Through the open inner door beyond the service porch I could see a straight chair with a man’s coat hanging over it and in the chair a man in shirtsleeves with his hat on. He was a small man. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he seemed to be sitting at the end of the built-in breakfast table in the breakfast nook.
I banged on the screen door. The man paid no attention. I banged again, harder. This time he tilted his chair back and showed me a small pale face with a cigarette in it. “Whatcha want?” he barked.
“Manager.”
“Not in, bub.”
“Who are you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I want a room.”
“No vacancies, bub. Can’t you read large print?”
“I happen to have different information,” I said.
“Yeah?” He shook ash from his cigarette by flicking it with a nail without removing it from his small sad mouth. “Go fry your head in it.”
He tilted his chair forward again and went on doing whatever it was he was doing.
I made noise getting down off the porch and none whatever coming back up on it. I felt the screen door carefully. It was hooked. With the open blade of a penknife I lifted the hook and eased it out of the eye. It made a small tinkle but louder tinkling sounds were being made beyond, in the kitchen.
I stepped into the house, crossed the service porch, went through the door into the kitchen. The little man was too busy to notice me. The kitchen had a three-burner gas stove, a few shelves of greasy dishes, a chipped icebox and the breakfast nook. The table in the breakfast nook was covered with money. Most of it was paper, but there was silver also, in all sizes up to dollars. The little man was counting and stacking it and making entries in a small book. He wetted his pencil without bothering the cigarette that lived in his face.
There must have been several hundred dollars on that table.
“Rent day?” I asked genially.
The small man turned very suddenly. For a moment he smiled and said nothing. It was the smile of a man whose mind is not smiling. He removed the stub of cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. He reached a fresh one out of his shirt and put it in the same hole in his face and started fumbling for a match.
“You came in nice,” he said pleasantly.
Finding no match, he turned casually in his chair and reached into a pocket of his coat. Something heavy knocked against the wood of the chair. I got hold of his wrist before the heavy thing came out of the pocket. He threw his weight backwards and the pocket of the coat started to lift towards me. I yanked the chair out from under him.
He sat down hard on the floor and knocked his head against the end of the breakfast table. That didn’t keep him from trying to kick me in the groin. I stepped back with his coat and took a .38 out of the pocket he had been playing with.
“Don’t sit on the floor just to be chummy,” I said.
He got up slowly, pretending to be groggier than he was. His hand fumbled at the back of his collar and light winked on metal as his arm swept toward me. He was a game little rooster.
I sideswiped his jaw with his own gun and he sat down on the floor again. I stepped on the hand that held the knife. His face twisted with pain but he didn’t make a sound. So I kicked the knife into a corner. It was a long thin knife and it looked very sharp.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I said. “Pulling guns and knives on people that are just looking for a place to live. Even for these times that’s out of line.”
He held his hurt hand between his knees and squeezed it and began to whistle through his teeth. The slap on the jaw didn’t seem to have hurt him. “O.K.,” he said, “O.K. I ain’t supposed to be perfect. Take the dough and beat it. But don’t ever think we won’t catch up with you.”
I looked at the collection of small bills and medium bills and silver on the table. “You must meet a lot of sales resistance, the weapons you carry,” I told him. I walked across to the inner door and tried it. It was not locked. I turned back.
“I’ll leave your gun in the mailbox,” I said. “Next time ask to see the buzzer.”
He was still whistling gently between his teeth and holding his hand. He gave me a narrow, thoughtful eye, then shoveled the money into a shabby briefcase and slipped its catch. He took his hat off, straightened it around, put it back jauntily on the back of his head and gave me a quiet efficient smile.
“Never mind about the heater,” he said. “The town’s full of old iron. But you could leave the skiv with Clausen. I’ve done quite a bit of work on it to get it in shape.”
“And with it?” I said.
“Could be.” He flicked a finger at me airily. “Maybe we meet again some day soon. When I got a friend with me.”
“Tell him to wear a clean shirt,” I said. “And lend you one.”
“My, my,” the little man said chidingly. “How tough we get how quick once we get that badge pinned on.”
He went softly past me and down the wooden steps from the back porch. His footsteps tapped to the street sand faded. They sounded very much like Orfamay’s heels clicking along the corridor in my office building. And for some reason I had that empty feeling of having miscounted the trumps. No reason for it at all. Maybe it was the steely quality about the little man. No whimper, no bluster, just the smile, the whistling between the teeth, the light voice and the unforgetting eyes.
