He squinted secretively, pressed a finger to his lips, and shhhhhhhhhed me to be quiet, even though I hadn’t said a word. I wanted him to know my hostility, to remind him that I had no respect for a man who failed to meet his obligations. Now he closed the door quietly and tiptoed across the room on his bony toes, his bathrobe wide open.

‘Do you like milk?’ he whispered.

I certainly did, and I told him so. Then he revealed his plan. The man who drove the Alden milk route on Bunker Hill was a friend of his. Every morning at four this man parked his milk truck behind the hotel and came up the back stairs to Hellfrick’s room for a drink of gin. ‘And so,’ he said, ‘if you like milk, all you have to do is help yourself.’

I shook my head.

‘That’s pretty contemptible, Hellfrick,’ and I wondered at the friendship between Hellfrick and the milkman. ‘If he’s your friend, who do you have to steal the milk? He drinks your gin. Why don’t you ask him for milk?’

‘But I don’t drink milk,’ Hellfrick said. ‘I’m doing this for you.’

This looked like an attempt to squirm out of the debt he owed me. I shook my head. ‘No thanks, Hellfrick. I like to consider myself an honest man.’

He shrugged, pulled the bathrobe around him.

‘Okay, kid. I was only trying to do you a favour.’

I continued my letter to Hackmuth, but I began to taste milk almost immediately. After a while I could not bear it. I lay on the bed in the semidarkness, allowing myself to be tempted. In a little while all resistance was gone, and I knocked on Hellfrick’s door. His room was madness, pulp western magazines over the floor, a bed with sheets blackened, clothes strewn everywhere, and clothes-hooks on the wall conspicuously naked, like broken teeth in a skull. There were dishes on the chairs, cigarette butts pressed out on the window sills. His room was like mine except that he had a small gas stove in one corner and shelves for pots and pans. He got a special rate from the landlady, so that he did his own cleaning and made his own bed, except that he did neither. Hellfrick sat in a rocking chair in his bathrobe, gin bottles around his feet. He was drinking from a bottle in his hand. He was always drinking, day and night, but he never got drunk

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I told him.

He filled his mouth with gin, rolled the liquor around in his cheeks, and swallowed ecstatically. ‘It’s a cinch,’ he said. Then he got to his feet and crossed the room towards his pants, which lay sprawled out. For a moment I thought he was going to pay back the money he owed me, but he did no more than fumble mysteriously through the pockets, and then he returned empty handed to the chair. I stood there.