The Pawnbroker. Edward Lewis Wallant
“Amazing how stupid some people can be, isn’t it?” Sol said. “I mean that he shouldn’t have noticed that there wasn’t a blade of grass within two miles of your house. Your friend, that is.”
“Oh well, yeah,” Tangee agreed, beginning to tire of the badinage, his eyes licking more hungrily at the great collection around him, darting occasionally toward his companions as though for some agreement. “You know how it is.”
“Yes, I know very well,” Sol said flatly. “Where did you get it?”
“Hey, man, I don’t see where you come off askin’ like that. I got it, that’s all. I mean that there my business, ain’t it?”
“Look, my friend, the police have lists of stolen merchandise. I am obligated to list all the items taken for pawn. For myself, I don’t give a care if you stole it from Macy’s window. All I am concerned with is that I would be out my money if they appropriated it.”
Three other customers came in while he struggled with Tangee and his silent companions. He pressed the little signal button that called Ortiz down from the second floor.
“I ain’t stole it, man; you don’t have to worry. Some guy give it to me, figure I make some use out of it.”
“A lawn mower?” The Pawnbroker’s sarcasm was a bland poison that acted only on himself. He had a faint sensation of suffocation as he watched the loose rubbery lips of Tangee and the nightmarishly blue eyes of the Negro in the ash-gray suit.
“Sure, a lawn mower! I hock the friggen thing and get money. That useful enough, ain’t it?” Tangee said with a roving, marble-eyed study of the Pawnbroker’s face, an expression of cold appraisal, as though he were figuring how to go about taking Sol’s face apart.
Buck White stared at Sol’s tattooed arm, and the blue-eyed Negro kept his gaze on the rear of the store, his face like a burned bone. There was, in their idle patience, the murderous quality of hunting dogs so sure of their prey that they rest, panting, in a confident circle around it. Sol held himself motionless, trying to be as patient and cool as they. Across the store, Ortiz was crowded with customers, moving busily, waiting on two or three at once, disposing of them quickly and efficiently. And he stood there before the three strange men, imprisoned in their mood of menace, the silly lawn mower in the middle of the floor like some grotesque totem they were urging on him.
“Even if it isn’t stolen . . . a lawn mower! No one comes in here for a lawn mower. Even at auction . . .”
“Take it, Pawnbroker, take the goddam thing,” the blue-eyed Negro said suddenly, his voice amazingly low, subterranean even, like an echo from a distant depth.
Sol looked at him bleakly for a moment, went on to the inhuman ox-glance of Buck White, the insolent appraisal of Tangee. Suddenly he just wanted them out of there; they were like bands around his chest. He nodded.
“I’ll give you seven dollars,” he mumbled. “Take it or leave it.”
“Why sure, man, sold! See, I ain’t no trouble . . . pleasure to do business with, ain’t I?” Tangee turned to his two companions like a performer. Buck White grinned, a shy expression forming as he shifted his huge, powerful body. The blue-eyed man just bent his mouth and took his eyes reluctantly from whatever they had been fixed on at the rear of the store.
Tangee took the money and then, his eyes mockingly on the Pawnbroker, crumpled up the pawn ticket and tossed it lightly against the Pawnbroker’s hands.
“We be in again, Uncle. I like to do business 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