That was from the apartment below.
Breaking glass, much nearer, brought his eyes from the floor.
Kidd went to the living room.
Mrs. Richards, kneeling over something shattered, looked up and shook her head. “I…”
He stopped before her restrained confusion.
“…I dropped one of the—”
He could not tell what the figurine had been.
“So thin—these walls are so very thin. Everything comes through. I was so startled…” By the nest tables, she picked faster in the bright, black shards, white matte overside.
“I hope it wasn’t anything you really—” but was halted by his own inanity.
“Oh, that’s all right. Here, I’ve got it all.” She stood, cupping chips. “I heard that awful…and I dropped it.”
“They were going on pretty loud.” He tried to laugh, but before her gaze, he let the laugh die in breath. “Mrs. Richards, it’s just noise. You shouldn’t let yourself get so upset about it.”
“What are they doing down there? Who are they?”
He thought she might crush the ceramic between her palms. “They’re just some guys, some girls, who moved into the downstairs apartment. They’re not out to bother you. They think the noises from up here are pretty strange too.”
“Just moved in? How do you mean, they just moved in?”
He watched her expression lurch at fear, and not achieve even that. “They wanted a roof, I guess. So they took it over.”
“Took it over? They can’t come in here and take it over. What happened to the couple who lived there before? Management doesn’t know things like this are going on. The front doors used to be closed at ten o’clock, every night! And locked! The first night they started making those dreadful sounds, I sent Arthur out for one of the guards: Mr. Phillips, a very nice West Indian man, he’s always in front of our building till one in the morning. Arthur couldn’t find him. He’d gone away. All the guards. And the attendants for the garage. I want you to know I put that in my letter to Management. I certainly did.” She shook her head. “How can they just come in and take over?”
“They just…Ma’am, there aren’t anymore guards, and nobody was living there; they just moved in. Just like you’re moving into nineteen.”
“We’re not just moving in!” Mrs. Richards had been looking about. Now she walked into the kitchen. “I wrote Management. Arthur went to see them. We got the key from the office. It isn’t the same thing at all.”
Kidd followed Mrs. Richards around the stripped kitchen.
“How do you know nobody was living there? There was a very nice couple downstairs. She was Japanese. Or Korean or something. He was connected with the university. I didn’t know them very well. They’d only been here six months. What happened to them?” She looked back, just before she went into the dining room again.
“They left, just like everybody else.” He still followed.
She carried the broken things, clacking, down the rugless hall. “I think something awful happened to them. I think those people down there did something awful. Why doesn’t Management send some new guards?” She started into Bobby’s room, but changed her mind and continued to June’s. “It’s dangerous, it’s absolutely, terribly dangerous, without guards.”
“Mrs. Richards?” He stood in the doorway while she circuited the room, hands still cupped. “Ma’am? What are you looking for?”
“Someplace to throw—” she stopped—“this. But you took everything upstairs already.”
“You know you could just drop it on the floor.” He was impatient and his impatience embarrassed him. “I mean you don’t live here anymore.”
After the silence in which her expression became curious, she said, “You don’t understand the way we live at all. But then, you probably think you understand all too well. I’m going to take this out to the incinerator.”
He ducked back as she strode through.
“I don’t like to go out in the hall. I don’t feel safe—”
“I’ll take it out for you,” he called after her.
“That’s all right.” Hands still together, she twisted the knob.
When the door banged behind her, he sucked his teeth, then went and got his notebook from the window. The blue-rimmed stationery slid half out. He opened the cover and looked at her even letters. With his front teeth set, he took his pen and drew in the comma. Her ink was India black; his, dark blue.
Going back to the living room, he stabbed at his pocket several times. Mrs. Richards came in with a look of accomplishment. His pen caught. “Mrs. Richards, do you know, that letter’s still down in your mailbox?”
“What letter?”
“You’ve got an airmail letter in your mailbox. I saw it again this morning.”
“All the mailboxes are broken.”
“Yours isn’t. And there’s a letter inside it. I told you about it the first day I came here. Then I told Mr. Richards a day later. Don’t you have a mailbox key?”
“Yes, of course. One of us will go down and pick it up this afternoon.”
“Mrs. Richards?” Something vented still left something to come.
“Yes, Kidd?”
His teeth were still set. He sucked air and they opened. “You’re a very nice woman. You’ve really tried to be nice to me. And I think it’s a shame you have to be so scared all the time. There’s nothing I can do about it, but I wish there was.”
She frowned; the frown passed. “I don’t suppose you’d believe just how much you have done.”
“By being around?”
“Yes. And also by being, well…”
He could not interpret her shrug: “Mrs. Richards, I’ve been scared a whole lot of my life too. Of a lot of things that I didn’t know what they were. But you can’t just let them walk all over you—take over. You have to—”
“I am moving!” Her head bobbed in emphasis. “We are moving from 17-E to 19-A.”
“—do something inside yourself.”
She shook her head sharply, not looking. “And you are very presumptuous if you think you are telling me something I don’t know.” Now she looked up. “Or your telling me makes it any easier.”
Frustration drove the apology. “I’m sorry.” He heard his own reticence modify it to something else.
Mrs. Richards blinked. “Oh, I know you’re just trying to…I am sorry. But do you know how terrible it is to live inside here—” she gestured at the green walls—“with everything slipping away? And you can hear everything that goes on in the other rooms, in the other apartments? I wake up at night, and walk by the window, and I can see lights sometimes, moving in the smoke. And when the smoke isn’t so heavy, it’s even worse, because then the lights look like horrible things, crawling around…This has got to stop, you know! Management must be having all sorts of difficulty while we’re going through this crisis. I understand that. I make allowances. But it’s not as though a bomb had fallen, or anything. If a bomb had fallen, we’d be dead. This is something perfectly natural. And we have to make do, don’t we, until the situation is rectified?” She leaned forward: “You don’t think it is a bomb?”
“It isn’t a bomb. I was in Ensenada, in Mexico, just a week or so ago. There was nothing about a bomb in the papers; somebody gave me a lift who had an L. A. paper in his car. Everything’s fine there. And in Philadelphia—”
“Then you see. We just have to wait. The guards will be back. They will get rid of all these terrible people who run around vandalizing in the halls. We have to be patient, and be strong. Of course I’m afraid. I’m afraid if I sit still more than five minutes I’ll start to scream. But you can’t give in to it, anymore than you can give in to them. Do you think we should take kitchen knives and broken flower pots and run down there and try to scrape them out?”