Three Gold Crowns

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You don’t put the name “Death” under a doorbell. How could you collect the rent from Death? What would you confront if you rang the bell — and the door beside it was opened?

No, you can’t have Death on your tenants’ list. But just the same, the name under the bell beside that particular door should have been I.M. Death.

Instead, it was A.A. Ismail.

The doorway was in a dilapidated building. The building was in a slum-and-warehouse neighborhood. The street lights around the neighborhood were scarce; in fact, they were practically nonexistent.

In these shadows, toward this dilapidated building, a stoop-shouldered, smallish man of late middle age made his plodding way.

The man looked to be about sixty. His shoulders were set in the slouch of years of clerical work. His eyes were brown and blinked in a watery way, as if he should have worn glasses all the time instead of only when he was poring over musty books.

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