Dark Stain Read Online Free PDF Page A

lips curving out, the nostrils flaring. He was glad that he had thought of Johnny; Johnny knew him. They had played football together in high school, and had met years afterwards in the shipping room of the Schrang Leather Goods Company where Sam had worked one summer between college sessions. Johnny hadn’t gone on to college but he had, graduating and taking civil service exams for patrolmen. He had become a silver badge. And Johnny?
    At the next drugstore, Sam swerved inside. He marched into a phone booth, pulled the folding door shut. It was only then that he realized he didn’t know Johnny’s phone number or even if Johnny had a phone number. “Hell,” he said. Besides, talking it over with Johnny would be a violation of the P.D. regulations. Johnny was an outsider and you weren’t supposed to discuss a case with outsiders. He glared at the mouthpiece, tapping his forefinger and middle finger on his chin. He had forgotten until now about the regulations. He wouldn’t be able to explain to his family or to his girl. This was the first time that day that he had thought of his family or of Suzy. What would they think of him? Especially what would Suzy think? He fished out a nickel, dropped it into the slot, dialed her number. His tight lips softened, relaxed as he waited for her to answer. He could almost see her as if she were standing besides him in the booth, a small girl only as tall as his shoulder, with strongly molded cheekbones and bright grey eyes. Her cheekbones and her eyes always made him feel that she was a stranger in the city as he could never be a stranger, yet she had been born in the city like himself and she spoke with the tart tongue of the city’s girls.
    At the other end of the wire a voice said, “Yes?”
    “Hello, Mrs. Buckles,” Sam said. “Is Suzy home?”
    “No,” Suzy’s mother replied. “I expect her later, Sam. How are you?”
    “Fine, thanks. Will you tell Suzy I’ll meet her tomorrow in her lunch hour. Tell her to wait for me in front of her building. Good night.” He hung up, thinking that he had forgotten to ask Suzy’s mother how she was; it was a hell of a thing to forget. Mrs. Buckles was worried about him anyway; besides being a Jew he was also a cop; Mrs. Buckles had her reservations about Jews and cops.
    He left the drugstore and took the uptown subway at Seventy-Second Street and Broadway, collapsing into a seat under the blacked-out bulbs. He gaped sleepily at the subway faces. His eyes shuttered, opened at stations that weren’t his, numbers strung on the steel rails, the subway roaring through miles of tunnels. Ten minutes later, he climbed up to the street level. Men and girls were sitting on the benches on the traffic islands, the girls glimmering pale and white and silky. On the sidewalks, people walked home, reading the morning papers, absorbed in the black war headlines. He saw nothing, he felt nothing. The incessant whirring of his thoughts had stopped. Like a sleepwalker he hurried along Broadway, the upper Broadway of Washington Heights, of old-fashioned apartment houses once fashionable whose ground floors had long been converted into store fronts, markets, drugstores, appetizing, stores, kosher butchers, florists.
    Sam turned into a sidestreet. Down below at the end of the block, the black land of New Jersey towered over the black river. He entered the lobby of his apartment house with its piece of faded imitation tapestry, marble bench and gilt-framed mirror. He strode to the automatic elevator and his image walked towards him in the mirror, hatless and wide-shouldered. He pushed the elevator button. The signal glass glowed ruby red. The elevator descended. He stepped inside, pressed the number of his floor. He wondered if his family would be waiting up for him. He got out in a marble-tiled corridor, lined with doors; over many of the doors the Jewish tenants had nailed
mezzuzahs
or miniature scrolls of the Bible; the
mezzuzahs
were supposed to bring