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At about the instant the clerk had seen the lights go out, Emmanuel's tenant, the old colored woman who lived in the adjoining rooms, heard three pistol shots from the interior of the laundry. The sound alarmed her, and she went to the connecting door and called out, "Are you all right? Is everything all right in there?" But she got no answer, and she hurried through the door of the tenement house and onto the sidewalk, bumping into a policeman who was passing. What she told the policeman as she disengaged herself was not known, but the chances were she did not say that she had heard three shots. If she did tell him that, then his assumption that he was dealing with a routine suicide seemed, in Mr. Nation's opinion, almost incredible.

"She was excited at the time," said John Littleton. "Maybe she jumped at the conclusion, and simply told the cop that the laundry-man had shot himself. Maybe the cop accepted her theory without question."

Mr. Nation considered this explanation logical. At any rate, neither the policeman nor the old woman had thought murder a possibility as they approached the laundry door. "All this had taken only a minute or so, but already a crowd had gathered, and when the policeman found the door locked, and realized he couldn't get in without breaking it down, he thought of the transom. There was a small boy in the crowd, so the policeman lifted the boy onto his shoulders, and told him to crawl through the transom and open the door from the inside; but the boy found out soon enough that Emmanuel had thought of the transom too, and that it was nailed shut Then the policeman handed the boy his club, and told him to break the glass with it. The boy did so, and lowered himself into the room. Almost at once the group outside heard him fumbling at the locks and bolts, but he solved them all at last, and the door swung open upon the most beguiling mystery of our time."

The telephone rang just then, and Mr. Nation lifted the receiver. When he replaced it, he went on to say that, in the long, precise wedge of brightness from the policeman's flashlight, Emmanuel Vogel was seen lying in the center of his room, rapidly bleeding to death. There was an expression of horror on his face, as if what he had feared in secret had come true at last, and as the policeman and the crowd watched him, the arm that had rested against his thigh twitched, relaxed slowly, and slid forward to the floor. He moved his lips three times, as if trying to speak, then shuddered and slumped somehow from within. His eyes opened and fixed themselves on the ceiling in the patient, impersonal stare of death, and the obsessed purpose of his harried and insipid life was now fulfilled.

The first thing the policeman noticed was that there was no gun near the body; the next was that the victim had been shot three times—twice in the head, once through the right hand. When the significance of these facts became clear to him, he told one of the people outside to call police headquarters and report a homicide. Then he pushed back the crowd and bolted the door again. He found the light switch and snapped it on, moving forward with nervous caution. He was convinced, at that time, that the murderer was still in the room, but he searched it thoroughly, and there was nobody there. When he couldn't discover the murderer, he determined, at least, to locate the weapon the murderer had used; but he couldn't find the gun either.

By that time the ambulance and the police cars had arrived, and at once the medical examiner settled the question of how Emmanuel had died: he had been shot from a distance of several feet, by a revolver held level with his head. It was murder, he said; it couldn't possibly be anything else. At once the room was filled with specialists testing, measuring, photographing, examining, and asking questions. They found the one window closed, and latched from the inside, the iron bars all in place. The connecting door was still bolted and locked from the inside, still firmly nailed shut

When the homicide experts saw all this, they looked at one another in astonishment, and shook their heads. Then the policeman repeated his story, and the detectives again questioned the group who had been at the door when it had swung open. They verified each detail of the policeman's story: the door had most certainly been locked on the inside, they said, and after the boy opened it, absolutely nobody had come out of the room. There was no doubt in their minds on this point. They would swear to it anywhere, any time.

The homicide men had then gone back to work in earnest If the murderer had not left the laundry, obviously he was still in it somewhere; and in the days that followed, they almost dismantled the place as they searched, but without success, for trapdoors, sliding panels, or even holes in the walls and ceiling through which a pistol could have been fired. They followed every clue, exhausted every possibility, and learned nothing. To this day, the mystery of how Emmanuel Vogel was murdered, by whom, and for what reason, was as great as it had been on the original February night of his death.

"How about the boy?" asked Phil Cottman. "He might have picked up the pistol while he was alone in the room. Did anybody think of that?"

"Yes," said Mr. Nation. "Everybody thought of it, including the cop who was first on the scene. When he saw the gun was missing, even before he shut the door again, he searched the child, but there was no gun."

He said he'd like to clear up some of the other points that might be bothering his listeners. To begin with, there were no fingerprints, no strands of hair in the victim's fist, no torn letters to be pieced together, no broken buttons—no physical clues of any sort, in fact. The laundry had not been ransacked. Everything was found to be in order, in its proper place. The glass in the barred window was quite intact, the front door elaborately secured from the inside, as everybody knew by this time. It wasn't likely the murderer could have refastened the bolts and chains after leaving the room, but even if he had been able to do so, he would not have had time. Then, too, he would have had to make himself invisible while doing it, for the cigar clerk had been watching the door from the time the lights went out until the crowd gathered. Afterwards, Emmanuel's life had been traced step by step, from the time he was bom, until the time he had died. He had been no famous person in disguise; he had been no secret agent of a foreign government He had been precisely what he appeared to be—an illiterate, obscure, terrified, eccentric little laundryman who lived alone and who had known almost nobody.

To the west, along Madison Avenue, the cabs sped up and down in a steady, aggressive stream, their bodies flashing yellow, green, and orange in the brilliant, late afternoon light Farther away, somewhere to the north, an ambulance clanged as it approached East River, and Dr. Flugelmann, listening tensely, as if the warning were a sound most familiar to her, pressed her plump, ringed fingers together and said, "I do not know why, but I assumed that Emmanuel would be killed by a crushing blow, something brutal and entirely primitive. Being killed by a pistol was not at all right for him."

She explained that while Mr. Nation was telling his story, she, too, had been occupied. She had been weaving a fantasy of her own, she said—a fantasy which had concerned Emmanuel and his mother's washtub. As the others no doubt remembered, he had spent his formative years above it, and when he had left his native country at last, what was clearly the most precious thing he possessed? It was the washtub, of course, and she thought it the one thing from his past that he had brought with him to America. He could not have abandoned it if he had tried, for he was tied to the tub in a way that others are tied to the ones they most love: it had become his father and mother, his sister and brother; it had even become a sort of industrious wife to him, a wife who shared his labors, and gave him security against the world he feared so much.

She went on to say that we all want security of one sort or another. It was normal and most natural to want security. But life itself was not at all secure. Life was strong and cruel, and its purpose was not peace, but conflict If we are just secure enough, we are fortunate indeed, for then we can enjoy the wonderful things that life also has to give us; but if we become too secure, if we give up too much, then we have repudiated life itself. Who can say where the dividing line is? How can we know when we are entirely safe, or are merely not living at all?

She lowered her head with a smiling humility, as if asking pardon for being both trite and tiresome, and said gently: "And now, if you permit it, I will finish my small fantasy of the laundryman and his washtub: now, let us recall that Emmanuel's mother had washed her life away over that tub, and Emmanuel himself, although he did not realize it, perhaps, had really done the same. Then where had the essence of those lives gone? What had become of all that vitality, that energy, that strength and striving? I think the tub had absorbed it"

She turned in her chair, played with the beads about her throat, and went on with her story: she thought that after a while the assimilated lives of Emmanuel and his mother had had their effect on the ancient, wood-and-iron tub—so much so, in fact, that gradually the tub had achieved an awareness of both its own existence and the existence of its tormentors. It had begun to feel a little too; to suffer pain in a sort of primitive, mindless way. Perhaps, during the last months of the laundryman's career, it would sometimes appear to shiver. Perhaps it would manage to slide forward on the bench, as if seeking to escape its oppressor, and Emmanuel, grasping it again with his reddened, soapy hands would sigh patiently and pull it into place once more. Perhaps the tub even resisted him on occasion, and he would feel the tension, the sudden hostility between them.

And then, one night, life itself had originated mysteriously in the tub, just as it had, with an equal mysteriousness, once originated in Emmanuel and his mother, and at that moment the tub understood the bondage the three of them had shared in common; but what it could not know was that the Vogels, being human, and as such almost indestructible, could endure easily what the tub could not. ... All this had happened on the February night when Emmanuel had bought his cigarettes and crossed the street. Then, as he prepared to do his extra work, the tub had gathered all its strength together, had risen up, struck him, and crushed his skull.

She held her glass forward toward the window, allowing the sunlight to touch it, to bring to life the shattered pinks and greens in the crystal; then, seeing that John Littleton was about to offer an objection to her theory, she smiled and said placatingly, "I know, I know. He wasn't killed by a blow from a washtub. He was shot by a pistol. It makes my story even sillier, doesn't it?"

"Emmanuel Vogel was killed by somebody as real as any person in this room," said John Littleton, "and I think I know how it was done. Now, the first thing is to determine the motive. All right, then: Let's take the commonest motive of all—greed."

He went on to say that the frightened ask for the disaster that so often overtakes them. If Emmanuel had behaved like others, perhaps his neighbors would have thought nothing of him; but with all those bolts and locks, they must have wondered what he had so precious that he must guard it so well; then, since we can understand the minds of others only with the content of our own minds, and since the most precious thing to those who knew him was money, they all must have thought, at one time or another, that the little laundryman was rich, that his wealth was hidden somewhere in his room. Having come to this conclusion, it was only natural that one of them should decide to take the money for himself.

"Now we have a logical motive," said Mr. Littleton; "the next thing is to get the criminal inside the room. That can be done easily between the time Emmanuel left the cigar store and the time the shots were heard. Nobody knows, of course, but I think somebody just knocked on the door, and when Emmanuel asked what he wanted, he said he'd come to pick up a bundle of laundry."

To fear indiscrirninately was even more naive, in Mr. Littleton s mind, than to trust without reason. He felt that Emmanuel had so long quieted his terrors with formulas he had established for his protection that he no longer had the power to distinguish between what was dangerous and what was not The fact that the murderer had announced his intention in a phrase entirely familiar to him, had reassured him, and he had opened the door with no misgivings at all; then, as if to protect both himself and his murderer against a world outside which menaced them equally, he had at once relocked and rebolted his door.

Perhaps the intruder had not planned to kill Emmanuel, had meant only to frighten him into giving up his money; but Emmanuel had gone to pieces when he saw the pistol and had hurled himself at the thief with that despairing, superhuman courage that only the truly timid achieve. No doubt the last thing the robber had anticipated was resistance of such heroic quality. Perhaps he had become frightened, too, and had backed away from the laundryman's hysterical grasp, firing straight at his head. Then he had hurried to the door, but before he could get the locks undone, the crowd was there waiting for him.

"You got him inside the laundry," said Phil Cottman. "Now get him through that locked and watched door—if you can."

To Mr. Littleton's way of thinking, that was the most obvious part of the mystery—so simple, in fact, that perhaps the others would not consider it a solution at all; nevertheless, he was convinced it had happened precisely in the manner he had in mind. He said he could visualize the murderer standing in the dark, his mind working coldly, as he listened to the crowd outside. He knew he was trapped, that if he tried to hide in the room he would be caught Suddenly he had seen the only way of escape for him, had known what every sleight-of-hand artist takes for granted: that the audience would be so surprised when it saw the laundryman bleeding to death on his floor, so diverted in that first shocking moment of revelation, that no eye could possibly take in anything else.

Realizing this, he had flattened himself against the wall, as close to the door as he dared, and at the instant the door swung inward, he had thrust one foot through the opening, and had planted it on the pavement outside, swaying his body backward as the crowd pressed their bodies forward to meet him. No one had seen him, no one had paid the least attention to him, and in a second, he had ceased to be a murderer trapped in a room, and had become, instead, one of the vanguard of those citizens who sought that murderer. A little later, when the policeman shut the door in the face of the crowd, no doubt he pushed the murderer out with the others.