small business a block away, a distant car horn, bird noises, a kind of whir not unlike a furnace noise, the sound of a small dog barking across the street, his breathing, the noise of the screwdriver in the cheap lock, the crack of the door.
Inside, he moved silently and quickly out of sight, through the back porch and kitchenette, into the hallway, past the phone, living room, back through the bedroom, squeaking loudly across her bare wooden floor. Each room was alive with the strange pervasive odors of age, of garbage, of the woman herself, all offensive in his nose. She was not fastidious but, as best as he could tell in this cursory pass through, she apparently lived alone. Not even a parakeet chirped in the house.
He assumed she'd come in the front door. But what if she entered through the rear door, found the puny lock compromised, and began screaming for the police? His mind ran many steps ahead of her, planning his exit routes, cobbling together some plausible construct of lies should the unthinkable happen. He sensed his own panic, controlled it. He moved one of her kitchen chairs away from the window, where he could wait unobserved, and sat down.
Out of view from either door he prepared his syringe, which he carefully placed on the kitchen countertop, and arranged the other items he would need. With the weapon in his right hand he practiced standing a time or two, but he could neither stand nor move across the kitchen floor silently. He decided to remove his shoes and did so, standing again. He moved a couple of steps. Better. Pleased with the results, he sat down again, working to calm himself in the remaining seconds or minutes before she showed herself.
A younger woman, a woman with a more normal background, a less totally frightened woman, a woman whose emotional gyro had not been impaired by the horrors to which Anna Kaplan had been subjected, a woman with a keener olfactory sense might have detected some vibrations, sensed something out of place, felt another's presence, intuitively realized she was not alone, smelled the cologne of a stranger.
But it was all she could do to get her key to work in the lock and move directly toward the telephone in the hallway.
To the man who waited for her in the shadows of her small kitchen the key in the door had sounded like a gunshot, and it was as if her screeching voice began its high wail the moment she burst through the front door.
She'd flung the door open and lunged at the phone, dialing almost as she opened the phone book to the first page where the police numbers were printed. That page was all she'd focused on since she started the long, frightening walk home, how she would open the Bayou City book and see that number listed on the Fire-Police- Ambulance page. It never dawned on her that there were two small books issued to residences, one for the immediate city limits, one for the surrounding communities, and she'd grabbed the book with the county sheriff. Sheriff, police, they were all the same.
As the words tumbled out of her mouth and she heard the laughter in the man's voice she knew it would be useless. Even before he'd finished questioning her she knew what she must do.
The thing that prolonged Alma Purdy's life was not saying goodbye. When the call to the authorities had come to an end, and the man taking her call had said they'd look into it, she simply said, “Yes,” a monosyllabic grunt in the same dead, emotionless tone she'd used all the way through the conversation. As she set the phone down on the slim directory and began rummaging around in her desk drawer for a newspaper account she'd saved, the man listening patiently in the next room had no way of realizing the line had been disconnected.
There were the few seconds it took for the woman to dial when he heard the unmistakable sounds of another call being made, but he decided against a quick move, assessing it as excessively risky. There was always the chance he'd be implicated in the moments it would take him to spring from the kitchen and strike her down.
“Mrs. Talianoff?” Her screech broke the silence of the house. “It's Alma Purdy. You know the package I gave you for safekeeping? ... That's right. Please go ahead and send it. Yes. That's right. Just tell him to mail it now. Okay. Thank you.” She broke the connection and he was out of the chair, moving on his stocking feet, but she'd just dialed the 0 this time, and her high whine was already speaking again as he reached the doorway. “Operator?” He froze.
“I want to call a man in Kansas City,” she demanded. The woman's voice then dropped back to the dead monotone she'd used during the rambling call to the local authorities. “No. Please get the number for me. I don't have the number.” He heard more conversation about how it was an emergency.
He'd put himself in incredible jeopardy with the inane business of waiting for the woman in her filthy home. What an idiot he'd been to react in such an illogical manner. A hundred times he'd curse the fates, and himself, for not having simply run the bitch down in the street. It would have been so simple. A traffic mishap.
“A mentally defective elderly cripple lurched out in front of his car,” he imagined one of his defenders would say. No one would have suspected him for a second. He goaded himself with wish-fulfillment scenes as he listened to the crone's lies, heard himself described, stood in this simpleton's kitchen fighting for composure, when he could have painlessly deducted one more bitch from the female Jew population with his front bumper.
“Is this Mr. Kamen?” he heard her ask. “Are you the one who looks for Nazis from the war?” Regrets mounted. How many mistakes had he made in the last ten minutes? He felt perspiration in his right palm, the hand gripping the weapon. He never perspired. The situation would have been ludicrous had it not been threatening. He must kill her and leave the “elderly cardiac arrest victim” to rot. “I'm calling because I know where there's a Nazi.'
He heard her say his name and realized he now would not even be able to wash his hands of her simply. Now he must also make the meddlesome old bitch vanish. That meant coming back after dark, taking more chances, somehow moving the dead weight to his car. Nothing insurmountable, but each element compounded his risk factor.
By the time she finally replaced the phone and walked into her kitchen his pent-up fury lashed out at her and she died without knowing that Emil Shtolz had smashed her to death like the wrath of the devil itself.
Ignoring her frail, fallen body, he checked the directories and then tried local directory assistance for new listings. The hurried search failed to yield a Talianoff, Taliakoff, or anything close. Emil Shtolz moved on to other more pressing matters, and never found Lenore Talianoff, Bayou City's only other old Jew, and the closest thing Alma Purdy had for a confidante.
Mrs. Talianoff lived with her son and his family, the son having taken his stepfather's name, and it was to the son she spoke.
“Are you going to the post office today?'
“Not today, Mother. Whatcha’ need?'
“I'm keeping a package for a woman. She called me and asked me to mail it for her, so I'm mailing it already.'
“I'll get it after a while. I'm calling in a UPS pickup. Will that be all right, if it goes out tomorrow?'
“That's fine, honey. So, are you coming home for lunch?'
The package, about the size of a small book, was rectangular and wrapped in thick paper obtained by cutting apart a grocery sack. The label, printed in a somewhat shaky hand, bore the address of a man in Kansas City, Missouri. The UPS center in Earth City would, in fact, misdirect it, but so far as Lenore Talianoff was concerned the matter was ended and she'd discharged her responsibilities in full.
Now
23
He does not remember wandering away from the car, nor the protective vibes that pushed him to seek cover.
