Except to wait for him to leave the apartment.
For two days he’d snuffled around that building, loping and looking, waiting for Parker to come out of there. He’d been out of town for awhile, ever since Ellen had screamed at him that time, ranted and raved, cut him up with her tongue like slicing a piece of paper with a razor blade. She’d said things to him no one had ever said before in his life, things he would have killed a man for saying. She made fun of his triumphs, detailed his failures. She mocked his manhood, described the extent of his stupidity. She told him he was lousy in bed and worse out of it. She threw his electric razor out the window and told him to take the rest of his things and get the hell out of there. And when he went after her, driven beyond endurance, she’d run to the kitchen and grabbed a sharp knife out of the drawer there and held him at bay with it, screaming at him and taunting him all the time.
So he’d finally gathered up his gear and left the apartment, and she slammed the door after him. Standing in the hallway, he heard her slap the police lock into place. He had a key for the other lock, but not for that one.
He left town that same night, wound up in Mexico for a while. He knew Ellen would talk, would tell everyone how she’d routed him and why, and what she’d said to him, and how she’d held him off with a knife. He couldn’t face them, face anyone he knew in that city, knowing they would know, Ellen would tell them.
After months in Mexico, humiliation and rage gradually hardened into something colder and more dangerous than either, and he’d finally come north again, knowing he wouldn’t be able to rest until he’d paid Ellen back for everything she’d done to him.
He arrived Saturday afternoon. It was a cold fury that activated him, cold enough to make it possible for him to think, and to plan. He would even the score with Ellen, and he would do it in such a way that he himself would never be caught, because if he was caught and punished then that would negate the getting even, and Ellen would still be one up.
So he didn’t just attack. He reconnoitered first, studied the apartment, and saw Parker going in and coming out. He saw Parker drive off with the truck and later come back in a cab. He was waiting then to see the extent of Ellen’s perfidy. Was this stranger going to stay overnight?
Yes. Overnight and then some.
He waited. He’d taken a small room a few blocks away, and when he could stand it no more, when his eyes were dosing and he was weaving on his feet, he went back there and slept, fitful dozing, plagued by bad dreams. It was fully night when he went to sleep, and still night when he drove himself up from the bed and out of the room and back again to watch Ellen’s apartment.
He had begun by hating Ellen, but as the time went on, his hate expanded to include the stranger, too. Three days. Three days and three nights in that apartment there with Ellen. In bed with Ellen.
All the vicious things Ellen had said about his own prowess in bed came back to him, contrasting brutally against the silence of that apartment door and the slow inexorable moving of time.
Three days and three nights, and then at last the stranger came out. A big man he was, hard-looking, mean-looking. Alter all that time he didn’t even seem pleased or satisfied; his expression was flat, emotionless.
The stranger went down the stairs. He waited, listening to the stranger’s footsteps receding, then the door closing way down there at street level, and he was alone again.
His key still worked, and the police lock wasn’t on. No, and not the chain lock either. He went in, moving fast, moving silently.
He knew she’d be in the bedroom. Where else could she be, the slut? Where else in all the world?
He came in and she was there as he’d expected, sitting cross-legged tailor fashion on the bed, a cigarette dangling from her loose mouth. She was half-asleep. She looked up and frowned at him, and she wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t even angry. All she did was act weary, disgusted, this-is-too-much-to-bear. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she said.
The details of his revenge had never been clear in his conscious mind. He had known only that he had returned to this city in order to even the score with Ellen. Now he was here, at the very core of Hell, at the brink of vengeance, and he felt an instant of utter panic because he had no idea what to do next.
He could see her eyes assessing his weakness, see her lips curling around the opening phrase of another cutting remark. He could see everything that would happen now; her verbal arrogance, his helplessness in the face of her, his clumsy, sullen, pathetic retreat.
Not this time.
His head turned this way and that, his eyes searched the room for something he didn’t yet remember he remembered and then he saw the silver X on the wall, sleek and sharp.
It was too late for thought. Words were slipping from her mouth, ready to cut him.
He reached up his band, and the silver X became a silver stroke, a diagonal slash separating the wall into metric feet, and the other slash was in his hand. He didn’t know yet what he would do with it - though the hilt felt so perfect in his grip, so natural, so inevitable — and for an instant he just stood there, holding it above his head like a Goth on the way to Rome.
If even then she’d been frightened, everything might still have been all right. Even at that point, he might have been able to convince himself he had only taken the sword down to frighten her with, he meant no physical harm; anyone could see he wasn’t the type.
But she wasn’t frightened. Or if she was she made no sign of it. Instead she said with utter scorn, ‘You moron, what are you going to do with that? You never could slab me, not with -‘
Knowing what she was going to say, knowing in advance all the ways she now meant to hurt him, he also knew he had to stop her. There wasn’t any choice, none at all.
He lunged forward, and his right arm pushed ahead of him, and he impaled her forever on that red instant of time. The words remained unspoken, would remain unspoken ever after. The world tick-locked on, and Ellen remained back there in that blood-red second, slowly slumping around the golden hilt.
It was as though he had stabbed her from the rear observation platform of a train that now was rushing away up the track, and he could look out and see her way back there, receding, receding, getting smaller’ and smaller; less and less important, less and less real. Time was rushing on now, like that rushing train, hurtling him away.
That’s what death is; getting your heel caught in a crack of time.
He had to get out of there, get away, but he couldn’t turn his back on her. It was as though the sword wasn’t enough to impale her there; she was being held also by his eyes, as though once he stopped staring at her she would live again, move again, speak again. As though, should he turn his back, catlike she would leap on it and bear him down under her weight.
Police. There would be police now. Had he left any clues?
He was wearing gloves; that was a lucky thing. He’d worn them because of the cold outside, not to cover fingerprints, but it came to the same thing. So he was safe there.
Anything else? Anything of him in this apartment, anything he hadn’t taken away with him last time?
He studied the room and saw nothing, and then opened the closet door and saw the suitcases and all the guns.
All those guns.
And when he opened the suitcases — given the presence of the guns, he had to open the suitcases — when he opened them they were full of money. Bills and bills, green and green.
For a minute or two he forgot Ellen completely, sitting over there on the bed in a posture of contrition. He closed up the suitcases again, he grabbed one of the handguns at random and stuck it into his pocket, and he lugged the suitcases out of the bedroom, out of the apartment, out of the building.