‘Graft is one thing, Hardesty. Suicide is another.’
Book Two
One
It was the sound of breaking glass that woke Nicolas up. Not downstairs, in his own delicatessen, but all over the city. Glass breaking, in street after street, with a terrible wintry jangle like sleighbells.
Nicolas sat up, and listened. He was Greek, round-shouldered, with fuzzy grey hair all over his chest and back, although his head was bald and blue. Next to him, his wife Dolores was still sleeping, her heavy eyebrows drawn together with all the intensity of mating caterpillars. Nicolas laid a cautious hand on her shoulder, as if silently advising her to remain asleep.
Outside, the noise grew louder. The cracking and smashing of huge plateglass storefronts. Then, suddenly, a series of malicious, slushy crashes, as glass display cases and cold-beer cabinets were attacked with hammers and bricks and bars. Sombody screamed – really screamed, as if their fingers were being torn off. There was a whole lot of garbled yelling, and then the distant scribbling sound of ambulance sirens.
‘Dolly,’ whispered Nicolas, but now she was awake. The danger in the night air was as strong as a smouldering mattress – too strong for anyone to stay asleep. She stared up at him, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead, and said ‘Nick? What is it? What’s the matter?’
‘Listen,’ he told her, as if he was going to tell her something interesting. But he meant: listen to the noise outside.
They sat in their dark wallpapered bedroom in that rundown section of Milwaukee where the elevated highways leave you blotted in shadow in the summer, and blessed with nothing but dirty second-hand slush in the winter; and the two of them, both fifty-five years old, heard the chiming of glass that heralded the end of their life’s labours, and their small ambitions, and the mutual love which they had nursed through two delicatessen stores, one bankruptcy, five children, two deaths, and more freezing Christmases on the shores of Lake Michigan than they could remember.
The smashing noises were coming closer. They were in the next street now. And they could hear something else: the pattering of running feet. Nicolas thought: they sound like rats, hurrying through the night. He had heard rats running across the floor of a flour warehouse once, and that was just what they sounded like.
He hesitated for a moment, but then he gave a decisive sniff, and swung his legs out from between the sheets. He walked around the end of the bed, where his pants were neatly hung with their maroon suspenders still attached, and crossed the bedroom to the window.
Dolores watched him as he held aside the floral drapes and peered down into the street. There must have been a fire burning not far away, because she could see the reflected sparkle of orange in his eyes. On the top of the varnished bureau beside him were the bits and pieces of his hobby – the modelling knives and tubes of glue and carefully-cut sections of balsa wood which he devotedly assembled into tiny ships. The sad gilded face of the Virgin looked down on him from a plastic icon.
Dolores said, ‘What do you see?’
Nicolas frowned. ‘Nothing so far. But it looks like something’s burning on the next block. An automobile, maybe. Or a van.’
‘They’re burning a van on the next block?’
‘It’s hard to say. I can’t see anyone around.’
‘Not even a cop?’
Nicolas shook his head. They were both sensitive about the police, the Prokopious. In this neighbourhood, they were regularly shaken down and robbed, and the police patrols did very little to protect them. There were always plenty of police around at Thanksgiving, or at Christmas, when Nicolas gave away bottles of retsina and Keo brandy. But when the kids came around with their knives and their zip guns and raided the cash register, you could scream ‘Police!’ until you were purple in the face and nobody would come.
‘What do you think’s happening?’ asked Dolores. ‘All that glass breaking. It sounds like a war.’
‘Maybe it’s something to do with the food shortages.’
‘You mean that television programme? I don’t understand.’
Nicolas let the drapes fall back into place. His face was sweaty and serious. ‘You heard what they said on the news. They said keep calm, don’t try to stock up on more food than you need. But you think people are going to take any notice of that? They panic when there’s a shortage of gas. They panic when there’s a shortage of bread. In my opinion, that’s what they’re doing now. Panicking. Breaking into food stores, looking for supplies.’
Dolores said anxiously, ‘They’ll come here.’
Nicolas nodded. On the bedside table just behind Dolores’s black wavy hair, his luminous alarm clock read three in the morning, almost to the minute.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Dolores. Her question was punctuated by a loud crash from across the street, and the sound of a woman shouting. Nicolas turned and regarded the drapes as if he expected them to fly apart of their own accord.
‘I’ll call the police,’ he said.
‘The police? And what will they do?’
‘I’ll call Sergeant Kyprianides.’
‘You really think he’s going to worry? Just because he’s Greek? He’s as rotten as all the rest of them.’
Nicolas unbuttoned his striped pyjamas, peeled them off, and folded them up. He was a short, heavy man, with a girdle of fat around his hips. He found a clean pair of jockey shorts in the bureau drawer and then stepped into his pants. In the stained-pine wardrobe he found a clean red shirt.
‘I’m going downstairs,’ he said.
Dolores said, ‘What for? What can you do on your own?’ Nicolas pointed towards the window. ‘What for? Do you hear what they’re doing out there? You want the store wrecked?’
She climbed out of bed. She was wearing the pink baby-doll nightdress he liked, with the frilly panties. Her sagging breasts showed dark-nippled through the nylon, and her thighs were creased with fat.
‘I don’t want you wrecked,’ she said, and she really meant it. ‘Who cares about a few bowls of taramasalata?’
Nicolas held her wrist, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘The day I let some bum walk in off the street and tear my store to pieces without lifting so much as one finger to stop him – that’s the day I’m going to be laid out in my coffin. You got me?’
She bit her lip.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and opened the door to go downstairs.
It was then, right then, that the front window of their own store was smashed in. It was so loud and violent that Nicolas said, ‘Hah’ in involuntary shock. Dolores crossed herself, and whispered ‘Mother of God.’
Nicolas was angry now. He could hear people shouting downstairs as they clambered into his store through the broken window. Looters, in his store, trampling over his displays and his counters, and helping themselves to all the things he had worked for years to buy. Helping themselves to the cans and the bottles and the home-cooked pastries. Destroying his life and his livelihood.
The .38 police revolver was on top of the wardrobe. Nicolas stalked over, reached up for it, and brought it down. Dolores said, ‘Nicky – for God’s sake – leave them—’
‘Leave them?’ he asked her. His mouth was tight and he had that bitter, hard, sorrowful look in his eyes, the same look he always had when they were robbed or ripped off. ‘In this country, you have to fight for what’s yours. You understand me?’