The City When It Rains

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Authors: Thomas H. Cook
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life, he’d actually heard someone say something that struck him as absolutely true.
    â€œThis is what it’s all about,” he repeated now in his mind as he watched the action on the stage. A world-weary man was singing to a little boy, trying his best to teach him how to live. “Careful,” he kept saying. “Careful.”
    Once home, Corman prepared dinner for the two of them, read to Lucy awhile, then washed the dishes, his mind thinking of Lazar again, a story the old man had told him several years before. It was a kind of fairy tale, like the ones in the play, he realized now, with its own oddly happy ending. In his mind he could see Lazar as he’d appeared that night, puffing at his cigar while his voice sounded over the featureless hum of the barroom crowd.
    â€œI was in the coalfields, you know,” Lazar had said. “When I was a boy. There was a strike, and I hired on, you might say, as a courier. At night, I’d run from one striking mine to another, telling the miners the latest news, keeping everybody up to date on what was happening.” Here he’d paused, taken a draw on his cigar. “Well, I got caught one night, and some of the gun-thugs gave me a bad beating.” Here he’d waved his hand, dismissing it. “But I survived, and before long I was here in the city, working for the Tribune.” A quick, ironic smile. “Well, a few years after that, there was another strike down in the coalfields and the Tribune sent me down to take some pictures. I took a lot of pictures, and during the course of the whole thing, I found out that one of the couriers for the miners was really an informer.” Here he drew the cigar downward, like the muzzle of a gun. “I didn’t know what to do about it, so I finally decided to take it into my own hands.” A pause, mostly for effect. “So, I tracked down that courier one night, and I gave him a good beating.” The voice deepened slightly. “I learned something from all that, Corman. I learned a little part of what it’s like to live a balanced life.” The face grew very calm, the voice exquisitely soft. “Once to receive the blow, once to deliver it.”
    Corman put the last of the dishes away and walked determinedly to his darkroom, as if it were a research laboratory on the rules of life. He sniffed the clean, sweet smell of the chemicals, peered at the soft red light, felt the way the room’s continually building heat gave him the sense of moving toward the core of something. Outside, the world seemed hopelessly diffused, but in the darkroom, it became concentrated, intensified, and the vast blur gave way to small rectangles of highly focused light. Sometimes, in brief visionary glimpses, the mosaic struggled toward a decipherable design. Coils and spirals disentangled, and when that happened, he felt as if he were edging not so much toward some great revelation, as just a small, faint suggestion of what life ought to be.
    After a while he returned to the living room, snapped on the television, and collapsed onto the sofa in front of it. Lucy came out of her room a few minutes later and eased herself beneath his arm, her eyes focused on the flickering screen. An old black-and-white detective movie was playing, and in the film, a wiry little snitch had just handed a battered-looking private eye a picture. “See. See,” he told him excitedly. “Now you know.” As Corman watched the screen, bethought again of Lucy, Trang, his work, all the other imponderables, and it struck him that basically what everyone needed was a skinny little snitch just like the one on television, someone who could clear things up, get to the bottom of something, hand over a single exquisite photograph of what had really happened.

CHAPTER
NINE
    I T WAS STILL very gray at midmorning, but the rain had stopped and the streets had begun to dry slightly in the brisk fall air. Corman had

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