He forgot his suitcase. It sat in the darkness just under the corner of Tony’s plate-glass window and if anyone had been close enough to it they might have heard it ticking between screaming gusts of wind — merrily, or ominously, depending upon whether one took it for the ticking of a cheap alarm clock or the vastly more intricate and alarming tick of a time-bomb.
The man walked up First Avenue to Thirteenth. He got into a cab on the northwest corner, said, “Grand Central,” and leaned back and looked at his watch.
It was nine minutes after one.
At sixteen minutes after one Tony Maschio came out of the backroom, washed his hands, whistling a curiously individual version of “O Sole Mio,” and turned to grin cheerily at the big bald man who sat reading a paper with his feet propped up on the fender of the stove.
“You are next, Mister Maccunn,” he chirped brightly.
Tony Maschio looked like a bird, a white-faced bird with a bushy halo of black feathers on his head; he spoke with an odd twittering lilt, like a bird.
Maccunn folded his paper carefully and unfolded his big body as careful from the chair, stood up. He was about fifty-five, a very heavily built, heavily jowled Scot with glistening shoe-button eyes, a snow-white walrus mustache.
He lumbered over and sat down in Number One Chair, observed in a squeaky voice that contrasted strangely with his bulk:
“It’s a cold, cold night.”
For eight years Maccunn had come to Tony’s every Friday night at around this time; for eight years his greeting, upon being invited into Tony’s chair, had been: “It’s a cold night,” or “It’s a hot night,” or “It’s a wet night,” or whatever the night might be. When it was any of these things to an extreme degree he would repeat the adjectives in honor of the occasion. Tony agreed that it was a “cold, cold night” and asked his traditional question in turn, with a glittering smile: