— Twenty-one Ellery?
— Twenty-one. One after another the flashbulbs burst and, in the gray light of that day, seemed each time to arrest an instant of riotous motion as lightning freezes motion and then, in the dark again, the persistence of vision retains that imaee of abandon which could not have sustained itself, as it did here, on the winter pavement, alter the newspaper photographer had bundled up his equipment and hurried into the hotel, hoping to make the sporting final.
The morning mail was late, for the falling body had struck the mailman, setting off a pattern of inconvenience which intruded upon many loutines. Outside that hotel of faded Edwardian elegance which, having become a landmark, was about to be torn down, the body lay in a pose of reckless flamboyance, a gratuitous gesture annoying such passers-by as the tall woman who was leading a poodle and saying to a friend, — Her name is Huki-lau, that means fish-picnic in Hawaiian, isn't that cute? She used to bite her nails right down to the quick, analysis is doing her a world of good. Oh God! Look! No, don't look.
Discovered breathing, she was taken away on a stretcher instead of the pinewood crate which was already half unloaded.
The hotel room itself proved so rewarding that the newspaper photographer telephoned for more flashbulbs, and asked the city desk to send over somebody with shorthand. He said the reporter with him had just been taken sick by the fumes. Then he hurried back down the hall, took a deep breath, and entered that melange of smoke, whisky, and roses, where he paused only to sweep some of the letters into a pile with his foot as graphic witness to the story which would say that they were ankle-deep all over the room. The bottles he did not have to rearrange at all, their hollow necks protruded everywhere. As for the roses, he could not have done a better job if he'd taken a month to it. They were festooned dead, dying, and two or three dozens still in bloom, wherever that desperate ingenuity could contrive, and the hand reach. — Roses… he would say later (when someone was trying to recall a line of poetry that contained "Roses, roses. ." to use in the caption), — Roses till hell wouldn't have them. The bathroom, especially, was entirely transformed. There was no place to sit down at all.
But when he returned to his office, the newspaper photographer found an atmosphere of tense gloom which even his prize plum could not dispel. The managing editor, the feature editor, and the foreign editor were all gazing at a story from their own columns. There were two pictures: in one, a little girl in long white stockings; but they were looking at the other, a man with a round face whose limp flabby quality was belied by an exquisite mustache and penetrating eyes beneath a sharply parted widow's peak. — That bastard, one of them muttered, and which one was not clear, for all of their expressions reflected the same feeling. — That dago bastard.
— All right, how much is four million lires? What are lires, Spanish or Italian?
— Eyetalian.
— What do these spies want with Eyetalian money? for Christ sake.
— That's their business.
— Six thousand six hundred sixty-six dollars and two-thirds of a cent, a junior reporter reported, after careful miscalculation.
— Lemme see that God damn letter again. "A respectable business man and professor," for Christ sake. "A mere child in arms when this unhappy incident occurred," for Christ sake. "Reparations. . my unblemished character. . four million (4,000,000) lire. ." for Christ sweet sake.
— You're a Catholic yourself, aren't you?
— Christ yes, but not one of these ignorant spic Catholics.
— So?
— So we're screwed. We'll settle for three million. How much is that?. . And what the hell is all this?
— These are some of the letters from that hotel room where that dame jumped out the window, the photographer said, and continued pulling them out of a bulging pocket. — You didn't send me a speedwriter down so I just brought some along before the cops moved in.
— Any good reporter would have done that in the first place. Why didn't you bring them all?
— I would have needed a truck. .
— So you just left the rest of them there, for every other paper in town to sift through. .
— I mailed one of them.
— You what?
— There was a thick one all sealed, with the name of this Doctor somebody on it, so I just looked his name up in the phone book and wrote an address on it…
— You stupid bastard. You stupid stupid bastard. What address?
— I don't remember, the first one I saw under his name, I think it was somewhere on Fourteenth Street. .
— Oh you stupid bastard.
— I just thought I'd do her a favor, I…
— You just thought. . Christ! How did you get onto this paper? How did any of you get onto this newspaper? And how much is three million lire, didn't you figure it out yet?
— All I get is sixes, six six six… — All right, shut up. And now what's this? — A watch. I found it on the pavement beside her. — Jesus Christ. The battered thing dangled between his fingers. — Even Minnie wouldn't know him.
It was roses, roses, all the way
And like an avenue of flags unfurled, the newspapers quivered in the hands of passengers whose faces reflected costive content and requited destitution, prodigies of unawareness, done with plotting against life, secure in disenchantment, recovered from the times when Cleopatra's gnathic index, or Nefertiti's cephalic index, might have made a difference, while the train shook only negligent response from attitudes which flouted the aesthetician who devised the divine proportion of seven to one from the dimensions of the human being.
All save one: for there was an alertness about Mr. Pivner's attitude, as there was an eagerness in his face, which distinguished him, hurrying home now under the ground. Eddie Zefnic was coming over again this evening, and they were going to listen to something on the radio which Eddie said was very worth listening to.
Above ground, he hurried, scarcely pausing at curbs, scarcely pausing to greet ferry when he got his paper, almost run down at his own corner where a truck swerved past bearing before his eyes a primitive family pictogram and the legend, "None of us grew but the business." Even near his own door he scarcely paused when he dropped a coin into the tin cup of the blind accordion player who had been stationed there the last few evenings.
Once inside he did not waste a moment, did not even pause to lock the door behind him, entered in darkness straight across the room to the floorlamp, which he turned to its highest brilliance. He ate with no sensation but of what was too hot, what too cold; looked three times to make sure of two quart bottles of beer in the icebox; took his injection with professional dispatch; and then, his shoulders drooping in weariness, squaring again with pride, he drew on his dressing gown, pulling its generous folds tight: for he still had the sense that it had been a gift from the guest he expected. He turned on the radio and it responded with The Bells of Saint Mary's, played by the Department of Sanitation Band. Uncertain just what it was that Eddie had said would be very much worth listening to, he left it at that and sat down with his newspaper. the ghost artists He read the advertisement automatically.
We Paint It You Sign It Why Not Give an Exhibition?
He gazed at it a minute longer without understanding, and then went on to an article which said that Swedish scientists hoped soon to be able to breed men ten feet tall.
He could not concentrate. It was not that he was without his glasses, which he had hardly worn since Christmas: he could read clearly enough. It was not that the newspaper was less provoking than usuaclass="underline" quite the other way, in tact. In addition to the frontpage story, where he read fragments from the letters found in "ankle-deep" dispersal in the hotel room (including a proposal of marriage addressed to a man executed for murder some time since, a discrepancy accounted for with evidence of a crumpled news item torn from an old paper used to wrap the roses), there were other diverting tribulations: the bones of Sitting Bull, buried in North Dakota, had been dug up by unauthorized persons and buried in South Dakota; a man apprehended on a charge of engraving ten-dollar bills said that it had grown out of etching nature studies, he had "just drifted into counterfeiting from a hobby of fooling around with engraving copper plates"; a Reverend Gilbert Sullivan had been arrested for practicing phrenology without a license and, on the side, distributing literature which described his South African kingdom, holy water from the spring of Nebo, Uncle Ned's Black Cat bone dust, Eagle-Eye Joe's controlling powder, Aunt Sally's Black Cat pussy-foot oil, and Mother Duck's holy No. 8 oil. . then the doorbell rang.