The two old men moved in the third-floor darkness.
«Don't check the numbers,» said Foxe. «Let's guess which apartment is hers.»
Behind the last door a radio exploded, the ancient paint shuddered and flaked softly onto the worn carpet at their feet. The men watched the entire door jitter with vibration in its grooves.
They looked at each other and nodded grimly.
Another sound cut like an ax through the paneling; a woman, shrieking to someone across town on a telephone.
«No phone necessary. She should just open her window and yell.»
Foxe rapped.
The radio blasted out the rest of its song, the voice bellowed. Foxe rapped again, and tested the knob. To his horror the door got free of his grasp and floated swiftly inward, leaving them like actors trapped on-stage when a curtain rises too soon.
«Oh, no!» cried Shaw.
They were buried in a flood of sound. It was like standing in the spiliway of a dam and pulling the gate-lever. Instinctively, the old men raised their hands, wincing as if the sound were pure blazing sunlight that burnt their eyes.
The woman (it was indeed Mrs. Shrike!) stood at a wall phone, saliva flying from her mouth at an incredible rate. She showed all of her large white teeth, chunking off her monologue, nostrils flared, a vein in her wet forehead ridged up, pumping, her free hand flexing and unflexing itself. Her eyes were clenched shut as she yelled:
«Tell that damned son-in-law of mine I won't see him, he's a lazy hum!»
Suddenly the woman snapped her eyes wide, some animal instinct having felt rather than heard or seen an intrusion. She continued yelling into the phone, meanwhile piercing her visitors with a glance forged of the coldest steel. She yelled for a full minute longer, then slammed down the receiver and said, without taking a breath: «Well?»
The two men moved together for protection. Their lips moved.
«Speak up!» cried the woman.
«Would you mind,» said Foxe, «turning the radio down?»
She caught the word «radio» by lip reading. Still glaring at them out of her sunburnt face, she slapped the radio without looking at it, as one slaps a child that cries all day every day and has become an unseen pattern in life. The radio subsided.
«I'm not buyin' anything!»
She ripped a dog-eared packet of cheap cigarettes like it was a bone with meat on it, snapped one of the cigarettes in her smeared mouth and lit it, sucking greedily on the smoke, jetting it through her thin nostrils until she was a feverish dragon confronting them in a fire-clouded room. «I got work to do. Make your pitch!»
They looked at the magazines spilled like great catches of brightcolored fish on the linoleum floor, the unwashed coffee cup near the broken rocking chair, the tilted, greasy thumb-marked lamps, the smudged windowpanes, the dishes piled in the sink under a steadily dripping, dripping faucet, the cobwebs floating like dead skin in the ceiling corners, and over all of it the thickened smell of life lived too much, too long, with the window down.
They saw the wall thermometer.
Temperature: ninety degrees Fahrenheit.
They gave each other a half-startled look.
«I'm Mr. Foxe, this is Mr. Shaw. We're retired insurance salesmen. We still sell occasionally, to supplement our retirement fund. Most of the time, however, we're taking it easy and―»
«You tryin' to sell me insurance!» She cocked her head at them through the cigarette smoke.
«There's no money connected with this, no.»
«Keep talking,» she said.
«I hardly know how to begin. May we sit down?» He looked about and decided there wasn't a thing in the room he would trust himself to sit on. «Never mind.» He saw she was about to bellow again, so went on swiftly. «We retired after forty years of seeing people from nursery to cemetery gate, you might say. In that time we'd formulated certain opinions. Last year, sitting in the park talking, we put two and two together. We realized that many people didn't have to die so young. With the correct investigation, a new type of Customer's Information might be provided as a sideline by insurance companies…»
«I'm not sick,» said the woman.
«Oh, hut you _are!_» cried Mr. Foxe, and then put two fingers to his mouth in dismay.
«Don't tell me what I am!» she cried.
Foxe plunged headlong. «Let me make it clear. People die every day, psychologically speaking. Some part of them gets tired. And that small part tries to kill off the entire person. For example―» He looked about and seized on his first evidence with what amounted to a vast relief. «There! That light bulb in your bathroom, hung right over the tub on frayed wire. Someday you'll slip, make a grab and―pfft!»
Mrs. Albert J. Shrike squinted at the light bulb in the bathroom. «So?»
«People,» Mr. Foxe warmed to his subject, while Mr. Shaw fidgeted, his face now flushed, now dreadfully pale, edged toward the door, «people, like cars, need their brakes checked; their emotional brakes, do you see? Their lights, their batteries, their approaches and responses to life.»
Mrs. Shrike snorted. «Your two minutes are up. I haven't learned a damned thing.»
Mr. Foxe blinked, first at her, then at the sun burning mercilessly through the dusty windowpanes. Perspiration was running in the soft lines of his face. He chanced a look at the wall thermometer.
«Ninety-one,» he said.
«What's eating you, pop?» asked Mrs. Shrike.
«I beg your pardon.» He stared in fascination at the red-hot line of mercury firing up the small glass vent across the room. «Sometimes―sometimes we all make wrong turnings. Our choice of marriage partners. A wrong job. No money. Illness. Migraine headaches. Glandular deficiencies. Dozens of little prickly, irritable things. Before you know it, you're taking it out on everyone everywhere.»
She was watching his mouth as if he were talking a foreign language; she scowled, she squinted, she tilted her head, her cigarette smoldering in one plump hand.
«We run about screaming, making enemies.» Foxe swallowed and glanced away from her. «We make people want to see us― gone―sick―dead, even. People want to hit us, knock us down, shoot us. It's all unconscious, though. You _see?_»
God, it's hot in here, he thought. If there were only one window open. Just one. Just one window open.
Mrs. Shrike's eyes were widening, as if to allow in everything he said.
«Some people are not only accident-prones, which means they want to punish themselves physically, for some crime, usually a petty immorality they think they've long forgotten. But their subconscious puts them in dangerous situations, makes them jaywalk, makes them―» He hesitated and the sweat dripped from his chin. «Makes them ignore frayed electric cords over bathtubs― they're potential victims. It is marked on their faces, hidden like― like tattoos, you might say, on the inner rather than the outer skin. A murderer passing one of these accident-prones, these wishersafter-death, would see the invisible markings, turn, and follow them, instinctively, to the nearest alley. With luck, a potential victim might not happen to cross the tracks of a potential murderer for fifty years. Then―one afternoon―fate! These people, these death-prones, touch all the wrong nerves in passing strangers; they brush the murder in all our breasts.»
Mrs. Shrike mashed her cigarette in a dirty saucer, very slowly.
Foxe shifted his cane from one trembling hand to the other. «So it was that a year ago we decided to try to find people who needed help. These are always the people who don't even know they need help, who'd never dream of going to a psychiatrist. At first, I said, we'll make dry-runs. Shaw was always against it, save as a hobby, a harmless little quiet thing between ourselves. I suppose you'd say I'm a fool. Well, we've just completed a year of dry-runs. We watched two men, studied their environmental factors, their work, marriages, at a discreet distance. None of our business, you say? But each time, the men came to a bad end. One killed in a bar-room. Another pushed out a window. A woman we studied, run down by a streetcar. Coincidence? What about that old man accidentally poisoned? Didn't turn on the bathroom light one night. What was there in his mind that wouldn't let him turn the light on? What made him move in the dark and drink medicine in the dark and die in the hospital next day, protesting he wanted nothing but to live? Evidence, evidence, we have it, we have it. Two dozen cases. Coffins nailed to a good half of them in that little time. No more dry-runs; it's time for action, preventative use of data. Time to work _with_ people, make friends before the undertaker slips in the side door.»