THE EINHORNS
645
with a gun and saw me at this desk?
If
he said 'Stick 'em up!' do
you think he'd wait until I explained to him that my arms were
paralyzed? He'd let me have it. He'd think I was reaching in a
drawer or pushing a signal button, and that would be the finish of
Einhorn. Just have a look at the hold-up statistics and then tell me
I'm dreaming up trouble. What I ought to do is have a sign put up
above my head saying 'Cripple.' But I wouldn't like to be seeing that
on the wall all the time. I just hope the Brink's Express and Pinkerton
Protective labels all over the place will keep them away."
He often abandoned himself to ideas of death, and notwith–
standing that he was advanced in so many ways, his Death was
still the old one in shriveling mummy long-johns; the same Death
that beautiful maidens failed to see in their mirrors because the
mirrors were filled with their white breasts, with the blue light of
old Gennan rivers, with cities beyond the window checkered like
their own floors. A cheating old rascal with bones showing in his
buckskin fringes, not a gentle Sir Cedric greeting young boys from
the branches of an apple tree. Einhorn had no kind familiar thoughts
of him, but superstitions about this frightful snatcher, and he only
played the Thanatopsis stoic, but really considered what to do about
this other, who had already gained so much on him. Who maybe was
the only real god he had.
Often I thought that in his heart he had completely surrendered
to this fear. But when you believed you had tracked Einhorn
through his acts and doings and were about to seize him, you
found yourself not in the center of a labyrinth at all, but on a wide
boulevard; and here he came from a new direction-a governor in a
limousine, with state troopers around him, dominant and necessary,
everybody's lover, whose death was only one element, and a remote
one, of his privacy.
