began to close the door.
He watched her disappear behind it as he usually did, but differently too, in the way he thought must inevitably accompany the dwindling of life, when everything counts more in number than degree, and each sensation asks how many times are left to see, hear, feel or taste it.
It was only a short walk from the Broadway to Lazar’s apartment on West 44th Street. It was in a rundown five-story building where some of the older tenants, unable to live on Social Security, rented out their rooms for thirty minutes at a time to the small army of Eighth Avenue prostitutes who swarmed over the neighborhood. They were mostly old Broadway types, bit players in the long spectacle, who chatted casually on the stoop while their rooms were being used upstairs.
Corman rang Chico’s buzzer and waited the few seconds it took for him to come up from his own basement apartment.
“I need to get into Mr. Lazar’s apartment,” Corman told him.
“Sure, no problem,” Chico said. “How’s he doing? He doing okay, or what?”
“He died.”
Chico’s face remained oddly cheerful, despite the news. “My mother, the same. Sometimes, you know, it’s the best thing.” He smiled quietly. “You his son, right?”
“Just a friend.”
“You the only one I ever see him with,” Chico said. “So I figure you was his son.”
“No. We worked together.”
Chico nodded quickly. “So, what you want? The key?”
“I need to get a suit to bury him in,” Corman explained.
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” Chico said hastily. He pulled a huge ring of keys from his pocket, pulled one off and handed it to Corman. “What’s going to be with the apartment? You going to clean it out, or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s decontrolled now, you know,” Chico said. “So, the land-lord, he’s going to want to take it back, okay? I mean, right away.”
“He can have it tomorrow,” Corman said.
Chico looked unsure. “You sure that’s okay? The old man, he didn’t have nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“So, okay if we clean it out?” Chico asked. “You give me the okay to do it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good, then,” Chico said happily. He slapped Corman gently on the shoulder. “You take whatever you want. The rest, we’ll dump it.”
Corman nodded quickly and made his way upstairs, then into the apartment.
It was a one-room apartment which overlooked the street. Long, dark blue curtains hung over a tangle of battered Venetian blinds. The sink was stained and rusty, the toilet ran incessantly, filling the air with a soft gurgling rattle. The bed sat in one corner, its covers rumpled, the torn sheets piled up along the floor beside it like a drift of faintly yellow snow. In a photograph, Corman realized as he walked to the window and raised the blinds, it would look like a stage designer’s idea of a loser’s apartment, a dusty little room in a pathetic has-been of a building full of people who had nothing left to turn a trick with but their beds.
He walked to the single, nearly empty closet at the back of the room. The door was already ajar, the upper hinge pulled nearly free from the wall so that it slumped to the right. There were two suits, five shirts and four pairs of trousers. A cracked leather belt hung from a wire hanger, along with a scattering of ties. Corman picked the dark blue one, then added a white shirt and a black suit. The world could hardly contain the vast irrelevancy of his shoes.
A large suitcase rested on the upper shelf of the closet, and as Corman pulled it forward, he felt its unexpected heaviness suddenly shift toward him, then stood by helplessly as it tumbled over the edge and slammed into the floor below, the top springing open as it fell, spilling hundreds of photographs in a wide, black-and-white wave across the bare, wooden floor.
Reflexively, he dropped to his knees and began sweeping the scattered pictures back into the gutted suitcase. At first he returned them in large handfuls, then slowly, one by one, taking a long, lingering moment to stare appreciatively at each of them. These were what the old man’s soul had needed, and as Corman continued to look at them, staring longer and longer at each one, he knew that this was his way of paying homage to a life he’d only come to know in its final years. All through the morning and then into the afternoon, he sat on the floor and looked at the photographs Lazar had saved through his long career. While the air grew steadily darker, he peered at pictures of children playing in the park, women leaning from their windows, men slumping against parking meters, cars and brick walls, and over and over, in one picture after another, in a theme that seemed to have developed slowly throughout the old man’s life, pictures of people huddled beneath awnings, in doorways, under the fluttering batlike wings of a thousand black umbrellas, but all of them staring out toward unseen open spaces, as if still searching for some break in the unrelenting rain. And as Corman returned the last picture to the suitcase, it struck him that this was what had been missing from Groton’s apartment, that there’d been no photographs hanging from the walls or stuffed into his bag, not one picture after all those years to stand forever as something he did right.
He was still in Lazar’s apartment when he called Pike. “I’m going to pass on Groton’s job,” he told him quietly.
“Suit yourself,” Pike said casually. “It’s not a job I’ll have any trouble filling.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Too bad, though,” Pike added nonchalantly. “The fag liked you, said you were a pretty good shooter.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Said you had an eye for things.”
“An eye,” Corman repeated unemphatically, then with more significance. “Lazar died yesterday.” He tapped the side of his camera bag. “I’m taking some of his clothes up. For the body.”
“He was good,” Pike said, “a good shooter. But he was weak, Corman. What the Irish call a harp.”
“He seemed tough enough to me.”
“How tough’s that?”
“He drank it down to the worm,” Corman said. “He didn’t fake anything.” If he’d been a sculptor, he thought as he hung up the phone, he would have etched the same proud words upon the old man’s stone.
Corman laid the bag on the desk beside a tray of hospital plates. “This is for Mr. Lazar,” he said.
The attendant recognized him immediately and gave him a quizzical look. “Did anyone call you?” she asked delicately.
Corman nodded. “I know he died,” he told her. “I brought some clothes for him.”
“Oh, I see,” the woman said. “Well, Mr. Lazar is … we have … I mean he’s downstairs.”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to see him?”
Corman shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
The woman smiled softly. “He died in his sleep,” she said. “Very quiet. We didn’t know anything had happened until we made our regular rounds.” She glanced at the bag for no reason, then returned her eyes to Corman. “He was sitting up. I mean, when it happened. I guess he was listening to the radio. He had it propped up against his ear.”
“Yes, he was probably doing that,” Corman said. He could feel a strange restlessness somewhere deep within him and worked to keep it down. “As far as a funeral, I’ll make the arrangements. He owned a plot in a cemetery in Brooklyn. The one you see from the train on the way to Coney Island. It’s very crowded. He liked that, crowds.”
“I know the one,” the woman said with a sudden cheeriness. “I live near it.”
“They would know about the plot,” Corman added. “Where it is. That kind of thing. I’ll call them, make the arrangements.” He slid the bag over toward her. “I guess you can take these now?”
She pulled them toward her, peeked in. “Looks fine,” she said.
Corman placed his hand on the suitcase. He could feel the many miles it had traveled, smell the hotel beds
