“Eh, eh, hey! How are you, Mr Leventhal? I see you got yourself some company while your wife is away.”
“How do you know?” said Leventhal.
“Us supers, we keep track of everything around a building. We’re supposed to be nosey. That’s not what it is, you find out even if you don’t care. You can’t help it. The tenants get surprised. Brujo, I see through the wall. They don’t know, eh?” He described a spiral with his fingers, enjoying himself greatly. “No. You go out in the morning and then I hear your radio play. This afternoon the dumb-waiter goes up to the fourth floor. Later on, what’s in it? — A empty soup can and rye bottle.”
“So that’s what he’s doing?” thought Leventhal. “Guzzling all day. That’s what I let him in for.” He said to Nunez, “I’ve got a friend staying with me.”
“Oh, I don’t care who you got.” Nunez gave a suggestive laugh and wrinkled his nose with pleasure, the veins on his forehead puffing out.
“Who do you think I’ve got?”
“That’s okay. The way the dumb-waiter went up, there was no lady pulling on the rope, I know that. Don’t worry.” He swung the bag with his big-jointed, muscular arm tattooed with a bleeding heart. Leventhal continued toward the restaurant. “No money for rent,” he said going down the stairs and bending under the awning. “But for hooch he has it. For hooch he can raise it. Where?” It occurred to him that Allbee had stolen some article from the house and pawned it. But what valuables were there? Mary’s sealskin coat was in storage. Spoons? The silver was not worth stealing. Clothing? But a pawnbroker would be running a great risk, seeing how Allbee was dressed, to deal with him. No, hockshops had to think of their licenses. Leventhal did not really fear for his clothes. He had a tweed suit sealed in a mothproof bag in his closet; the rest was not worth pawning. And the suit was a small enough price to pay for getting rid of Allbee. Allbee was certainly clever enough to realize that. Drunks, of course, when they were thirsty enough, desperate enough, turned reckless. “But it isn’t the few bucks he’s after,” Leventhal reasoned. For he had already offered him money. Allbee must have some of his own, since he could afford to buy whisky. Then what about his being evicted, was that an invention? But what of his appearance, that filthy suit of his, his shirt, his long hair? Leventhal tentatively concluded that he kept a little money for whisky by economizing on rent and other things. “But I better lock up the valuables, meanwhile,” he told himself.
He ate a small dinner of baked veal overseasoned with thyme, had a glass of iced tea with sandy, undissolved sugar, and lit a cigar. Max and the family had replaced Allbee in his mind. Should he phone? Not just now, not tonight — he busily supplied good excuses, flinching a little at the shadow of his own weakness which lay behind them. He knew it was there. But this was not really the time to call. Later, when things had settled down, Max would soon find out — assuming that Elena’s last look in the chapel signified what he thought it did — what he had on his hands. Though perhaps there was nothing so unusual in that look under the circumstances. Perhaps — Leventhal studied the seam in the long ash of his cigar — he had let his imagination run away with him. Grief, overloading of the heart… “Horror, you know,” he silently explained. People crying when their faces were twisted might appear to be laughing, and so on. “Well, I hope to God I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope I am. And if he can run the old woman out of the house, maybe they can come through.” The boy’s death ought to bring the family closer together, at least. The old woman’s influence on Elena was bad; and now especially she could work round her. For Philip’s sake, Max ought to show the old devil the door. With her cooking and housekeeping she might try, at a time like this, to make herself a power in the house. He must impress the danger of this on Max, who might be inclined to let her stay. “Throw her out, don’t give her a chance!” Leventhal exclaimed. If Max came to rely on her, why… And he might, if it freed him, go where he liked and leave Philip in her hands. No, she must be pitched out. He sat awhile at his gloomy corner table, his black eyes giving very little evidence of the gloomy anxiety that filled him.
At home he took off his jacket in the vestibule. Through the window, in the clear depth over the wandering brown smoke and the low-lying red of twilight clouds, he saw the evening star. He went through the narrow kitchen into the dining-room, which was empty. Coming back to the front room, he was not immediately aware of Allbee’s presence. It was only after he had dropped into a chair beside the window that he discovered him sitting between the desk and the corner, and he cried out fiercely, “What’s the big idea!”
He shot up and turned on the desk lamp. His hands were shaking.
“I was enjoying the evening.”
“My foot, the evening,” Leventhal grumbled. “Drunken bastard!”
He was stubbornly silent, after this, determined that Allbee should speak first. The electric clock whirred swiftly. Allbee’s head lay on the back of the chair, his large legs were thrown wide apart, their weight supported on his heels. His hands, loose-wristed, were folded on his chest. After some time he moved a little and sighed, “This killing heat, it takes my energy away.”
“It couldn’t be something besides heat that takes it away, could it?”
“What-?”
“Whisky,” Leventhal said. “You’re supposed to be looking for work. What have you been doing? Sitting here, drinking? When you came I understood you were going to get something to do and find yourself a room.”
Allbee brought his head forward.
“I don’t want to rush into anything,” he said beginning to smile. “In any deal — you know that, you must know it by instinct — the worst thing of all is to hurry. Before you make up your mind… if you settle for buttons, peanuts… You have to think things over,” he ended with an unsteady, delighted, foolish look of self-congratulation. Was he drunk? Leventhal wondered.
“You, a deal,” he said contemptuously. “What kind of a deal have you got?”
“Oh, I might have. I might have something.”
“Furthermore, how do you get in and out of here? I locked the door last night. I’m sure I locked it.”
“I hope you don’t mind. There were some keys in the kitchen and one of them fitted.”
Leventhal scowled. Had Mary forgotten her key? Or was this an extra? “Originally the agent gave us two,” he thought, “and the mailbox keys and the key to the locker in the basement. Or were there three house keys?”
“I wasn’t sure I was coming back,” said Allbee. “But as long as there was a possibility of it, I thought it would be more convenient to have a key. I tried to call you at your office yesterday, but you weren’t in.”
“Don’t start bothering me at the office,” Leventhal said excitedly. “What did you want?”
“I wanted to ask your permission about the key, for one thing. And then there was something else that occurred to me, that on an outside chance there was an opening for someone like me at Beard and Company, and I might apply. You’re in a position to help me there.”
“At Beard’s? — It didn’t just occur to you! I don’t believe it.”
“It did so,” Allbee quickly began, but stopped. His large full lips were parted and his loud breathing suggested repressed laughter; he looked at him with comic curiosity. But, seeing him stare back, he started over again, more seriously. “No, it did, it struck me all of a sudden as I was eating breakfast. ‘Why shouldn’t Leventhal help me get a job at his place?’ And it’s fair enough, isn’t it? I introduced you to Rudiger. We won’t count what happened. We’ll forget about it. Let’s think of it only as a return courtesy. You make an appointment with Mr Beard for me — does he do the hiring over there in person? — and we’ll be square.”