The Cutting Room Read Online Free

if she was going to smoke it, I was going to light it for her.
    “Thanks.”
    “Sure.”
    I waited patiently, not wanting to push. “Were these people you’d seen before?”
    “It’s hard to say. My cataracts make it hard.”
    I couldn’t help but grunt a bit, in frustration. But she didn’t seem to hear.
    “I know one was that muscleman. But her, I’d never seen before.”
    I just nodded, feigning calmness. But heat was starting to fill my shirt. Gus had been there that night! Even though he said he had not!
    “When you say
muscle
, you mean—”
    “The short one, who sometimes carried the camera back and forth.”
    “Right, right. And . . .”
    A woman? Alan Gilbert anywhere near a woman? Suddenly, reality was taking a shape I didn’t recognize.
    “The woman was on the run, I know that. Two steps at a time.”
    I nodded, with a little “uh-huh.” Like her, I was just another neighborhood gossip, more interested in
knowing
than in doing anything.
    “She came out first,” Mrs. Heater went on. “Then muscleman showed up. And then
he
left. I thought there was a party going on, attended by only one person at a time.”
    Mrs. Heater laughed at this, a brown ash jiggling off her smoke. Then, sighing a little, she seemed to lose interest in the whole affair. She unrolled and took up her magazine again, as if I wasn’t even there.
    So I started to leave. But before I did, I turned around, because I had to know one other thing.
    “Tell me—”
    Mrs. Heater looked up, as if I were a person she was meeting for the first time.
    “Yes?”
    “Were either of them carrying anything?”
    “Who?”
    It took her a second to remember. But when she did, she gave a snort of recognition and didn’t hesitate.
    “Oh! The man had something in a bag. He was clutching it to him, like he was afraid he would drop it. And hanging out of the top of the bag was, like, a tail, or something.”
    “A tail?”
    “Not like a dog’s tail. Shinier than that.”
    “Like a piece of film?”
    “That’s right. Filmy.”
    She stared at me a second. Then, recognition again slowly vanished. Mrs. Heater went back to reading, her hat dipping down over her flawed but still observant—to me, very beautiful—eyes.
    Gus Ziegler lived in a hole of an apartment house uptown on the West Side, where Columbia University begins to mingle with Harlem. His flat was on the first floor, and his buzzer just said, GUS , as if that was all we needed to know.
    I needed to know a lot more.
    Standing on the sidewalk, I could see that his one lousy room, which faced the street, was dark. When I pushed his bell—insistently, several times—no one answered. So I thought I’d kill time next door in a magazine store, reading the movie reviews in every newsweekly, glancing out the window every few seconds, until I saw him come home.
    I only had to wait a few minutes before I saw the big man lumber by.
    To be honest, in his own fashion, Gus was moving quickly, as if he was being pursued by someone. His expression—panicked and fearful—confirmed this, when, as he opened his apartment house door, I tapped him on the shoulder. I said just, “Gus.”
    He let out his own low, rumbling version of a scream. Then, turning immediately away, he frantically pushed his key into the lock until the front door fell open before him.
    I would not go away. I had never been in a fight before—as opposed to being on the losing end of assaults, as I had been through most of my schooling—but being close enough to
The Magnificent Ambersons
that I could taste it made me bizarrely brave.
    I attached both of my hands to Gus’s broad back and got a secure hold of his shoulders. As I pulled down his shirt, I saw a tattoo on his neck that said HERMAN .
    I thought of Hitchcock’s
Torn Curtain
, the scene where Paul Newman has to kill an enemy agent. The director insisted that it be long and arduous—the victim kicking and screaming, his head in an oven, his fingers clawing, never