"All right, stop breaking my heart-thirty-five, okay?" the Jew said.
Rufus wiped his smooth black cold-creamed face with a white silk handkerchief. "Okay, man, okay," he said harshly. "Let's get finished; I ain't got all day."
The Jew hid a vindictive smile and went into the kitchen. He took one look at the enamel-topped table and tubular stainless steel chairs with foam-rubber plastic-covered seats and said, "I can see that your wife was a cook."
He sat at the table and added up the total, allowing $13 for the kitchen's contents, exclusive of the table service and utensils. It came to $117. He then wrote a receipt on a form taken from a pad that looked like a check book:
Received from A. Finkeistein $117.00 for total furnishings of apartment No. 44, 118th Street, Manhattan, New York City.
Leaving it undated, he asked Rufus to sign it.
"Man, don't you never talk to me no more about taking risks," Rufus grumbled as he signed.
"You got to bury your wife," the Jew needled slyly. "I ain't got no wife."
The helpers exchanged looks and grinned.
"No cracks," the Jew warned. "You just sign here as witnesses."
Laboriously, they spelled out their signatures below.
"Okay, now you can take this junk and load it," the Jew said, tucking the receipt carefully into a stuffed wallet and extracting a thin sheaf of banknotes.
Stolidly the helpers shuffled into the sitting room and began slamming the furniture about. The colored lady had retired from her grandstand seat in the front window when they appeared on the street with the first load, but other windows up and down the street on both sides were occupied with the customary Sunday afternoon sightseers. No significance was attached to the moving. In a number of windows only the grayish bottoms of big bare black feet resting on the sills were visible from below; and they remained stationary. A patrol car idled past, but the cops didn't give the movers a second look. Moving on Sunday was a perfectly legitimate undertaking; many people figured that was the best time to do it.