Where the Dark Streets Go by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Read Free Book Online

thinking, Father, what I am going to do: I am going to sit down and try to write the things I remember we talked about. It will not sound very much, the way I write it. I have tried to write before, and my mind it becomes a moth just trying to get at the light. But I will try and I will give it to you. Who knows? Maybe you and I can talk also.”
    “I would like that,” the priest said.
    At the door of the shop they shook hands. McMahon remembered that it was Friday. “Good shabbos ,” he said.
    “ Gut shabbos .” Rosenberg squinted up at the sky. “It will be a fine sunset.”

5
    I T HAD BEEN MCMAHON’S intention to go directly home. But then that had been his intention when he had left the precinct station house well over an hour earlier. He found himself walking toward the sunset. Scotch and brandy and Gustave Muller. Benediction and rosary at eight, a sermon to be got into his head, Muller out. He paused at the parapet beneath which lay the railroad tracks and beyond which the West Side Highway arched against the sky. Every approaching car caught an instant of sunset in its windshield, passed, and seemed no more than a beetle on a rampart. He turned and walked back on the street where Muller had died. The rush of suburb-going traffic was over, the street again a silent wilderness, bulldozers and cranes the dinosaurs of the era. The one lone building stood, its walls raw brick where the walls it once met had been shorn away. At the very top, the windows shone like golden eyes.
    He paused where the uniformed policeman stood by the basement grill and exchanged a few words with him. “Love Power” had been all but wiped out with the shuffle of many feet. At the top of the steps the double doorway was open. “Mind if I go up, officer?”
    “I guess it’d be all right, Father. They’re all through up there. Just stay away from the basement.”
    “Believe me, I will.”
    A house without doors, he noticed, climbing one flight of dusty stairs after the other. To have stolen the doorknobs Muller would have needed to be around for a while. And he was, of course. Carlos had said that, the man coming down when he called him. The turn-of-the-century gas fixtures were still in the hallways, and there were patches of a floral-patterned wallpaper where the paint had chipped away. On every landing he noticed a clutter of tinfoil and burnt-out photography bulbs. The police had gone over the building well. The roof hatch had been tilted to let in air. When he reached the fifth and final floor the room to the west was suffused with light, the blearing X’s had been removed from the windows. There were spatters of paint on the floor, and squares of raw wood where bits of the surface had been cut out, he suspected for laboratory study. So the police too would now presume him to have been an easel painter as well as the painter of Mrs. Phelan’s walls. Northern light was painters’ light, and in the mornings here Muller would have had the best of it. Now, with the sun having gone down, the sky was changing fast, holding briefly the red and yellow tints, then almost palpably letting them go, yielding to the darker strokes of night. The room was utterly bare. Silence and peace: he could feel it. He found it himself only at the altar when he was no longer himself, at the moment of the transubstantiation. His conscience told him that he must go, but the wish to wait for night was very strong.
    “Father McMahon?” The voice halloed up the stairwell.
    He thought it would be Brogan and went to the top of the stairs.
    “Stay there. I’m coming up.”
    McMahon went to the west window and waited. Torn wisps of cloud held the last pinks and lemon of the sunset.
    “Some spot he found for himself, wouldn’t you say, Father?”
    “How did he find it?”
    “We’ve been asking the same question. The building belongs to an old crank who wouldn’t sell it to the developers. They went ahead without him, starting the wreckers next door.