Bill Kerwin

Big Smiley leaned across the bar and grabbed the red-eyed knifeman by the lapels of his mackinaw and lifted him from the floor.

“Gimme that chiv, shorty, ‘fore I makes you eat it,” he said lazily, smiling as though it were a joke.

The knifeman twisted in his grip and slashed him across the arm. The white fabric of his jacket slevve parted like a burst balloon and his black-skinned muscles opened like the Red Sea ….

Big Smiley draw back and reached beneath the bar counter with his right hand. He came up with a short-handled fireman’s axe. It had a red handle and a honed, razor-sharp blade.

The little knifeman jumped into the air and slashed at Big Smiley again, matching his knife against Big Smiley’s axe.

Big Smiley countered with a right cross with the red-handled axe. The blade met the knifeman’s arm in the middle of its stroke and cut it off just below the elbow as though it had been guillotined.

The severed arm in its coat sleeve, still clutching the knife, sailed through the air, sprinkling the nearby spectators with drops of blood, landed on the linoleum tile floor, and skidded beneath the table of a booth.

The little knifeman landed on his feet, still making cutting motions with his half arm.

I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.

The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old....