He changed his mind after the Gruber’s job ended in disaster.
Again by accident.
All that work for nothing.
And now he was angry.
He did not normally enjoy excesses of emotion. A woman in bed was not an object of love to him, but merely something to control. In his lexicon ‘to love’ meant ‘to risk.’ Elizabeth Turner had made the fatal mistake of falling in love with him and thereby risking all. She had pleaded with him not to execute the Gruber’s job, to change his way of livings move with her to another city, forget the past.
The whiff of danger had been all-pervasive.
Her love for him could have led her into dangerously unexpected paths: perhaps a visit to the police to warn them of the impending job, with a tearful scene later in which she would confess her indiscretion and beg him once again, now that she had made the job impossible, to give it up.
She had never threatened him with such a course of action—she knew better than to threaten him—but he sensed in her shifting moods that she now regretted the information she had given him and, because she ‘loved’ him, might do something foolish to ‘protect’ him. What the Deaf Man dreaded most were the good intentions of well-meaning people, the fools of the world.
Hut he had not killed her in anger.
Anger was wasteful, a silly energy-consuming extravagance.
He had, in fact, killed her immediately after making love to her, whatever that meant. Two people ‘making’ love. Two heavy-breathing individuals—although he hadn’t been breathing quite so heavily as she—together constructing a dripping edifice known as—ta-rah—love! The architect and the contractor in passionate collaboration, ‘making’ love.
To make.
The verb itself as many-faceted as a diamond, the way most words in the English language were.
To make.
To create, construct, form, or shape: I made a chair—or a bomb.
To give a new form or use to: I made a silk purse from a sow’s ear—or a symbolic partridge from a wino’s ear.
To earn: to make money—which I failed to do on Christmas Eve.
To prepare and start: to make afire—which I will do on Twelfth Night.
To force or compeclass="underline" I made her do my bidding—which I thought Elizabeth Turner was doing until she began to have those fatal second doubts.
To cause to become: I made her dead.
But without anger.
The kiss of death.
When one pimply-faced teenager asks another similarly blossoming pal, ‘Did you make her last night?’ is he actually asking, ‘Did you force her to succumb?’
The Deaf Man had not forced Elizabeth Turner to succumb.
She had offered herself to him of her own volition, and he had casually shot her afterward—she on her knees before him, head bent, expecting God knew whatever further pleasure from behind.
No anger.
But now there was anger.
* * * *
The old brick armory on First Street and Saint Sebastian Avenue had been used to stable horses for longer than any of the neighborhood residents could remember. At one time in the city’s history as many as a hundred horses were kept there, all part of the then-elite Mounted Patrol. The Golden Nugget Squad, as the mounties were familiarly, derisively, and enviously called by their fellow police officers, had been slowly reduced in numbers over the years—two successive mayors believing that men on horseback were too reminiscent of cossacks—and was now virtually defunct. Cops on horseback were used only for ceremonial occasions or events expected to draw huge numbers of crowds. There had, for example, been twelve mounties on duty last night on the Stem downtown, where hundreds of thousands of people watched the red ball’s descent into the New Year. The horses those twelve cops were riding were all stabled in the armory up here in the 87th Precinct, together with another twelve, the two dozen being the remnants of a once-proud legion. Most of those horses were brown. Only ten of them were black.
On New Year’s Day there was only one police officer on duty at the armory. Even on days that were not legal holidays there were three officers there at most. The stable hands—four of them—were civil service employees, but not policemen. On New Year’s Day only one stable hand was at the armory. Both he and the patrolman were nursing terrific hangovers.
It was a cold rainy day—a bad harbinger for the year ahead.
The man who arrived at the armory was carrying a pizza in a white cardboard carton. He was also carrying a white paper bag. He approached the big wooden door with its iron hinges, lifted the knocker, and waited.
The patrolman on duty opened the door and looked out into the rain.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘Got a pizza and some sodas for you,’ the man outside the door said.
He was wearing a black trench coat. He was blond and hatless. There was a hearing aid in his right ear.
‘Nobody ordered no pizza,’ the patrolman said, and started to close the door.
‘It’s from the Eight-Seven,’ the man said.
‘What?’ the patrolman said.
‘Okay to come in?’ the man said. ‘It’s kinda wet out here.’
‘Sure,’ the patrolman said.
The delivery man went into the armory. The patrolman closed the door behind him. It thundered shut—or so it seemed to him because of his hangover—with a ponderous roar, which caused him to wince. The armory smelled of horses and horse manure. From somewhere in its cavernous reaches one of the horses whinnied.
‘They don’t like rain,’ the patrolman said.
‘Where do you want this?’
‘Bring it in the office here,’ the patrolman said.
The office was a small cubicle that still had regimental flags on its walls. The stable hand was sitting in the office, his feet up on the desk.
‘That smells good,’ he said.
‘Little present from the boys of the Eight-Seven,’ the delivery man said, putting the carton down on the desk. ‘Thought you might be getting hungry all alone here on New Year’s Day.’ He took two Pepsis from the white paper bag and put them down on the desk beside the pizza carton. He reached into his pocket for a bottle opener and uncapped both bottles. The caps came off easily and soundlessly, with no fizzy pop of released carbonation.
‘That’s very nice of them,’ the patrolman said.
He did not know anybody at the Eight-Seven. He himself was a Bow-and-Arrow cop, who’d once been a mountie. He was still officially assigned to the Mounted Patrol, but he never rode a horse any more, nor was he permitted to carry a weapon—hence the sobriquet ‘Bow and Arrow.’ The police department had taken away both his horse and his gun three years ago, after he rode a big black stallion into a gathering of some thousand people, firing the gun into the crowd. He was drunk at the time. Nobody got hurt but the horse, who bolted at the sound of the pistol and shimmed into a lamppost, breaking his leg. The horse had to be shot. Horse lovers all over the city protested.