small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadow’s boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap: she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt comforted.
The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadow’s head.
“Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom,” said Jacquel. “Your work clothes will be hanging in the closet—you’ll see. You’ll want to wash up and shave first, I guess.”
Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. He looked at his wet, black hair and the dark gray eyes which looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at him, looked at the marks on his coffee-colored skin.
And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat.
It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if there’s anyone who’d simply take it in their stride, who’d just clean up the mess and get on with things, it’s the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Laura. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. That’s all it’ll take.
He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. It’s painless. Too sharp to hurt. I’ll be gone before I know it.
Then the door to the bathroom swung open, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the doorframe and “Mrr?” up at him, curiously.
“Hey,” he said to the cat. “I thought I locked that door.”
He closed the cut-throat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door.
His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. The room itself smelled faintly musty, as if it was too infrequently aired, and the sheets of the bed seemed faintly damp when he touched them.
Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed.
He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them were new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead man’s socks? Would he be stepping into a dead man’s shoes? Then he put the clothes on and looked at himself in the mirror. The clothes fit perfectly: there was not even the stretching around the chest or the shortness in the arms he had expected. He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically. He scratched the side of his nose, was actually relieved when his reflection did the same.
Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie.
“Hey,” he said to it, “you know something that I don’t?” and immediately