It came from somewhere up the street. The street was black except for the light. Genero stopped and squinted his eyes against the wind.
Then Max would nod and smile and give him a glass of that sweet wine he kept behind the counter. All at once, Max didn't seem so stupid.
Max was the kind benefactor of all cops walking beats everywhere. Max's light was a shining beacon, the shop a sanctuary for ice-bound freighters.
He headed for the tailor shop and the light, and he would have really enjoyed that glass of wine with Max, were it not for one thing:
The light was not coming from the tailor shop.
The light came from farther up the street, spilling from the open mouth of the basement steps under one of the tenements. For a moment, Genero was puzzled. If not Max…
Genero quickened his step. Quite unconsciously, he drew off his right glove and yanked his service revolver from its holster. The faces of the buildings were closed with sleep. Only the light pierced the darkness, and he approached the light warily, stopping before the steps where they descended beyond the hanging chain to enter the bowels of the tenement.
A door was hooded in shadow beneath the brick stoop of the building, and a window was set high up in the brick alongside the door. The window was caked with grime, but it glowed like a single wakeful eye. Cautiously, Genero climbed over the chain and started down the steps.
A narrow alley ran straight as an arrow to the back yard of the tenement. The garbage cans were in for the night, stacked haphazardly in the alleyway, dispelling their stench on the crisp December air. Genero glanced quickly up the alleyway, and then walked quietly to the door.
He stood listening. There was no sound from beyond the door. He held the revolver ready in his right hand, and with his left hand, he twisted the doorknob.
Surprisingly, the door swung open.
Genero backed away suddenly. He was sweating. His ears were still cold, but he was sweating. He listened to the sound of his own breathing, listened for other sounds in the cold sleeping city, listened for the silent scrape of a foot, something, anything. He listened for a long time, and then he entered the basement room.
The light came from a naked bulb suspended from a thick wire cord. It hung absolutely motionless. It did not swing, it did not make the slightest movement, so that the wire cord seemed almost to have been frozen into a slender steel rod. An orange crate rested on the floor beneath the light bulb. There were four bottle caps on the crate. Genero pulled out his pocket flash and swung the arc around the room. There were pin-up pictures on one of the walls, pasted close together, breasts to buttocks, cramped for space. The opposite wall was bare. There was a cot at the far end of the room, and there was a barred window over it.
Genero swung the light a little to the left and then, startled, pulled back, the.38 jerking upward spasmodically.
A boy was sitting on the cot.
His face was blue. He was leaning forward. He was leaning forward at a most precarious angle, and when the first cold shock of discovery left Genero, he wondered why the boy didn't fall forward onto his face. That was when he saw the rope.
One end of the rope was fastened to the barred window. The other end was knotted around the boy's neck. The boy kept leaning forward expectantly as if he wanted to get up off the cot and break into a spring. His eyes were wide, and his mouth was open, and there seemed to be life coiled deep within his body, ready to unspring and catapult him into the room. Only the color of his face and the position of his arms betrayed the fact that he was dead. The blue of the face was a sickly hue; his arms lay like heavy sleepers at his sides, the hands turned palms upward. Several inches from one hand was an empty hypodermic syringe.
Tentatively, somewhat frightened, somewhat ashamed of his superstitious dread of a dead body, Genero took a step closer and studied the blue face in the beam of the flash. To prove he wasn't frightened at all, he stood looking into the blank eyes for a moment or two longer than he felt he had to.
Then he hurried from the room, trembling, and headed for the nearest call box.
The word had gone out long before Kling and Carella arrived.
