Peter James
Sussex
1
There is a strange sensation you get when you know someone has entered your room but you haven’t yet seen or heard him. You just feel him there. I got that feeling in my bedroom late one night. It was very late and very dark.
I had had the same chill before on a thousand different occasions, in a thousand different circumstances; a car breaking its grip on a wet road, an aeroplane dropping 5,000 feet in an air pocket, a shadow coming from a dark alley.
There was definitely someone in the room. He wasn’t a friend. Friends don’t drop by into my bedroom at 2.30 in the morning — not on the thirty-second floor of a building where the elevator has been switched off, and the key is in my jacket pocket, hanging on a chair near the bed, where there are 3 Ingersoll ten-lever deadlocks, 2 Chubb two-bolt upright mortices, a Yale No. 1, and a double safety chain, not to mention a 24-hour armed door surveillance, making entry to this building harder than the exit from most jails. He was no friend. I didn’t move. He didn’t move. I had an advantage over him: he thought I was asleep. He had a better advantage over me: he’d probably been in the dark for a long time and his eyes would be well accustomed to it. He had one bigger advantage stilclass="underline" he wasn’t sprawled, stark naked, dripping in baby oil, with one foot manacled to the bedstead, and he didn’t have a quietly sleeping naked bird occupying the 5 feet 11½ inches that separated an extremely greasy hand from an uncocked Beretta.
I spent the next several tenths of a second debating what to do. My visitor obviously wasn’t going to hang about for the rest of the evening — he’d have to have been a very dedicated voyeur to go to such lengths. He certainly wasn’t any kind of cat burglar out to steal anything — the place didn’t have any valuables, neither the Fort Knox nor the National Gallery variety; there was nothing in it that a colourblind midget with an IQ of 24 couldn’t have bought from a Bloomingdale’s sale in half an hour flat for a couple of thousand dollars — and in fact probably had. What there was could best be described as embryonic Jewish Renaissance, and constituted the equivalent amount of personal effects you are likely to encounter walking into a room of a half-built Holiday Inn.
My visitor didn’t seem like he wanted to chat. If he did, he’d probably have opened the dialogue by now. No, the most likely reason for his visit, I concluded in the two-tenths of a second it took me to weigh up the alternatives, was to do some killing.
On account of lack of choice the most likely victims seemed to be either Sumpy or me. Sumpy is a variation of ‘sump’ — a nickname I gave her for her fascination with Johnson’s Baby Oil — at the procreation end, which is what she seemed to think it was for, rather than at the end product of same for which it was originally intended. If the visitor was for her it could only have been some jilted lover; since Houdini had died before she was born I ruled out the possibility of the caller being for her.
All of a sudden I felt lonely. Our house guest must have just about figured out who was who by now; a 9-millimetre silenced parabellum slug for me and a razor for her so she wouldn’t be waking the neighbours with any hollering.
There was no way I could make it to my gun in time. There was no way I could swing my right foot high into the air and bring that bedstead crashing down on his head prior to having to retrieve my brains and most of my skull from my neighbour’s apartment. It was equally unlikely that if I remained still he might go away.
The bang came. Not a quiet, silenced plug sound but a great, hefty, high-velocity, 200-grain magnum .44 explosion, and death descended on me. It was a hot, dark thump; a huge, great weight that crushed my bone and shot the wind out of me, shot all the wind out of me. It was damp and bloody and hurt like hell. It was the son-of-a-bitch visitor himself.
He lay there, sprawled over the top of me, revolver sticking in his mouth and most of the back of his skull deposited out onto Park Avenue.
I sat up, managed to get the lights on. There were shouts. There were yells and footsteps and bells and sirens and pounding sounds, and Sumpy woke up without even opening her eyes and asked if I had gone mad and went back to sleep again.
I disentangled my foot and staggered to the kitchen to put the kettle on — it didn’t look as if I was going to get much more sleep that night. I cracked my head on a cupboard door because I was confused. Reckon I had a right to be. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to commit suicide.
2
What a hell of a night it had been. I wanted to spend the morning forgetting it for a few hours. It was a glorious, cold, November Sunday morning and Manhattan looked just great. Only a few factories and few exhaust pipes were chucking their excrement into the sky. The World Trade Centre and the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and all the rest of Manhattan’s fantastic skyline stood crisp and clear against and into the sky, just as all its creators had ever envisioned it should.
Sumpy and I stood wrapped in our coats on the open deck of the Staten Island ferry with the water of the Hudson river churning past us. I took a large bite from the still-warm potato knish I had been carrying in a paper bag in my pocket, and hoped it would mop up some of the pints and pints of coffee that swilled in my insides and take the taste of the Marlboros and Winstons and Salems and Tareyton Lights and Camel Lights and Cools and Mores and Chesterfields and all the other cigarettes I had been able to scrounge during the night, out of my mouth and throat and lungs and everywhere else.
That knish tasted good. It came from Yonah Schimmel’s. The Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery is one of the great eating establishments of the world; if the Michelin gastronomic guide extended to the US it would surely mention it as ‘worthy of a detour’. Anybody who hasn’t been there has to go. It is spectacularly insignificant in appearance; it sits in one of the dirtiest, dreariest, grungiest places on God’s earth, deep in the heart of Manhattan, on the forlorn border between the East Village and Lower East Side, a bottle cap’s flick from the Bowery; a solitary five-storey brownstone with a yellow facia board that stands next to the yard of Blevitzky Bros Monuments, where two elderly vans sit, sagging on their suspension, behind collapsing wire-fencing. The street in front is a dismal dual carriageway with odd bits of barren shrubbery; there are morose and grubby people wandering around, and bits of garbage rolling along in the wind. It could pass with no difficulty as a suburb of any of a hundred American cities.
The inside isn’t much of an improvement. A sign behind a high counter invites the clientele to ‘Try our new cherry cheesecake knish!’ and looks at least 10 years old. Behind the counter stands a short elderly man in a white apron with the burden of the world on his shoulders. The restaurant is empty except for two men in battered leather jackets deep in discussion but he still doesn’t have much time to spare to take orders. He marches over to a dumb waiter, a real one with a rope pull, and barks down the shaft, then stands on guard beside it with the hapless look of a sentry on a winter’s night.
What comes up from that dumb waiter, however, is pure gold; busting with every conceivable filling — large, heavy, lovingly misshapen, immensely fattening and doubtlessly knee-deep in cholesterol.
Early on that Sunday morning, paradise was a warm Yonah Schimmel potato knish, eaten with the salted breeze of the Hudson and the warm perfume of Sumpy.
I’d kept the truth from her so far. What she thought was simply that we’d had an intruder and I had shot him. I decided that for the time being, and probably for ever, it was best to leave it that way. She thought I’d done something brave and heroic in saving both our lives. I’d no desire to take false credit, but on the other hand she was a bright girl and I didn’t want to set her thinking too much in case she came to the realisation that there might be more to my job in the plastic box manufacturing business than met the ordinary long, short or squint-sighted naked eye. And that wouldn’t be any good at all.