She turned to the other side, ran her eyes along there at astigmatism-distance. Newmark, Simms, Lopez, Kirsch, Barlow, Stern.
It ought to be one. It couldn’t be all. It mightn’t be any. One chance out of eleven to be right. Ten chances to be wrong. Eleven, considering that it might not even be this building at all. “Next door” was elastic, could mean two houses down, three, any number as far as the first intervening crossing.
Ring one, any one at all; suppose they did scowl or snarl at her, what was that? She might be able to find out from them. No, she didn’t want to do that; she might be giving herself away. The floors, the walls, might have ears. The only way to strike and hope to succeed was suddenly, without giving any warning.
She went over to the inner door, to see if she could get in beyond where she was, even though the eventual flat remain anonymous. The knob was brass and it was kept well-polished. This seemed to be a conscientiously cared-for building, even though in the lower-rental brackets. She just stopped her hand in time, from pressing on it and turning it.
It was such a small thing, such a faint thing, such a nothing really. The contact of her hand, no matter how light, would have surely obliterated it. It was a miniature smudge upon the glossy, satin-surfaced brass, but in white. A sliver, a paring of a fingerprint, the ghost of a crescent scallop. As if someone whose fingertips had lately touched chalk had turned this knob before her.
“My pumpernickel-customer.” The delicatessen-man’s voice. “The machine don’t cut it thick enough to suit her. She takes her finger like this and shows me how wide she wants it cut.” Pumpernickel, a bread dusted with stubbornly-adhesive flour.
“She came in this door,” she said to herself. “She’s somewhere in this house.” The eleven chances to be wrong had shrunk to ten.
Go on in, you fool, go on up, go from door to door; you know now. She shook her head, stayed where she was. Strike suddenly, strike unexpectedly, otherwise you might lose everything.
A tiny piece of paper on the floor. In this entryway that was otherwise so meticulously clean, so it must have fallen only recently. A little fingernail-length tatter, that was all it was actually. It lay under the six letterboxes on the right-hand side as you came in, but under the whole row of them in general, not under any one in particular. For it was too far below, and out a little too far, to be attributed to any one of them individually.
She picked it up and looked at it carefully. It was so small, her two fingers almost hid it even as they held it. It was too much to expect it to have writing on it, there wouldn’t have been room for any, even had coincidence been willing to vouchsafe her that freak of good fortune; and there wasn’t. It was just a little nick of white.
But everything can tell you something. Her fingernail pried at it, and it came open, in flap-shape. It had been doubled in thickness. There was a neat, machine-made seam bisecting it now.
In other words, it was from a letter. It was a minute sliver torn from the top of an envelope, where the flap folds down, in hasty finger-opening. All the rest of the way across, the envelope had simply erupted into unsightly tatters. This one microscopic section, however, had been amputated by the violence of the process, had fallen off entirely.
What good was it to her even then? To be opened in here, the letter had come out of one of those boxes. One of the six on the right-hand side. Well — and? Well, to come out of one of those boxes, the box first had had to be opened. They opened downward, like little brass gangplanks. In opening them, the letterbox-key alone would be touched by the fingers. But in closing them up again, wouldn’t the natural, the quicker, the more dexterous thing to do be to use the tips of the fingers, to press them back flat again?
On the knob of the door was a tiny white sworl.
She peered close this time, even closer than the eight-inch gauge she’d used before. She looked all up and down the glass inset in each one, and the brass trim around it, not just at the name on the card beneath the pushbutton. She looked so close her breath steamed each one, and then it cleared again as she passed on to the next. Newmark, Simms, Lopez, Ki— She stopped short, went back a step, in a double-take of her entire body, not just the eyes alone.
There it was, a sketchy scar of white flecking the outside of the box, right up against the seam. A blemish that was so trivial, had not her mind been prepared ahead of time to see it, her eyes would surely have not seen it even then. And the name above it, Kirsch. The second-floor flat, on the right-hand side of the stairs as you went up.
The six chances had collapsed into one. The one was not a chance now any longer, it was a positive certainty.
Little things, the little things that are all around you, if you only know how to use them. The little things that can destroy you, if you don’t stop and think of them in time, guard yourself against them. And who could, for you don’t even realize they are there until it’s too late.
The nick of a nail across a loaf of pumpernickel, to show how thick it is to be sliced. The closing up, by thoughtless fingermotion, of a letterbox-flap within which there had been a square of white peering waiting. A bill, perhaps an advertisement, almost certainly nothing important. The hasty ripping of it open; what else is one to do with a letter? Finally, the turning of a knob to gain entrance within a building. How else is one to go inside to where one lives? Little things. And the sum-total of all of them? Catastrophe. Identification, confrontation, and accusation, for a thing thought safely buried miles away from here, and unseen by living eyes.
She pushed the ground-floor one on the other side. They wouldn’t have to shout down an inquiry through the core of the house then. The door retched several times on inner pushbutton-control, to show the latch had been lifted, and she swung it open and went in.
A man stood looking inquiringly through a crack of the inner door on her left-hand side as she made for the stairs. She flashed him a placating smile as she went hurrying past without stopping. “I’m sorry, that was a mistake. My hand must have slipped.”
He was too sleep-riddled for his perceptions to be very acute. He blinked vacantly and the door-crack closed up again. She was already nearly at the top of the first flight, and climbing fast.
A swing around the turn, and there it was looming in front of her. Coffin-size. The door through which death had come home a little while before. It looked just like all the other doors here. But it wasn’t. There was death pulsing from it, in unseen waves. She could almost feel them on her face, like a vibration.
Her outthrust foot had fallen to a halt, toe inches away from the bottom of it. Her other foot lingered further behind.
She listened. For a moment nothing, because she had caught it in a moment of silence. Then suddenly there was the sound of a plate going down on a table. Quick footsteps going away. Quick footsteps coming back again. The sound of another plate going down. This time the sound of a plate going down on another plate. Or more likely, of a cup going down on a saucer. Quick footsteps going away again.
She shuddered in spite of herself. Death had come home to an early-morning snack.
Quick footsteps coming back again. A paper bag rattled noisily as something was taken out of it. Pumpernickel bread, sliced thick.
Quick footsteps going away again. Gee, they were so busy, so chipper, happy almost. They wouldn’t be in another second or two. Death didn’t know she had an uninvited guest about to join her.
She knocked.
The footsteps died a sudden death.
She knocked again, fast and insistent.
The ghost of the footsteps came toward the door.
“Who is it? Who’s out there?”
She was a little frightened, you could tell it by the voice. People didn’t challenge in quite that breathless way, no matter what the hour of the night.