'Bugs! You Bugs!… Eeee!…So much for your dog, eh? So much for your barking dog!'
'Make him stop!' Diane screamed. 'Oh, Jesus, he's going to kill us both, make him stop!'
'I rot you, you abominations!' closer now. The umbrella hadn't held him up for long, that was for sure. 'I rot you all!'
I saw three doors, two facing each other in a small alcove where there was also a pay telephone. Men's and Women's rooms. No good. Even if they were single toilets with locks on the doors, they were no good. A nut like this would have no trouble bashing a bathroom lock off its screws, and we would have nowhere to run.
I dragged her toward the third door and shoved through it into a world of clean green tiles, strong fluorescent light, gleaming chrome, and steamy odors of food. The smell of salmon dominated. Humboldt had never gotten a chance to ask about the specials, but I thought I knew what at least one of them had been.
A waiter was standing there with a loaded tray balanced on the flat of one hand, his mouth agape and his eyes wide. He looked like Gimpel the fool in that Isaac Singer story. 'What -' he said, and then I shoved him aside. The tray went flying, with plates and glassware shattering against the wall.
'Ay!' a man yelled. He was huge, wearing a white smock and a white chef's hat like a cloud. There was a red bandanna around his neck, and in one hand he held ladle that was dripping some sort of brown sauce. 'Ay, you can't come in here likea dat!'
'We have got to get out' I said. 'He's crazy. He's -'
An idea struck me then, a way of explaining, and I put my hand over Diane's left breast for a moment, on the soaked cloth of her dress. It was the last time I ever touched her intimately, and I don't know if it felt good or not. I held my hand out to the chef, showing him a palm streaked with Humboldt's blood.
'Good Christ,' he said. 'Here. Inna da back.'
At that instant the door we'd come through burst open again, and the maitre d' rolled in, ever wild, hair sticking everywhere like fur on a hedgehog that's tucked itself into a ball. He looked around, saw the waiter, dismissed him, saw me, and rushed at me.
I bolted again, dragging Diane with me, shoving blindly at the soft-bellied bulk of the Chef. We went passed him, the front of Diane's dress leaving a smear of blood on the front of his tunic. I saw he wasn't coming with us, that he was turning toward the maitre d' instead, and wanted to warn him, wanted to tell him that wouldn't work, that it was the worst idea in the world, and likely to be the last idea he ever had, but there was no time.
'Ay!' the chef cried. 'Ay, Guy what's dis?' he said the maitre d's name as the French do, so it rhymes with free, and then he didn't say anything at all. There was a heavy thud that made me think of the sound of the knife burying itself in Humboldt's skull, and them the cook screamed. It had a watery sound. It was followed by a thick, wet splat that haunts my dreams. I don't know what it was, and I don't want to know.
I yanked Diane down a narrow aisle between two stoves that baked a furious dull heat out at us. There was a door at the end, locked shut by two heavy steel bolts. I reached for the top one and then heard Guy, The Maitre D' from Hell, coming afer us, babbling.
I wanted to keep at the bolt, wanted to believe I could open the door and get us out before he could get within sticking distance, but part of me - the part that was determined to live - knew better. I pushed Diane against the door, stepped in front of her in a protective maneuver that must go all the way back to the Ice Age, and faced him.
He came running up the narrow aisle between the stoves with the knife gripped in his left hand and raised above his head. His mouth was open and pulled back from a set of dingy, eroded teeth. Any hope of help I might have had from Gimpel the Fool disappeared. He was cowering against the wall beside the door to the restaurant. His fingers were buried deep inside his mouth, and he looked more like the village idiot than ever.
'Forgetful of me you shouldn't have been!' Guy screamed, sounding like Yoda in the Star War movies. 'Your hateful dog!... Your loud music, so disharmonious! … Eeee!… How you ever-'
There was a large pot on one of the front burners of the left-hand stove. I reached out for it and slapped it at him. It was over an hour before I realized how badly I'd burned my hand doing that; I had a palmful of blisters like little buns, and more blisters on my three middle fingers. The pot skidded off its burner and tipped over in midair, dousing Guy from the waist down with what looked like corn, rice, and maybe two gallons of boiling water.
He screamed, staggered backward, and put the hand that wasn't holding the knife down on the other stove, almost directly into the blue-yellow gas flame underneath a skillet where mushrooms which had been sauteeing were now turning to charcoal. He screamed again, this time in a register so high it hurt my ears, and held his hand up before his eyes, as if not able to believe it was connected to him.
I looked to my right and saw a little nestle of cleaning equipment beside the door - Glass-X and Clorox and Janitor In A Drum on a shelf, a broom with a dustpan stuck on top of the handle like a hat, and a mop in a steel bucket with a squeegee on the side.
As Guy came .toward me again, holding the knife in the hand that wasn't red and swelling up like an inner tube, I grabbed the handle of the mop, used it to roll the bucket in front of me on its little casters, and then jabbed it out at him. Guy pulled back with his upper body but stood his ground. There was a peculiar, twitching little smile on his lips. He looked like a dog who has forgotten, temporarily, at least, how to snarl. He held the knife up in front of his face and made several mystic passes with it. The overhead fluorescents glimmered liquidly on the blade - where it wasn't caked with blood, that was. He didn't seem to feel any pain in his burned hand, or in his legs, although they had been doused with boiling water and his tuxedo pants were spackled with rice.
'Rotten bugger,' Guy said, making his mystic passes. He was like a Crusader preparing to go into battle. If, that was, you could imagine a Crusader in a rice-caked tux. 'Kill you like I did your nasty barking dog.'
'I don't have a dog,' I said. 'I can't have a dog. It's in the lease.'
I think it was the only thing I said to him during the whole nightmare, and I'm not entirely sure I did say it out loud. It might only have been a thought. Behind him, I could see the chef struggling to his feet. He had one hand wrapped around the handle of the kitchen's refrigerator and the other clapped to his bloodstained tunic, which was torn open across the swelling of his stomach in a big purple grin. He was doing his best to hold his plumbing in, but it was a battle he was losing. One loop of intestines, shiny and bruise-colored, already hung out, resting against his left side like some awful watch chain.
Guy feinted at me with his knife. I countered by shoving the mop bucket at him, and he drew back. I pulled it to me again and stood there with my hands wrapped around the wooden mop handle, ready to shove the bucket at him if he moved. My own hand was throbbing and I could feel sweat trickling down my cheeks like hot oil. Behind Guy, the cook had managed to get all the way up. Slowly, like an invalid in early recovery from a serious operation, he started working his way down the aisle toward Gimpel the Fool. I wished him well.
'Undo those bolts,' I said to Diane.
'What?'
'The bolts on the door. Undo them.'
'I can't move,' she said. She was crying so hard I could barely understand her. 'You're crushing me.'
I moved forward a little to give her room. Guy bared his teeth at me. Mock-jabbed with the knife, then pulled it back, grinning his nervous, snarly little grin as I rolled the bucket at him again, On its squeaky canisters.