with you,” he said, and then walked out with his retinue like one of those strange little chieftains who are so impressive because they do not see anything ridiculous in their air of power.
All afternoon Sol’s head pounded. It seemed very important for him to keep busy. Tangee’s quiet, haggard wife came in like her vivid husband’s drab shadow. She pawned some of her husband’s castoff finery without attempting to bargain, took the money with the trace of a polite smile, and walked out stiffly, as though she feared she might be called back for some reason. Cecil Mapp’s wife came in, covering her shame with righteous scorn for all men, Sol included. She offered a silver-plated tray. “You can be happy to know, Mr. Pawnbroker, that you is at least helpin’,” she said sourly, waving the money he had just given her. “You’re feedin’ the children that Cecil Mapp’s whisky is robbin’ of food!” With that, she stalked out like a huge avenging angel, and Sol could see her take a small child’s hand and move off like a liner with a tug; she wouldn’t corrupt her child with the air of the pawnshop. One of the prostitutes from the masseur-fronted brothel down the street brought in a fancy sterling-backed brush and hand mirror. She was a handsome, light-skinned girl named Mabel Wheatly, and she had a surprisingly clean and unsullied look. But she wore boredom like armor and didn’t look at Sol once during their brief transaction. A plumber with dented, cheerful features and battered ears came in to redeem the shiny nickle-plated Stillson wrench on which Sol had been loaning him money for almost three years; two dollars to him when he brought it in, something more than that to Sol when he redeemed it—a cycle as pointless as the following of the surface of a metal ring. A laborer, a schoolgirl, a sailor, a swarthy gypsy woman with shiny pots. An old man, a young man, a man with a hook for a hand. A dim-witted ex-fighter, a student, a deadpan mother. In and out, and back again in another guise. And all the while the Pawnbroker maintained that long-mastered yet precarious equilibrium of the senses. It was as though his nerves and his brain held on to the present and the immediate like some finely balanced instrument. If it ever broke down . . . he murdered that thought at birth for the thousandth time. The shop creaked with the weight of other people’s sorrows; he abided.
He faced the depraved and the deprived, the small villains, the smaller victims. And his battlements were his hard assaying eyes, his cool voice that offered the very least. Through the hours, others besides Jesus Ortiz found time to wonder at the peculiar ragged numbers etched like false veins under the skin of his arm, or to speculate on the graven cast of his fleshy, spectacled face. But the Pawnbroker kept his secret, for while some of them might surmise some of the facts of his history, none of them could know its real truth. And as he plied his trade, each of them took away only a feeling of something quite huge and terrible.
At six forty-five in the evening the phone rang, and Sol answered, knowing who it was.
“Murillio?” he said with only the slightest intonation of question.
“You got to spend five thousand bucks, Nazerman.” The voice in the receiver had the depthless timbre of a recording. “A contractor comes over tomorrow. He gives you an estimate of five thousand for general repairs. Give him a certified check on the store account.”
“I see. What is his name?”
“Savarese.”
“Yes, very well.”
“How is business, Nazerman? Are we making money?” A dry chuckle had the same recorded quality as the spoken word.
“As always, we spend more than we make.”
“Very good, Uncle. Pretty soon Uncle Sam will have to pay us money. Subsidize us, hah? Can’t expect taxes from a losing business, can they? Hey, that’s a good idea, subsidize. Sponsor us. Like they use to do in Italy durin’ the Renaissance. The Medici, you know. They was patrons to the artists, Michelangelo, da Vinci. Hey, how about that. Why not us, too! The hell, Uncle, we’re artists, too, ain’t we? Gyp artists!” The dehumanized, mirthless chuckle sounded again. “Okay, okay, partner, I’ll talk to you in a day or so. You take care of that little matter then. And keep your nose clean, hah?”
He looked up from the phone to see Ortiz studying the engraved plaque under Daniel Webster’s bust. The store was dim even with the lights on, so it seemed the quality of light was at fault, not the intensity. Outside, the evening sun made the street shimmer in a golden bath through which the passers-by moved like dark swimmers in no hurry to get anywhere. He breathed, with his assistant, the dust of the much-handled merchandise, the imaginable odors of sweat and pride and weeping; and it was an indefinable yet powerful atmosphere, which gave them an intimacy neither de sired.
“All this junk,” Ortiz said musingly. “Still an’ all, it’s business. A solid thing, oh a real solid thing—business. You got records an’ books an’ papers, everythin’ down in black an’ white. Take like you people, how it carry you along no matter what.”
“What people?” Sol asked, numbly admiring the almost poreless skin over his assistant’s delicate features.
“Jews, all the Jews.”
“Yes, yes, certainly, you have it all figured out,” Sol said dryly, as he drew his eyes from the young man’s face to fish for more substantial catches among the brass tubas, the cameras and radios and silver trays.
“Niggers suffer like animals. They ain’t caught on. Oh yeah, Jews suffer. But they do it big, they shake up the worl’ with they sufferin’.”
“You tell them, Ortiz, go spread the word. You have it all figured out, a regular professor is what you are.”
“I know, don’t worry, I know,” Ortiz said smugly. “I know the way things is.”
“You know nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“That’s all right, jus’ don’t worry about what I know.”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“You go around with that poker face, think you the only one what know. Don’t fool yourself. I got eyes and ears, I figure, I know.”
“Nothing,” the Pawnbroker hollowed out of himself in a sigh.
“An’ what I don’t know, I find out.”
Sol turned cold, denying eyes on his assistant. “You’re a pisher, that’s all you are,” he said. “It’s after seven; why don’t you go home now?”
“All right, sure, boss,” he said sourly. He put Daniel Webster down regretfully, a calm anger on his dark, ivory face. “Good night, boss, a very good night to you.”
“Gay in draird!”
Ortiz bowed himself out with a mocking smile, his shiny black hair bobbing over his forehead with each bow.
“Good night, good night, good night . . .”
Sol hissed at the empty store. What is it, what is it? He was shaken with a minute trembling, like an aspen in an almost invisible breeze. A fever, could I have perhaps a fever? Oy, the season; every year it gets like this. Some people have hay fever, I have my anniversary! What, it’s about two weeks away, the twenty-eighth. I’ll get through it like always. Maybe I’ll go to Tessie tonight? No, too tired. I’ll go home and read in my bed. Oh yes, I have a wonderful two weeks ahead of me. Oh what nonsense, what non sense this all is!
After a while he began readying the store for the night. He closed
