Nicholas sat up. He took Herbert's hand in his, and gripped it tight. 'Herbert, you mustn't say things like that. Nobody can help themselves from growing old. And anyway, what's sixty? It's when you get to ninety-five that you've got to start worrying!'
Herbert wiped blood from his chin. 'Sixty is older than twenty. Nick. It's all my fault. I threw my youth away. Two movies, too much money too fast. They offered me $25,000 for my third picture. I was high on my own conceit. I said $100,000 or nothing.'
'And?'
'You know what happened. I got nothing. I was young and headstrong, and I wouldn't give in. Don't you think that's worthy of punishment?'
Nicholas rested his head in his hands. He felt tired and depressed, and he didn't know what possible words of comfort he could give. He was a one-time art student, a one-time merchant seaman, and articulating his sympathies didn't come easy.
'Nicky,' said Herbert Gaines, 'you must hit me.'
Nicholas shook his head. 'No, Herbert, I can't.'
'But you must! It's the only way! The past must punish the future!'
Nicholas stood up, and walked over to a painting of a Chinese mandarin on the other side of the room. He looked ancient, and inscrutable, and deeply wise. The youth gazed at his calmness, and wondered how it was possible to live the kind of life where you could smile as calmly and benignly as that, even once. 'Nicky,' whispered Herbert Gaines again. 'What is it, Herbert?'
'I want you to kill me.'
Nicholas almost smiled — 'No, Herbert, I can't.'
'The police needn't know. You could drown me in the bath. An unfortunate accident. Only — I couldn't do it myself. I'm a Catholic. It isn't easy to want to die, and to be afraid of it.'
Nicholas turned around. He stared at this pathetic, blood-smattered figure, and he shook his head once again. 'I can't kill you, Herbert. You're indestructible. You're in movies, aren't you? Two magnificent movies. It doesn't matter if your body is dead, does it? Every time those movies play, you'll come back to life again.'
'Nicky,' said Herbert wretchedly, 'I need to be punished.'
'You are being punished,' said Nicholas, quietly. 'Every day of your miserable life, you're being punished. You don't need me to do it. Only one thing will ever let you off the hook, Herbert, and that's the end of civilization. When there are no more people to go to the movies, and the last picture-house closes down, that's when you get your freedom.'
Herbert lowered his head. In a scarcely audible voice he said, 'If that's true, Nicky, then I pray God that civilization comes to an end before I do.'
Nicholas walked back and rested his hand on Herbert's shoulder.
'The way things are going these days, God might even grant your wish. Now, let's go and get you cleaned up, hey?'
Across the hallway, in apartment 109, Kenneth Garunisch was the only person in Concorde Tower who was concerned about the plague. He was sitting at his cluttered desk, trying to fix his necktie, watch television, and talk to his union attorneys on the telephone, all at the same time. He spoke with the steady relentlessness that had earned him the nickname of 'Bulldozer', and he was angry.
'This thing broke out last night, Matty. How come they only told me this morning? Because I have a right to know, that's why! What do you mean, emergency? I don't care what they call it.'
Through the open hatch in the sitting-room wall, he could see his wife, Gay, in the kitchen, fixing cocktail snacks with their black maid, Beth. She was warbling Strangers in the Night as she popped little curled-up anchovy fillets on to crackers and cream cheese. Beth, silent and fat, was peeling prawns.
'You'd better believe it, Garunisch said, in his hectoring voice. 'I got a call from two of my guys at the hospital. Plague, that's what they got. The Black Death.'
He put his hand over the receiver and sighed. He was a short, stocky, bullet-headed man with an iron-gray crew-cut. His eyes were pale and uncompromising, and there was a prickly roll of fat at the back of his neck. He spoke with a monotonous harshness, like the retreating sea dragging pebbles down the beach. He was Germanic and hard-bitten, and he was president of the Medical Workers' Union — a union he had started himself in 1934, with four other hospital porters from Bellevue — and which was now a powerful, nut-cracking international with a billion-dollar fund and a two and a half million membership.
'You hear that? Plague. They don't know what kind, and they've got people dying like flies. So how come I only found out this morning?'
Gay stuck her heavily-lacquered blue-rinsed curls through the serving hatch.
'What did you say, Ken? Did you say something?'
Kenneth waved her away. 'I was talking to Matty. They got some kind of plague in Miami. Can you believe that?'
Gay, with her head still stuck through the hatch, blinked her eyes as if she was trying to work out whether she could believe it or not. Finally, she said, 'What's plague?'
Kenneth ignored her. His attorney was asking him what he intended doing about Miami.
'What do you think I'm going to do? I want to protect my members. If my members have to handle people with plague, they're gonna catch it themselves, right?'
His attorney guessed that was right.
'In which case,' went on Garunisch, 'I suggest you call the health department down at Miami and tell them it's double time or nothing, and all hospital workers got the right to refuse to handle plague cases, without penalization, recrimination, or loss of benefits.'
His attorney was silent for a while. Then the lawyer suggested that under the circumstances, union action might be construed as taking immoral and unfair advantage of a medical emergency.
'Listen,' grated Garunisch, 'you just get on to that telephone to Florida, and you tell those health folk that if they want my members to risk their lives, they're gonna have to pay for it. I don't want no arguments, and I don't want no fuss. Now do it.'
He clamped the receiver back on the phone, and shook his head. 'Immoral and unfair advantage,' he repeated, sarcastically. 'You get some underpaid Cuban hospital porter to risk his life, and you don't expect to pay him no more? Immoral and unfair advantage, my ass.'
Gay popped her head through the hatch again. 'Did you say something, Ken?'
Garunisch stood up and walked over to the kitchen, tying up his necktie as he went. It was a very lurid necktie, with purple flowers and greenish spots. It had been an expensive gift from Gay.
'Was that something serious, dear?' said Gay, rinsing her hands. 'You look awful sore.'
Garunisch reached over to pilfer a smoked-salmon canape. 'It's just the usual,' he said, with his mouth full. 'They got some kind of epidemic down in Florida, just like the Spanish influenza, and they're expecting the porters and the drivers to handle the patients without any compensation for extra health risk.'
'That's awful,' said Gay. She was a small, busty woman with wide-apart eyes. 'Supposing they caught it? Supposing their children caught it?'
Garunisch looked around the expensive, glossy, Colonial kitchen, with its antique-style tables and chairs. It still gave him a sense of justice and satisfaction, this condominium. For the first time in his life, he owned a luxurious home, decorated just the way that he and Gay had wanted, and he could turn around to all those capitalist palookas who had tried to crush him, and grind him and his union out of existence, and he could raise two rigid fingers.
'That's right,' he said absent-mindedly. 'Supposing their children caught it.'
Gay said, 'Beth, haven't you finished those prawns yet? We still have the fondant frosting to make.'
Beth peeled as quickly as her fat fingers would allow. 'I don't have too many more now, Mrs. Garunisch. Just as soon as I'm through, I'll make that frosting.'