Maybe you think you’re like a doctor, hah? Gotta be on call in case some nigger suddenly runs out of booze money or needs dough for a quick fix. I mean you got to wise up, Solly. You get some kind of trouble here and pretty soon the department starts poking their nose in your business and . . .” He shrugged suggestively.
“I appreciate your concern. I know what I am doing. Just do not trouble yourself worrying about me,” Sol said coldly, lowering his attention pointedly to the checks again.
“Aw now, don’t take that attitude. That’s my business to worry about you. Where would you be without law and order?”
“Oh yes, law and order.”
“I mean you ought to be more co-operative, Solly. Take my advice in the spirit it’s given. Look, we’re landsmen, got to stick together against all these crooked goys,” Leventhal said with a loose smile.
“Is that a fact?” He stared at the policeman with an icy, inscrutable expression. “Well thank you then. Now if you will excuse me, I have work to do.” A landsman indeed! And where was the heritage of a Jew in a black uniform, carrying a club and a revolver? Sol had no friends, but his enemies were clearly marked for him.
“Okay, Solly, we’ll leave it at that . . . for now.” Leventhal shrugged, looked slowly around with the pompous, constabulary warning, and walked slowly, insolently out, trailing a toneless whistle behind him.
And then, at ten o’clock, the traffic began.
A white man in his early twenties walked stiffly up to the grille. He had wild soft hair that rose up and was in constant motion from the tiniest drafts and crosscurrents of air, so that, with his drowned-looking face, he seemed to float under water. His clothing was threadbare but showed the conservative taste of some sensible, middle-class shopper. He held a paper bag before him under crossed arms, and he stared with cautious intensity at the Pawnbroker before even entrusting his burden to the edge of the counter.
“How much will you give me?” he asked in a low, breathless voice.
“For what?” Sol twisted his mouth impatiently.
“For this,” the man answered, his black eyes gleaming above the big blade of nose. There was something histrionic and a little mad in his manner, and he clutched at the bag as though against Sol’s attempt to steal it.
“This, this . . . what in hell is this? All I am able to see is a paper bag. What are you selling? I am no mind reader.” Sol’s voice was harsh but his face was professionally bland behind the round, black-framed glasses.
“It is an award for oratory,” said the wild-haired young man. “I won it in a city-wide oratorical contest nine years ago.”
Sol took the bag, which was greasy-soft and made up of a million shallow wrinkles. He wondered where they got those bags or what they did to ordinary bags to make them feel like thin, aged skin. He opened it with an attitude of distaste. Inside was a bust of shiny yellow metal on a black-lacquered wooden base. A plaque in the same yellow metal was inscribed:
DANIEL WEBSTER AWARD
New York Public School Oratorical Contest for 1949
LEOPOLD S. SCHNEIDER
“It’s gold,” Leopold Schneider said.
“Plate,” the Pawnbroker corrected, tapping Daniel Webster’s shiny skull. “Look, I’ll loan you a dollar on it. The devil what I could do with it if you didn’t come back for it”
“A dollar!” Leopold Schneider pressed his starved face against the bars like a maddened bird. “This is an important award. Why, do you know there were two thousand quarter-finalists out of twenty thousand, only fifty semifinalists. And I won! I recited ‘The Raven,’ and I won, from twenty thousand. I was the best of twenty thousand.”
“Good, good, you are one in twenty thousand, Leopold, maybe one in a million. That’s why I will loan you a dollar . . . because I’m so impressed.”
“But one in twenty thousand. You don’t think I would part with that glory for a miserable dollar, do you!”
“There is a very small market for oratory awards with your name engraved on them. One dollar,” Sol said, lowering his eyes to the checks again.
“Look, I’m hungry. I’m busy writing a great, great play. I just need a few dollars to carry me. I’ll redeem it, I swear it. It’s worth more than money . . .”
“Not to me, Leopold.”
“I’ll give you triple interest. . . .”
“One dollar,” the Pawnbroker said without looking up. He had added one column of numbers three times now.
“What’s the matter with you?” Leopold Schneider shrilled suddenly in the quiet store. Upstairs, Ortiz’ footsteps stopped for a moment at the sound, as though he might be considering coming down to see what was happening. “Haven’t you got a heart?”
“No,” Sol answered. “No heart.”
“What a world this is!”
Sol ran his finger deliberately down the column of numbers again.
“Five dollars at least?” Leopold whined, breathing the sour breath of the chronically hungry on the Pawnbroker.
Sol finally totaled the first column, carried a seven to the second.
“All right, three dollars, at least three miserable dollars. What is it to you?”
Sol raised his gray, impervious face. All the clocks ticked around his unrelenting stare. “I am busy. Go away now if you please. I have no use for the damned thing anyhow.”
“All right, all right, give me the dollar,” Leopold said in a trembling half-whisper.
Sol reached into the money drawer and took out a bill as greasy and battered as Leopold’s paper bag. He tore off a pawn ticket, wrote up the description of the award, and gave the claim ticket to Leopold Schneider. Then he continued his adding of the numbers. Leopold stood there for a full minute before he turned and went out of the store with the awkward tread of a huge, ungainly bird.
Only several minutes later did the Pawnbroker look up to stare at the empty doorway. He rubbed his eyes in a little gesture of weariness. Daniel Webster caught a tiny dart of sunlight, and it disturbed Sol’s corner vision. He picked the award up and shoved it into a low, dark shelf where the light never reached.
Mrs. Harmon might have seemed a relief after Leopold Schneider. She was big and brown, and her face had long ago committed her to frequent smiling; even in repose it was a series of benevolently curving lines. Mrs. Harmon was convinced you could either laugh or cry, that there were no other alternatives; she had elected to go with the former.
“Come on, Mistuh Nazerman, smile! You got some more business comin’ at you. Here I is with a load of pure profit for you.” She held up two silver candlesticks, the latest of her diminishing, yet never quite depleted, store of heirlooms. Her husband, Willy Harmon, was a janitor in a department store and came home with occasional delights for her in the form of floor samples, remains of old window dressings, and various
