The Killing Room (42 page)

Luther takes a few steps toward the door, glances into the alley, continues.

“When I left the house today, this situation — this unfortunate state in which we find each other — was not my dream. I suspect, however, that it was yours.”

“No, man,” the thief says. “It wasn’t. Just let me —”

“And yet you brought with you this knife.”

“It’s for protection.”

“Against whom? Old women with credit cards?”

The thief looks at his hands. “I was going to give it back.”

“I understand,” Luther says. “In the broadest sense, I believe this to be true. And that is why this may end well for you after all.”

A light returns to the thief’s eyes. “What I gotta do?”

Luther approaches him, again crouches down. “There is a dream about a blind man. Do you know it?”

The thief shakes his head.

“They say to dream about blindness means that there is a truth about yourself you refuse to accept, or that you have lost your way in life. I believe this applies to you.”

The thief begins to tremble.

“I am here to help you find your way,” Luther says. He picks up the thief’s knife, then reaches beneath his jacket and pulls out a long, bone-handled knife.

“No,” the thief says. “You can’t do this.”

“You are right,” Luther replies. “That is why you will do it to yourself. You will take your eyes, as the matador wields his
espada
, and by this you will see.”

“You’re fucking
crazy
, man!”

“That is not for you or I to determine,” Luther says. He reaches down, finds an oily rag on the floor, hands it to the thief. “For the blood.”

“No, man. You can’t —”

“Now, this is a subtle undertaking. Extreme care must be taken. If you push the knife in too deeply, you will sever the optic nerve, yes, but you may run it into your frontal lobe. The truth is, if
you
do it, there is the possibility — quite a good possibility as I understand it — that you will live. If I do it, I fear you will not. I cannot make the choice for you.”

Luther stands, holds the butterfly knife by its blade.

“Do you see that old calendar on the wall behind me?” he asks.

The thief looks over. There is a yellowed calendar hanging on a nail. It is from January 2008. “Yes.”

“Do you see the date for January 15?”

The thief just nods.

Without another word Luther spins quickly around and throws the knife. It hits the small square for January 15 dead center. Luther crosses the room, retrieves the knife. He steps back over to where the thief sits, hands him the bone handled filet knife, handle first. He steps away.

“So, tell me. Which dream do you choose?” Luther asks. “To live many more years as a blind man, or to die in this terrible place?”

Luther smells the sharp tang of urine as the man fouls himself. In the chill of this unheated room, steam begins to rise from the thief’s lap.

“If … if I do this, you won’t kill me?” the thief asks.

“I will not,” Luther says. “You have my word.” He glances at his watch. “But you must do this in the next thirty seconds. Beyond that, I cannot make any promises.”

The thief takes a deep breath, releases it in four or five small gusts. He slowly turns the knife toward himself.

“I can’t do it!”

“Twenty-five seconds.”

The thief begins to sob. The knife shakes in his hand as he brings it closer to his face. He raises his other hand to steady himself, and stares at the blade as a man might consider a burning rosary, the abacus of his sins.

“Twenty seconds.”

The thief begins to pray.

“Dios te salve, Maria.”

“Fifteen seconds.”

“Llena eres de gracia.”

“Ten seconds.”

“El Señor es contigo.”

“Five seconds.”

At the moment the tip of the blade descends, the 11:05 train on the Frankford line carrying eighty-one passengers roars to a stop overhead. The thief’s screams are swallowed by the whet of steel on steel, plumed inside the release of hydraulic steam.

Twenty seconds later, when the knife falls from the thief’s hand, there is only silence.

The thief — whose name was Ezequiel “Cheque” Rivera Marquez — had always thought that when death came it would be accompanied by a bright white light, or the sound of angels singing. When his mother died at the age of thirty-one in an osteopathic hospital in Camden, New Jersey, it was what he wanted to believe. It was possible that all eight-year-olds wanted to believe this.

For Cheque Marquez it wasn’t anything like that. Death wasn’t an angel in a long flowing gown.

Death was a man in a tattered brown suit.

One hour later, Luther stands across the street from the old woman’s row house. He watches the woman sweep the leaves off her small porch, marveling at how small she is, how big she had at one time seemed to him.

He knows that the next time he sees her it will be in her bedroom, her ruched and cloying boudoir with its peeling wallpaper and brown mice and generic powders, a visit during which he will replace her credit card in her wallet.

Nothing can be out of place over the course of the coming days. Everything must be as it has always been.

He’d already visited her home, three times sitting at the foot of her bed as she fitfully slept, chased by what demons he could only imagine. Perhaps he was one of those demons. Perhaps the woman knows that when her time comes, it will be him.

In the end, someone always comes.