Thursday Morning — Eight o’clock: I have returned from my hasty breakfast and am writing this as I sit on my park bench and wait for the exodus of the innocent. My mind’s eye sees sticks of dynamite lying in perfect repose beneath Gordon, who sleeps on his back with his hands folded across his chest. There is something funereally beautiful in that.
Out they come in perfect, timely order. At 8:12, Miss Ivy bound on birdy legs for the library. At 8:33, the Barbetta’s headed for Greenwich Village and at 8:45, Mr. Owens for his lecture classes at N.Y.U. Shortly before nine, the Mishkins emerge for their trip to New Rochelle and at 9:30 Mr. Bennett for his after-slumber breakfast.
The tenants left behind have received their messages from the City Engineering Department to refrain from using the storage room; and Mishkin’s workshop is vacant and locked. All things are progressing in impeccable order.
There is left now a single occupant to disembark the ship of immovable concrete and ivy across the street: a shaggy, spiritted, lovable St. Bernard dog of uncertain parentage.
While I wait for the safe exit of the last innocent bystander I here reflect on those years of companionship and friendship. I write of Cory’s faithfulness when weather was inclement and foul or when I was ill abed and he would pad the city with a tiny basket afix beneath his chin to fetch medicine or food. I write of the times he routed burglars from the building and I write of the many occasions when he sped after me carrying in his jaws a forgotten scarf or hat or briefcase. I write, too, of his companionship on lonely nights, and more of his kindnesses which in this hour of trouble and impending disaster have escaped my mind.
In the pocket of my topcoat is his leash, with which he shall be secured to a leg of my park bench. I long to take him with me but a man on the run from such a heinous crime as I am about to commit has no use for excess baggage, no matter how personal the attachment to it has become. Someone will find him a good home and a loving master.
It is now 10:02 three minutes until the explosive execution of a wicked, thoughtless brother. It disturbs me that Cory is two minutes late coming through Mishkin’s trap door. Always his impetuous race to the park has been Pavlovian in its punctuality.
The time has proceeded to 10:03 and still Cory has not emerged from the building. Something is delaying him and I see now, the solitary flaw in my plan. Depending on an animal’s sense of punctuality, I have not allowed time to disarm my bomb should that punctuality lapse. There will be no time now to return to the apartment and disarm the bomb. If, in the next thirty seconds Cory does not appear, he shall die an ignorant, innocent death!
It is now 10:04, sixty seconds from the blast. I put my face in my hands and pray, intermittently writing these final few words. To live, it is imperative that Cory now be pounding down the stairs from the impending holocaust on the sixth floor. And out Mishkin’s trap door in the lobby. And across the street to the safety of Bryant Park, to lick my hand a fond goodbye and then to wonder as I leash him to the bench.
Writing, I have now raised my head from my prayers. The second hand on my watch sweeps through the final minute of silence before the morning is tom apart by an explosion.
And then I see him as he comes bounding up to me across the grass. He’s made it out of the building! Cory has made it safely away!
A big, oval friendly face with a mouth as wide as the Sea Lion Caves of Oregon. My hand is covered with wet, sloppy kisses and then like a red missile he is off and away after a plump squirrel.
There are left just fifteen seconds, time enough to write these final words in my diary. There is, alas, no time to run. There is only time hurriedly to write the epitaph of a man who for the briefest time, enjoyed the exhilaration of the possibility of turning the perfect murder.
But it is not to be. For Cory, faithful Cory, has seen fit to bring me an item of which I am always forgetful.
It is at my feet, silently whirring off seconds inside. It is my atta...
Greater Hartford and Queens
by Frank Sisk
Faceless, alone, he waited on the rim of hell. For he knew, only too well, that for a man who has betrayed the Mafia there can be no tomorrow-only slow, cruel death in the night.
They said they would give him immunity in exchange for his testimony at the trial of Herman Ventura.
“Immunity from what?” Steinbach asked.
“Immunity from prosecution,” they said, the U.S. attorney named Esmond doing most of the talking.
“That won’t buy me much time,” he said.
“We’ve got enough on you right now, Sol, to salt you down for a good ten years.”
“Sure you have. That’s not the kind of time I’m referring to.”
“We’ll give you protection around the clock.”
“For how many years?”
“Until we feel you’re fairly safe,” Esmond said.
“If I sing, I’ll never be safe, Mister Esmond. You know that as well as I do.”
“Is that your last word, Sol?”
“I sure hope not.”
Esmond’s heavy eyebrows lowered in iron-gray menace as he turned to the deputy U. S. marshal. “Take him back where he came from, George. And throw the key away.”
They let him stew in a cell for a week without exercise and then they had him out again for an airing.
Esmond was sitting at his big desk reading a newspaper. His assistant, a frowzy-haired pipsqueak called Herbert O’Hara, was drawn up to his full height of five feet three before a window, as if on the verge of addressing a jury. Also present was a man new to Sol Steinbach, a tall wiry-looking man with a long sallow face and black patent-leather hair parted in the middle. He was sitting on the edge of the conference table.
“How are you feeling this morning, Sol?” O’Hara asked.
“Like seven days in Vegas with none of the fun,” he said.
“Meaning exactly what?”
“Meaning his throat’s dry and raw from too many cigarettes,” Esmond said, glancing up from the newspaper.
“Right,” Steinbach said.
“Meaning he hasn’t been sleeping any too well,” Esmond continued. “Look at those red eyes, Herb.”
“Now that you mention it,” O’Hara said.
“Peckish appetite. Am I right, Sol?”
“The menu’ll never win any blue ribbons,” Steinbach said curtly.
“Nerves edgy. Notice how he keeps rubbing his fingers together.”
“All right already. I plead guilty.”
“And I bet you’re constipated too.”
Steinbach kept silent, trying not to fidget.
“The Vegas syndrome, Herb,” Esmond said, smiling his mean smile. “Classic example.”
Sol Steinbach found his fingers playing with a button of his shirt. He willed them to stop. The sallow-faced man was watching him like a bird of prey.
“Well, to change the subject,” O’Hara said, gliding slowly away from the window, “your playmates are showing a profound interest in you. Just an hour ago Harold Fitzroy, the great mouthpiece, was nosing around on the matter of bail.”
“How about that? What is my bail anyhow?”
Moving along the wall as if pacing out the dimensions of the room, O’Hara said, “There is no bail.”
“No bail? How come?”