“Stop that,” Bertie said indignantly, and thought, I have never been so indignant in the face of danger.
“You said they were out of town,” a voice said. The voice did not come from behind the flashlight, and Bertie wondered how many there might be.
“Jesus, I thought so. Nobody’s answered the phone for days. I never seen a guy so plastered. He stinks.”
“Kill him,” the first voice said.
Bertie stopped struggling to get up.
“Kill him,” the voice repeated.
“What is this?” Bertie said thickly. “What is this?”
“Come on, he’s so drunk he’s harmless,” the second voice said.
“Kill him,” the first voice said again.
“You kill him,” the second voice said.
The first voice giggled.
They were playing with him, Bertie knew. Nobody who did not know him could want him dead.
“Turn on the lights,” Bertie said.
“Screw that,” the second voice said. “You just sit here in the dark, sonny, and you won’t get hurt.”
“We’re wasting time,” the first voice said.
A beam from a second flashlight suddenly intersected the beam from the first.
“Say,” Bertie said nervously, “it looks like the opening of a supermarket.”
Bertie could hear them working in the dark, moving boxes, pulling drawers.
“Are you folks Negroes?” Bertie called. No one answered him. “I mean I dig Negroes, man—men. Miles. Jay Jay. Bird lives.” He heard a closet door open.
“You are robbing the place, right? I mean you’re actually stealing, aren’t you? This isn’t just a social call. Maybe you know my friend Klaff.”
The men came back into the living room. From the sound of his footsteps Bertie knew one of them was carrying something heavy.
“I’ve got the TV,” the first voice said.
“There are some valuable paintings in the dining room,” Bertie said.
“Go see,” the first voice said.
One of Norma’s pictures suddenly popped out of the darkness as the man’s light shone on it.
“Crap,” the second voice said.
“You cats can’t be all bad,” Bertie said.
“Any furs?” It was a third voice, and it startled Bertie. Someone flashed a light in Bertie’s face. “Hey, you,” the voice repeated, “does your wife have any furs?”
“Wait a minute,” Bertie said as though it were a fine point they must be made to understand, “you’ve got it wrong. This isn’t my place. I’m just taking care of it while my friends are gone.” The man laughed.
Now all three flashlights were playing over the apartment. Bertie hoped a beam might illuminate one of the intruders, but this never happened. Then he realized that he didn’t want it to happen, that he was safe as long as he didn’t recognize any of them. Suddenly a light caught one of the men behind the ear. “Watch that light. Watch that light,” Bertie called out involuntarily.
“I found a trumpet,” the second voice said.
“Hey, that’s mine,” Bertie said angrily. Without thinking, he got up and grabbed for the trumpet. In the dark he was able to get his fingers around one of the valves, but the man snatched it away from him easily. Another man pushed him back down on the couch.
“Could you leave the carbon tetrachloride?” Bertie asked miserably.
In another ten minutes they were ready to go. “Shouldn’t we do something about the clown?” the third voice said.
“Nah,” the second voice said.
They went out the front door.
Bertie sat in the darkness. “I’m drunk,” he said after a while. “I’m hooked and drunk. It never happened. It’s still the visions. The apartment is a vision. The darkness is. Everything.”
In a few minutes he got up and wearily turned on the lights. Magicians, he thought, seeing even in a first glance all that they had taken. Lamps were gone, curtains. He walked through the apartment. The TV was gone. Suits were missing from the closets. Preminger’s typewriter was gone, the champagne glasses, the silver. His trumpet was gone.
Bertie wept. He thought of phoning the police, but then wondered what he could tell them. The thieves had been in the apartment for twenty minutes and he hadn’t even gotten a look at their faces.
Then he shuddered, realizing the danger he had been in. “Crooks,” he said. “Killers.” But even as he said it he knew it was an exaggeration. He had never been in any danger. He had the fool’s ancient protection, his old immunity against consequence.
He wondered what he could say to the Premingers. They would be furious. Then, as he thought about it, he realized that this too was an exaggeration. They would not be furious. Like the thieves they would make allowances for him, as people always made allowances for him. They would forgive him; possibly they would even try to give him something toward the loss of his trumpet.
Bertie began to grow angry. They had no right to patronize him like that. If he was a clown it was because he had chosen to be. It was a way of life. Why couldn’t they respect it? He should have been hit over the head like other men. How dare they forgive him? For a moment it was impossible for him to distinguish between the thieves and the Premingers.
Then he had his idea. As soon as he thought of it he knew it would work. He looked around the apartment to see what he could take. There was some costume jewelry the thieves had thrown on the bed. He scooped it up and stuffed it in his pockets. He looked at the apartment one more time and then got the hell out of there. “Bird lives,” he sang to himself as he raced down the stairs. “He lives and lives.”
It was wonderful. How they would marvel! He couldn’t get away with it. Even the far West wasn’t far enough. How they hounded you if you took something from them! He would be back, no question, and they would send him to jail, but first there would be the confrontation, maybe even in the apartment itself: Bertie in handcuffs, and the Premingers staring at him, not understanding and angry at last, and something in their eyes like fear.
IN THE ALLEY
Four months after he was to have died, Mr. Feldman became very bored. He had been living with his impending death for over a year, and when it did not come he grew first impatient, then hopeful that perhaps the doctors had made a mistake, and then — since the pains stayed with him and he realized that he was not, after all, a well man — bored. He was not really sure what to do. When he had first been informed by the worried-looking old man who was his physician that the disquieting thing he felt in his stomach was malignant, he had taken it for granted that some role had been forced upon him. He knew at once, as though he had been expecting the information and had long since decided his course, what shape that role had to assume, what measures his unique position had forced him to. It was as if until then his intuitions had been wisely laid by, and now, thriftlessly, he might spend them in one grand and overwhelming indulgence. As soon as the implications of the word “malignant” had settled peaceably in his mind, Feldman decided he must (it reduced to this) become a hero.
Though the circumstances were not those he might have chosen had he been able to determine them, there was this, at least: what he was going to do had about it a nice sense of rounded finality. Heroism depended upon sacrifice, and that which he was being forced to sacrifice carried with it so much weight, was so monumental, that he could not, even if he were yet more critical of himself than he was, distrust his motives. Motives, indeed, had nothing to do with it. He was not motivated to die; he was motivated to live. His heroism was that he would die and did not want to.