Blue City (27 page)

The receiver came down with a crash like an explosion. No, the explosion was in the other room. I ran in, and saw Allister on the floor and the woman standing over him. He too had grown a Cyclops eye, a dark red socket in his forehead weeping tears of blood.

I looked from his empty face to the woman’s. Her black eyes were burning with triumph. “Well?” she said.

“Murder is as catching as typhoid, isn’t it?”

“Self-defense isn’t murder,” she started to say.

I turned from her abruptly. I felt as if I had already spent hours in the room with the dead man on the floor and his ex-mistress standing over him with the dangling gun in her hand. Five were enough, and six were too many for me. I was sick and tired and old.

I flung open a window and leaned out over the sill. The
sickness I had was more than physical, a spiritual sickness that turned the real world crazy at the edges. The street below the window, bare of everything but the dirty leavings of the last snowfall, was undeniably real and solid. But if an army of rats had turned the corner and marched down the street in front of the Harvey Apartments, I would have watched them without a word.

It was an ugly city, too ugly for a girl like Carla. Too ugly even for the men and women that made it what it was, for Kerch and J.D. Weather and his wife, and Allister and Garland and Joe Sault. If Carla and I wanted to make anything of each other—and that would be hard enough—we’d have to get away from this city. When her shoulder healed, I knew she’d be ready to go.

But then I couldn’t be sure that I’d be ready. I had a chance to stay and stick in the monster’s crop. I was hardly the man for the job, and I couldn’t do it alone, and you couldn’t build a City of God in the U.S.A. in 1946. But something better could be made than an organism with an appetite for human flesh. A city could be built for people to live in. Before I decided to leave or stay, I’d have to look for the good men who lived here, the J.D. Weatherses who still respected the people, the Kaufmans who lived in the real world and not in a stiff old European dream, the Sanfords who had learned their lessons from history, the Allisters who hadn’t broken down. Men with a hunger and a willingness to fight for something more than
filet
in their bellies, women in their beds, the champagne bubbles of power expanding in their egos. Ten rounds by myself had beaten
me down, but with good men in my corner I could last for seventy-five.

Far down the street a black police sedan roared into sight and hearing. I put both hands on the window ledge and pushed myself back into the room. The woman was still standing by the body.

“He was a strange man,” she said. “I often wanted to kill him. Now I’ve gone and done it.”

The gun fell out of her hand and gleamed on the carpet. A set of brakes shrieked at the curb outside and a car door slammed. When I looked at her face, it was beginning to work with grief, or with some other passion.