He was still standing there, when he saw Haller down the street, a lopsided figure, one shoulder down, hurrying along toward the brownstone. Fischer wondered if Haller had come to America to accept a job as a cook. Perhaps he was the chef at one of the big downtown hotels.
He slid the curtains closed, casting deep shadows in the room, and fished the potato from the pocket of his coat. It was not a very large potato. He had wanted a bigger one, round and temptingly fat, but it would do; besides, Liebermann had thrown it in with the liverwurst, free of charge.
Quickly, he unfastened the clasps on the violin case, and removed the heavy, flat-honed meat chopper he had purchased at the hardware store. He put the package of liverwurst in the violin case and slid the case beneath the bed. He placed the potato carefully in the center of the sagging, wooden-topped dresser, opened the door to the closet and slipped behind it just as Haller came into the room.
From his hiding place he could see the potato clearly, illuminated by a soft shaft of light from the hall, no more than an arm’s length away.
Haller did not close the door. He seemed to be standing still. Fischer could almost place him by the rasp of the other man’s breathing. He knew somehow that Haller was staring at the potato, puzzled, perhaps disturbed by some half-forgotten recollection.
Fischer wanted to cough, but he did not, sucking air into his mouth and down into his pounding chest. He wondered how long it would be before Haller’s curiosity made him reach for the potato. He raised the chopper slowly over his head. There was a faint crinkling of the flesh around his eyes and the corners of his mouth pulled into the beginnings of a smile.
Body-Snatcher
by C. B. Gilford
“Anton,” Mrs. Kopping said. “I want to reward you for your years of faithful service.” Then she told him where she’d hidden his wife’s body.
Anton Vandrak groveled in the dirt, literally and figuratively. And he cursed the day and the hour and the woman that had brought him to this place.
He halted his toil, sitting back on his heels, resting his agonied back, wiping perspiration from his face with both grimy sleeves. He surveyed his handiwork, not with pride, only with hatred and bitterness.
“I want a rose-bordered driveway,” Mrs. Harriet Kopping had decreed. “All the way from the gate, right up to the verandah, and around the circle. And all red roses, mind you, Anton. I want a solid wall of red roses on both sides of the drive. I’m going to give my house a new name, Rose Hill.”
He had groaned inwardly when he’d received the command. It was almost three hundred feet from the front gate at the street up to the house. Adding the keyhole circle, and figuring the bushes at four feet apart, it meant a hundred and sixty plants. A hundred and sixty holes to dig!
But he hadn’t grumbled aloud to Mrs. Kopping. He’d saved his resentment for Stella, when they were alone together in their apartment behind the kitchen area.
“A hundred and sixty holes to dig!” he’d shrieked at her.
“Sh!” Stella had said. “Mrs. Kopping will hear you.”
“Well, let her hear me.”
“Do you want to lose us our jobs?”
“Yes, I’d like to lose this job of mine, or it’ll be the death of me.”
Stella had turned on him then, with the kind of quick fury she could manage so easily. “Now don’t start complaining about your back. When I have this whole house to care for, and the cooking besides, and when all you have to do is to keep the outside neat...”
“Nine acres!”
“When you were farming, you had eighty.”
“I was a young man then.”
“But you had an old back right from the beginning. It was your poor suffering back that lost us the farm. Well, it won’t lose us this job. Now get your lazy carcass out there and dig.”
He had obeyed her, because at the time he had been able to think of no other alternative. He had gone out in the fresh dew of the morning with spade and fork. The truck from the nursery met him and deposited forty rose bushes, balled and sacked and ready for planting, on the lawn.
“I’ve ordered forty delivered each morning for four mornings,” Mrs. Kopping had said. “I expect you to complete the job in four days, Anton.”
And now it was the end of the first day. And more than a fourth of the job was finished. He’d not only dug forty holes, but he’d cultivated the earth so that now, along the whole left side of the drive, was a neat strip of freshly turned soil. For a hundred and sixty feet of that strip, and regularly at four-foot intervals beginning at the gate, the bare, thorny stumps of young rose bushes jutted out of their newly dug bed.
But his poor back was on fire. Punished muscles and nerves were in open, savage rebellion. As he struggled to rise from his knees, to straighten his curving spine, fresh waves of pain engulfed him with each movement. But because he wanted to walk, rather than crawl, he persisted till he got himself erect. And then the sweat on his brow was the cold kind, clammy, chilling, unpleasant, unlike the honest sweat of toil.
He began trudging up the drive past the already long line of bushes. And looking up, he saw what he knew he would see — Mrs. Kopping, sitting at a window watching him.
He had expected to see her there, because she almost always watched him, changing windows as he went from one side of the house to the other, or from front to back. She spent some time, of course, overseeing the management of the interior of the big white house. But she never read or watched television. She was just one of those old women whose greatest pleasure seems to come from looking out of windows. And her eyes were sharp. Anton Vandrak knew that she had personally checked his procedure on every one of those forty rose bushes.
Now as he looked up to meet her gaze, he saw her white head nod. That meant approval. He had done well, she was telling him. He could keep his job therefore, and for the next three days he could perform just exactly as he had performed today!
Curse her, he thought, and he lowered his eyes so that she might not detect the hatred in his face. Curse her! I don’t believe she is interested in roses or any of the other things I plant, or water, or trim. She’s interested only in having some human being cavorting out here for her entertainment and pleasure, doing something not because it needs to be done, but simply because she has ordered it done.
He hurried as fast as he could to get out of her sight. When he reached their quarters, Stella wasn’t there. She’d be putting Mrs. Kopping’s dinner on the table, so the mistress of the house could dine precisely at six. It didn’t matter when the people who’d actually been working got fed.
But this night he wouldn’t bother to complain. He was too weary, too full of pains, to want to eat anyway. He stretched wearily on his bed. I am tired, he thought, and will need to sleep tonight, but how can I sleep with these horrible aches in my back?
But without sleep — his thoughts continued — how can I put forty more rose bushes in the ground tomorrow? Then at the prospect of tomorrow his mind rebelled. No, he simply could not go on as he’d done today. No matter what the consequences, that was his decision.
He was still lying there about eight when Stella returned. “Mrs. Kopping is very pleased with the work you did today,” she said.
“I’m glad,” he said, “because it’s the last work I’ll do for her.” Stella came to the bed and glared down at him. She was getting fat, he noticed suddenly, but without great interest. Her face, always round and plain, was even rounder than it used to be. Life in the Kopping house somehow agreed with her.