A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

But the Commissioner would, and does, in his office a couple hours later. He’s anything but eager about it, too. They’ve tried to shunt him, Bloch, off their hands in every possible legal way open to them. No go. He sticks to them like flypaper. The old colored man didn’t try to attack him, or rob him, or blackmail him, or kidnap him, or anything else. The gun didn’t go off accidentally, and he didn’t fire it on the spur of the moment either, without thinking twice, or in a flare of anger. The Commissioner almost beats his own head against the desk in his exasperation as he reiterates over and over: “But why? Why? Why?” And for the steenth time, he gets the same indigestible answer: “Because he was killing me.”

“Then you admit he did lay hands on you?” The first time the poor Commissioner asked this, he said it with a spark of hope. But this is the tenth or twelfth and the spark died out long ago.

“He never once came near me. I was the one looked him up each time to plead with him. Commissioner Oliver, tonight I went down on my knees to that old man and dragged myself around the floor of that dirty room after him, on my bended knees, like a sick cat — begging, crawling to him, offering him three thousand, ten, any amount, finally offering him my own gun, asking him to shoot me with it, to get it over with quickly, to be kind to me, not to drag it out by inches any longer! No, not even that little bit of mercy! Then I shot — and now I’m going to get better, now I’m going to live—”

He’s too weak to cry; crying takes strength. The Commissioner’s hair is about ready to stand on end. “Stop it, Mr. Bloch, stop it!” he shouts, and he steps over and grabs him by the shoulder in defense of his own nerves, and can almost feel the shoulder-bone cutting his hand. He takes his hand away again in a hurry. “I’m going to have you examined by an alienist!”

The bundle of bones rears from the chair. “You can’t do that! You can’t take my mind from me! Send to my hotel — I’ve got a trunkful of reports on my condition! I’ve been to the biggest minds in Europe! Can you produce anyone that would dare go against the findings of Buckholtz in Vienna, Reynolds in London? They had me under observation for months at a time! I’m not even on the borderline of insanity, not even a genius or musically talented. I don’t even write my own numbers, I’m mediocre, uninspired — in other words completely normal. I’m saner than you are at this minute, Mr. Oliver. My body’s gone, my soul’s gone, and all I’ve got left is my mind, but you can’t take that from me!”

The Commissioner’s face is beet-red. He’s about ready for a stroke, but he speaks softly, persuasively. “An eighty-odd-year-old colored man who is so feeble he can’t even go upstairs half the time, who has to have his food pulleyed up to him through the window in a basket, is killing — whom? A white stumble-bum his own age? No-o-o, Mr. Eddie Bloch, the premier bandsman of America, who can name his own price in any town, who’s heard every night in all our homes, who has about everything a man can want — that’s who!” He peers close, until their eyes are on a level. His voice is just a silky whisper. “Tell me just one thing, Mr. Bloch.” Then like the explosion of a giant firecracker, “How?” He roars it out, booms it out.

There’s a long-drawn intake of breath from Eddie Bloch. “By thinking thoughtwaves of death that reached me through the air.” The poor Commissioner practically goes all to pieces on his own rug. “And you don’t need a medical exam!” he wheezes weakly.

There’s a flutter, the popping of buttons, and Eddie Bloch’s coat, his vest, his shirt, undershirt, land one after another on the floor around his chair. He turns. “Look at my back! You can count every vertebra through the skin!” He turns back again. “Look at my ribs. Look at the pulsing where there’s not enough skin left to cover my heart!”

Oliver shuts his eyes and turns toward the window. He’s in a particularly unpleasant spot. New Orleans, out there, is stirring, and when it hears about this, he’s going to be the most unpopular man in town. On the other hand, if he doesn’t see the thing through now that it’s gone this far he’s guilty of a dereliction of duty, malfeasance in office.

Bloch, slowly dressing, knows what he’s thinking. “You want to get rid of me, don’t you? You’re trying to think of a way of covering this thing up. You’re afraid to bring me up before the Grand Jury on account of your own reputation, aren’t you?” His voice rises to a scream of panic. “Well, I want protection! I don’t want to go out there again — to my death! I won’t accept bail! If you turn me loose now, even on my own cognizance, you may be as guilty of my death as he is. How do I know my bullet stopped the thing? How does any of us know what becomes of the mind after death? Maybe his thoughts will still reach me, still try to get me. I tell you I want to be locked up, I want people around me day and night, I want to be where I’m safe—”