind the hanging rows of meat-stuffed intestines and sausage, like prison bars, appeared a face. Bloated, smooth, full-lipped, innocent looking... it was Haller.
He was a man distinguished only by his plainness, thin almost to emaciation, jostled along by the last-minute stampede of Christmas shoppers. Stringy arms clutched a battered, handleless violin case against his chest. He came up out of the subway in the West Side tenement section. It was snowing. It had been snowing all day and the slush was heaped in dirty mounds on the pavement.
In the middle of a long block he stopped, waited for a break in the traffic, and crossed. He hissed at a growling dog that darted out to snap at his heels. He did not like dogs. They were vile things that ate perfectly good food without so much as a snicker of appreciation.
He stared down at the pounded slush as he walked, chin thrust forward, shoulders stooped from too many years of sleeping in a cramped wooden cubicle. In front of Liebermann’s Delicatessen and Grocery he stopped again. He stood on the patch of wet sidewalk under the awning where the snow hadn’t reached and examined the merchandise in the window. It was a ritual with him. He had stopped in front of Liebermann’s on nearly every week-night for the past fifteen years. Tonight there was a new display; shiny tins of potted meat and Christmas cakes from the Old Country. He thought briefly about buying one of the tins of meat but changed his mind. The price, scribbled on a sign atop the pyramid Liebermann had painstakingly built in the window, was exorbitant. There was no money to spare. It was always this way at Christmas. Nobody wanted music lessons. After the holidays, when the children had new instruments, things would be better.
He stamped the loose snow from his shoes. Perhaps some sausage. He could afford that. His gaze shifted to the rows of meat-stuffed intestines hung from bloody hooks in the ceiling. Something happened. In his mind the sausages suddenly became metal bars, partially obscuring a bloated face, smooth and perspiring with a full-lipped pink mouth, innocent looking, smiling.
He felt a cold twist in his heart. A quick squeeze. He did not understand. The hated image had never come on him in just this way. Never so suddenly. He closed his eyes.
It was Haller’s face.
The image, like a searing knife-blade in the brain, branded there the washed-out blue eyes and mocking smile and sensuous lips. For a moment he stood there, fighting the rising tide of hate that for so long had eaten away at his mind, blotting out everything else. Things would be different if he could forget. But he could not. He swallowed, his mind burning as the familiar features wavered and changed shape before him, becoming a series of jagged slashes inflicted by an imaginary knife until the red gore ran together into one sickly wound that trickled blood down inside his pounding chest.
A man lurched out of the doorway, jostled him, his galoshes leaving a trail of dark pockmarks as he trudged off through the snow. The thin man opened his eyes. He blinked. The image was gone, replaced by the reflection of his own vacant face, the weak chin and thin lips a pale smear against the dark upturned collar of his coat. He stared at the reflection, feeling sorry for himself. The odor of fresh-baked bread lingered in his nostrils. He hugged the violin case closer to his chest, sneezed, dropped his gaze to the fingerless left hand protruding from a threadbare sleeve.
With a barely discernable shrug, he turned, choking back the bitterness in him as he trudged two more blocks on Sixth Street to his room.
His name was Heinrich Fischer. He was born in Germany in the early twenties, a remarkably-gifted child, who at the age of seven was studying music under his Jewish father at the Akademie in Munich. At eleven he played before royalty at the Opera House in Salzburg. It was the following year that the pogroms started. Heinrich’s parents were put into a concentration camp, but they managed to leave him with friends who still had some influence with the Nazis. He stayed on at the Akademie, even after he heard that his father and mother were dead, until one day they came for him too. He was sent to a camp a few miles outside of Munich where he miraculously survived the war. But his health was broken. Afterwards, he wrote to friends who had escaped to America before the war. They helped him get to New York where he was able to make a meager living teaching young people to play the violin.
It was on Thursday, three days later, that Fischer saw the face clearly again. The snow had changed to a chilling rain. He stood under the faded canopy in front of Liebermann’s, peering silently into the dimly-lighted window, like a bundle of wetwash waiting to be spun dry. Today it was smoked herring, spilling out of a wicker basket into the window, and at a price!
He was about to go inside and buy one of the fish, when he saw the face, bobbing back and forth behind the sausages like a demented child’s painted balloon. Something in his stomach went suddenly berserk. His throat went dry. He knew this time that the face was no terrible invention of his tortured mind. It was impossible — but he saw the face with his own eyes. His eyes did not lie.
He moved closer to the grimy window. There was no mistake. The face belonged to Erich Haller, the man he hated more than the stench of death.
It was too good to be true. Haller! Here! In America!
For a moment he could not move. He just stood there, his heart sending a pounding rush of blood through his system, uncertain of what he should do. He sidestepped awkwardly as Haller came out of the store, pudgy arms struggling with brown-wrapped packages. Their eyes met, and for an instant Fischer thought that he saw a flicker of recognition in the other’s gaze, but he was not sure.
Lurching crazily, like a man with too much whiskey in him, he hurried into the store. The end of the violin case caught a stack of cereal boxes, nearly toppling them.
“That man—” he said coarsely. His tongue flopped.
“Heinrich!” Liebermann’s greeting was husky and warm. He stopped what he was doing and wiped big hands on a soiled apron. “You saw the herring, eh? You know, you’re my best customer for herring, Heinrich. Every time there is herring I know you will come into the store to buy some. For you, I have saved a nice prize. A beautiful fish, believe me. And such a price, eh?”