A Game for the Living Read Free

and raised the latch. He went into a small, cluttered patio lighted only by the glow from several windows above. Lelia’s window was one of the windows that were lighted, Theodore saw. He went through a doorless stone arch and began to climb the stairs. Lelia lived on the third floor. He walked down the corridor to her door and knocked.
    There was no answer.
    â€œLelia?” he called. “It’s Theodore. Let me in!”
    She did not open the door for a caller she did not want to see, but Theodore was not in this category. Sometimes she was deep in a book, and if it were he, or he and Ramón together, she might take two or three minutes to come to the door, knowing they would be patient.
    Theodore knocked more loudly. “Ramón?—It’s Theodore!”
    He tried the door, which was locked, and wished he had her key. He always carried it, but for some reason, perhaps to feel quite free of her for a while, he had taken it off his key chain before he left for Oaxaca. The transom was slightly open. Theodore reached up on tiptoe and pushed it still wider.
    â€œLelia?” he called once more to the transom.
    Maybe she was visiting a neighbor or had gone out to make a telephone call. He set his suitcase flat against the door, put a foot on it, and gently pulled himself up. He stuck his head through the transom and looked to see what he might land on if he climbed through. The light from the bedroom was just enough to show that the red hassock was about two feet from the door. He listened for a moment to find out if any of the other tenants happened to be on the stairs, because he would have felt very silly to be seen crawling through Lelia’s transom, but he heard nothing except a radio somewhere. He put his hands on the dusty bottom rim of the transom, stuck his head through, and pushed up from the suitcase. Once the rim of the transom began to cut him across the waist, he debated whether to push himself back out again. The pain forced him to move, and he wriggled forward until his hands lay flat against the inside of the door, his heels touched the top of the transom, and the blood rushed alarmingly to his face. Desperately, he struggled to get his right knee through the transom. It was of no use. He aimed for the red hassock and came down in a slow dive, clung to the hassock, and crumpled to the floor.
    He stood up, dusting his hands, and glanced around happily at the familiar, spacious room with its ever-changing patterns of paintings and drawings on the wall, then unlocked the door and dragged his things in. He turned on the lamp at the foot of her couch. On Lelia’s long table lay a bunch of white carnations that should have been put into a vase. On the table stood a bottle of Bacardi also, his favorite spirit, and he thought perhaps Lelia had bought it especially for him. He walked down the short hall, past the kitchen, to the bedroom. She was here, asleep.
    â€œLelia?”
    She was face-down in bed, and there was blood on the pillow, lots of it, in a red cirde around her black hair.
    â€œLelia!” He sprang forward and pulled back the thin pink coverlet.
    Blood stained her white blouse, covered her right arm, where he saw a ghastly, deep furrow in the flesh. The wound was still wet. Gasping and trembling, Theodore took her gently by the shoulders and turned her, and then released her in horror. Her face had been mutilated.
    Theodore looked around the room. The carpet was kicked up at one corner. That was really the only sign of disorder. And the window was wide open, which was unlike Lelia. Theodore went to the window and looked out. The window gave on the patio, and from the patio there was not a thing anyone could have climbed up on, but from the roof, only one floor above, a drainpipe came down inches from the window jamb and stopped just above the top of the window of the floor below. Theodore had told Lelia a dozen times to have bars put on the window. All the other windows